After I retired my wife, our older daughter and I purchased a home in the country, 42 acres with a house and a barn, a large yard, two fenced pastured, a hay field and a pond. We also got a variety of trees. In the yard around the house were sugar . . .
The sky is clear and blue, this morning, an example of October’s bright blue weather. Today is a few minutes shorter than yesterday and tomorrow be a few minutes shorter than today. Tree leaves are changing from green to yellow and orange and red. . . .
School bus drivers, oil and gas truck drivers stop for railroad crossings. I stop for turtles. I stop and when the road and traffic permits I get out, pick the turtle up, carry it across the road in the direction it was heading, then put it down, silently . . .
One hundred years ago, in 1916, representatives of the United States and Great Britain signed the Migratory Bird Treaty.
Great Britain signed for Canada. The Migratory Bird Treaty was an agreement to save the birds of North America.
From the time . . .
I heard a robin chirping when I stepped outside one morning earlier this month. It was a young robin, a fledgling I thought, perhaps just out of the nest.
An adult robin sang from a tree nearby. A third robin on the ground picked something up from the . . .
May is the month to look for warblers in Indiana and in the other mid-latitude states of the U.S. May is the month when the warblers that nest in those states return after spending the winter farther south, many in South America, and May is the month . . .
Recently I wrote an article which I titled, Birds and Climate Change. In that article I listed summer birds I’ve seen this winter. By summer birds I mean birds that normally migrate, birds that leave northern Indiana and go south for the winter. . . .
My sister found it in a used bookstore in Augusta, Georgia, bought it and gave it to me. It’s obviously very old. Its cover is dull and splotchy, the title, Field Book of Wild Birds, is faded and hard to read. It’s the size, the height and width, . . .
When did red-winged blackbirds become feeder birds? There were seven of them, all males, scoffing up seeds at my bird feeder this morning. There were more red-wings than any other bird. This didn’t just start this year. Red-winged blackbirds, mostly . . .
The leaves have fallen from the maple and oak trees in our yard and from the walnut tree out by the barn. Acorns and walnuts have fallen and are scattered among the fallen leaves. When I look out my study window I look across a road, then a field where . . .
October has come, October with its bright blue weather.
It’s October, and more and more tree leaves are changing to the colors of fall. Cottonwood tree leaves are turning yellow, maple leaves are changing to red and yellow. Oak leaves are becoming . . .
The wild turkey, read in a recent magazine article, is a winner. A winner among birds was described in the article as a bird that has increased in number, or is increasing or both. The wild turkey has certainly done that. Once it was found in limited . . .
A robin sang from a branch near the top of a maple tree in our yard, a house wren sang from a lower branch of another maple nearby. A song sparrow sang from an oak. It was early morning. The sun was up, just above the horizon and I stood on the back . . .
Sparrows have a bad name. Many people don’t like them. Ask why and people who dislike them say they’re just little brown and gray birds. They’re colorless. They’re noisy too, but they don’t sing. They just chirp. They’re messy. They make . . .
Robins have returned after spending the winter farther south. I hear one or two singing from the trees in our yard when I step outside every morning, if it isn’t raining. I see one often on the lawn. Red-winged blackbirds are back and several . . .
Boobies are birds. Boobies are also people who are not considered very smart, who are dunces, fools. The two are related, by name at least. The word booby is from the Spanish word, bobo, which means fool. From Spanish to English a name for a person . . .
Another dreary, gray-sky day I thought as I sat at my desk one morning trying to compose an article for a newspaper. But no words came, nor even a subject. I shifted my gaze from the computer screen before me to the bird feeder outside the window behind . . .
There are two red-winged blackbirds and a mourning dove on the bird feeder outside my study window. A black-capped chickadee flies in, snatches a seed and flies away, and a tufted titmouse, a male cardinal and a female, a white-breasted nuthatch and . . .
A telephone caller told me she and her husband had seen twelve or thirteen bald eagles below the dam on the Salamonie River one morning earlier this month. Most were perched in the trees along the river below the dam, she said, though a few were flying. . . .