Outside My Window

If you want to see birds up close, go to where the birds are, sit down on the ground and eat your lunch. 

I’m not kidding!  But first you have to understand the context.

I was prepared for rain last Sunday so I was wearing a big floppy hat and a yellow rain slicker over my backpack.  This gave me a big head and a hunchbacked look.

I was in one of the best spring birding places in Pennsylvania:  Enlow Fork, literally the “Enlow Fork of Wheeling Creek” which forms the border between Washington and Greene counties, almost in West Virginia. 

I was the only person there - even the fishermen weren’t on the scene - and the sky looked ominous.  It rained off and on.

I moved slowly.  The hungier I got, the slower I moved.  When it rained at lunchtime, I took shelter at the second bridge and opened my crinkly lunch bag.  Imagine a bird’s perspective:  a creeping yellow hunchback with a floppy green head making crinkly sounds.  How intriguing!

Zip!  A yellow-throated warbler flew past my left shoulder, stopped on the bridge for a quick glance and he was gone.

Chink!  A Louisiana waterthrush, pictured above by Chuck Tague, perched across the creek and sang a challenge to me.  How dare something so weird sit in his territory!

The rain came down harder.  I crept into better shelter and the Louisiana Waterthrush flew up for a better look.  Perched on the bridge just above eye level, he took a bath in the rain.  Awesome!

Bonus sightings:

While standing above a small pond, I saw a muskrat swim by carrying leaves.  He went back and forth several times without noticing me. 

Finally I couldn’t stand the suspense.  Animals often recognize a human voice faster than a human shape, so I spoke to the muskrat.  “Hello, Muskrat.”  He froze immediately, feet splayed out, but he kept drifting forward.  Ha!  He’s not hidden with those waves moving out ahead of him! 

Chuck Tague tells me muskrats are oblivious.  This one proved it.  (Muskrat photo from Marietta College website, click photo for origin.)

And finally, though Enlow Fork is known for its wildflowers the rain kept most of them closed.  Not so with the Virginia Bluebells as you can see in this photo from my cellphone.

So if you want to see birds up close, put on a big floppy hat, and sit in the rain.  It works for me!

Not a bird story, but interesting anyway. 

Last Saturday my husband and I visited Homewood Cemetery in Pittsburgh’s east end and walked around the part of the cemetery that borders Frick Park.  I came around the edge of a building - a mausoleum, actually - and suddenly saw a red fox carrying a dead fox squirrel in his mouth.   Fox squirrels are larger than gray squirrels and have fox-colored reddish coats.

I called softly to my husband to come see the fox but it heard my voice and immediately disappeared into Frick Park’s brush and trees.

After I posted my sighting on PABIRDS, Candy Gonzalez from Lawrence County replied that squirrels seem to make up a large part of the fox’s diet.  As she wrote, “Once they are seen in a residential neighborhood, it seems they stay for a year or two until there are virtually no squirrels left. …  They seem to raise a couple litters, feed them with the squirrels, and then move on to someone else’s neighborhood.”

Nature’s way of balancing the number of squirrels at our bird feeders.

(This photo is not the fox I saw; it was taken by Chuck Tague.)