Stéphane’s Blog for May 12, 2011

A Feast of Leaves!

Today, I learned that I can NOT catch a black bear with a mist net! Mmmm, who knew? We had a bear on our “front lawn” this morning, while we were inside the house. It probably heard our excited voices, so it took off on the path of least resistance, which, of course, is the path we take every 30 minutes to check the nets. And after 10 meters, there is the first one, nicely PERPENDICULAR to the path. Well, that didn’t stop the bear a bit. It made a nice, big hole in the bottom panel of this BRAND NEW net, set up not even 2 weeks ago. What a nuisance bears can be, ripping up your nets! 🙂

We were, nonetheless, quite happy with this sighting! Bird-wise, it was very quiet this morning, except for chickadees. It seems that we are getting some sort of a small invasion by these little, feisty, tough, cute balls of feathers. Our official chickadee net, net C13, got 19 of them in one go! As we were finishing extracting the last one, another flock of about 50 Chickadees started to stream by. With rain threatening and only 2 people on deck (including your humble servitor), I decided to close C13 for the rest of the morning.

Maybe it was the fog, maybe it was the coolness that came with it, but not much else than Chickadees was moving today. We finally got our first Common Yellowthroat. About time! It is more in the very first days of May that they arrive! 13 species of warblers today, but in extremely small numbers…

There was a female Red-bellied Woodpecker detected. And the Summer Tanager is still around, very familiar, perching on the wire or the windowsills, and churping away.

Yesterday afternoon, the horizon started to green up. This morning, with a light rain of a few minutes and warm weather, it was a burst of leaves that changed the landscape instantly. Very refreshing to the eye!

Stéphane