Roseanna Denton and Doug Downs have recently turned in some sightings of Rusty Blackbirds, so I have created a table listing all Regional sightings of Rusties this winter in an appendix to the Winter 2006-2007 UCR Bird Report.  If you have any records of this blackbird for the winter, please send along.  The Rusty Blackbird is a breeder in boreal forest; its population is thought to be undergoing long-term decline, so all records of its presence in the Region this winter and during future winters will be of value.

 

BIRDFOLK messages are shared with those Upper Cumberland Region birders who share their bird sightings with me, either directly or indirectly.  The minimal sharing threshold is one bird record per month (note: a bird record always contains the name of a specific species, the number seen, the date seen, the site where seen, and the name of the observer).  BIRDFOLK messages are archived at a page of my website that is accessible via the birdpage:

 

http://iweb.tntech.edu/sstedman/birds.htm

Doug Downs reported two calling American Woodcocks at the Bridgestone/Firestone Centennial Wilderness in White Co., TN, last Saturday; these are the only ones reported since the last message went out.  Doug also found a good number of Northern Harriers at this site that same day; the six he reported was double the largest number reported on any of the Regional CBCs this past CBC season.  It would not seem to be an overly good winter for this raptor, or any other raptor really (perhaps indicating a below average year for small rodents around the Region?).

 

A Natural Moment: on the Cumberland Trail, Brady Mountain, Cumberland Co., TN, c. 0900 CST, 23 December 2006.

 

I am walking the CT as part of my effort to count birds during the Crossville CBC, and I am wondering why I am seeing so many downed trees and treetops along the crest of this upthrusting ridge (which clocks in at about 2900 feet at its highest point).  A long (12 kilometers), mostly narrow "spine" of a mountain, Brady must have been the site of some pretty serious wind during the growing season of 2006 because every 200 meters or so I see the fallen remains of fairly large trees.  All of them have fallen in an east-west orientation, with the bases of the downed trees lying to the east and the tops, still festooned with the leaves they possessed when they fell--but the leaves now all dried and brown--pointing west.  Whatever wind it was that downed these dozens of trees came from the east with one big rush, probably surpassing 100 kph, and laid low all the weakest members of the forest (evolution in action).  Now these fallen trees add a feature to the winter woods that is not always present in such abundance here I suspect.  The dried leaves of each fallen tree form a kind of safe "harbor" from wind and predator for birds, for instance, that is probably not present in such profusion during most winters, so perhaps there are a few more birds present than would be the case in a year when the forest was not wind-wounded--though the birds here still appear to me to be mighty few and far between, at least in comparison to numbers of birds I would see at many lower-lying sites.

 

I ruminate on these matters as I reel off some of the 25,000 steps that I will take this day, and I pass close by one of the dried leaf "tents" that a fallen deciduous tree has created.  As I pass by, I stop briefly for some reason--perhaps a slight birdsound of some sort has set off the internal bird detector that I have working inside of me somewhere, or perhaps I decide that this particular dead treetop needs a better look; I can't really say why I stop; I just do.  Nothing presents itself, either in the dead leaves or anywhere else, so I move on, but I am immediately shaken out of my ruminative mood by an explosion that erupts from the dead leaves of this tree.  I stop, somewhat weak-kneed, and wonder if a suicide bomber has gotten disoriented and found his way to this dead treetop in a misguided effort to take out what he must deludedly think is a large number of infidels.  Then another explosion disrupts the quiet of the woods, and I catch sight of a medium-sized brown bundle of feathers winging its way low through the tree trunks.  Ah, explosive mystery solved; a Ruffed Grouse, two, in fact, bring order back to the jumbled place that had just become my mind, and all is well, for I have seen the very bird that has drawn me to this dead-tree-top dotted landscape to begin with.  As I pass down the CT, I listen for the next hint of birds ahead, but I feel suddenly more inclined to be content with whatever little the forest has to offer in the way of birds. Such are the mind-altering effects that a brief encounter with a grouse can cause, but I realize that behind my brief moment with the grouse were many months when that tree and its headdress of leaves lay curing in the summer, autumn and early winter woods, waiting for the December morning it would shelter two grouse, and behind those months was that enormous rush of wind that took down the tree, and behind that rush of wind was some inexplicable weather pattern that had its origin in places far away, perhaps even in the vast reaches of the Pacific during an El Nino or La Nina event, and behind that vast and years long weather event were the great weather pulsations of the planet over the eons.  Each of us each day lives through many moments that are the end-points of a series of events that go back well beyond the dimmest glimmerings of history into the planet's farthest past.

Note of the semi-frivolous kind: The 18 juvenile Whooping Cranes that stayed in Cumberland Co., TN, from November 22 to December 2 shared their presence with Regional birders in a modest way not often considered.  During their stay, these cranes inhaled and exhaled collectively a very large number of times and with each exhale they released into the atmosphere several trillion atoms of respiratory gases that were at least briefly a part of a Whooping Crane.  Intermixing of these exhaled gases with the local atmosphere would have led to a saturation of the local area with atoms that had been in contact with Whooping Crane lungs, such that anyone breathing in Cumberland County during the end of the period of the cranes' layover would be almost certain to have inhaled at least a few of these atoms and thus would have shared Whooping Craneness.  How far this would hold true as one moves outward from Cumberland County is hard to say, but there is at least a little chance that all of us in the Region got a dose of  Whooping Crane, whether we knew it or not.