Nature Notes

By Larry Penny

Inquire about juncos and blue jays and they come out of the woodwork. It seems that the former are here, albeit less than abundantly, and the latter are here in spades. Several readers of last week's column called to report both juncos and jays; a few reported house finches as well.

May Petersen, who lives at the southwest corner of Lake Montauk, has a dozen blue jays and one or two juncos at her feeders. May also has had a nice red-bellied woodpecker from time to time.

There has been no shortage of birds at her feeder thus far this winter. She's out of the wind and she regularly changes her birdbath water and keeps it from icing up.

Fox Sparrow

Stephanie Baloghy lives in the foothills of Springs, north of the East Hampton landfill. To complement her bird feeders, she has a little pond, which is regularly visited by a variety of birds during all seasons.

On Friday she looked out her window and counted 24 blue jays and four juncos. She also had a fox sparrow around; it's an oversized rufous sparrow with a little red on the shoulder and a lot of stripes and spots.

The fox sparrow invariably feeds on the ground in the manner of white-throats, juncos, and towhees. They are rather rare and in winter you almost never see more than one at a time, as with the hermit thrush, another solitary ground feeder in this season.

Unusual Woodpecker

Saturday morning, Emily Cobb, who lives at the south edge of Accabonac Harbor in Springs, called. She feeds generously with sunflower hearts and her yard was fairly covered with blue jays gobbling them up; she was able to count as many as 53, and there were more.

She also counted two juncos among the jays and an unusual woodpecker, which she took pictures of for identification purposes. "A few years back," she related, "I had one of those great big ones," referring to the pileated woodpecker.

It stayed around for several days and may have been the same one that was regularly seen around Fort Pond Boulevard in Springs a couple of winters ago (as reported in this column).

House Finches

Richard Pollack of Further Lane in Amagansett near the ocean called on Saturday to say that his six feeders are regularly visited by lots and lots of blue jays, as well as lots of mourning doves, several cardinals, and a fair number of house finches.

The latter have been in very short supply since the infectious conjunctivitis that swept through the local population in the early and mid-'90s.

He also has an unusual "southern" woodpecker and, a while back, had a male pheasant. Raccoons have become extremely noisome of late, getting into all of the feeders and unsettling everything.

The Most Juncos

Terry Stein lives in Promised Land on the Napeague isthmus. She called on Sunday to report 11 juncos at her feeders, the largest number reported by any of the observers thus far.

On Martin Luther King Day my wife, Julie, called me out to the kitchen; there were two birds feeding on the ground that she hadn't seen for a long time. Put the binoculars on them out the kitchen window - behold, they were two juncos, the first to visit our yard since late last winter.

They joined the blue jays, which swelled from a population of one last week to two on the weekend.

Bob Savage on Hand's Creek in Northwest never had as many juncos in past years as this year. Up until the weekend he had five to 10 every day; they were in differing plumages, some dark gray, some brown, and the like.

They disappeared since, however. Every winter Bob usually has goldfinches, but was visited by them, four to five of them, only once this winter, a short time ago. He still has a brown creeper, as in past winters; it's more unusual at this time than the fox sparrow mentioned above.

A gentleman from Deerfield Road, Water Mill, had the most juncos of all, 13 of them. After all of these reports we gather that juncos are alive and well on the South Fork, just not as common as in past winters.

Bluebird Spa

Susan Harder of Deep Six Drive in Springs writes that on Jan. 2 at 9:30 a.m., she had no fewer than 29 bluebirds at her heated birdbath. "They were drinking the water and eating the red berries on my sparkleberry bush. About one-third were juveniles."

That's the largest number of bluebirds in any one grouping that the writer has heard of locally, in this, the "winter of the eastern bluebird." You can see by Susan's letter that bluebirds are attracted to water and berries.

Look up, or listen up, at any time during the day and you can hardly miss the sound of geese in the air. Last Thursday afternoon around 4 Lisa D'Andrea called the writer's attention to a great commotion in the sky above East Hampton Town Hall.

Gaggles Of Geese

A great gaggle of Canada geese was going by, from northeast to southwest, probably on their way to Georgica Pond. There were thousands of them.

Sunday afternoon Job Potter called to say that there had to be at least a couple of thousand Canada geese feeding in the corn fields along Town Lane.

On Monday, Penny Kemp called. She'd been walking on the Maidstone golf course near Hook Pond on Sunday afternoon when skein after skein (there could have been as many as a hundred of them) of Canadas were dropping in from the northeast, presumably from the Town Lane feeding fields.

Penny has had a "fawn-colored" rat beating a trail to her feeder. The writer and his wife were visited several times over the weekend by a not-so-prettily-colored large rat. It lives in the low yews next to the feeding area.

On one of its trips it was accompanied by two little ones. Uh oh!

Given food and shelter, Norway rats can breed as many as three or four times a year, producing as many as six to eight young in a brood. The female baby rats are able to grow up and have babies before they are a year old. Do the math. You can readily see to where something like this can lead. Uh oh!