 Wednesday, Kurt Lindbergh, who was the co-founder of Vermont Alliance of Half-Earth, is speaking on our better nature, hopeful excursions and saving biodiversity, and of course, Birdie goes along with that too, so it's sort of a normal follow-up. So, today, I see that we have a lot of birdievers, and in fact, as I left my house, the poles that the bird feeders were to go on were being planted. I know not to put them out yet. I know. Don't worry. I'm putting you on my list. No, I know. It's hard to wait, but it's worth it. So, Sean Beckett is our speaker today. He is the program director at North Branch Nature Center, which I imagined all of you have been to. If you have not, you certainly should go because they do all sorts of wonderful things, and have done so. I was thinking my daughter, who was 31, used to go to nature camps there, so we've enjoyed it ever since. So Sean studied biology and environmental studies at Barrister College and received his MS in the UBM's Field Naturalist Program. He has worked extensively as a wildlife ecologist, researching Atlantic Puffets in Maine, saw wet owls in New York. Didn't you speak to us about saw wet owls? I sure did. There'll be a test on that later. We're all old. Raptors in Idaho, pygmy owls in Mexico, and Clark's nutcrackers in Wyoming. Sean also leaves world-class wildlife safaris across North America, making inquisitive travelers to the threshold of wolf dens, toe-to-toe with polar bears and through the heart, the Utah's canyon lands and deserts. Sean, back up. Well, thanks everybody for having me. Can you hear me all right through the microphone? That'll make it easier for you to be able to read my lips. Yeah. Okay. But the microphone level's okay. Good. And I'm good with that. Great. Well, thank you very much, everybody, for having me here today. So I also just want to give a quick plug for the talk next week by Kurtz. It's a delight to hear that the Our Better Nature book is going to be featured here among this audience next week. It's a really awesome collaboration that we at the Nature Center have been privileged to be a part of. It's just an amazing story of how biodiversity conservation happens in Vermont and how that's really somewhat unique in the world in terms of how we collaborate, how we put our heads together, and how folks of all sorts of different agencies and organizations and schools and interests and backgrounds all work together to keep Vermont's looking as beautiful and green as it is and kind of the vision for that in the future. So I just want to encourage folks to come back next week for Kurtz talk. But we're here for birds, aren't we? So who would consider themselves a birder? Who likes looking at birds? Well, I'm pleased to announce that you are all birders in that case. All you need to be a bird or a bird watcher is just having a love of birds. You don't need to keep a list. If you want to, that's fine. You don't have to know everything about plumage and flight patterns and all that. But if you do, that's fine. And the list goes on. Birding is really for everyone. And I really want to collectively capture that word, bird or bird watcher, and give it back to the people. Anybody can be a birder. And we're going into one of the best times of year for it, because the birds come to us. We don't have to go out and stare up into the tall canopies through all the dense leaves and the trees to find a tiny little warbler that's moving around in the canopy and then open up an awfully daunting bird book where it's one of these 75 options of things that look basically the same. No, we have chickadees. We have robins. We have cardinals. We have blue jays. We have things that we're familiar with, right? Things where you can go on, you know, get on a plane or on a train and go to somewhere else in the country, step off, and you can see a robin and think, oh, I feel like I'm at home because there's a friend of mine back from Vermont that's over here in Wyoming or in California or whatever. So we get to spend the winter looking at our friends, the birds that are here all year with us, eking out a living in Vermont's winter just like we do. So today I wanted to talk about, we're going to kind of go in a few different directions, go to a few different places. First, I just want to talk about bird feeders and bird feeding and kind of some ethics around that and some suggestions for, you know, just equipment and things that I recommend. We can also talk a little bit about optics and binoculars and whatnot. And then I'll talk a little bit about different types of science projects, community science or citizen science projects that you can participate in just right from, you know, right from the recliner next to the window. It doesn't get any easier than this. And then we'll kind of dive into, at the time we have left, some of our common winter feeder birds and things that here in Montpelier we see on a regular basis. So those of you that are wondering how to tell this bird apart from that bird, we can spend a little bit of time on that towards the end. So does that sound all right? Great. Oh, thank you. So this is a bear feeder. So probably the most common call I get at the nature center is can I put up my bird feeder yet, right? And everybody wants to know. And it totally depends on the circumstance and the situation and where you live and what you're doing. So I thought I'd just kind of run through some things that I think about when I'm asking myself, can I put up my bird feeders yet? First, the big one is bears, at least in our area. When I give this talk and given this talk to the South Hero Land Trust, we don't have to think about bears up there because there aren't any in the Champlain Islands yet. But there are raccoons, there are skunks, there are all sorts of other things that come to your feeders. But around here, the big one that I'm always thinking about is bears. You know, they walk down State Street in Montpelier. You know, they're at the nature center. They're nothing to be afraid of, but they are ever present in our community, especially at night. And this time of year, they're getting ready for hibernation. That means they're walking around the forest and unfortunately back yard is looking for things they can fatten up on to be able to put on as much weight as possible to go into their winter hibernation and then use that as a food source. So when we put up our feeders and leave them out this time of year in November, we're actually just putting out food that is exactly what bears are looking for in the wild. Really high-fat food sources in the form of sunflower seeds and whatnot. So if you want to put up your feeders, the recommendation is waiting until after Thanksgiving, at least around here, because bears don't really go into hibernation until we start getting snow and they start having a hard time finding food. There's nothing, when it comes to hibernation with bears, they don't like look at their calendar and think, okay, well it's November 7th, time to pack it in for the winter. They will just keep being active until they end up burning more calories finding food than they would say by just sleeping, which is kind of a good life lesson for all of us, I guess, in terms of working smarter, not harder. So that happens to be around Thanksgiving for us. But if you're really eager to get those feeders up and you just can't possibly wait until after Thanksgiving, and I know what that feels like, and I'm there with you, the recommendation is just take the feeders down at night. Put them up in the morning while you're watching, and then take them down at night. And if you just kind of keep a regular pattern of you putting up and taking down your feeders, the birds will adapt to that pattern too, and they'll show up waiting for the food in the morning, and then they won't notice it gone at night when they're roosting. So putting up your feeders for just the daytime until they get into Thanksgiving time period is a good idea. Cats, yes, question. I mean, so they can come around during the day. This is not foolproof. And depending on where you are, like if you're out in the middle of Calis, you know, there could be a bear walking through a yard in the middle of the day. I'm less concerned about there being bears around in the middle of the day here in like State Street and around town. I'd be totally comfortable with having the feeders up. And of course, if you do encounter any bear activity, or you see on the front porch, or your neighbor's house or something like that, then take the feeders down. But yeah, if you're kind of in the city limits, I think having the feeders up during the day is perfectly fine. Other things to think about are cats. So one of the biggest sources of death and wild birds is domestic house cats. And so if you have your feeders up and have an outdoor cat, that's not a great combination. Cause even though you may not notice your cat killing any birds, they do and they kill a lot of them. And so if you're, so just be mindful of if there is either your outdoor cat in the area, or if you have a lot of outdoor cats in your neighborhood, it's being mindful that feeders can attract, well feeders attract birds and therefore attract cats. So keep an eye out. And you know, just it's always good bird friendly advocacy to encourage folks and neighbors and whatnot to keep their cats indoors. So you can, this little pie chart here shows that of all the major human cause collisions or human cause deaths of birds, cats make up the lion's share, much more so than collisions with buildings and with vehicles and electrocutions and other things. So cats are, cats are bad news for birds. There's no way around that. Also bad news for birds. Another kind of best practice for feeding is making sure you have fresh seed in there and that you're cleaning things out. Another reason why we often recommend waiting until like the winter to put up bird feeders is cause it's cold. And bacterias and viruses and other pathogens can't really proliferate and grow as much inside of a bird feeder. Like right now it's like 75 degrees and raining outside. Like that's exactly the environment that big terrier would really like in a bird feeder. So if you have your bird feeder up this time of year, even if it's just during the day, make sure you're keeping the seed regularly changed. Make sure that the feeder itself is cleaned and sanitized as often as you're willing to do it. It's better for the birds. The other thing that we're thinking about this time of year too is avian influenza. I don't know if folks have heard that there's kind of this avian, this kind of bird flu outbreak among, well birds. And back in the spring, the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department issued some recommendations around not, basically not feeding birds and whatnot. But they haven't rescinded that recommendation yet. None of that, the recommendations haven't really changed. There's no further guidance really from anybody about bird feeding and what that means for avian influenza. But what is pretty clear is that the disease is really, it's not really a problem of feeder birds and songbirds and things like that. It's really something that's a problem with raptors, with domestic poultry and things that aren't the birds that are coming to your feeder. Nevertheless, keeping your feeder nice and clean, the seed change regularly, the feeder's clean, makes it so that the birds you are bringing in, you're not providing them a source of infection. So your backyard doesn't become a transmission zone for things. So, things to keep in mind. Next thing I have up here is seed selection. And there's lots of different types of bird seed you can use. Oftentimes, unfortunately the cheapest one you get at the store is the one that the birds don't really care for very much, or it's a mixture of things that has a little bit of sunflower and a lot of other stuff. And if you've ever gotten that bird seed and watched the birds, they'll pick through it and they'll eat the sunflower and then just pick out everything else and throw it on the ground, just digging through it. It's like getting the M&M's out of trail mix, right? So, I tend to just spring for black oil sunflower in my bird seed mix because that's what they want, for the most part, and so at the nature center, we just fill our feeders with straight black oil sunflower. Yes, thank you, that's the other thing that we do. So, a lot of things, chickadees, not hatches, blue jays, really anything, elite the black oil sunflower, but finches really like the thistle seed as well. It's also called Niger seed. And so, it's really fun, really thin stuff, but it often takes a different type of bird feeder. So, things like this feeder here have a nice, there's a cage around this to protect it from squirrels, but also to protect it from large birds, like blue jays and stuff, but will let in chickadees and tit mice and things. So, there's kind of a large hole that can take sunflower, sunflower seeds. But, thistle seed feeders have really, really small, I don't know if you can see that very well, but really, really, really small holes that looks like just somebody took a little like kitchen knife and like popped a hole in it. So, that way, they can get the thistle seed out, but it's not spilling out onto the ground. But, a squirrel would love to tear apart the plastic edge around this. And so, this one here is an example of the same style of feeder, but it has a metal cuff around the thistle seeder hole. So, in your never-ending quest to deter squirrels from your bird feeders, there's nothing that's perfect, but there are things that are better than others and having a metal collar around us, the squirrels can't just tear open these holes. It's a good idea. So, this works great for keeping squirrels off the feeder, but then you have to think about how is this feeder attached to the pole? Can a squirrel just pick it up and then drop it on the ground? And so, I've had squirrels bite right through like metal, like framing wire, and had my feeders fall to the ground. So, make sure you're thinking about, can however I'm hanging this, will a squirrel be able to get this off that way? Inside of one of these. Oh my gosh. Get a reef on that. Right, so, oops. When the squirrel's inside, it does tend to keep the birds off. No, so this is actually designed less for squirrels and more to keep like blue jays off. Some folks don't like blue jays because they come and they eat like all of your seeds out. So, this allows a lot of things to get in, the smaller birds, but not the bigger birds. So, at the Nature Center, you know, we have, I took this actually right off our pole outside. So, we have this, but then we also, we also have some other types of feeders, you know, that larger birds can get on, but are still squirrel proof. So, this is actually a good example here. Oops, except it apparently has broken in transit. Let's see. Okay. So, this is kind of weight sensitive, where if a bird sits on this, it's fine, if a squirrel sits on it, it kind of comes down and blocks access. So, these tend to be pretty effective. If you have a branch over here and a squirrel hangs down upside down, and you know, then it can sometimes get in. So, again, it's just kind of looking at the whole surroundings. But, you know, this way, cardinals and blue jays and whatnot can sit on the feeder. But then also, the chickadees, chickadees don't hatch as other small things that still get in here. And, yeah, I'll mention hummingbird feeders really briefly. This is another case where even though we're past hummingbird season, just to, you know, plant this in the back of your mind for the next time it warms up, you know, we have the hummingbird feeders out when it's hot outside, right? And we're filling them with sugar water. So, another breeding grounds for bacteria. So, hummingbird feeders really important to be changing the liquid frequently. You know, at least every, you know, once a week at the very least, but more than that if you can. And the recipe, you know, you don't have to go to the store and buy a fancy hummingbird solution, like a hummingbird water solution. And in fact, that's usually pretty bad for the hummingbirds because it's, you know, high-fructose corn syrup and it's dyed red, and that red dye is actually toxic to the birds. So, all you gotta do is make a, basically you're making a simple syrup. It's four parts water to one part sugar and you boil it and then make sure it cools back down before you put it in the feeder and hang it back up or you'll scorch the hummingbird's tongues. So, but yeah, four parts water to one part sugar is your hummingbird food. Yeah, yeah. And I'll repeat for those that can't hear. So, Anne said that one tried-and-tree strategy is to, if you have two trees and a string between them with PVC pipe kind of around the string and your feeder in the middle, the scrolls on their way to try to get to the feeder will fall off because the pipe will roll and whatnot. Other people use slinkies over there, over the line for that reason, or they put slinkies, you know, they'll put slinkies like on this part of the feeder too. So, we even- You have the posts. Yeah. Yeah, the post is, it depends on the specific circumstance. But yeah, just having a big post of the feeders up here but often is not gonna be enough to keep the squirrels off. So, people will put a slinky around the frame of the post and that usually works. So, that's worth a try, slinky. Or the other way to approach this whole thing is just, you know, if you can't beat them, join them. Like just make yourself a squirrel obstacle course and then it's gonna be really entertaining to watch the squirrels trying to like ride the slinky down to the basketball and then over to the twirly slide and then if they get to the food store, if they get to the feeder, then, you know, they win. So, at the Nature Center, we're thinking about going that direction. We're actually creating a squirrel obstacle course. Yeah. And a question that often a lot of people call and ask is, are we changing the bird's behaviors? Are we harming them in any way by feeding the birds, right? You know, if I were to be up here giving you a presentation on how to feed foxes, like, you know, there would be a much different reaction, like, oh, like, here's how to feed bears. Here's how to feed foxes. Here's how to feed squirrels. But, you know, birds, somehow we've decided that we're okay with that, just culturally, which is, I'm just an interesting place that we've drawn the line. So we wanna make sure we're doing it ethically and responsibly, but the other thing is that we're not habituating the birds by doing this. You know, they come by your feeders in their routine as they fly through the forest and are going about looking for food. And so you having your feeders up or not is not gonna be life or death to those birds. They're not coming to depend on your feeders. So in studies that have had where they look at, you know, they follow birds around that go to feeders versus don't, or situations where feeders have been taken down, there's plenty of research out there showing that feeders don't negatively impact birds by being removed and then suddenly the birds starve because there's no more food. That's not what happens. So you can feel good about that. And yeah, and I think the big difference between feeding birds and feeding like mammals say is that, you know, if you feed a bear, the bear's gonna come back and it's gonna cause trouble and it's gonna get habituated and it's gonna lose its fear of being in your backyard in your trash can and so, you know, they say a fed bear is a dead bear, right? Because bears often have to be euthanized for safety. Similar with other sorts of things, you know, if a lot of mammals get access to human food source, well now they know that that's a human food source and they can go seek that out again and again. We don't have to worry about, you know, birds breaking into our cars or biting people or anything like that, fortunately. But anyway, I just wanted to address that before you move on. Sure. You didn't cover seeds on the ground. Oh, thank you. And wouldn't bears just come, even if you're putting it out in the day and taking it at night, there's the seed on the ground? Yeah, that's a great point. So if you have all the seed collecting on the ground, then that will attract bears. And squirrels. And blind squirrels, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. I think it's just a coincidence that the bird, the patterns of the deer and the patterns of the bird seem to not be overlapping too much. You know, the deer like to be at your feeders in the backyards before kind of the human world wakes up, right? So just addressing a couple of these things, yeah. So seed on the ground will attract wildlife, whether it be squirrels or flying squirrels actually, if you have a trail camera that you put on your feeder. If you have red squirrels or gray squirrels during the day, you probably have flying squirrels at night that you don't know about. Because flying squirrels are pretty common in our area. We just don't see them because we're not out there looking for them at night. So yeah, another reason for using black oil sunflowers because there's less seed that's just thrown out under the ground because it's discarded. So birds are just eating everything in the feeder or something they want. They're not tempted to drop it. It's not perfect. There will be a mess below the feeder. And you can put a catchment platform below the feeder if you really want to. But it just comes back to just using your judgment. If you have a lot of bears in the area and then you have a lot of seed on the ground, maybe it's just not a good combination you should wait. So I'll let you make your own decisions about that. I don't want to be too prescriptive about this. But just give folks things to consider. Oh yeah, thanks. So like dark-eyed junkos and morning doves, they really like seed on the ground. In fact, they won't come up to a feeder. They kind of are looking. They're specializing in that seed that's on the ground. And so once we do get into the winter and bears are in hibernation, we actually do scatter sunflower seeds down below our feeders so that we can attract those species that wouldn't come up to the actual feeder itself. So we don't do that until bears are really in hibernation. We don't have to worry about that too much. But yeah, I definitely encourage throwing seed out on the ground. It depends on how many squirrels you want. Some people love squirrels, nothing wrong with that. I think the big problem with squirrels is that they eat so much seed so fast that you're constantly refilling things. Yes. OK, OK. Mill it for the junkos. I'll keep that in mind. Yeah. Oh yeah, good question. So it really has to do with snow more than anything. Once the snow has really melted away for this season, that's when bears are going to be up and active again. So there's not necessarily a date on the calendar where you can really say, oh, by this date you're safe and this date you're as, I mean, it's a gradual process of bears coming out of hibernation. Depends on where they hibernate. If they're hibernating up a higher elevation, then they might be there for longer. If they're hibernating at lower elevation, might be snow free, and they might feel comfortable moving around in the middle of March. So it really depends on the circumstance. Really it's just I think if you are having your beard feeders up, it's also worth keeping an eye out for bear tracks, just keeping your ear to the ground and with your in your neighborhood about if there's been bears around, and just do the best you can to try to prevent the bear-bird feeder combination. It's not going to be perfect, but it's the best we can do. Couple of opportunities I want to share with folks of things that you can actually do and contribute to while sitting in your recline or looking out the window at chickadees. So one is the Christmas bird count. And everybody, if you all live in Montpelier or nearby, you're all within the radius of the Christmas bird count circle that North Branch Nature Center coordinates, which basically runs from Montpelier on the west side all the way to Marshfield on the east side, and then up to Callis and down past Berry. So the way Christmas bird counts work is that this is the longest-running citizen science project in the world. I think they're on year 117 or something like that. And the way it works is that there's count circles. And a circle is 15 miles in diameter. And it's broken up in different kind of subterritories that make sense with the driving, like where the roads go and where the mountains are and everything. And local birders will split up that territory and they'll go and pretty much try to find as many birds as they possibly can in their sector on a given day each year. So this year is Saturday, December 17. It's called the Christmas bird count because these counts take place within a week or two of Christmas on either side. Yeah. Well, and so it's a little bit of, oh, the question is, how do you know you're not counting the same bird more than once? And really, it's just trying to use your judgment. So usually we, so the teams go out in such a way that they're not overlapping. So one team goes out and covers their sector and no one else is covering that sector. And if there are folks who want to participate, so there's two ways to participate. One is to get in the car or go for a hike or whatever and go for a walk and watch birds in the sector. The other is to be a feeder watcher and just watch the birds at your bird feeder over the course of the day and keep track of how many you see that are like the highest number you see. So if you see, you might look at your bird feeder and over the course of the day, you see 60 chickadees, but you only ever see three of them at a time. Well, then your count is three for chickadees. So the highest number that you see at any one given time so you don't double count that way. And then that feeder watch data then gets reported back to the teams and we kind of compile all that together into our results for how many birds of how many species we've seen. And a lot of amazing things have been tracked over the course of this 117 years, you can imagine of what's being seen and what's not. The Plainfield Montpelier circle that we coordinate has been going on for 63 years, which is one of the oldest counts in this country. And just in that 63 years, there's a lot of birds that we see now that we didn't in the beginning and vice versa, things like turkey vultures sometimes show up now. Cardinals, easy, right? Cardinals all over the place, but we don't see spruce grouse, we don't see Canada Jay. There's things that have not shown up in quite some time. Another one is the great backyard bird count. And this is the one that's organized by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in collaboration with Audubon Vermont and many others, sorry, National Audubon Society. And this is like, it used to be a one day event too, but now it's over this period in February where you pretty much sign up to be a feeder watch counter. You go to their website, feederwatch.org and you sign up to do the feeder watch. And you just look at your bird feeder as often as you want over this period of time and just keep track of what you see. And there's a very simple data submission process where you can enter the data, you know, how many chickadees, how many goldfinches, whatever that you saw. And if you don't know all the species, that's perfectly fine. It's really, you know, low barrier to entry. If you know what a robin looks like, you can do it. If you don't know what a robin looks like, you can still do it. So it's a great entry level way where you can report what you do know and it'll contribute to these long-term studies. And project feeder watch is another similar project. Let's see, so great backyard bird count is it happens over several days. Project feeder watch I think happens over the course of the whole winter, but it's another simple project that you can contribute to where, you know, whatever you know, whatever you see is useful and you can just submit that right through a simple data entry portal. So check out project feeder watch, check out the great backyard bird count. If you want to get involved in our local Christmas bird count, just send me an email and be happy to add you to the feeder watch list and give you more information about that. I will leave my business cards around here so folks have my email. But for those that are writing notes, Sean, S-E-A-N, at northbranchnaturescenter.org. Yeah. Oh, great. So to reiterate through the microphone. So project feeder watch, it takes place over like a six month period and you submit your data regularly, you know, twice a week. Does it have to be twice a week or can it be even? You know, the watch for two days. Two days. And then you submit it once a week. Okay. This is some of the information that we've learned based on project feeder, 30 years of project feeder watch data. So these maps look very similar, but what we're looking at here is the range expansion of cardinals or the range distribution of northern cardinals in 1989 to 1990. And comparing that to the range expansion of cardinals 2015 to 2016. Particularly look over at Maine, Canadian Maritimes and basically the darker the color, the darker color, the greater percentage of feeders have cardinals on them in the data that's submitted. So you can really see the core range of northern cardinals expanding north and even west over the years. So I've been really interested, and I'll tell you what this is. Actually, I'm gonna back up so that I don't, this is not too distracting. So for those that really want to get nerdy about their observations, eBird, eBird.org is a way that you can submit checklists of things that you see at your feeder or on your walk or whatever. And again, it's kind of like challenged by choice. You can submit as many birds or as few as you want. So eBird, and eBird is kind of a repository for bird sightings that is used by great backyard bird count. We keep some of our data on the Christmas bird count in eBird. eBird is kind of like the place to collect data on all things bird observations. And so it's a pretty user-friendly platform. You can, if you're the type that is out there with your phone on an app while walking around, you can submit observations that way. If, more likely, you're not like that. And you want to just pull up a website and just type in how many chickadees you saw and hit Enter, it's as simple as that too. But yeah, eBird and all of these different projects together have been able to show us some really amazing information about how birds are moving around not just from year to year, but during the year. We can really visualize migration patterns and whatnot. So this next slide that I'm gonna show you is a visual of candidate goose migration. So it's the darker the color is, the greater the percentage of the greater the likelihood that candidate geese showed up on somebody's checklist that they submitted. So it's kind of President's absence data. And so the darker the color, the more candidate geese showed up on people's count. So it's kind of like this cardinal thing. But this is starting in January, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December. We'll do that again for fun. But right, so we can actually see how candidate goose move. This time of year, we always look up to see geese flying south or flying north or flying. They seem to just fly whichever way they feel like that day, right? But you take that anecdote and you multiply it by 100,000 observations and you can get patterns like this. We can actually see really how populations are moving around the country. Right, especially by the call. Yeah. Merlin is the app that you can use to identify bird songs. And it works really well for, especially for feeder birds, backyard birds, right? The more common the bird, the more likely that Merlin knows what it is. And so it's a great tool for bird song ID. Well, and you know, bird, you can ID birds with it and ID their songs as well. So Merlin's a great opposite, I think of that, yeah. I love Merlin, I created that by one of the songs. It was free, it was a free app. And it turns out it was a Carolina rim, and who knew? I mean, I guess it's not, I still haven't seen it. But Merlin kept saying it was the Carolina rim. Well, I think we'll hopefully hit on Carolina rims a little bit here. And the Merlin app is free. Merlin app's free, yeah, yeah. And do you have a comment? Question? I have a question. Something I saw a year ago, October, I was in a high old nation looking across the valley of U-12 to a field. And I think it was raptors that were big birds, flying very slowly in a circle. And there were different kinds of raptors, because they're different shapes. What were they doing? Say again what time of year this was? October, after they got there. And just fields off of Route 12, or where are you? Yeah. Just north and north clear. I wondered if they were forming up to migraine? Flying low to the ground? Did they just go very slowly in a big circle? Did they migrate in a group of other than one kind of raptor? Yeah, so basically the question is to oversimplify just for the microphone. Whole bunch of what seemed like raptors flying around in a big circle in Montpelier. What's the deal? And so, yeah, raptors do often will look up and high into the sky. And you'll see what's called a kettle of raptors, birds of prey, that are kind of circling up high. And up in those kettles, there can be all sorts of mixed species. There can be eagles. There can be vultures. There can be hawks, falcons, Cooper's hawks, red-tailed hawks, fraud-wing hawks. So it can be a mixture. So anytime there's a kettle, I go up and look at it. Often those kettles are made up primarily of turkey vultures in our area. Now, if you see that and you're suggesting down kind of low to the ground to eye level, it's probably not a mixed species group. It's probably just turkey vultures, if I had to guess, or some other thing that I'm not quite sure what would be causing that. Yeah? There's another app that I use called iNaturalist. And if you're a photographer, you can put your picture on it and it will identify the bird before you. Yeah. So are there any other things in nature? Shout out for the iNaturalist app. iNaturalist.org or iNaturalist app. And it's pretty much like the world's repository for all observations on things other than birds. Well, it does birds also. Like eBird is kind of like the place for bird observations, but you can't really do photos. It's you can't add photos, but it's not really about that. Whereas iNaturalist, the idea is you take a picture of whatever, a slime mold, a fungus, a tree, yourself, and you put it up there. And the community of naturalists will identify it for you. And there's all sorts of algorithms and things like that that will help with the process. So it's great for birds. The only trick is that it's hard to get good photos of birds unless you have the equipment for it, or it's like right in your face. But iNaturalist, great, great, great thing. I want to get into some of the birds here, but I do want to mention just a couple of quick words about optics and binoculars here, because I find that kind of the one barrier that I see to folks getting interested in birding and birdwatching is not having binoculars that are any good. And good doesn't mean expensive. But if you've got your binoculars out of a gumball machine, it's probably getting in the way of your birding enjoyment. And these days, especially in the last 10 years, binoculars have come out that are very affordable, that are excellent. And they're as good as your own vision is. However good or bad that is, the binoculars just magnify that rather than if you've ever looked through binoculars, and it's just like you see this one gray splotch. And you can see out of the right side, but the other side is just a crescent, and then it's blurry. And it's weird. And it takes forever to focus. Those are binoculars of the past. So if your binoculars look like something like this and are 75 pounds, if they work for you and you like them and they're comfortable, and you can see, well, great. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And these binoculars are excellent binoculars. They're just an older style. But there's also plenty of binoculars that are like this, where they're knocked out of alignment and they're full of dust. Or you have to spin the knob like 75 times in order to change the focus. And so I wanna encourage folks, if you'd like to get interested in bird watching and have optics to help you along, getting binoculars that are kind of this style, where they're kind of two long tubes rather than like a letter M. So for what it's worth, these are called Poro Prism Binoculars, and these are Roof Prism Binoculars. But basically there's this kind of binocular and this kind where you have the bend in them. These are usually older style and heavier and optically they're not quite as good as the new binoculars that are coming out like this. And this pair of binoculars is $100. And they're the only pair of binoculars you'd ever need. And this company Vortex, I recommend too. Because you could just throw these out the window and have a truck run over them. And you can send in the broken shattered pieces and they'll just send you a brand new pair of binoculars. They have an amazing warranty, no questions asked warranty policy. So I love Vortex Optics and there's binoculars that Vortex makes that can hit all price points. I might also add that at the Nature Center we have lots of binoculars. And if you'd like to come test them out or loan a pair for a week or something like that you're welcome to reach out to us and we can hook you up with a pair of binoculars to try out. So. What are the numbers on that that you would recommend? Yep, so these ones here are this is like getting out of your comfort zone. You can just forget about this for a minute. But these are eight by 42s. So the first number of the eight is the magnification power. So like eight means that you're magnifying by eight times. Bring it eight times closer, right? 10X brings it 10 times closer. The more magnification, the harder it is to hold it steady, right? So like if you ever tried to use binoculars in a moving car, right? Like it's a small change in your hand position makes it a huge change in what you're looking at, right? So the more magnification, the closer the bird is but the harder it is to hold it steady. And so if you're birding in a place where you can always have your hands on your knees or on a window sill or on a car hood or something like that, then go for the 10. But if you're often just walking in the woods and you don't have anything to stabilize your binoculars on, maybe go for an eight powered. And then the other number, this is 42. And so these are eight by 42s. Talked about what the eight means. The 42 is basically how big is the field of view once you're at that magnification. So the larger the number there, the bigger the field of view. And I definitely recommend 42. What was the name of those binoculars? These are Vortex Crossfires. What was it? A V? V, V-O-R-T-E-X Vortex. So yeah, anything less than 42. You can do 32, but the narrower the field of view gets, the harder it is to actually find that bird. How many of you have used binoculars and you can see the bird's like right there, but you're like this for like 20 minutes trying to figure out where it is. And by the time you get there, the bird's flown off. Right, so. All right, so let's familiarize ourselves with, oh sorry, one last thing. So over here on the side of the screen I have a spotting scope as well. I put that there mostly just to remind me to talk about spotting scopes because they can be a great tool if you have a feeder out the window and you can just put a tripod inside and on the window sill or something like that and just point it out at the feeder. You can really bring in birds so that they feel like they're right in your hand. You can count every eyelash on a robin. You can, you know, it's amazing, amazing. And scopes used to be really price prohibitive and they have come down a lot so that you can get a really good scope that's gonna serve you really well for a bird feeder for a few hundred dollars. So it's definitely more expensive than binoculars but they've come down a ton in price so something to consider getting a scope. Okay, so who's this bird? Chickadee. All right, you're all ready for Project Feeder Watch. So this is a black cap chickadee and over here on the right or on the left here are the 25 most common feeder birds in the country. Maybe this is the East Coast actually. Must be the East Coast. Over 7,000 different sites. I don't know if this is a feeder watch report or whatnot but anyway, one of these, you know, this is, these are the 25 most common birds and many of these are our most common birds right here in Montpelier. So why don't we hit on a couple of these that we recognize. So black cap chickadee. It's the archetypal feeder bird. We know the chickadee. White mask, black cap, hence the black cap chickadee. What sound did they make? It's like we have a whole flock right here. Chickadee, dee, dee. What's the song that they sing in the spring? But anyway, chickadees say chickadee, dee, dee and they do that especially when they're upset about something and the more dees you get, the more upset they are. So when we walk by on the sidewalk, we're like a 3D threat, like a chickadee, dee, dee. But if they see a cat walking by on the sidewalk, that's like a 9D chickadee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee. So as you listen for chickadees, you can now kind of gauge what it is that they're seeing and hearing even if you can't see them and what they're looking at. If you hear chickadees, you can kind of guess what they're upset about. And this is the range map for the chickadee. Now this is a bird that is not a big migrant. They're populations, they kind of ebb and flow a little bit throughout the year, but they're residents here. They're here in the spring, summer, fall, winter. They are residents. Who's this? This is a dark-eyed junko. The subspecies for those that care is the slate-colored junko, but dark-eyed junko. And they have these outer-white tail feathers. So when they're hopping around in the ground and they're displaying their tail out, we'll have two white feathers on the outside of their tail feathers, and the rest of their tail feathers are really like charcoal black. So little gray bird with outer-white tail feathers or dark-eyed junko. Now, a lot of these birds, you don't necessarily need to remember all of their, none of these birds, you need to know all of their different plumage characteristics and where is the eye spot and what color is their bill and all this. Just their behavior and their attitude kind of can tell you what they are, right? Just like if we see each other in the grocery store, you could be facing the other way, and if we know each other, I could recognize you from the back and the other side of the grocery store by how you're walking or maybe what section of the grocery store you're in. And it's the exact same with birds, right? So if I see a bird that's on the ground hopping around beneath the feeder, kind of scratching at the ground looking for seeds, and it's dark in color, my odds are it's a dark-eyed junko. If I see the outer-white tail feathers, I know it's a dark-eyed junko. So I know birding can seem overwhelming because there's so many different birds out there to choose from, but really in the winter in our area, we're really looking at 10, 12 species that would like to be to come across. And so just getting to know their behaviors and attitudes, these will never come up to the feeder. They'll always be on the ground. Cardinal. So here's one that, like, you got this one, right? This one you can feel comfortable about if you see it. But what does the female look like? Yeah, she's, I think, really beautiful. All sorts of beiges and oranges and creams and peaches, not bright red like this, but a lot more intricately colored. But you know it for a cardinal because it has the crest and big red bill, and they're often calling back and forth to one another. So folks, a quick little tidbit about cardinals. They are kind of made it all year round, and a pair of cardinals, they'll make a little contact calls to one another throughout the day. Chip, chip, chip, right? And you'll hear that really kind of chunky chip note in the cedar trees at the edge of the yard. And that chip note is them telling the other bird that like, I hear you, I'm still okay, everything's fine. And they're doing that because if one of the birds stops chipping, it means something's wrong. So like chickadees, they only make noise when something's wrong, right? Cardinals is the opposite. They chip, and if there's a problem, then they stop chipping. And then if their colon response kind of ceases, then that's the cue to those cardinals or something, you know, some danger of it. These are morning dubs, beautiful, beautiful bird, right? Never is probably not gonna come up to the feeder. Depends, I guess sometimes they come up to the feeder, up to platform feeders, but often on the ground, right? Often in the trees, near the feeders. Often in groups, right? What else do you all know about? How, what these do and how they behave? Yeah, that cooing, right? Go ahead. Sometimes around my house, they seem every year to be more and more. A couple of years ago, I had 15, last year I had up to 22, and they were just all over the place. It was quite amazing. They definitely congregate up in the winter. A lot of bird species, they form these, like feeding flocks. Sometimes they're one species flocks. Sometimes they're multi-species flocks. But if you're a bird out there trying to find a food source in the winter, and you aren't successful, you know, you're done for, right? You can't go very long as a bird without finding something to eat. And so birds form up feeding flocks in the winter so that as they're trailing together, there's many eyes looking out for possibilities. And as soon as one bird sees something, every bird can benefit from it. And usually in the winter, food sources, there's, you know, it's a big seed source. It's a huge field of seeds. It's, you know, whatever there is to eat, there's often enough for a little flock. So it benefits the whole, it benefits the bird to find friends and feed together. So anyway, with morning dubs, they will flock up in the winter and form these big groups. I don't know if they're exclusively family groups, or if they're just all the dubs that happen to be around. But on our Christmas bird counts, when we're driving around, you know, oftentimes you'll go the whole day without seeing any morning dubs at all. Then you'll get to one yard and there'll be 150 of them, you know, in the tree. And that's the only morning dubs for 10 miles around. So they, you know, they find a good pattern. They find a safe spot. They find a good place to roost. They find feeders they like. Sheltered spot that's out of the wind. Then they'll kind of hang out there. You know, then we get back and do our reporting at the end of the day for Christmas bird count. We put in 150 morning dubs and people think, oh, they must be everywhere. Well, no, they're just in one place. Right. This right here, that's just black feathers. So it's, that's just a part of their plumage. They have these little kind of black speckles, just like the black speckles on their wing here. And if we were to see this bird from the back from the other side, it would kind of have more of that black speckling. Who's this? Lou J. Lou J. All right, so y'all are excellent birders. Moving on. So, so we have two kinds of nut hatches here in Mobbular. We have the white breasted nut hatch. And let's see if I put the next one. Yeah, all right. And then the red breasted nut hatch. And the nice thing about birding in the winter is, you know, when birds are first born and when they fledge, they look weird and they don't have the same plumage as their parents. But by this time of year, everything kind of looks the way it's going to look. And so they're, you know, seeing our red breasted nut hatch in June can be confusing because sometimes they don't really have much red. But this time of year, you know, they're going to have that red breast. White breasted nut hatches are going to have that white breast. Red breasted nut hatches tend to be in place that have a lot more conifer trees. So if that's you, then red breasted is probably your default. If you have a lot of pines, spruces. Whereas white breasted nut hatches tend to be in place that have a lot more hardwoods, maples and oaks and that sort of thing. But does the word nut hatch mean anything? No, but it reminds me of a really great comic by Royza Marie Moscoe where a nut hatch, she takes a acorn and puts it in her nest and incubates it and it hatches a nut hatch out of the acorn. But I should add that to the slide. So I don't know why they're called nut hatches. The nut hatches refers to a whole family of birds, the citidae family. And so it may be that that family was named because of a behavior that a particular nut hatch makes that isn't the nut hatch that we have here or something like that. That's often the case where you name a whole family of birds before you really know who else is in that family. And then you're kind of stuck with calling them that even though most of them don't do that thing. Trying to think of another example off the top of my head. Maybe you can think of one. So red breasted nut hatches and white breasted nut hatches, they sound very similar, but for those that are looking for a little bit of a handle, the white breasted nut hatches are the ones that go yank, yank, yank. See if I can actually, let's see here. White breasted nut hatch. So yank, yank, yank. Whereas red breasted nut hatches, I think sound like a tiny bird playing a tiny trumpet. So it's kind of a clear, higher call. That sounds like a note rather than the white breasted nut hatch that's just like yank, yank. And both of them come in and eat seeds at the feeder. And when they're on the trees, right, their behavior, you don't need to know anything else about the bird, but if you see them on a tree, they're winding their way down the tree trunk, right? They're pointing downwards and kind of working on their way down. You're never gonna see a cardinal doing that or a sparrow, right? It's a bird that's working its way down the tree, down the trunk of the tree, it's a nut hatch. Are they related to the brown creepers? They're not, I don't think they are related to the brown creepers, because they go up the tree, yeah. Yeah, so if you see a bird that looks just like the trunk of the tree, but it's working its way up, then yeah, it's a brown creeper. Reminds me of another comic where there's nut hatches going down the tree and a brown creeper's going up the tree and they run into each other in the middle and bonk their heads. So, that's right, yeah. But they will also eat seed. Yep. Okay, so that's the case. Yeah, a lot of things that stick around here in the winter are generalists, because they kind of have to be, right, in order to take advantage of enough different food sources. So like chickadees are eating a lot of caterpillars and pupa and things like that, which are available on the tree branches by the tens of thousands, but good luck going out and trying to find them yourself. That's actually a really interesting activity, is like watching chickadees in the trees for 10 minutes, plucking food off of the branches and presumably every time they're grabbing at something, they're actually finding something to eat. Well, time them doing that for five minutes, then go yourself out to a tree and just look on the branches and see if you can find anything. And it's amazing how much better they are at this, although their life depends on it, right? So, American goldfish, goldfish. This is an American goldfish. The only fish that comes to our feeder. Goldfinch and a lot of folks recognize American goldfinches in the spring or in the spring and summer by this bright golden sunshine color to them. But in the winter, they really fade out quite a bit. This is actually a pretty colorful one. Nice, a lot of folks will call me asking, I have this really strange bird in my feeder. It's the size of the goldfinch, except it's not gold and it has these black wings with white kind of barring all over them and they're in these groups and they are feeding at the thistle feeders. Well, that's a goldfinch. So yeah, they lose that bright colored pigmentation when they molt into their fall, winter plumage like this. They're drab, but they're still a bit yellow which helps give them away and they're in groups, right? They forage in groups. They'll come to your sunflower seed feeders but they also really like the thistle seed feeders. And when they're flying around, they have a really diagnostic call as well. So, let's see if I can, potato chip, potato chip, potato chip, right? So listen for potato chip up in the sky. They only do it when they're flying. So, yeah. What's the after using? This is the Sibley Guide to Birds. So this, my favorite handbook to bird, like Field Guide to Birds is the Sibley, S-I-B-L-E-Y, the Sibley Guide to Birds. They also have the same guide available as an app which is great because it has all of the calls and songs built into the app as well. So you can really quickly pull up a bird, play it song, play it's call, and you can even compare things side by side. So if you're not sure if it's a Swainson's Thrust or a Hermit Thrust, you can put them up side by side and then still be confused. So here's American Gold Finch. So they're a nomadic finch. Like most of our finches, they're in their nomad. They move big distances over the course of the year and it varies from year to year where they go. Try that again. Correct, the ones that we have in the summer may or may not be the ones that we have in the winter. And in fact, we go along, like, this is another common phone call I get in nature centers. All my finches are gone, where did they go? Well, they're hanging out by the tens of thousands in the Northeast Kingdom right now, and by then they'll come down to Montpelier for a couple of weeks and then they'll go to Ontario or whatever, and so they really are nomadic. And if suddenly you don't see any finches and you've been seeing them for a long time, that doesn't mean anything happened to the finches, it just means they moved. They went somewhere else. So that's just kind of what they do. So in absence of having bird feeders around, these finches are eating seeds. And in the winter, these seeds are really found in the form of conifer seeds, like spruce and fir, and well, like spruce and fir cones. And so across the boreal forest, across our northern forest, from the Northeast Kingdom all the way to the West Coast, this band of boreal forest full of spruces and firs, that's the, those are the seeds that our finches are really relying on. And the cones that are developed, these trees develop, they really, like some years there's huge numbers, some years there's really small numbers, and so it's very regional. So the birds have evolved to go from one place to another, looking over wide ranges to find that spot that has lots of cones. Hi. The last thing I want to do is just cut you up. But it is over an hour. How about if we have two more questions? This has been great, because we've had questions all through the day. He might still have more of a presentation like that. Let me, describe with me, it's just that usually people start getting antsy after an hour. I'll, well, I don't want to be, but I know that some folks don't, and I don't want to force folks to stay because I've been there. So I'm personally gonna stay if it's okay. I'll stay for a while off mic and answer questions and things like that. So I'll hang around for anybody that wants to, but I also recognize that we're over time. Do you have more presentations? There's a couple, two more things I want to hit. Okay, go ahead. If you want to be going, leave, just go right ahead. You won't be offending me. Yeah. I want to do, oh, that's our Carolina red. You're wondering about that, the Carolina red. It's a beautiful bird in that we get, well, they're here all year, but they show up in Montpiler in the winter here and there. And so it's a really, if you hear this bird, it's just singing this beautiful song where everything else just going, map in the winter Carolina red. But I wanted to hit the Donnie Woodpecker and the Harry Woodpecker because these two here are the one that everyone wants to know, like how do you tell these birds apart, right? Do I have a Donnie Woodpecker or a Harry Woodpecker? So on the left is a Donnie Woodpecker, on the right is a Harry Woodpecker. They're both full size. It's really helpful when they're at your feeder because you can use the size of the feeder itself as a size comparison tool because without any reference, who knows how big that bird is, but when they're on your feeder, you can think, okay, well, this is, half the height of the feeder or it's the three quarters of the height of the feeder. So the Donnie Woodpeckers are quite a bit smaller, but then their size of their bill is also much smaller proportionally to their head, right? So with the Harry Woodpecker, you go from the tip of the beak to the base of the beak. So like right here where that white line starts, here to here, that's about the same length as the width of their entire head. So you can like turn this beak around and it would touch the back of their head. Does that make sense? With the Donnie Woodpecker, it won't make it that far. It'll only go about halfway, three quarters of the way. So looking at the size of the bill in relation to the size of the head is, I think, the best way to tell them apart. So Donnie. Harry. Harry. There are other ways, but we'll stick with that one. Okay, well, I think we'll pause there. And yeah, I can do whatever you want, Grace. I'm happy to do. What would you like us to do? Well, I would like you to answer Cindy's question. All right, Cindy. I was just looking at your chart. Looks like the only one that's going down on your chart is American Crow. Oh. Can you tell us something about that? Hmm. Yeah, well, you know, I haven't noticed because I wasn't really looking for it, but I'm also surprised to see it would be the case because that's not what I've been finding here on our Christmas bird count records. The American Crow numbers are very strong. So I'm not sure why crows would be declining. I'm not sure if that's a real thing. Or, you know, this is also records of observations at bird feeders. And so it might just not necessarily at the feeder, but like visible from the backyard or whatever. And so it might be that just there's a lot more crows out there, but maybe behavior has changed and they're just not as they're seen as frequently in that particular context. I have no idea. That's the surprise to me to notice. So thanks for noticing that. Now I'm going to go look into that. But I don't think that there's that crows are having any issues right now. Yeah. Just a comment. I used to teach Sunday school in Guilford, Connecticut. And David Sibley was in the fourth grade. His dad was a professor aboard a theology Yale University. And he was in my Sunday school class. Wow. So we have you to thank for David Sibley's success, is what we're saying. Yeah. Oh, a good story. Maybe we'll do one question, and then we'll break. And I'll stay here. And if anyone wants to ask further questions, we can do that. Oh, thank you. Suit, yes. So this is a suit feeder that we have. It also has a cage around it to keep off big birds. Well, so you can see the suit block is inside of this. And it's surrounded by a cage. So a suit is a great thing to have up in addition to your sunflower seed and addition to your thistle seed, because that is what woodpeckers really like. And other things like that, too. What else have you seen at your suit feeders? Cardinals like suit feeders? Sometimes strange things that shouldn't be here this time of year would come to suit feeders, like tannagers that get stuck here in February. They'll show up at suit feeders sometimes. Weird stuff. But you can buy suit blocks at the store that fit into this. But you can also just get suit, which is just like beef tallow from the butcher, a hunger mountain co-op or whatever, because they often have the stuff that they're not going to use. And so you can just buy it and just cut it to a size that fits in this and keep the rest of it in your freezer. And in your freezer, it'll last for plenty long. You can also make your own suit by adding peanut butter things. So there's all sorts of suit recipes. Really, you just want something that's high in saturated fat that you can stuff inside of this. And you can mix in all sorts of other nuts and seeds and stuff. Yeah. And you recommend the cage inside the cage? Well, it depends on what you're trying to attract in terms of if you want the cage around it. This is the only one I could find, so that's what I brought. But the one at my house doesn't have the cage around it. If it's getting mobbed by a lot of things that are eating it too fast, I'll just take it in. Yeah. What about the fruit? The what? Fruit? Fruits. Oh, so some people in the spring will put oranges out. They'll stake them onto the side of the feeder under the side of a branch or something like that. Kind of an orange and half and stick it out there. And it attracts Baltimore Orioles. Some people have great luck with this. I've never had good luck with it. But if you have an orange, give it a shot. Yeah. Could you address those fillers that none of you are single? Yeah, I don't know what those fillers are. I mean, they're kinds of seeds. But I notice that they don't eat them. And so then I've switched over to sunflower seed entirely. Yeah. I want to be mindful of time. So I think we'll I'll turn it back over to Grace, maybe, if we need to have any conclusion remarks. If Grace doesn't have anything, just say it. Grace, OK. Thanks, John. And he's going to stay around and answer any questions you have about anything in your life. And we have, as usual, some wonderful cookies that our friend Amalia de Stefano baked for us. And please help yourselves. And don't forget to leave your name tags. Hope to see you next week. You're all great. Goodbye. Thanks all.