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(Image: iNaturalist)

Spring is a time of wakefulness. A time to pull out of our winter funk, poised for the leaves and blooms bursting forth, pollinators and migrants winging back. Spring is the watchful season too.

Instead of anxiously staring at the vegetable starts on your windowsill, direct that nervous energy towards an upcoming opportunity to help monitor your local ecosystem. The City Nature Challenge calls for us to engage in the spirit of “nature, everywhere.”

Beginning in 2016 as a competition between San Francisco and Los Angeles aiming to engage community members in documenting as much urban wildlife as possible, the Challenge has become an international affair. In 2020, 244 cities across the globe participated and over 32,000 species were documented with 1300 of those being rare or threatened. The Challenge concept is simple: during specific dates, get outside and document nature with nothing more than a smartphone and curiosity. Continue reading →

Bald eagle circling #CapitolHill 🦅 pic.twitter.com/NMiWIdfDUU

— Adam (@avance88) March 17, 2021

There is a long list of things I take for granted. Some are deeply important like clean running water. Others are not, but make my life significantly better: good pizza and microbreweries, for example. To some degree, I could live without pizza and beer, but certainly not water. I’d argue that bald eagles fall somewhere in between this hierarchy of needs. But that doesn’t mean I necessarily love bald eagles. They feel more like an oil change.

Just under a year ago, my favorite undergraduate professor and dear friend passed away. His personality and impression on generations of ornithology students was so indelible I can’t help but quote him on a regular basis. One of my favorite statements during field outings was in relation to young eagles: “They look like they are rotting” — which summed up his feelings on bald eagles quite well.

I’m not quite to the point of accusing young, mottled individuals of being flying corpses, but I cannot call myself an eagle fanboy either. They are deeply aggressive bullies that scare other birds and alter their behavior. This can be impressive but also frustrating when you are birding and every other species in the vicinity is cowering under the frown of the big bald tyrants. Their presence soaring this late winter above Capitol Hill is, at best, a mixed bag of excitement and dread. Continue reading →

A Pine Siskin (Image: Brendan McGarry)

As we go about our lives, the rest of the world keeps moving. Seasons change, animals and plants enact glorious revivals, tremendous gatherings and movements, that we take various approaches to noticing. All too often we miss great natural events in urban spaces, either because we are simply too distracted or don’t know where or when to look. Sometimes it’s simply that our spaces don’t support such events.

And sometimes we do notice, because they’re too hard to miss. The Eastern Cottontail Rabbit population explosion of the past couple years. Or this winter: the initial joy of Pine Siskin flocks at our bird feeders — a moment that quickly backpedaled into dismay.

If you don’t feed birds or don’t watch them as religiously as some, I wouldn’t put it past you to have missed the bevies of tiny finches. However, if during this dark winter, you were constantly at home you might have found new (or renewed) relief in bird feeding. It’s entirely likely that a few people reading started feeding birds for the first time in 2020, realizing how fun it can be to see our neighbors up close and personal. This isn’t just a posit: during the spring of 2020 Instacart searches for “Bird Food” rose by as much as 450%.

The birds
Pine Siskins are small, brownish finches with embellishments of yellow in their wings and tails. They are extremely gregarious, exploding into noisy flight, filling the tops of alder and conifers to find the winter seeds they subsist on. Siskins flocks are hard to miss once you know their intensity.

Though they are a northerly species, they are year-round residents on the Hill (though most head for the forest in summer) and mountainous areas of western North America all the way into northern Mexico enjoy them as such also. Siskin populations are deeply influenced by coniferous seed crops, so much so that in some years we have huge numbers and others they are entirely absent. Many finches have similar ways of responding to the variability of food and live irruptive, nomadic lives across much of their ranges.

Especially epic eruptions of finches are called “superflights.” Not only do Pine Siskins show up, but their enticing cousins do as well. Redpolls, crossbills, and grosbeaks, all are reliant on cone crops in winter. Only sometimes that food isn’t there. Continue reading →