(Not quite) a massive murmuration

Walking home today through one of my favorite 1930's neo-Tudor neighborhoods (and feeling just a bit sorry for myself that soon I'll be back in my own 1950's subdivision, where there's not a single diamond-paned window to be found), I was drawn out of my funk by the sound: the twittering of quite a large number of birds, species unknown. No birds were visible in the immediate area, so I knew that the sound had to be coming from a large flock of something.

Finally; a few hundred feet away, I saw them: dozens of starlings in the upper branches of two enormous, spreading trees, probably oak or maple of some kind, their cheerful chatter drowning out the traffic from a busy street only a block away. It quickly became obvious why a group of starlings is called a murmuration, which dictionary.com defines as "a low continuous indistinct sound; often accompanied by movement of the lips without the production of articulate speech." Starlings have no lips, but the sounds they were making were continuous, and as much as I would have liked to know what they were saying to each other, their speech was not articulate from a human perspective. But it was a delight to see and hear so many birds congregating and murmurating on a grey November noon.

"Murmuration" also describes a specific kind of flocking behavior: the tendency of starlings to swoop in huge groups shortly before roosting in the evenings. If you want to see a real murmuration and have a shortage of starlings roosting in your neighborhood, you can watch a video of an enormous Irish flock here.

Closer to home, near the drainage ditch that has become a protected stream, I could hear the twitters of large numbers of much smaller birds. Not even meandering along the margin gave a good look at the flock, which was hiding in thick vegetation that included way too much tatarian honeysuckle. Based on the two individuals brave enough to venture into the stream, I suspect that I was hearing a spattering of sparrows.

More November delights

• Robins in a fully-loaded (though not for long) hawthorn
• A red-tailed hawk making lazy circles in a surprisingly blue sky (scouting the robins, maybe?)
• Juncos and chipping sparrows at the feeder

Late fall color

October is generally the best month for fall color in the places I have lived, but autumn is taking its own sweet time saying good-bye this year. (No complaints from me.) These pictures were taken in the Old Orchard neighborhood of Toledo on November 20.

First, of course, is the ubiquitous Bradford pear.

This now-invasive non-native is not a favored tree of mine, but it definitely has fall color. Luckily, the same block includes several red maples that have hung on nicely this year.

as have a few sugar maples.

I've no idea what this tree is, but its color really popped on a gray afternoon.

On the same block, these pastels lightened a shady grove next to the sidewalk.

And lest we forget what November usually looks like, the tracery of branches against an afternoon sky.

Delights of a November afternoon

Warm weather keeps returning to Toledo, necessitating park rambles. Sunny November days with light jacket temperatures are not to be wasted indoors (even though my course projects have come along nicely).

There was a time when I found late autumn depressing. Nothing much is blooming, most of the trees have lost their leaves, and the dominant colors are generally variations of brown. I'm not sure how I managed for so long not to notice the colors of a field of little bluestem,

especially when the plants are backlit by afternoon sun.

It's easier to notice details of trees when the leaves are gone, like the nearly iridescent bark of some members of the genus Prunus.

Sycamores for me only come into their own when bark is their dominant feature. (Of course, sycamore fruit makes my eyes water, and the leaves take forever to break down, so I'm biased.)

This white oak is possibly the most magnificent tree at Wildwood,



but this young one and several of its friends were partnering with the breeze to drown out traffic noise.

Today was a good day for birds. The woodland edge of a prairie trail featured four bluejays squawking, and while I couldn't get a decent picture of the jays, I did get the bittersweet berries that had attracted them to hold still for a photograph. 

 .

This was a good afternoon at the feeders, too. While the goldfinches have lost their breeding plumage and the fall migrants seem to have migrated south, there's nothing boring or depressing about our regulars. Today's visitors included this titmouse

and a nuthatch or two.

So maybe the flowers and butterflies are gone for a few months. There's still plenty to see.

Park Pleasures

It's no secret that I think public parks, especially nature preserves, are one of civilization's best inventions. Parks with playgrounds and ball fields are good things, too, but they just aren't as interesting as the miniature wildernesses in our cities. And even though places whose trails can all be traversed in an afternoon's meander aren't REAL wilderness (Aldo Leopold, one of the patron saints of wilderness preservation, said that a wilderness needed to be "big enough to absorb a two-week's pack trip" and free of all signs of humans, including obvious trails), they do give the imagination room to breathe. 

Prairie patches open out at the edges of woodland.

Little bluestem going to seed catches the light,

as does the Maumee River.

A dead tree helps to nurse the forest's next generation

like these young sassafras.

October paths are sometimes covered by maple leaves,

and sometimes they just leave us wondering what's around the next bend.

 

Beautiful but bad

I was walking along the Upland Woods Trail in Wildwood Metropark yesterday afternoon when I spotted it: burning bush, euonymus alatus.

Euonymus alatus in oak-maple woodland

It looks innocent, doesn't it? And even I have to admit that the late color is welcome, for all the fun of crunching through brown, dried leaves.



leaf close-up

Many of us have this plant in our yards. The college where I teach has planted a hedge of it, and the bright red shrubs are a showstopper in early October. But there's a problem.
This particular euonymus is an Asian native and has no natural controls on this continent. Insects leave it alone, deer have no interest in browsing it, and birds like the fruit. Check out the following USDA publication: http://efotg.sc.egov.usda.gov/references/public/VT/JS314-Burning_Bush.pdf



Yes, each of those red berries contains at least one seed that can turn into a bush. This single specimen bore hundreds of berries, and the woods were full of this plant. Burning bush can grow in shade and is invading woodlands throughout the eastern US, crowding out native shrubs and spring ephemerals like trillium.

As beautiful as burning bush is and as easy as it is to grow, if you have it in your yard, do consider taking it out. Our woodland wildflowers will thank you.

And then it changed

This started out to be a very different kind of post, one about the joys of an unexpected 70-degree November afternoon in northwest Ohio, and that post will probably eventually get written, the Maumee River being as lovely as it is.

But after a few hours of delighted trail-wandering with my spouse, we decided to detour past the Battle of Fallen Timbers monument on the edge of the Metropark where we'd spent the afternoon. Even before we left the parking lot, I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the wind off the river. The monument area is filled with spirits not yet at rest.

I have to confess that the history of battles has never been my thing. I love history and subject my students to lots of it in our literature classes, but generally ignore the "kings and wars" aspect of the subject. In today's Lucas County, Fallen Timbers is a mall, Ottawa a river, and Anthony Wayne a highway and a school district. In 1794, however, on that bluff overlooking the river, the Western Confederacy of Native nations made a desperate attempt to hang onto the rich territory that today is Ohio at the same time that a new nation was encouraging land-hungry immigrants to establish farms and schools. The earth we walked across to get to the monument was once drenched in the blood of members of Wayne's Legion of the United States and a group of 1500 Shawnees, Delawares, Miamis, Wyandots, Ojibwas, Ottawas, Potawatomis, and Mingos led by Blue Jacket and Little Turtle. Looking from the bluff to the rich river bottom below, the contrast between today's peaceful parkland and 1794's clash of cultures is nearly overpowering. So much beauty. So much suffering.

The development of the monument itself demonstrates cultural clash and shift. The first memorial on the site is a flat stone where offerings were once made to the spirits of the Native leaders who perished in the battle. Then in 1935, the Ohio Historical Society erected a white marble monument to the 33 members of the Legion of the United States who perished and the 89 wounded in the battle. A brass plaque lists the names of the officers but states that the names of the privates and musicians among the casualties are unknown. There is no mention of the Native participants in the battle. A contemporary statue on the site includes a Native warrior among the figures depicted, but gives more words to the settlers "massacred" between 1783 and 1794 than to the peoples who did not recognize British authority to sign away their territory. Only in 1994 was a monument--in white marble, matching the original 1935 slab--created to honor the Native participants in the conflict.

And yet--the National Park Service is making an attempt to commemorate the whole story. In a single human lifetime, our society has moved from the erasure of the original human inhabitants of the Maumee Valley to a recognition of their role in the history of the place. For the second time, a person of (mixed) African ancestry has been elected President of the United States, and we are discussing his policies on their merits, not simply as originating from a person of his particular ethnicity. Whether one supports this president or not, it is possible to discuss his ideas as ideas; such discussion would not have been possible in the years when abolitionist Frederick Douglass was described as "a representative colored man."

The monument park does not yet feel like a peaceful place to me, but it may be that some of the ghosts of our past are being laid to rest.

More of them!

Regular readers of this blog (if such there be) may remember how delighted I was when the Black Squirrels of North Parkersburg migrated to our neighborhood, our block, and finally, our yard. Having waited for them for what felt like forever (and was in fact a year or so after my first sighting of the little creatures), I was surprised to learn that melanistic squirrels are in fact fairly common. This last week, I spent time in a place in which black squirrels were the only squirrels in town (or at least in the immediate area).

The vicissitudes of life necessitated spending several days hanging around Union Hospital in Dover, Ohio, part of a sprawling medical complex that includes nicely wooded parking lots. Since I get antsy sitting for too long, I walked around most of the parking areas at one time or another. As is typical of Ohio in late fall, squirrels were busily locating and burying acorns and other winter foods (on their breaks from stuffing their little faces). What was not so typical, at least not in places more familiar to me, was that all the squirrels in the complex were solid black--not a gray squirrel in sight. The oak trees directly in front of the main entrance boasted a whole herd of melanistic rodents. These squirrels looked healthy--they were active, their fur was shiny, they were alert in the way of squirrels--but they were uniformly tiny, somewhere between the average gray squirrel and the fairydiddle in size. I did not expect to discover a distinctive local race of squirrels while waiting around a hospital, but that was in fact the entertainment of the week.

A new favorite

My time in Toledo has introduced me to another (supposedly common) northern bird that is rapidly becoming a favorite. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology describes the red-breasted nuthatch as "an intense bundle of energy," and if the one visiting our feeder is typical of the species, the description is accurate. A few sightings were required before I could ID the bird because it was so small and moved so fast (and the ground-level window is so in need of washing). I also suspect that our regular visitor is a female as the red is really more of a washed-out orange. Still, whether the name is accurately descriptive or not, the sight of one of these tiny dynamos flitting around a feeder is one of life's more cheering sights.

It's official

Even as far north as we are here, the weather allowed the illusion that winter was a long way off. Afternoons in the seventies were common throughout much of October (not what I expected of Toledo, Ohio), and flowers continued blooming in all the yards around here. We've still had no frost in the neighborhood, and a few roses were hanging on yesterday (at Halloween!), but winter is officially on its way.

How do I know? The juncos are here in droves (or flocks, or gaggles, or whatever groups of juncos are called).