Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy

I never saw a disconnected tree. They grip the ground as though they like it, and though fast rooted, they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering in all directions with every wing, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day and through space heaven knows how fast!
- John Muir

Every gardener knows that under the cloak of winter lies a miracle …
a seed waiting to sprout, a bulb opening to the light, a bud straining to unfurl.
And the anticipation nurtures our dream.
–Barbara Winkler

A very birdy New Year to all!  Hope your holidays were merry!  Welcome new book club readers and warm greetings to all.

A reminder to all that our next meeting is Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 7 pm in Ashburn.  We are reading Bringing Nature Home by Douglas W. Tallamy.  If you’re not already on our Book Club list but would like to be, you can sign up on our LWC Nature Book Club page. You’re welcome to join us on February 4th or future get-togethers.

For those who are coming on the 4th, please bring suggestions for our next book and feel free to share favorites with the group.  I’m thinking that since we’ve read only non fiction thus far, perhaps its time for something light and fun?

Happy reading,
Donna Quinn

Water is a huge attraction for birds and other wildlife any time of the year but it is especially so during the winter. Having a shallow dish (max depth of 2 1/2 inches) with fresh water provides birds with the fluids they need to metabolize the nutritious seeds and other foods they’re gobbling up throughout the day. It also enables them to preen and clean their feathers which keep them insulated and warm as well as ready for flight.

During our snowstorm in December and the really cold weather we’ve had the last few weeks, the birds were particularly thankful for this fresh water, with all sorts of different species dropping in. The Bluebirds seemed to especially enjoy it and just last week we had six of them here at once enjoying the fresh water.

Throughout these chilly months, the birdbath I use has a thermostat and heater built in so it turns on when the temperature drops down below 40 degrees and turns off when the temperature rises. You can see in the photo here the plug where I plug it in. In the summer, I just remove the cord. There are also heaters that you can get to put in your birdbath just for winter.

Keeping the water clean is also important. Bird droppings will get in there throughout the day. At our house, we also have raccoons that come in the night to wash their paws in the birdbath. Their paws are always so muddy… oh what do they get into? So, I have it as part of my morning routine when I fill the platform feeder with seeds, to also head out with my brush and watering bucket to clean and fill the birdbath.

In terms of placement of a birdbath, it’s best to locate it within a few feet of some trees or other vegetation so the birds have some protection both from the elements and from predators.

Keep an eye on those birdbaths for interesting birds – we’ve had reports of hawks and owls coming in for a drink now and then as well as the songbirds.

Perpetually now, we search and bicker and disagree. The eternal form eludes us — the shape we conceive as ours. Perhaps the old road through the marsh should tell us. We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no image except Life, and life is mulitudinous and emergent in the stream of time.
- Loren Eiseley

As we kick off this new year, we have a lot of great programs and plans lining up!  The LWC Board just had its annual strategic planning retreat and a key theme as always is to engage lots of people in our programs and activities so together we can learn about Loudoun wildlife and habitats and work on ways to preserve and protect them into the future — besides, it’s fun to make new friends and get outside and explore nature together!

I’ll be posting our strategic plan to our website in the next few weeks so you can see what our plans are (and volunteer if you want) but in the meantime, I wanted to do a quick posting on the various ways we can stay in touch, share stories, ideas and sightings and learn together about Loudoun nature, wildlife and the great places we have here. We welcome your feedback and ideas so please feel free to reach out – we really appreciate your input! Please share this with friends and anyone who might be interested:

Monthly Email Announcement: Sent on the first of each month, this email has all of our upcoming programs and field trips for that coming month. It often includes events that didn’t make it into the Habitat Herald by the time we had to go to print, and it has all sorts of photos of wildlife and plants taken right here in Loudoun. If you’re not already on the list, fill out our Sign Up form and click the box that says “Add me to the Email List”.

Website:Our website has all sorts of information on our programs and activities as well as resources you can use around your home and with kids. There are book reviews and links to other great organizations, data and information from our various monitoring programs, puzzles and games, a map of Loudoun’s Great Places, updates on our conservation advocacy issues, and other news. It’s updated at least monthly with new information and materials that you can access. http://www.loudounwildlife.org/ 

Blog:  Well you obviously know about our blog already since you’re reading this posting here. For the blog, you can come to the blog page and read the postings at your leisure and you can also subscribe to it and have the posts sent to you once a day in a digest form. If you’re not already subscribed, you can do so but entering your email address in the subscribe box in the right column of this page (just scroll down a bit and you’ll see it)

Podcasts: Podcasts are the audio files I put together on different wildlife and habitat news and information local to Loudoun county. I try to do these about once a week (or so) and they run anywhere from 5 minutes to 30 minutes depending on the topic.  You can subscribe to the podcasts through iTunes (and other pod feeders) or you can simply listen to the episodes on your computer.

Facebook: Yes, you can visit Loudoun Wildlife on Facebook too and become a fan . On Facebook, we can share wildlife stories, ask (and answer) questions, post quick announcements, share stories and videos we find, chat about what’s going on around Loudoun, and so much more. We also have photo albums posted here so we can share some of our sightings from the field. LWC Facebook Fans can post their own photos to the page and use the other facebook tools that are set up too.

Twitter: Well, when we heard that people “tweet” on twitter, we just had to be a part of it!  Tweets are short and sweet posts of our sightings and other news that’s going on. It’s also linked to the blog so when there’s a new blog posting it’s announced on twitter too so you can read it and share it. Come on over and check out the Loudoun Wildlife Twitter page.

Habitat Herald Newsletter: And last but certainly not least, our quarterly newsletter, the Habitat Herald. Now, I’ll try not to be biased but I think this is an excellent newsletter – filled will all sorts of great educational information of different aspects of our environment, habitats, animals and plants, as well as upcoming programs and field trips and a great quarterly children’s article called The Adventures of Zoom and Compass. The newsletter is pulled together by a great group of volunteers who are involved with researching and writing articles, editing them, doing the layout and mailing them out to our members. You can view past issues on our Habitat Herald page of the website.

The results are in!  Here’s our report from Joe:

The 13th Central Loudoun Christmas Bird Count, sponsored by the Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy (LWC), took place on Sunday, Dec. 27, 2009.

I want to thank all the counters, for helping with this count, one of about 2,000 different Christmas Bird Counts, part of the longest and largest citizen-science effort in the world.  I especially want to thank the sector and subsector leaders for your help as without you these counts would not be possible.  We also appreciate all the private and public landowners who give us permission to visit their properties to survey the birds there – those permissions make an incredible difference in the numbers and diversity of what we find!

For those of us owling, the day started with promise under clear skies, a nearly full moon, and temperatures in the mid-30’s at 4 am.  Unfortunately that quickly changed as the temperature dropped to 25 at 7 am accompanied by a freezing fog.  Roads that had been simply wet an hour before were dangerously slick.  And while the fog was beautiful, it was also cold.  While the temperature ultimately warmed up to the low 50′s later in the day, making it a great day to be outside, most ponds remained totally frozen.

The 92 participants, including many beginner birders and ten under 19, found 87 species, a bit less than average, and 28,353 individual birds, about average.

The highlights of the count included
- a Loggerhead Shrike found by Gerco Hoogeweg’s team
- a single Long-eared Owl found by Bob Abrams, and four Barn Owls, the most we’ve found since our very first year
- 2 Gray Catbirds
- 3 Brown Thrashers, a high count
- 5 Red-breasted Nuthatches in two different old pine plantations
- 38 Hermit Thrushes, a high count
- the raptors included 30 Bald Eagles, our second highest count, and 18 Cooper’s Hawks, our highest count
- interesting sparrows included 15 Trees (low), 29 White-crowned (low), and 7 Chipping (a high count)
- a single Pine Siskin and 6 Purple Finches, both way down from last year, an irruption year.

Two teams had seven woodpecker-days with one team finding all seven woodpecker species in 40 minutes on the same farm and then finding all seven woodpecker species again later in the day.  A total of 20 Red-headed Woodpeckers, a high for this count, were found throughout the county.

With most of the count’s ponds frozen and the streams and Potomac in flood, it was hard to find a lot of waterfowl. 

To make it more challenging several of the larger bodies of water, which do not totally freeze, were totally fogged in when visited early in the morning.  Nonetheless the team led by Dori Rhodes did see a flock of Snow Geese flying overhead while Gerco Hoogeweg’s team located two Red-breasted Mergansers, surprisingly the first found on this count.

Afterwards about half the participants met at the Red, Hot, & Blue for the Tally Rally, coordinated by Mike Friedman, to share tales of their day.   They not only ate a lot of tasty meat choices but vegetarian fare as well.

We hope you will join us on one of our future bird walks, or even better, one of our counts or help with the Loudoun County Bird Atlas. 

To find out about our upcoming events or to see a comparison of this year’s count to previous years check out our Christmas Bird Count page.  At the bottom of that page we have reports from past years as well as a summary of our data since we began the count 13 years ago. To compare the Central Loudoun CBC to others check out www.audubon.org/Bird/cbc/.

Joe Coleman, Count Compiler
540-554-2542 or jcoleman@loudounwildlife.org

Many thanks to Constance Chatfield Taylor and Peter Kaestner for sending over photos from their birding adventures! Additional photos can be seen on our Loudoun Wildlife Facebook page.

Our January 9th, the Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy and Northern Virginia Birding Club teamed up to lead a walk at Banshee Reeks. While chilly, they did get in some good birding. Here’s the report from our leaders, Andy and Gerco:

Surprisingly, it was nice weather until about 10am when the winds picked up. We found several locations where the birds were very active–mostly sunny spots that were out of the wind. Many sparrows were foraging in the shrubs and the various hawks were calling and flying over. We were rather startled to see many mallards and a single black duck flying up from the ponds. Some open water was there. Once the wind picked up, we decided to leave.

Highlights of the walk included an Eastern Phoebe, American Black Duck, Field Sparrow, Brown Creeper, and Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers.

Our total tally was 39 species:

American Black Duck 1, Mallard 47, Great Blue Heron 1, Black Vulture 1, Turkey Vulture 2, Bald Eagle 1, Red-shouldered Hawk 2, Red-tailed Hawk 4, Ring-billed Gull 3, Mourning Dove 2, Red-bellied Woodpecker 3, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker 3, Downy Woodpecker 4, Hairy Woodpecker 1, Northern Flicker 7, Pileated Woodpecker 1, Eastern Phoebe 1, Blue Jay 5, American Crow 11, Carolina Chickadee 2, Tufted Titmouse 4, White-breasted Nuthatch 3, Brown Creeper 1, Carolina Wren 2, Golden-crowned Kinglet 1, Ruby-crowned Kinglet 1, Eastern Bluebird 9, American Robin 30, Northern Mockingbird 2, European Starling 27, Yellow-rumped Warbler 2, Eastern Towhee 3, Field Sparrow 2, Song Sparrow 4, White-throated Sparrow 25, Dark-eyed Junco 20, Northern Cardinal 4, Brown-headed Cowbird 5, American Goldfinch 2

Banshee Reeks Nature Preserve is definitely one of Loudoun’s Great Places for wildlife and nature explorations. Hike the trails, breathe in the fresh air, enjoy the wild sights and sounds! More information can be found on our page highlighting Banshee Reeks.

One of the things I love to do when I go for a nature walk is to look for the “stories” of the wildlife that live in the area that I’m walking through. I’ll confess, it often takes me a long time to walk a short distance because there’s so much to investigate, so many “clues” to see!

This time of year can be especially fun for looking for wildlife tracks and signs – there’s mud or snow to look for tracks and trees and shrubs are mostly bare making it easier to see signs.

So head on out and look for some tracks….perhaps some bird prints in the snow or a mammal track?

Ask yourself some questions…how big are the tracks, what direction are they going in? what would have brought that animal to this spot? Is there food or water nearby? If it’s a mammal track, can you tell if they were just passing through or did they dally there awhile?

You can also look for other signs – perhaps there’s some scat nearby or some feathers or fur or some chewed twigs and or a nest or burrow? Are there shells from nuts or seeds?

The stories will come together as you pull together these great clues, and you may even see the animals as you look for the clues. The other day, I was out taking a stroll and was quietly taking a photo of the deer print above when I heard a commotion coming towards me. A herd of about 9 deer was coming my way…

I was just as surprised to see them as they were to see me so I stood still as they passed by, resisting my urge to get a great leaping deer shot. I then came across a network of trails through the snow, smaller than a deer would make, that leads down a bank to a stream. My guess here is that raccoons and maybe opossums are using this trail. I’ll watch for more tracks and signs.

You can see more wildlife scat, tracks and signs photos from this nature walk on our Loudoun Wildlife Facebook page.

If you enjoy wildlife tracking, there are some great resources that you can use to make your identifications. One really handy book that’s small enough to take on a walk is Animal Tracks of Maryland, Delaware & Virginia by Tamara Eder. It also has a fun running rabbit drawing at the bottom of each page that moves when you flip the pages quickly as well as a ruler on the back cover for measuring the tracks. There’s no scat in this book though. The best overall resource for both scat and tracks is Mammal Tracks and Signby Mark Elbroch – complete with color photos.

You can also come along on our general nature walks. Our field trip leaders are great at helping identify tracks and signs. Check our Programs and Field Trips calendar for upcoming walks.

Here are our January News and Tips from our Bird Atlas Coordinator, Spring Ligi:

As we head into 2010, I can’t help but wonder what interesting sightings the new year will bring.  The atlas highlights from December include a Long-eared Owl (private property, Leesburg 5 block) as well as a Ruddy Duck and Common Merganser on the Potomac River (Seneca 3 block).  Keep up the great work!
 
Reminders to Current Bird Atlas Participants
1.  Our atlas is a year-round project.  Be sure to atlas your block at least once each month and enter your fall/winter data in the online atlas database.
2.  Familiarize yourself with parts of your block you haven’t had time to atlas yet.  Determine who you need to get permissions from. 
3.  If you feel your block has been adequately covered, consider identifying a new block to atlas.
 
Species of the Month – Great Horned Owl
• The Great Horned Owl is now within safe dates (12/15- 8/31).  This owl loves old Red-tail’s nests so be on the lookout for old hawk nests, but be careful not to disturb a nesting owl – this is a critical time for them.
• This owl will take large prey, even other raptorial birds. It regularly kills and eats other owls, and is an important predator on nestling Ospreys.
• Even though the female Great Horned Owl is larger than her mate, the male has a deeper voice. Pairs often call together, with audible differences in pitch.

Information taken from Jay Sheppard of the Maryland/DC Breeding Bird Atlas and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Blue-winged_Teal/lifehistory).
 
Atlas Progress
36 enthusiastic atlasers have spent 1,107 hours in the field documenting 12,070 sightings. You have recorded 185 species, with 91 of these species having a confirmed nesting status. Field cards have been reported for 28 blocks.
 
Upcoming Events
We definitely need more Atlas volunteers!  An atlas training session will be held in late February/early March for all new atlasers and people interested in helping with the project. 

If you’re interested in participating in the Bird Atlas contact me at sligi@loudounwildlife.org . More information on the Loudoun County Bird Atlas can also be found on our website.

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season!
 
Happy Atlasing,
Spring

Winter doesn’t seem like a time when you’d encounter warblers. We often think of warblers during the great spring and fall migrations as well as those times during the summer when we go birding and crane our necks to try to catch a glimpse of them at the tops of trees.

But here in Loudoun, we do have 5 species that can sometimes be seen in the winter: Orange-crowned warbler, Yellow-rumped warbler, Palm warbler, Common Yellowthroat and the Yellow-breasted Chat. Of these, the Yellow-rumped warbler is considered common in winter while sightings of the other 4 are considered rare.

So, why am I writing about all this?  Well, because one of our members, Beth Arsenault, had a Palm warbler at her homemade suet feeder the last few weeks!!  Isn’t that cool! 

She writes that it showed up with the Goldfinches, eats suet (not only from the ground but also by hanging upside down to get it) and enjoys eating the mealworms that she puts out. She also notes that it bobs its tail up and down constantly.

What a great sighting! And what a smart bird for going to Beth’s house where, with her TLC, she had all the best foods! (Who wouldn’t love homemade suet!)

You can learn more about Palm Warblers – see where they normally winter, hear their calls – on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Bird Id site.

Let us know what birds are coming to your yard this season!