I spent most of last week (2/17 - 2/22) at home on our farm on Flint Ridge. Winter has been a little harsher than usual, and multiple wind and ice storms have given us plenty to work on to clear the trails, and plenty of more pressing repairs and improvements to the horse barn to keep me out of the field and woods. Anyway, I made a couple observations that struck me as noteworthy.

A white-crowned sparrow visited the ground below the sunflower feeder on Friday (2/20). This was the first of this species I have seen this winter. (Of course, I'm not home enough to make this statistically significant, but...) This individual was the only one of its kind, and there were no white-throated sparrows present at the time either. 

There are plenty of the usual seasonal feeder birds. Since most of the snow and ice are gone, I guess the towhees have gone back to the woods. I didn't see any visiting Cooper's hawks last week.

The aforementioned winds have knocked down the final emergent branch of our most prominent snag on the “back forty” (actually about six or seven acres of open area that we manage as early successional habitat.) I will miss it. It may seem a little odd to mourn the demise of a dead tree, but over the past eight years this particular snag has been a favorite bird spot, for the birds and for me. I have watched dozens of species perching on its exposed branches, from turkey vultures to Blackburnian warblers to bluebirds nesting in a downy woodpecker excavation. We have plenty of other dead trees, but this one was in a perfect setting: surrounded by open area, with its base encompassed by a thicket that offered (and still does) shelter for a wide variety of wildlife. But now their “watchtower” has fully collapsed. Sic transit gloria mundi.

I saw a lone turkey vulture soaring over the upland on Thursday.

I saw at least one red-shouldered hawk occasionally cruising around the treetops of the forest during the week. Since our pastures are on the hillcrest we have pretty good views of the canopy of the adjacent forested ravines.

I saw four of the usual five species of woodpeckers last week: downy, red-bellied, pileated, and flicker. (No hairies.) I saw or heard pileated woodpeckers several times throughout the week. It's always nice to see them.

Bluebirds are singing as if it is spring.

House sparrows have resumed nesting in all their customary profusion in the horse barn. Yuck! If their continent-wide numbers are beginning to decline, there is no evidence of any decrease yet in my neck of the woods.

No killdeer or red-winged blackbirds yet.

Bob Evans
Hopewell Township, Muskingum Co.
DeLorme 70 A1 (Classic editions)

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