“Autumn Ducks” (photo by m.a.h. hinton)
Autumn has come to the North Country. The ash trees in the front of my house have lost most of their leaves. The locust in back is still mainly green but it is always one of the last trees to lose its small leaves.
Yesterday at lunch I walked along the wetlands that border the river. In one pond there were flocks of blue-winged teals and coots in another pelicans. In one of the more distant ponds there were a few trumpeter swans. A serious bird watcher was kind enough to let me look at the swans for a while through his big spotting scope. I have always found bird watchers to be generous with both their knowledge and their equipment.
When my daughters were young, we used to go bird watching often along the river. Morgan, my youngest, was especially good at spotting birds: owls, swans, indigo buntings, orioles and red starts, ducks of various kinds. She was also good at identification and classification. Much better than I ever was.
I have a birder’s journal that I have I have kept on and off since the Spring of 2004, when Morgan was 9. As bird journals goes, it is a modest thing. There are few birds a real birder would be proud of: a scarlet tanager, a lazuli bunting.
Flipping through the journal now, reading the places and dates, I realize that the birds I love best and remember most fondly are those I saw with Morgan: a barred owl that she spotted just above the trail at a local creek, juncos that she and I used to watch sitting in rocking chairs at a local nature center, indigo buntings singing along the Bloomington Ferry trail, and a belted kingfisher we spotted along a pond at the end of a day.
The little girl that used to go bird watching and hiking with me is now grown up. A senior in high school, she will soon be moving on to college and young adulthood. That is the way of nature… like changing leaves and blue-winged teals gathering to head south.