Merry Christmas, everyone!
This beautiful Christmas Star Dahlia from Paul Staniszewski reminds me that there are gorgeous flowers and light displays at Phipps Conservatory’s annual Winter Flower Show and Light Garden, open tomorrow through Sunday January 10.
Do they have this dahlia? I’ll have to go and see …
(photo by Paul Staniszewski)
This weekend kicks off 12 Christmas Bird Counts in the Pittsburgh area, half of them this Saturday, December 19.
Christmas Bird Counts (CBCs) are an annual opportunity to tally birds in the Western Hemisphere. Each count is a 15-mile diameter circle manned by volunteers who count the birds they see in a single 24-hour period.
Anyone can join the fun. Count in the field with other participants or watch at your backyard feeder. Just contact the count circle coordinator and he or she will handle the rest.
Bob Mulvihill gathered Pittsburgh area CBC information at this helpful link on the National Aviary website. Download the flyer that includes contacts and a map.
Here’s a quick list to whet your appetite.
And to give you some practice, count the wild turkeys in the photo above.
Count carefully.
How many do you see?
(photo by Marcy Cunkelman)
In case you missed it …
On November 11 a black vulture from the National Aviary made her debut on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. Chris Packham introduced Jimmy to two hyenas and then at the 2:00 minute mark …
Woo hoo!
(YouTube video from The Tonight Show)
p.s. Congratulations to the vulture (I forget her name) who’s famous in the daily Flight Shows at the National Aviary and to all the people who made her debut possible.
p.p.s I’m not so sure Jimmy Fallon likes vultures. What do you think?
Welcome to my new blogging home. 🙂
You’ve found Outside My Window at my new address.
Click on the big blue type below and make a new bookmark. You’re ready to go!
p.s. Today (November 30) I’m taking it easy and leaving this notice in place while we all get used to my new location. Stay tuned this week for: A vulture on the Tonight Show, Bald eagles on the hunt, and Pittsburgh peregrine nesting highlights in 2015.
(photo from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original)
Today, on Black Friday the biggest shopping day of the year, buy some habitat for the birds.
In Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s November eNewsletter I learned the back story about duck stamps. They aren’t just for hunters and stamp collectors. They’re for us birders, too.
One hundred years ago ducks were on their way to extinction in North America because of over-hunting and habitat loss. New hunting laws stopped the slaughter but the birds still needed habitat so Ding Darling, chief of the U.S. Biological Survey, pushed for the Duck Stamp Act that requires waterfowl hunters to purchase and carry a duck stamp with their general game hunting license. Stamp-generated funds buy National Wildlife Refuge land. Click here to read how ducks were saved by a stamp!
Cornell Lab gives us birders 8 great reasons to buy a duck stamp: (I’ve paraphrased below.)
It’s easy to buy the 2015 stamp at many post offices, National Wildlife Refuge offices, and sporting-goods stores, as well as online from USPS and Amplex.
Buy a stamp for the birds!
(image of the 2015 Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation stamp from the U.S. Postal Service, linked from allaboutbirds.org. Click on the image to see the original and read about 8 Great Reasons to buy one.)
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This Sunday is going to be a big day for me, but if all goes well you won’t notice a thing.
The blog will look the same as usual and all nine+ years of posts and comments will be online. The only difference on Sunday night will be my new address … but you’ll hardly notice. The magic of the Internet will send you to the new location (via 301 redirects) if all goes well.
Here’s what I’m up to.
When I retired from WQED more than a year ago, I thought about moving my blog to my own address but I was not up for the challenge back then. Life is calmer now so I’ve decided to go out on my own.
I’ve bought a new address and I’m packing my virtual boxes for Sunday afternoon’s move. If all goes well, Outside My Window will be up and running at this new address by Sunday night, November 29:
Keep in mind that you don’t have to do anything. I’m still at WQED.org for the next few days, and after the move is final you’ll be automatically redirected to my new site.
Sit back and relax. And stay tuned.
(photo from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original)
Eight years ago today I posted my first blog at Outside My Window. Back then I wrote three times a week, then increased to daily for the past 5+ years.
People sometimes ask me, “What does it take to write a successful blog?” I don’t know the answer for everyone, but here’s what I do:
Every day I get up at 5:00am to write for three hours, usually longer, finalizing today’s post and prepping tomorrow’s. When I’m outdoors I note topics of interest for future use. If I don’t have any ideas at 5:00am — yes, it happens! — I dip into my notes and hope for inspiration. My Muse is really good during Peregrine Season but she loses interest in the winter. Don’t we all!
This year the Muse inspired some lively posts and discussions. Her statistics show …
Thanks to you, my readers, for 8 years together. You keep me going every day!
And a very special thank you to the many photographers who allow me to use their photos and videos on the site.
Happy 8th Bird-thday to all of us!
(party crows by Joan Guerin)
p.s. Today is my blog’s birthday; my own birthday is in May. 🙂
Though many birds have migrated away from Pennsylvania our hawk watch sites are still going strong. November brings more red-tails, sharp-shinned hawks, and this month’s main attraction — golden eagles.
The Allegheny Front Hawk Watch, pictured above, was particularly good for golden eagles earlier this week (27 of them on Tuesday!) when the wind was from the southeast.
Southeast?
It doesn’t make sense that we’d watch hawks flying into a head wind until you realize that this beautiful view at the Allegheny Front is facing east. There’s no mountain edge on the west, just the Allegheny Plateau, so the best winds for watching are those with an easterly component that create an updraft and lift the hawks right above our heads.
Yesterday the weather changed, so the wind is now from the west and north. Other sites will be better for hawk watching.
Today and tomorrow, 11/7 and 11/8, the Pennsylvania Society for Ornithology is visiting Waggoner’s Gap Hawk Watch near Carlisle, PA. This site is on a ridgetop with great views in all directions and lots of raptors passing through in November, especially on a northwest wind. At this time of year Waggoner’s Gap often has the highest hawk count of any watch in the state.
For the best raptor viewing, pick a site with the right wind.
(photo by Kate St. John)
November 3, 2015:
Fifty-five years ago today an Act of Congress preserved this place in Morris County, New Jersey for wildlife. It was a victory for the land, water, birds, mammals, plants and everything living in the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge.
What good is a swamp?
In 1959 the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey thought the Great Swamp would be the perfect place for a huge new airport to serve metro New York. After all, swamps are useless until they’re drained and filled and cease to be swamps … right? The residents disagreed.
Can an individual make a difference?
You bet! The swamp would have become an airport, but four women stood up and said no. Residents Kafi Benz, Joan Kelly, Esty Weiss, and Betty White found out about a December 3, 1959 meeting, not open to the public, that was intended to promote the airport’s construction. They went to the meeting and got thrown out of it. The newspapers picked up the story, opposition to the airport mobilized, and within a year supporters of the Great Swamp had bought enough land to make it a National Wildlife Refuge. Morris County would have been blindsided if four women hadn’t made the news.
Today the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge is a 7,768-acre patch of undeveloped land in a sea of suburbs. Half the land is a Wilderness Area, a quiet haven for wildlife. Though it’s only 26 miles west of New York’s Times Square it’s a great place to find birds, especially during waterfowl migration when ducks and geese stop by to rest and refuel. 244 species have been tallied at Great Swamp NWR.
Thanks to the hard work of dedicated people 55 years ago, this land is wild today. It was a victory on so many fronts, and in retrospect a victory for birds.
p.s. See the comment, here, describing Dorothy Whitehead’s efforts.
(photo by Billtacular via Flickr Creative Commons license. Click on the image to see the original)
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What are these puppets frightened of?
When they came back from Trick or Treating their clocks looked like this!
Spooky!
Happy Halloween and don’t forget to turn your clocks back tonight. 😉
(photo of frightened and surprised puppets in a Vienna park from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original. Photo of clock turned back by Kate St. John)