The Big Sit! with Dog

This is one of the hardest-working homes in southeast Ohio. Four and often five people using it as a bivouac for their busy lives. And a steady stream of guests. For a place that's stuck in the middle of nowhere in a "depressed" area of Ohio, it does pretty good. Yes. I know "well" is the word to use there, but I'm being Appalachian right now, thank you. Been here a long time. It happens.

One of the really nice things that happened when the new front porch was built was that my bonsai bench had to be moved farther out alongside the house into the north bed, where it's easy to get to, to tend and admire. It had been stuck in the notch between the house and porch before. Hard to get to, and you couldn't see the beautiful trees. My oldest maple is doing its best to match the new siding as it turns toward fall!

Another is enjoying the sun on the far side of the new porch. I must say the colors set Chet Baker's shiny black coat off very nicely. He looks fab, doesn't he? And this shows you how big that little tree has gotten. Venerable. Chet can stand under it!

We were really hoping to get the new windows in before the Big Sit, which happened October 13. Donny brought his whole crew out on Friday October 11 and they did a window installation blitz with the newly arrived CORRECT Pella windows. Got them ALL in. Amazing. And they are so beautiful. We're seeing things in the landscape we have never seen before. 

New view out the east BR window. 

The middle box on the pole is the Observation Bat Box. Squeee! You can open it up and see BATS in it if you're lucky enough to get them. There's a sheet of plexiglas in between you and them if you're at all squeamy which I of course am not. 

South BR window view, orchids happily in place. Yowza!

The glorious huge living room window and its view of the meadow. We've truly never seen it from here, in 21 years.  That's the bell Piper the indigo bunting sings from.

But back to the Big Sit.

On the appointed Sunday, people started showing up. Chet Baker waited in the towertop to wash each face that came up the drop-down stairs into the towertop. You had to get many, many kisses from the Gatekeeper to be allowed to enter the Kingdom of Birding.

And if you had a cookie, you were expected to pay the Gatekeeper with a tithe.

He would remind you with gentle toenail prodding. Oinking, if that didn't work.

A Dog at the Big Sit by Seymour Butz

We attempted to counter his ButtVision by putting Chet Baker on his own special stool, but he only had eyes for cookies. This is him, asking to be helped down so he can beg some more. He spent the morning with us, and the afternoon hanging out with bored birders and a Kookerhondje named Wally in the front yard. It was a good day for Chet. Jason brought him a big red ball to pop.

 Kind of a slow Big Sit, with only 55 species logged (we try to break 70 in a good year). Probably the highlight was a passing peregrine in the afternoon doldrums, which lasted about 7 hours. That's OK. For us, it's a social event. Birds are a bonus. Because most of them leave here about two days before the Sit starts.

A few Cape May warblers hung around.

But the Lincoln's sparrow didn't. C'est la vie. Birds are where and when you find them. All birders know that.

Gifts of Bark Point

After a brief Chet Baker interlude, we're still riding on the incredible birding Wisconsin offered. Hope you don't mind a little time-space de-continuum. I just have to show you Wisconsin, even if I break the real time barrier--boom!

You never know what you'll find. Especially when you're alone, on a pilgrimage just to see what you can see. I was in an utterly Zen state of mind, once I figured out that the absolute best birding in rotten cold weather, with a gale coming off the lake from the northeast, would doubtless be on the peninsulas that project out into Lake Superior. I looked at the map and targeted two peninsulae for my afternoon's birding.

The anticipation is even more delicious when you're birding in an unfamiliar biome. I had asked around a little about a few birds I really wanted to see, but a number of them still took me by surprise. A small, finely striped sparrow spooked around in a boggy patch near the northern end of Bark Point. I recognized it from the numerous fall records at our place: a classic northern nesting sparrow, the Lincoln's sparrow. It's like a delicate song sparrow, finely penciled, beautifully shaded. If I had to guess, I'd say this bird had just bathed, which would account for the ragged look.

Serendipity was with me this evening. Four big birds, thrasher sized but heavier, flopped across the road right in front of my car. The general impression was of silt-gray birds with big white heads. I lowered the electric window and threw a handful of roasted corn snacks out onto the road even before rolling to a stop. GRAY JAYS!! Hello babies!! Every birder I'd spoken to had warned me that gray jays, the tame, confiding "whiskey jacks" who haunt campsites, stealing everything that isn't tied down, were hard to come by in this part of the state. I'd have to drive 30 minutes south to the thick stands of spruce to find them. And I had driven down to the Clam Lake area, but not knowing where to go, had found none. I did have a really, really bad cheeseburger at a diner, where I got a dose of local color (including a loud, scary woman wearing a sweatshirt saying, "Save a Tree. Eat a Beaver. PETA Trapper's Association). Being a writer, I considered it a break-even proposition...bad cheeseburger, fabulous material.

Ryan Brady, state biologist and birder/photographer extraordinaire, said, "Don't get your hopes up. It'd be really unusual to see them around here." And so I didn't, but I was ready for them, hurling GladCorn (my favorite birding snack) when grace sent them my way.


Ryan thought that perhaps these jays were the remnant of a mini-gray jay invasion of northern Wisconsin that happened last year. Making their way back to Canada, perhaps, and stalled on Bark Point just like all the warblers and sparrows.

Gray jays have lived around people for so long that they have learned to look for them, going to investigate each curl of smoke or report of a gun, hoping it'll mean a meal. Perhaps these birds sought me out. I was mighty glad to see them, too. They swooped in without hesitation, five of them, grabbing corn off the blacktop, so close I couldn't focus. One stored his corn bits in some Usnea moss, then sat for his portrait. Oh, I love gray jays, and I love birding, and Wisconsin.