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26 March 2023
Bird update March 2023
Click to enlarge I’m still birding voraciously. I’m up to 89 species in my county for the year. So that means I added a dozen since last month. A few of those are freshly-arrived migrants from southerly climes, and some are just me putting in the time to go rack up waterfowl at nearby lakes. I’ve maintained my high county ranking, which has oscillated between #4 and #2 this month. …
1 January 2022
Yard list 2021
It hasn’t been a good year for much, but I did get a lot of birding in. Traditionally, on new year’s day, I post my “yard list” from the previous year: a list of all the bird species I’ve personally observed from my yard. At my new house, I now have a full calendar year of observations. You’ll recall I moved to Albemarle from Shenandoah halfway through the previous year, …
20 January 2021
Peering through
When hiking recently in my neighborhood, I saw this gleaming apparition appear in an eroded gully in a dirt road: Those multicolored stripes are varying compositions in a zone of ultramylonite: ductilely-sheared-out rock that formed in the deep equivalent of a “fault” in the Blue Ridge basement complex. We call it a “shear zone” most of the time, but a better descriptor would be “high strain zone.” These rocks are …
1 January 2021
2020 Yard List(s!)
It’s my little new year’s tradition to present here my tally of bird species seen in my yard over the course of the year just concluded. Here are the previous iterations: 2012 (39 species) 2013 (51 species) 2014 (58 species) 2015 (65 species) 2016 (59 species) 2017 (56 species) 2018 (60 species) 2019 (67 species) Things are different this year, not because of the pandemic, but because I moved over …
1 January 2020
2019 Yard List
New year’s day! For this blog and me, the first day of the year is time for the annual recap of birds seen on my land in Fort Valley, Virginia. Here are the previous iterations: 2012 (39 species) 2013 (51 species) 2014 (58 species) 2015 (65 species) 2016 (59 species) 2017 (56 species) 2018 (60 species) This year’s list (biggest year yet!), in chronological order of first sighting: Pileated woodpecker …
