Birding in the Casperkill Watershed
July 20, 2010 by admin
On Saturday I joined the Ralph T. Waterman Bird Club on one of the five bird walks that they are leading for Dutchess Watershed Awareness Month. The walk was at the Vassar Farm and Ecological Preserve, which is one of three places that the Club frequents in the Casperkill watershed (the other two locations are the Vassar College campus and Peach Hill Park).
The members of the Bird Club were eager to share their expertise with a newcomer like me, so I was quickly overwhelmed by information and bird vocalizations to remember. For example, the Kingbird’s genus name is Tyrannus, which can help you remember that they are fierce fly-catchers that aggressively defend their breeding territories. Another bird, the Eastern Towhee, has a call that sounds strikingly close to “drink your tea-ee-ee-ee.” Throughout the morning we saw Indigo Bunting, Wood Thrush, Song Sparrow, Phoebe, Killdeer, Catbird, Barn Swallow, Kingbird, Yellow Warbler, House Wren, Gold Finch, Black-Billed Cuckoo, Red-winged Blackbird, Flicker, Mockingbird, Robin, Morning Dove, Pileated Woodpecker, Common Yellowthroat, Eastern Towhee, Green Heron, Downy, Cedar Waxwing, Blue Jay, Field Sparrow, and a Red-Tailed Hawk.
After the walk, I had the chance to catch up with the president of the Bird Club, Maury Lacher, and his wife Miriam. The Lachers moved to Dutchess County in the 1970s, and we spoke about how they got into birding.
Miriam Lacher:
When I was a young girl my father put peanuts in my hand to attract the chickadees at the Botanical gardens, right outside of the rock garden in the Bronx. He took me on other walks and because I was a good girl I got a set of bird cards that Arm & Hammer gave to schools and I kept those (…) When we (Maury and Miriam) met as undergraduates we didn’t take ornithology classes because we didn’t have a car. But when we went to grad school we had some friends who were also interested in bird watching and we got to go to Point Pelee, which is the lowest point in Ontario, Canada, and funnels through the great lakes. There’s a narrow point where Ontario gets close to Ohio, and the birds funnel through that during migration. It’s marvelous, all this shower of birds. So we got to see this in graduate school and we were hooked. By then my dad had gotten us a pair of binoculars (…) When we joined the bird club here, there were people who knew more then we did. With all those pairs of eyes and all that knowledge, we were able to learn a lot more.”
One of the best things about birding is that it is not that difficult for people to get into it once they start going out with more experienced birders. “People get so excited about birds!” Miriam told me. One time, when the couple went to an American Birding Association meeting in Southern California, they even got the bus driver hooked. “He started seeing things that we hadn’t seen. I kept telling everyone that we had to tip him enough so that he could get decent binoculars.”
And once you are hooked, says Maury, “it makes you a conservationist.”
The thing that’s sad is that over the years that we’ve been doing this, there are a lot of birds that have declined; you just don’t see as many anymore (…) I think there’s been a reduction of night hawks, we only see them in migration now. There have been Wood Thrush and Meadowlark declines.”
There have also recently been more problems with non-native introduced birds.
Eastern Bluebirds have been declining due to European Starlings and House Sparrows (…) Other birds are in danger because of the Cowbirds (…) There’s also been a general trend of southern birds moving north over the years. For instance, Mocking Birds and Cardinals used to be southern birds. In the 1970s we started to see them. Carolina Wrens have moved up here, they’re among the latest.”
Seeing rare birds is exciting, so trends like these make birders more likely to want to protect green spaces—and especially wetlands—from development. In the Casperkill Watershed in particular, preserving wetlands is highly critical for bird diversity. For example, the Brickyard Hill wetland was once a fruitful birding destination until shopping centers were built there in 1965 and 1975. Maury reminded me a number of times that “birds are habitat-dependent. Although some of them are generalists, there are many birds that are attracted particularly to wetlands. Some obvious ones are Red-Winged Blackbirds, Bitterns and Herons.”
Despite destruction of habitat, and increasing numbers of introduced generalist birds, the Lachers made sure to emphasize that the bird declines are not a hopeless situation. The creation of the Vassar Ecological Preserve is encouraging. And the big Osprey and Bald Eagle comebacks following the ban of DDT are good examples of the resilience of many birds.
If you are interested in joining the Ralph T. Waterman Bird Club for any of their bird walks (I highly recommend it), visit their website. The club goes out every Wednesday and every other Saturday.