Ten Little Celebrations – October 2020

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When I wrote the blog post about October 1990, I realized what a happy month it had been and now looking back at October 2020 and the things I recorded as little celebrations…the same is true. Maybe October is always my favorite month of the fall….lots of things that make me happy in this transition time of the year.

The celebrations that are could happen in any October:

The grand finale of the CSA season. The abundance of the last weeks of veggies from the farm….I have a freezer full to enjoy well into November…plenty of winter squash puree to make Thanksgiving dessert and breads and soups (maybe not all for the same meal). It happens every year….the celebration of the bounty.

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Conwingo outing. We didn’t know about the bald eagles congregating at Conowingo dam 30 years ago, but now that we do…there is almost always a trek to the place every October. Even if it isn’t a great day for lots of eagles (which it wasn’t this year)…we celebrate the field trip. This year it was appreciated even more because field trips have been such a rarity for us this year.



Fall leaves. Yes – cleaning up the leaves and acorns is a fall chore…but it also is a joy: the colors, the textures, the breeze made visible by leaves wafting from the treetops. The trees in our yard and in the forest behind our house fill our views; I’m realizing that I am celebrating the extra time I’ve had this year to observe them. Home has become more special during this pandemic year.

Wild turkey in our back yard. I missed it – but my husband saw it. He said there may have been more than one, but he only saw one clearly. We’d heard that there were wild turkeys in the forest but had never seen any until a few day ago. I am celebrating that they really exist…and hoping they return so I can see them too.

Flowers still available in the cutting garden. I thought the cutting garden might fade before the CSA ended…but it didn’t. I love having cut flowers in my office and on the island in the kitchen. Seeing them is an automatic mood brightener. Now I am beginning to realize that the strawflowers will last long into the winter – dried and arranged on a blue glass plate they remind me of water lily flowers.

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Letting go of more stuff. Cleaning out stuff that has collected in over 25 years we’ve lived in our house is tough. But I managed a big pile that I donated (picked up from our front porch) and am working on another. It feels good to clean out the house…particularly if it is something others could use.

And then there are the celebrations that are unique to 2020:

Cape May Fall Festival (virtual). I celebrated the whole festival of videos but particularly the roving reporters at the morning flight of songbirds. It would be wonderful be there some future year to see it in the field.

Hawai’i Festival of Birds (virtual). When I first discovered that the festival was going virtual, I thought it was a great opportunity because I probably would not make the trek to the Big Island again….but now I’m wavering…leaning toward making the trek for the festival and to see how things have changed since we were there in 2015. Maybe next year…or the year after. It’s an opportunity to celebrate an environment very different than the one where we live.

Telephone conversations with family. I normally take telephone conversations for granted…they happen often enough. During this pandemic year when I am not traveling to visit with my family, phone conversations have increased in importance….worthy of celebration.

Voting. In years past, we voted but it wasn’t something that made it to my little celebrations list and we usually did it on election day. This year we requested a mail-in ballot and returned it to a drop box….and checked the online site to track that it was received and accepted/counted. Voting is a celebration this year because of the challenges the country is facing on many levels….and a heightened awareness on our part of how much it matters.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

Old monitor heading off to a new home. I’ve had my old monitor mostly idle for the past year – since I got a new one – and finally found a way to give it a new home. There was an article in the Baltimore Sun about a teacher in our area trying to find monitors for teachers that need a second monitor as they forge ahead teaching virtually. I sent an email letting them know I had one to donate and someone came to pick it up! I’m thrilled to let it go!

Cape May Fall Festival

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Friday through Sunday were three intense days of webinars from New Jersey Audubon’s Cape May Bird Observatory (CMBO): the virtual Cape May Fall Festival We enjoyed their virtual festival last spring as well (posts for day 1, day 2); the organization tweaked a few things for this fall one that made it even better; I noticed the roving reporters out in the field and a little bit longer breaks. The days still started at 7 or 8 AM and ended at 5 or 6 (with one evening session after a 2-hour break). I learned to use the breaks to get up and move!

There is a lot of bird monitoring activity (Avalon Seawatch, Cape May Hawkwatch, and Morning Flight Songbirds) in the fall and the CMBO makes it easy to see the results with the buttons for Real-time Counts via Trektellen on their website(near the bottom of the page).

The weather was perfect for a big morning flight of songbirds on Saturday – 27,000 birds in 6 hours! See the Saturday results here – and check out other days going forward. There were huge numbers of warblers. The little bit larger songbirds that we saw (through the great work of the person filming the roving reporters) were Northern Flickers and Blue Jays (3,538 and 1,496 were counted for the morning). The songbirds migrate at night and are funneled down from points north to the Cape May Peninsula where most of them drop down for food and rest before continuing on – most of them working their way back to the north and west around Delaware Bay to then continue their southward migration.

The Hawkwatch also saw a lot of birds on Saturday (results here). These birds migrate during the day. There were 194 Cooper’s Hawks that came through.

The Avalon Seawatch had a bigger day on Sunday with over 1,000 (each) black scoters and double crested cormorants.

There were places featured in the talks and roving reports that we had seen in Spring 2019 (like South Cape May Meadows, Cape May Bird Observation Deck, Higbee Beach Wildlife Management Area, CMBO’s Northwood Center) and then the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge which was new to us. So many places we would like to be!

There is a also a CMBO Monarch Monitoring Project that tags butterflies! Even though the large winter numbers of Monarchs in Mexico were found in 1975, it was not until 1998 when 7 of Cape May tagged butterflies were found there that the debate of where the east coast Monarchs migrated was finally settled. The results of the monitoring at Cape May are reported in a table on the website.

Virtual sessions are great for classroom type presentations too. At birding festivals, I tend to always opt for the field sessions, so this year of virtual festivals has been great for the classroom-based skill building. I particularly enjoyed learning more about raptor id (in flight), winter seabirds of New Jersey, ravens, other bird observatories (international), international birding tours, and the bird id game done by 3 NJ Audubon’s Young Birder Club members (wow….they have impressive id skills and are good at sharing their knowledge). The Cornell Lab of Ornithology provided the one evening session; I learned about Birds of the World (a new subscription based resource) and more about resources I already know about/use:

One of the sessions brought up the topic of some birds eating Monarch butterflies and seemingly not suffering any effects. My husband and I remembered that we saw that on at a previous birding festival…and I looked back through my blog posts to find out where and when and what kind of bird. It was Couch’s Kingbird on Nov. 11, 2017 and I posted about it on Nov. 27th. It was at a woodlot on South Padre Island, Texas during the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival. I have two of my pictures from that event below. It’s always great to savor the memories of previous sessions an realize how much we seen/learned over the past few years of birding festivals.

Another prompt to think about personal history that was brought up in one of the sessions: What was your ‘spark’ bird (i.e. the one that got you interested in birds)? I tried to think back to birds that I remember from early in my life. Northern Cardinal is one – definitely. They were around in Wichita Falls, Texas….and stand out in any landscape because of their color. I remember some coloring pages from 1st or 2nd grade of various bird species and learning about Baltimore Orioles…but not seeing one until I was over 60 years old! Why didn’t the curriculum feature birds that we were more likely to see where we lived? I also remember being thrilled to see a Roseate Spoonbill the first time I went to Florida for a space shuttle launch in the 1980s; I’m not sure when I first learned about the bird but it was one that I knew when I first saw it in the field.

Overall – the Cape May Fall Festival was 3 days well spent. My husband also ordered the t-shirt for me since it is red ---- a good color for me. We ware looking forward to future festivals that we can enjoy in the field…but learned a lot and enjoyed this one. Kudos to the CMBO for doing this!

The August Pivot

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What a difference a year makes! Last year in August I was finishing up Zentangle sessions and butterfly migration games with Howard County Conservancy summer campers

And ramping up my volunteer shifts with the Brookside Gardens Wings of Fancy butterfly exhibit that would continue into mid-September.

My husband and I made a day trip to the Patuxent Wildlife Refuge where I managed to photograph a cicada in foliage (following its sound).

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Somethings were the same: there was the weekly pickup of the CSA share and grocery shopping (although I did it weekly rather than every other week).

Another aspect of the month that is turning out to be similar is the pivotal aspect of the month. For so many years of our lives, we have been so tuned to the school year that it only seems natural that August is a starting point – a change over from relatively free form summer to more structured ‘school.’ Even though we don’t have the forcing function of an actual school – we invent the pivot for ourselves.

Last year we were making plans for the fall and early winter: an astronomy focused camping trip, a birding trip to Smith Island, day trips to Conowingo (for the Bald Eagles), Thanksgiving in Springfield MO, a day trip to the Maryland State House, 3 days Delmarva birding, and the a trip to Texas for a family visit and then the Laredo Birding Festival. All in the September to February period. The travel was interspersed with lots of volunteer gigs.

The pivot is still happening this year but the plans are just for the early fall and are all birding festivals that have gone virtual: Yampa Valley (Colorado) Crane Festival Sept. 3-6, Puget Sound Bird Fest Sept. 12-13, Cape May Fall Festival Oct. 2-4, and Hawaii Island Festival of Birds Oct. 15-19. The two big festivals in November (Rio Grand Valley and Festival of the Cranes) have cancelled this year. I’m looking forward to the virtual festivals in September and October… and on the lookout for opportunities for virtual travel or online classes in November, December, and January.