The 21st Century Matriarch

My husband signed us up for Project FeederWatch and we are counting our feeder birds together – 2 days a week, an AM and PM time each day for a total of 2 hours. We have comfy chairs situated at a large window and leave our binoculars within reach. I do the logging into the app on my phone as we observe – no paper involved at all. This is the view from our window. I moved the chairs from around the table before our latest count. It’s a very calming activity. I usually have a cup of hot tea at my elbow.

We’ve had several rainy days. The light was poor enough that we opted to take the screens off the window (no bird strikes there so far). It made photography a little easier too.

A squirrel has come through may times while we’ve counted; it only stopped at a feeder once (didn’t manage to get anything) since there were plenty of acorns around and it’s the squirrel’s time of year to bury them!

The most numerous birds are sparrows (white throated and white crowned) and finches (gold and house). There are a couple of juncos but we had more last year so maybe they have not all arrived in our area yet from their breeding areas to the north. There are occasional titmice, chickadees, and a red-bellied woodpecker. The grackles are also occasional….they are too big to get much from our feeders; one or two come around to try but don’t stay long fortunately.

Our holly tree has berries, but we haven’t had any hard frosts yet…haven’t seen any birds eating the berries.

There were 2 Missouri Master Naturalist (MMN) training evenings during week 4. The topics for the first one were migratory birds and wildlife management. Both lectures were informative, and I read 3 publications from the Missouri Department of Conservation afterward:

Missouri Bird Conservation Plan Technical Section

Missouri Bird Conservation Plan Outreach Plan

Missouri Wildlife Management Plan

The topics for the second evening were Birds of Missouri (also Project Feederwatch), capstone projects and Botany. I took a bowl of show-and-tell materials that is the beginning of some collecting for my MMN capstone project (an educational trunk for trees). The red seeds of the magnolia that look a lot like red M&Ms and the size comparison between acorns (pin and white oak) and cones (hemlock and shortleaf) were the biggest hits…fun to share.

The follow-up from this class is to be ready to participate in Project Feederwatch at my house beginning in November; it will be something my husband and I will do together.

One of the handouts was a booklet Fifty Common Trees of Missouri (from the Missouri Department of Conservation) which I promptly looked at and checked the trees I’ve seen in the field in my Identifying Woody Plants class (30 of the 50 although the introductory lectures we have before going into the field have covered more of the 50).

I still need to browse the handouts from the two sessions.

There are also some things I can do to move along my capstone project…and I need to remember to keep track of the hours I am spending doing that.