The 21st Century Matriarch

The 2nd of 4 Delmarva Birding field trips was Birding the Harriet Tubman Byway. It was a mixture of cultural and natural history of the area around Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge and Cambridge, Maryland – an area Harriet Tubman knew well as she was growing up and returned to after she escaped slavery to help others make their way to freedom. There is a map of the byway available from the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center (we stopped there before the field trip…great orientation for the cultural history portion of the field trip) of the sites along the byway; our field trip visited a handful of them with excellent guides. From a natural history perspective - two species that are gone for the scene that she would have known are the American Chestnut and Carolina Parakeet.

The birding at Blackwater NWR was spectacular – just as every time I visit the place; it is where I saw my first Bald Eagle in the wild (in 1990 when my daughter was a baby). This year there were several Bald Eagle pairs that are nesting at the refuge. At one nest, the babies had evidently just been fed and were sleeping off their meal; the adult was still at the nest watching over them.

Osprey are making use of the nesting platforms and snags. There are more snags that ever because the water level is rising at the refuge…killing more trees that remain standing for a few years.

The muskrat mounds in the marsh were numerous. The color of the mounds is good camouflage for small birds. One of our guides commented that sometimes an eagle wll perch for a little while on a mound. If the muskrats are home…they probably go very still until the large bird leaves!

Rusty, the screech owl, is a well-known resident along the wildlife loop. The bird has a favorite perch in a pine with an hollow which provides protection for the bird’s back/sides. The hole where the bird might ‘live’ and raise young is in a nearby tree. The eyes moved while we watched but the bird was otherwise very still.

There are still parts of the refuge where the water level can be controlled; small fish swam in the shallow water….good snacks for some of the birds we were seeing.

Great Blue Herons are nesting at Blackwater. They like the tall pines just as the eagles do.

Great Egrets were also fishing in the shallows. I learned that they too were nesting at the refuge, but I didn’t see those nests.

Somehow moss and pine needles seemed an appealing mini-landscape on the spring day.

Redwing blackbirds were noisy….defending territory…finding mates.

The field trip group continued into Cambridge to the courthouse – a place where the laws governing slavery in Harriet Tubman’s time were administered. The short lecture and conversation were thought provoking and heartbreaking. Fortunately, the field trip ended on a happy note at the nearby Harriet Tubman mural in Cambridge.