Friday, March 27, 2009
Look around and see signs of springtime
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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If you're a birder, spring has thoroughly sprung in the Roanoke Valley.
For me, the season arrives on the first day I see a returning pine warbler. That usually happens in late February in the Fairystone Wildlife Management Area in Patrick County.
Then again, it could be the day I see the first returning red-winged blackbirds in the wetland behind Bent Mountain Elementary School.
Or if I'm feeling really crazy, it might be when I hear the first chorus frogs peeping at Fenwick Mines in Craig County. But the problem with that yardstick is that it happens frequently enough on warm January days that even the most cockeyed optimist knows there's still plenty of winter left.
However, not only do we now have the calendar on our side, but earlier this week I happened to look up in the parking lot outside Barnes & Noble at Tanglewood Mall and saw a northbound osprey.
That, my friends, is springtime.
One good spot for spring ospreys is the Montvale overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway, just south of the more famous Harveys Knob overlook where local birders congregate to watch autumn broadwings. In fact, the Montvale overlook with its clear southerly vista is good for any and all spring migrating raptors.
Another good spot for ospreys and other northbound raptors is the parking area atop Roanoke Mountain. And while walking to the top of Roanoke Mountain earlier this week, I heard and saw pine warblers in the jack pines starting about halfway up the mountain.
In other spring news, I saw a nesting pair of house finches on a light pole at a gas station in Franklin County. Also in Franklin County was my first-of-the-season Louisiana waterthrush.
The little "feathered trout" was walking along a streambed near Phoebe Needles, bobbing its rump and pulling the occasional tasty tidbit out of the chilly water.
I'm not dead certain, but I'm pretty sure I heard at least one and possibly two hermit thrushes singing near the top of the escarpment where Shooting Creek dives down the edge of Floyd County into Franklin County.
Halfway down that same road in the eaves of a decaying farmhouse was a pair of nesting phoebes. Robert Frost wrote about phoebes in an abandoned human dwelling, but I've always wondered about the line "One had to be versed in country things /Not to believe the phoebes wept."
Has anybody beside Frost ever mistaken the phoebe's raucous territorial song for weeping?
Finally, in Greenfield Pond and along its verge about a mile north of Daleville on 220, I saw green-winged teal, blue-winged teal, solitary and spotted sandpipers, masses of tree swallows usurping the bluebird boxes, eastern meadowlarks, and a Wilson's snipe.
The best thing about spring is that each day brings new arrivals.
Soon, expect to find bobolinks and grasshopper sparrows in the Greenfield grasslands. And in more sylvan precincts, it won't be long until the woods echo with the thin "weezy-weezy-weezy" of the black-and-white warbler.
