As I walk the walnuts, I reflect on the changes in bird life on the farm. Back in the early days, before the trees it was pretty sparse, though there were the annual visits from bobolinks, snow buntings, and red-winged blackbirds. Even the occasional kestrel, though this was a function of the hydro cable crossing the farm, and thus the prior existence of a superb scouting perch.
Those all still come, though in ways they didn’t before. The open areas of standing grass between the trees continue to attract the ground-nesters, and the trees themselves offer nesting sites for birds that wouldn’t have nested before. The red-winged blackbirds like to conduct their mating rituals on the aerial infrastructure the trees provide, making a good racket in the process. The kestrels are as likely to perch on the trees now, and it is wonderful to watch their young in their cart-wheeling antics up and down the rows in fall. This year, the snow-buntings may have had a harder time finding food in the open fields because a flock of a hundred or so took up semi-permanent residence in the few trees just outside the kitchen window, thus close to the bird feeder, and would come swooping in every half-hour or so, like a school of tropical fish flashing over a reef, all taking some sort of signal from one, feeding as a flock and not as individuals, taking flight together when someone called the time out. On those cold winter days these were my family, and I took great care to look out every hour or so, to make sure that there was sufficient seed for them, on the ground as much as on the table, as most would feed from that swept off the table either by their mates or by the blue jays that come in and shovel around, looking for the elusive peanut amongst all that other stuff.
