NorthernWings: March 2015

Sunday, March 1, 2015

Rutland County Birding Highlights

Today Don Clark, JoAnne Russo and I struck out for Rutland County, Vermont for a day of birding. None of us had any expectation of encountering a Northern Saw-whet Owl and a Eastern Screech-Owl in daylight no less. Both birds offered us excellent views and cooperated nicely for photos. The Saw-whet was seen on Book Road in West Haven and appeared to be scouting for prey. The gray morph Screech-Owl took absolutely no notice of us as it sat comfortably in an abandoned stove flue pipe at an old barn near Benson Landing. Also in Benson we came upon a "pair" of Cooper's Hawks but were unable get photos. We started the day by dropping in on the Peregrine Falcon pair which has been regularly seen on the steeple of Grace Congregational Church in downtown Rutland and ended it with a total tally of 36 species, not bad for late winter.

Northern Saw-whet Owl. West Haven, VT.

Eastern Screech-Owl. Benson, VT.

Peregrine Falcon. Rutland, VT.

"Birding, after all, is just a game. Going beyond that is what is important." ~Roger Tory Peterson

"May the relationship between man and nature not be driven by greed, to manipulate and exploit, but may the devine harmony between beings and creation be conserved in the logic of respect and care." ~Pope Francis, Vatican City, April 22, 2015.

"In the end we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; we will understand only what we have been taught." ~Baba Doum, Senegalese Ecologist

"The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: What good is it?" ~ Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac (1949)

"Life...[is] never a question of accumulating material things, nor in the struggle for reputation, but in the widening and deepening of perception, increasing the sensitivity of the faculties, of an awareness of the world in which one lives." ~Louis Lamour: Flint (1960)

"A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers but borrowed from his children." ~John James Audubon