The snow started at precisely 10:32 a.m. I can tell you this for certain because I actually saw it happen. One moment it was clear and then the next it was snowing; almost as if someone had flipped a switch and turned on a snow machine. I suppose this thing happens all the time, but how often are any of us in the right place at the right time to actually notice?
For me, the right place was the desk up in my study. I was writing a letter to my beloved Uncle Mort and it was no coincidence that the topic of this letter was snow. Uncle Mort lives out in Los Angeles, where he spent a career in movies and television. He’s everything you might hope to expect from an old Hollywood producer, but he also has the most endearing sense of humor that is simply joyous. I’ll never forget the morning that he sat down to the breakfast table wearing a fez, as if it was something he did on a daily basis. Sweet Uncle Mort.
Anyway, there isn’t much but fire, heat and mud in Los Angeles, so I thought I would regale him with the tale of the snowstorm that we all knew was about to arrive. Many schools had closed preemptively and the weathermen were all chattering with updates. It wasn’t really a matter of if the snow would arrive, so much as it was a question of when.
I finished my letter to Uncle Mort and looked out the window to see that light gray sky that means a storm is on the way. I walked downstairs and opened the door to head out to the mailbox and it was suddenly snowing. I noted the time, ran out to the mailbox, came back inside and started another letter. Why not give Uncle Mort a running story of the snowstorm?
For this I decided to change venues, so I took my pen and paper to my writing desk by the kitchen window. Here I could keep an eye on the snow while also tracking the movements of the birds at my feeders. I didn’t bother getting into great detail about the birds in my letter, but I was somewhat surprised that there seemed to be so few birds around. Usually a snowstorm brings them all out of hiding, but I wasn’t seeing that.
A few mourning doves were there when I sat down. I saw six of the birds, but I know that there are far more in the area. Every morning the doves arrive in a large group, feed for a few minutes and then depart en masse. The trick is to get to the window before they show up and keep a focused vigil. When everything works out, I have seen 40 to 50 doves all arrive simultaneously, engage in a feeding frenzy and then depart in an explosion of wings. I call this “swarming,” but that’s just my name for it.
There was no swarm of doves that morning, but I did end up seeing 14 species of birds including about a dozen American robins. I also noted the presence of seven white-throated sparrows, eight blue jays, six cardinals and a pair of tufted titmice. What puzzled me was the apparent lack of juncos in the mix. A dependable winter species, I only saw three of them at any one time, which seemed like a low number. This bothered me so much that it was foremost in my mind when I sat down to write this morning.
I went to my best resource for this sort of question: my own field journals. Looking back in 2017, I noted that juncos were seen every day that I “went birding” and that they regularly appeared in numbers of nine or 10 at a time. The same was true in the beginning of 2018, but when our current winter began, the juncos were present in very small numbers. I’ve never seen more than four juncos at any one time, and I also haven’t seen them on every day. This seems odd for such a winter staple.
So, I wonder what you may have noticed at your feeders. Juncos are of particular interest to me, but I’d be interested to hear anything else you feel is noteworthy. I don’t expect many others to keep the same sort of detailed records that I have kept, but perhaps a few of you out there share the compulsive data-collecting gene that many scientists possess.
I’d love to hear your impressions about the flocks at your feeders, and you yourself may become so curious about this topic that you’ll dedicate a little notebook to recording your observations so you can compare them to next year. That’s how science gets started, after all.
Bill Danielson has been a professional writer and nature photographer for 21 years. He has worked for the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service and Massachusetts State Parks and currently teaches high school biology and physics. Visit speakingofnature.com for more information, or go to Speaking of Nature on Facebook.