Well folks, we made it. There are just a few days left in 2021 and if you are anything like me you are thinking that this past year felt like three different years all wrapped up into one. It has been exhausting and I am very happy that I have this week off. I just need to close the front door of my house, silence the ringer on my phone, make myself a big pot of coffee and sit down with a good book for three or four days. Does this sound even remotely appealing to you?
It is during this final week of the year that I like to take my coffee on a little field trip up to my office where I can pore over the notes that I’ve taken throughout the year and take stock of everything that has transpired. I also begin to transfer my almanac notes into the journal for the coming year and this is going to be a fun one for me. My birthday is Feb. 22, which means that the calendar will read 2-22-22 this year. I have to make sure to do something particularly fun to mark the occasion.
January started off with quite a bang this year. We had lots of snow and all it seemed to do was accumulate. In recent years we had moments of snow that were broken up by other moments of warmer weather, but this year the snow just seemed to get deeper and deeper. I was also surprised on January when a Carolina wren made an appearance at my feeders. I can’t remember why I was home at 7 a.m. on a Wednesday, but I was looking out the window and I saw the little bird at a suet feeder. As a result of that “X-Factor” bird, I set a new record for species seen in my yard in the month of January.
February seemed to melt away unnoticed, as it often does, and then March, April seemed to follow in quiet procession. But things got weird in late April when it kept snowing. We’d have a week of warm weather and then a snowstorm. We had snow on May 1 and then temperatures in the 70s on May 2. It was really odd, but the huge wave of migrants that arrived on May 2 didn’t seem to notice at all. I’m just glad that none of them seemed to notice the event that I named the “Marsh Marigold Debacle” that involved me slipping down a muddy hillside and landing in a marsh in the process of getting some photos of flowers for my column.
Things really took off in for me in June. On the first Monday of the month, a 90-degree day with appalling humidity, I published my column number 1,000. Then, spending a lot of time in the woods down behind my house I managed to notice a family of raccoons living in a hollow maple tree next to my stream. A second Adirondack chair was installed down in this area and it was designated as the “Thinking Chair – Streamside.” Subsequent visits produced photos of a male wood thrush and pair of Louisiana waterthrushes.
But the real adventure came when I headed out to Martha’s Vineyard for two weeks of intense fieldwork. I was up early every morning and out with my camera on any day that it wasn’t raining. In the course of those two weeks I managed to take over 8,000 photographs and my proudest moment of the entire trip was finally … finally … managing to get close to a pair of American oystercatchers. I took so many photos at such close range that I was even able to decipher the band numbers on one of the birds with enough detail to allow me to track him down and share his life story with you.
September and October were exquisite and I was so active in my birding and photography that I was able to set new records for the numbers of bird species observed in my yard for both months. The three-month stretch from Aug. 1 to Oct. 31 were, hands down, the most enjoyable consecutive months that I have experienced in a long time. I photographed bobcats, Swainson’s thrushes, Canada warblers and then indulged in some forest bathing. And don’t forget that a hurricane caused me to become stranded on Martha’s Vineyard during that timeframe as well. What an adventure!
Things settled down in November and the month melted away with the same curious unobtrusiveness as February. Thanksgiving gave way to December and suddenly Christmas was upon us. The bird lists were quiet for the most part, but the recent appearance of a red-breasted nuthatch and a flying squirrel has me looking forward to an interesting season of winter photography at my feeders.
So, dear reader, I hope that you had a wonderful weekend and that you are looking forward to another wonderful weekend when we all say hello to a brand new year. My red journal for 2022 is already taking shape and I fully expect there to be some wonderful entries in it in then next few months. Images of northern harriers and northern shrikes keep popping into my mind and if a red-breasted nuthatch is in town then the irruptive winter finches might be close behind them. Whatever happens, I’ll be sure to keep you up to date. Until next year, be safe and be well.
Bill Danielson has been a professional writer and nature photographer for 24 years. He has worked for the National Park Service, the US Forest Service, the Nature Conservancy and the Massachusetts State Parks and he currently teaches high school biology and physics. For more in formation visit his website at www.speakingofnature.com, or head over to Speaking of Nature on Facebook.