busconews.com

by Neil A. Case

March is passing after giving us the usual contradictory signals, winter weather one day, spring the next. Many days the temperature failed to climb out of the teens, other days the temperature rose into the seventies. The heaviest snow fall of the winter came in March but was followed by a warming trend and the snow melted in days.  Within a week the only snow remaining was dirty piles where it had been pushed up by plows or shoveled.

by Neil A. Case

“We have a red-headed woodpecker coming to our bird feeder,” a lady called and told me recently. A couple of days later a man stopped me in a store and told me there was a red-headed woodpecker coming to his bird feeder.

by Neil A. Case

“We’ve had a bobcat confirmed at Salamonie,” the Salamonie property manager told me when I visited recently. Confirmed, sighted without a doubt. In this case confirmation is a photograph of the bobcat taken by a camera set along an animal trail and activated by the motion of an animal, a bobcat, walking past.

by Neil A. Case

Three houses up the street from my home when I was a boy was a house with a row of cottonwood trees in front. Those trees were huge. My brother and I together couldn’t reach around the trunk of one and the lowest branches were high above our heads. They were the only trees in the neighborhood we couldn’t climb. Those trees were not only big, they were very old. At least, my brother and I thought they were very old. To us dead limbs were a sign of old age and each of those trees had several dead limbs.

by Neil A. Case

Expert birders, the ornithologists at the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology and others, are calling this a winter of a superflight. What’s a superflight? It’s birds flying south, many birds, but not the usual migrants. It’s birds that live in the north and don’t usually fly south, many of them birds that live summer and winter in the boreal forests of Canada. Further, a superflight is not birds of a single species but of several species.