Author: Jess

Best Birds of 2024 – Running List

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Cover photo: a comically bad, blurry capture of one of the coolest spectacles I’ll probably ever see!

I start this as a placeholder blog annually to keep track of bird sightings and dates, to summarize at the end of year!

  • 4/6 – I dragged my non-birder beau up the Hillview Natural Trail (and through the paved trail) at Eisenhower Park (San Antonio, TX) to get a glimpse of my lifer golden-cheeked warbler!
  • 5/17- Josh Gant found an incredible record of common swift at the Meadows, during the spring festival! What a crowd-pleaser, to say the least!
  • 10/6 – white-tailed ptarmigan at Medicine Bow
  • 10/30 – black and yellow rails…!!! One of our trip leaders said of rails in flight: “if you have to think, it’s a sora. If it’s a yellow rail, you know.” The first time I saw this is when I saw a yellow rail flush that night, and followed it with my spotlight.
    • 11/2 – While riding on an ATV behind a combine, we saw a yellow rail flush and fly back (our way) giving great looks in a decent length flight trajectory. It was then that I got the first “telltale in flight” looks during the day. The bird landed in the rice, and knowing generally where it was, we went to stand in the field nearby. Then, on another pass harvesting that section, the combine flushed the yellow rail almost directly 10 ft in front of me. It was unbelievable! I watched its somewhat startled flight and saw even better how white they are under the wing. Our trip leader’s words held true indeed!

…more to come…and to be fully fleshed out in a NYE post!

Medicine Bow Trail

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What a perfect way to celebrate our workshop well received: a hike along Medicine Bow trail in the alpine zone of Rocky Mountain National Park! We didn’t see ptarmigan but we were able to pickup radio signal from our tags on a local flock. They seriously seemed to be keeping ahead of us, just over each hillside we traversed…eventually, we let them win.

Bay Walking

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It is a reflection of how house/yard busy I’ve been the last few years that it has taken me this long to start logging more walks on the beach…! So far, I’ve walked from the beach by the house north of Norbury’s landing to Bay Ave, and all of the beach crossings in between. From there, I’ve walked down to the end at David Douglass park, but not all the crossings. I’ll be working on logging more miles on foot this fall, with a goal of traversing the peninsula and covering the beach crossings too!

Red-Spotted Purple

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This little corner of my yard may not look like much, but maybe that’s kind of the point for now. This year, I’ve finally moved onto this part of home ownership I’m most excited about: creating backyard habitat. Over the last few weeks, I had help from my neighbors (tree trimmers) to transplant some young sweet gum trees that got a little too big for me to handle. Unfortunately, despite watering daily, they are in transplant shock and most of the leaves have died. There are plenty more where they came from, given the neighbors’ yards have big trees, so I’ll try not to be too attached to an outcome if they don’t make it. I always knew it was a bit of an experiment trying to transplant trees this month anyway, and those needed to come away from the house; I just wanted to give them a shot at growing instead of removing them. I didn’t notice another bigger young sweet gum (a testament to the overgrowth next to my house) that I might have asked them to take a shot at moving for me had I seen it in time. Instead, I tried to dig it up myself, and seeing how the transplant experiment has gone so far, I didn’t feel confident trying to plant it.

That and 2 other small saplings have been sadly added to the brush pile…but again, I still have plenty of other tiny trees to find a home for. Speaking of “brush pile” I moved some old wood left by the previous homeowner and unsurprisingly found lots of ants. I assume they’re carpenter ants from the tunnels left in the damp wood, but I’d have to brush up on my ant ID skills to be sure, I guess.

So far, it looks like 2 other small sweet gums I moved have been doing well, as have the 2 little red maples and a black cherry. Pictured below, though, is a black cherry sapling springing up at the base of a grove of sweet gums. I was most excited today to watch a red-spotted admiral flitting around the young tree laying eggs.

I stood very still, and eventually, she landed on a leaf right under my nose! She was so close to my face I could hear her moving on the leaf. I watched her lay an egg, and when she flew off, there was a tiny glistening freshly laid egg at the leaf tip. I can’t wait to look for caterpillars in the coming week!

Bonus: today was also the first day I saw a hummingbird use the little feeder I setup!

Great Gorge Trail

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After checking out the Ohiopyle state park visitor’s center, my parents and I walked from where this trail intersects the great Allegheny passage to cucumber falls! Then, we walked along the road inside the guard rail to look at the natural water slides. From there, we walked the foot trail across the bridge along the road back to the parking lot for the falls.

Landscaping

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Indulge me here as we veer into some summer landscaping updates! My neighbor gave me some overflow from his yard, including mint that has started to take hold. Then, thanks to some help from my parents, I was finally able to accomplish a few things in the yard that have helped me be able to start the native conversion step-by-step. First, though, I continue with some pretty ornamental annuals. We planted a Chinese hibiscus to add some curb appeal (looks like the orange? peach? double-flowered kind) which will die back with the frost, but it is a stunner for now!

I also started a railing box with an assortment of “Superbena” colors and Salvia. They will probably all die back in the winter, but as you can see I had some fun with my first trip to a garden center; my thought was to have a red railing box to bring in the hummingbirds.

Clockwise from the top left: whiteout Superbena, “Rockin’ fuschia” Salvia, sparkling amethyst Superbena, red Superbena, Superbena royale “Romance,” and scarlet sage

Then, my bosses gave me some of their backyard overflow! I put a deck planter down to hold black-and-blue and tropical Salvia (more hummingbird magnets, hopefully). They can be prolific perennials, so I’m hoping they’ll continue to flesh out the box. I have temporarily moved the anise hyssop into the swan planter you can see below!

They also gave me mountain mint and Spigelia marilandica (which I’m actually hoping to take home to plant along my parents’ stream bed). On the porch planter side of things, though, I found a handy tip and some perfect fit rods and wood pieces to shore up the railing planters.

word of the day: shim!

My first real natives that were planted in ground went where the elephant grass was torn out. I now have a pair of summer sweet bushes in their place.

“Vanilla spice” varietal

I also got a showy varietal of black-eyed Susan, both a native and a nod to my MD roots, for the porch.

“Sunbeckia Lucia” varietal that grows happily in a porch planter. Nice because I can see the butterflies there on the porch from my home office window! Here’s a broad-winged skipper enjoying a nectar meal.

Between all of these, I have been thrilled to watch the skippers (and other pollinators) parade in. It is pretty rewarding to watch them find the native flowers, and there will be much more to come…likely shovel by shovel!

Spatial Data from an ArcGIS Story Map

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Many thanks to Jonathan Chang for getting me most of the way to this goal! I am sharing some details of the process of identifying the URL here. Check out the linked tutorial; I am illustrating some of the steps to get to where you can find the API.

  1. Right-click on the Story Map web page and select “Inspect”
  2. Select the “Network” tab in the console
  3. Filter by “Fetch/XHR”
  4. Refresh the page
  5. Scroll down to the layer you want, and watch for “FeatureServer” in the “Name” field
  6. Right click this entry, “copy URL” and paste into the browser, and delete the string including and after the ?
  7. This should get you to the API where you can see the layer list; is your layer of interest there? If so, it is followed by a number in parentheses. Click on it, and this is the URL you can use with the esridump tool