[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

July 4 return of the native



I heard a welcome voice from the past on Tuesday morning, when I was sitting
outside -- a Northern Bobwhite. He called for a couple of minutes, loud and
clear. Sounded like he was about where my woods meet the neighbor's farm
fields. It's been 6 years or so since I saw or heard a bobwhite anywhere in
my neighborhood, so I could hardly believe it. A pair used to come in my
yard and take dust baths. After I had blueberry bushes, the male would jump
up to snag low-hanging fruit. He had a vertical leap about equal to mine --
one inch at most! When Pete Bromley from N.C. State came to talk to the
Chapel Hill Bird Club about the decline of bobwhites in the piedmont, I
figured I'd never hear these guys in my neighborhood again.

Whippoorwills left a couple of years before the bobwhites. I never knew if
it was all of our dogs roaming the woods and edges or what, but it sure hurt
me not to hear those birds anymore.

And guess what! Whippoorwills have made an appearance this year too. My
neighbor told me she'd heard one, and I went and stood one night in May on
the edge of her fields, and I heard it too.

One change that might somehow favor these birds -- though I've not read up
on their preferences -- is that the neighbors cut some timber off their farm
in 1997. There is now one 5-acre tangle of slash, grass, weeds and stump
sprouts adjacent to a hayfield -- a wonderful place to hide. Across the
field there's also a long border of deciduous woods left after they took out
the pines; I imagine it has a fairly brushy understory now. 

Don't know how long the Bobwhite and Whippoorwill will last this time, but
I'm enjoying them.

Ginger_Travis@unc.edu
Chapel Hill, NC