Least Bittern

Here in Vermont, and across much of Northern New England, spring migration reaches its crescendo this weekend. We herald the arrival of Least Bittern, Sedge Wren, Olive-sided Flycatcher, Mourning Warbler and other birds late to the party. They join migrants only passing through yet still lingering among us, including Brant, Red-throated Loon, White-crowned Sparrow, a bunch of shorebirds, Orange-crowned Warbler and a few others still northbound. It makes for bigtime bird diversity.

I’ve included a Least Bittern image here for Ali Wagner, who conveys her wonderful encounter with this secretive species in a post to the VTBIRD listserve. Way to go, Ali! A well-deserved find for an exuberant birder.

But late May also launches a season of other showy flying things. The first Canadian Tiger Swallowtails are now on the wing, along with a few early dragonflies, including Beaverpond Baskettail and Uhler’s Sundragon, all three of which I saw in Groton State Forest on Thursday. Any large dragonfly you might have seen earlier this spring was most likely a migrant, probably Common Green Darner. Yeah, some dragonfly species migrate like birds. Here in Vermont, and across much of the east, we’re studying them. (Stay tuned for a future blog post on this project.) With warmer weather, lots of dragonflies will begin emerging from waters this weekend.

Giant Swallowtail

By the way, Giant Swallowtail, one of the biggest butterflies on the continent, is showing up north of its range this spring, the most recent of which Marv and Sue Elliott found on Mt. Independence in Orwell, Vermont, on May 12. If you see this beast, please send me the date, location and a photo if you can get one. Even a lousy photo works for this distinctive butterfly. Note that it is dark above and pale yellow below. Our Tiger Swallowtails are sharp yellow and black above and below (like tigers).

Giant Swallowtail

Canadian Tiger Swallowtail

Late May also begins sort of a second season of woodland blooms. Those early spring ephemerals have all but gone by. Well, they’ve gone by unless you go up high. During our ascent of Mount Worcester in the rain on Monday, Ruth and I encountered forests of Trout Lilies still in bloom, along with a few Spring Beauties that won’t quit, sort of like ski area hanging on until June. Other new flowers in the woods, at least here in central Vermont, include Dwarf Ginseng, Hobblebush, Painted Trillium, Goldthread and a few violet species.

Incidentally, if you’re looking to escape the leaves for unobstructed  views of songbirds, do climb a mountain this weekend. The songbird show along our route up Mt. Worcester was spectacular. Leaves in the hardwoods were just emerging not too high on the trail. Watching Ovenbirds in there was like watching Song Sparrows in the yard. Our full-frontal views of Canada Warbler were sinful. As Blackpoll Warblers, soaked in low clouds, sang near the summit, we enjoyed an arm’s length encounter with a Magnolia Warbler, probably too cold and tired to move. It was like being at the famed Magee Marsh in early May. Here’s a Blackpoll below. I’m late for another mountain this morning. I’ll post more photos, including Trout Lilies, this afternoon.

By Bryan Pfeiffer

Bobby Martino

BARRE TOWN – Bobby Martino’s office is a gallery of empties: sticky bottles, clacking cans and the aroma of stale beer.

Here in the bottle room of M&M Beverage and Redemption Center, stale beer is the least of Martino’s concerns. Sorting returnable cans and bottles is a job with occupational hazards.

Broken glass is a problem. But it’s not as bad as maggots. And maggots aren’t as bad as “chew bottles,” essentially returnable spittoons. Those are pretty rank. But certainly not as creepy as when someone hauled in a load of about 100 beer bottles, many containing used hypodermic needles. At least needles aren’t as pungent as dead mice.

“There’s nothing like the smell of a dead mouse mixed with stale beer,” says Martino, 24, a calm, authoritative bottle clerk who takes pride in his palace of glass, plastic and aluminum.

Of course, a dead mouse has nothing on a live snake.

In his three years of sorting, Martino has seen it all. But he is hardly unique. His insights from the bottle room at M&M are common to most any redemption center in Vermont, insights deeper than you might think. Martino and his colleagues share a particular view of us. They see our character expressed in what we drink and what we return for a handful nickels. 

Vermont’s bottle law turns 40 this year. By all accounts it has helped to relieve the landscape of discarded beverage containers. It also spawned a brotherhood – mostly teenage boys or young men – of bottle professionals who sort what we dump onto their slimy countertops.

They sort with skill and dexterity. The hazards notwithstanding, the sorting has become somewhat easier over the years. Most of the state’s 110 certified redemption centers can now mix various brands of soda and beer containers, from different distributors, before selling them off to a huge recycling outfit. In industry parlance, the mix is called “the co-mingle.” Redemption centers like M&M sell cans and bottles in the co-mingle for their nickel plus a 3.5-cent handling charge (or 4 cents for some brands that must be sorted separately). At the heart of the operation are the bottle jockeys.

“They are really the people who make it work,” says Cathy Stacy, administrator of what is known officially as the Vermont Beverage Container Law. “It’s a nasty job.”

When a customer dumps a clinking, clanking load of bottles and cans (and sometimes an unexpected animal), Martino goes to work. With well-practiced grabs, he’ll seize at least 10 plastic bottles at a time, pivot and then plunge them upright into boxes. Cans and bottles of like sizes are later combined into the co-mingle. All Coke products get their own co-mingle because the company itself buys back its own returnables.

But Martino doesn’t really need to think much about where each item goes. In the pile before him, he spies a label and instinctively knows where to send it. That allows him to focus on the count.

“You have to be able to multi-task,” he says. “I think about the count. I can just concentrate on getting the count right.”

Most of the guys count by fives. “We did have a guy who counted by twos,” he recalls, graciously, “and he was quicker than the guys who counted by fives.” And, yes, customers sometimes dispute the count. When M&M had someone who regularly argued the count, store owner Gilles Moreau stood with his bottle guys, as he often does, and politely told the customer to take his returnables elsewhere.

Moreau reserves particular faith and fondness for Martino, whom he has awarded the rare dual responsibility of bottle clerk and night manager out in the store.

“He works hard; he’s a good kid,” says Moreau, who’s been around the beverage business for decades. “He’s got a dream of owning this store. I laugh about it. I had the same dream when I started out.”

So what do we drink? According to Martino’s unscientific tally, we drink both kinds of beer: Bud and Bud Lite. Budweiser in 12-ounce cans is the most common beverage to come across Martino’s desk and into the bins. After Bud, we drink Coke. A lot of Coke, in cans, says Martino, a proud new father who with mom Charlotte named their son Blake (not Bud).

So besides keeping hypodermic needles and mice from our returnables, what else can we consumers do for Bobby Martino and his colleagues? How can we change? What is our communal sin?

Dirty bottles, particularly in springtime.

“You get a lot of dirty, muddy, messy, smelly bottles that sit over the winter in snow and at the side of the road,” Martino explains. Residual beer is bad enough any time of year. Soda is no better. “Even if it’s a soda bottle that someone threw in the bin when it was half full, it makes all the cans very, very sticky,” he says. “You go to throw them – and they stick to your glove.”

“So rinse ‘em out,” he says. “It’ll make the counting process go a lot quicker.”

Making the process quicker is one of Martino’s goals. So, in the interest of speed, can consumers help bottle clerks by segregating our cans from our bottles, our Coke from our Bud, and then presenting them separately at the counter? Not really.

“That’s what we get paid to do,” says Martino. “We get to sort ‘em.”

Martino also gets to be a benefactor. A theme at redemption centers are good causes and charities – the Shriners, Project Graduation, Boy Scout Troop #714 and many others – that stand to benefit when we drop off bottles and choose to donate our refund. When customers leave bottles without specifying any particular charity, Martino has lately been preferentially directing the money to help a local kid with leukemia.

But most customers come in, dump their bottles and get a slip with a cash total that, about half the time, Martino says, “gets reinvested in the store.”

And one time a load of bottles included a live garter snake. Martino doesn’t care much for snakes. He shouted, “snake!” to his rookie co-worker and then backed away, nearly knocking over a rack of bottles. The rookie managed to corral the snake into a plastic bag and even show it around the store before letting it go out back.

“I made the new kid grab it,” Martino says with a grin.

At the redemption center, seniority has its benefits.

American Redstart

Songbirds pouring from the skies before dawn. Thousands of hawks gliding past a mountain summit. Rare oceanic birds blown in to shore. Birdwatching like this doesn’t necessarily begin when you go outside. It begins with a weather forecast the day before.

Weather can generate spectacular birding. Consider the spring fallout, when birds rain from the heavens. Fallout conditions occur when warm air from the south or southwest meets colder air to the north. The collision can produce fog, rain, and swirling winds – weather you might not consider suitable for birdwatching. But these conditions can cause countless birds – migrating north on tailwinds – to drop from migration and into view.

Indigo Bunting

Topography can also be your partner. If they’re over water, migrants seek any port in a storm, which means they will pile up on islands and along peninsulas. When forced into urban areas, songbirds often move to the nearest patch of trees where they find cover and food, which is why Central Park in New York City and Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Boston are legendary spring birding destinations.

During spring fallouts I’ve seen trees glowing with dozens of warblers seeking shelter from wind and rain. I’ve encountered exhausted scarlet tanagers at my feet. And I’ve experienced 70 indigo buntings in a single thicket. So dense are birds during a genuine fallout that you can point your binoculars in most any direction to find something flitting or flying.

It pays to watch the weather in autumn as well. The right conditions for hawkwatching generally feature cold fronts with weak or moderate winds blowing from the north. Hawks move relatively effortlessly on those crisp days in September and October. They rise late morning with thermals of warmer air generated by autumn sun shining into valleys. After reaching sufficient elevation, hawks break out of their thermal and glide south on high tailwinds. Meanwhile, along the ocean shore, it’s fine to spend a fall day watching eiders, scoters, loons, grebes, gannets, and gulls. But if you want alcids, jeagers, shearwaters, and other odd ocean-going birds, grab your foul-weather gear and get out during a Nor’easter or other weather that generates on-shore winds pushing the rare birds closer to land.

On a rainy morning, Liz Lackey watches warblers falling out at Point Pelee National Park

It’s one thing to know the local forecast when heading afield, it’s another to “see” birds on the way. The National Weather Service’s Next Generation Weather Radar system, NEXRAD, is sensitive enough to detect birds, bats, and occasionally insects in flight. Many songbirds rise together to migrate after sunset, and they’re often dense enough to form distinctive radar patterns that have a different profile than clouds and rain. Migrating birds move faster than prevailing tailwinds, which means the radar patterns, when viewed over time in an animated loop, help confirm that you’re indeed looking at birds in the air and show you the direction of the flight.

Reading online radar images takes some training, but a few dedicated biologists are watching the radar and the skies, and alerting birders when migrants might be coming. Two websites to watch are www.woodcreeper.com and virtual.clemson.edu/groups/birdrad. Visit their tutorials for lessons on radar and migration. A good source of radar data is weather.rap.ucar.edu.

Birdwatchers need not be slaves to weather – good or bad. Head out for birds any old morning this spring. But also realize that, at the very least, it pays to know which ways the wind blows.

Blackburnian Warbler

Color, music, grace, and flight mingle in the lives of most birds. But no bird, at least here in the Northeast, pulls it off like a warbler. Warblers are what’s outside now.

You want vernal pleasure? Find it in warblers. Like gravity, they exert a force of their own on birdwatchers. They’re like sex or chocolate, a Schubert piano trio, or shooting the moon in hearts. Once you’ve experienced warblers, you want more warblers.

Across North America, we’ve got warblers brown and streaky like thrushes, warblers marked like zebras, warblers with hoods, warblers with caps, warblers with bibs, a warbler wearing a raccoon mask, and a warbler, the Kirtland’s warbler, that is among the rarest nesting songbirds on the continent. We’ve got warblers clad in crimson, flame, rust, chestnut, lemon, lime, jade, cerulean, and cobalt. Those hues go well with the black, white, and/or gray base coat that most warblers display as part of their intoxicating plumage.

It’s even more intoxicating when you add song. We’ve got warblers that trill, warblers that shout, warblers that buzz, warblers that rub together only a couple notes, and warblers whose songs are nearly inaudible to the human ear.

Black-and-White Warbler

How big are warblers in the psyche of North American birdwatchers? A birder might find 100 or more species of all kinds during a busy dawn outing, but the real measure of “success” is the warbler tally: contemptible as it may seem to keep count, 20 or more species is respectable. I’ve had a few 30-plus warbler days. And once, during a dawn rainstorm in Ohio, which produced an epic fallout of migrants, I encountered 20 warbler species in my first 20 minutes of birding, which may be my greatest listing feat in nearly four decades of chasing birds.

The western U.S. may have more than a dozen hummingbird species to our one here in the East, but don’t mess with us on warblers. North America has 56 or so warbler species (not including the extinct Bachman’s Warbler), two-thirds of which can be found only in the northeastern quarter of the U.S., many of them exclusive to the temperate forests and points north. Now, around us, among us, they’re migrating through, soon to be nesting from the canopy tops to the bog mats, exploiting our grand flourish of insects, stuffing caterpillars and flies into the gaping beaks of their nestlings.

So stuff a field guide into your pocket and grab the binoculars. You now have yet another reason to visit woodlands and wetlands. In all their Technicolor, the warblers summon you to one of nature’s greatest displays of life.

Hooded Warbler

Click here to view the embedded video.

I encountered 14 warbler species at Berlin Pond and environs today. All five swallow species were swooping and swirling over the pond. Today’s haul included two Long-tailed Ducks, a Green Heron, 18 Bonaparte’s Gulls, a Wilson’s Snipe, three White-crowned Sparrows, and first-of-the-season Veery, Warbling Vireo and Baltimore Oriole. We had a major jump in the number of singing Swamp Sparrows at the pond. And three Rusty Blackbirds were my BODs.

By the way, during my walk along the North Branch of the Winooski River near the Montpelier Recreation Field on Thursday, a Peregrine Falcon was chasing an exceedingly distressed Ring-billed Gull. I think the gull lived.

Continuing south winds should make for a fine weekend of birding. So I’ll offer little else in this week’s edition of “What’s Outside” than counsel to get outside for migrants. You’ll be fighting leaves bigtime next week. For my list from Berlin Pond (with help from Ruth Einstein, Chip Darmstadt and his fine group of birders from North Branch Nature Center),

• Canada Goose  7
• Wood Duck  1
• American Black Duck  1
• Mallard  8
• Ring-necked Duck  1
• Greater/Lesser Scaup  3
• Long-tailed Duck  2
• Hooded Merganser  1
• Ruffed Grouse  1
• Common Loon  2
• American Bittern  1
• Green Heron  1
• Osprey  1
• Virginia Rail  1
• Wilson’s Snipe  1
• Bonaparte’s Gull  18
• Mourning Dove  1
• Belted Kingfisher  1
• Yellow-bellied Sapsucker  5
• Downy Woodpecker  1
• Northern Flicker  2
• Eastern Phoebe  1
• Blue-headed Vireo  2
• Warbling Vireo  1
• Blue Jay  1
• American Crow  4
• Northern Rough-winged Swallow  X
• Tree Swallow  X
• Bank Swallow  X
• Barn Swallow  X
• Cliff Swallow  X
• Black-capped Chickadee  6
• Red-breasted Nuthatch  1
• White-breasted Nuthatch  1
• Brown Creeper  2
• Winter Wren  1
• Golden-crowned Kinglet  6
• Ruby-crowned Kinglet  8
• Veery  1
• Hermit Thrush  1
• American Robin  6
• Ovenbird  3
• Louisiana Waterthrush  1 (1.6 miles south of Mirror Lake Road)
• Northern Waterthrush  4
• Black-and-white Warbler  1
• Nashville Warbler  1
• Common Yellowthroat  1
• Blackburnian Warbler  1
• Yellow Warbler  4
• Chestnut-sided Warbler  1
• Black-throated Blue Warbler  1
• Palm Warbler  3   (at least one Western and one Eastern)
• Pine Warbler  2
• Yellow-rumped Warbler (Myrtle)  30
• Black-throated Green Warbler  1
• Chipping Sparrow  1
• Song Sparrow  5
• Swamp Sparrow  8
• White-throated Sparrow  1
• White-crowned Sparrow (Eastern)  3
• Rose-breasted Grosbeak  1
• Red-winged Blackbird  20
• Rusty Blackbird  3
• Common Grackle  8
• Brown-headed Cowbird  2
• Baltimore Oriole  1
• Red Crossbill  X
• Pine Siskin  10
• American Goldfinch  8