Berkshire County--Common Redpolls

I've always wanted to see what our friends' place in Berkshire County looked like in the winter, but until recently one had to use snowshoes or cross-country skis to access their house deep in the woods. Recently they put in a "driveway" if you consider a 1/3 of mile road as such, so getting there was now possible. Combine that with a gift card for The Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge that's been sitting around since our wedding almost 4 years ago and a sudden deep and abiding need to add Common Redpoll our life lists and we journeyed up to the frozen North humming "Sweet Baby James" all the way.

Sue had checked with one of her friends, the local bird expert up there, and he had said the redpolls wouldn't be hard to find. In past years she's had them at their feeders but hadn't seen them this year.

Saturday was bitter cold and extraordinarily windy, making any birding aside from standing at their picture windows looking at the feeders out of the question. They had chickadees, a White-breasted Nuthatch and a couple of American Tree Sparrows. After an hour or so I saw a bird on the thistle feeder that didn't look like a sparrow. My first thought was female goldfinch, but of course, aside from the bill it was all wrong for that species and when Sue saw it she said, "Hey, they're back!" Suddenly a flock of them appeared on the ground, on the feeders and in the bare forsythia bush. Common Redpolls added to the life list.

Photos: Shari Zirlin

"We can go home, now," I told Shari.

The next day we met up with her friend Ed who knows where all the birds should be in the county. He was kind enough to act as our guide despite being in the middle of recovering from a rather painful foot operation.

There were two species he thought would interest us. The first one we found pretty quickly after first searching Flintstone Road (really) in Windsor, we found, one street north (called North Street) a flock of Bohemian Waxwings feasting on withered apples.

Photos: Shari Zirlin

For some reason, waxwings (Cedar or Bohemian) look like space cadets out of a low-budget 50's sci-fi movie. There were at least 10 birds in this flock, though others have reported flocks from 90 to 300! Ed said they're called Bohemians because they tend to wander over a large areas, as the original Bohemians were thought to do, so I guess there is just a hint of racism in the name. 

We spent the rest of the morning fruitless looking for a Northern Shrike. This has become our nemesis bird: we spent a frigid day on

Disposal Road in NJ looking for one, had one taken away from us at Jones Beach when it turned out to be a Loggerhead Shrike, and now after a couple of hours scanning tree tops we were still not rewarded. 

The rest of the day didn't bring much--some more redpolls (old hat), and some expected winter birds. In all we only tallied about 11 species, but I consider it a "quality over quantity" weekend. 

The weekend's list, for the record:

Mourning Dove

Blue Jay

American Crow

Black-capped Chickadee

Tufted Titmouse

White-breasted Nuthatch

Bohemian Waxwing

American Tree Sparrow

Dark-eyed Junco

COMMON REDPOLL