Bird walk bash!

The birding experts leading the walk, Dan and Georgia from the Baltimore Bird Club, lower expectations as they hand out a sheet of paper depicting common birds of Baltimore. The spring migration has been and gone and there might not much to see other than the usual robins, cardinals, crows, and house sparrows. That’s okay with Denise, who is active in the Winston-Govans Neighborhood Improvement Association. “I like to be in nature. I watch the birds in my back yard. There are more than there used to be, like the blue jays. They disappeared for a long time, but now they’re back with a vengeance!”

Denise’s friend Stephen agrees. Not only are there more birds, but more animals generally. Stephen has worked to clean up the local forest patches. “There’s more deer and foxes, and less trash so animals can survive and stay in the woods. Do you want to live in garbage? Well, neither do they!” Stephen’s mother taught him to forage when he was a boy, and he is happy to see the pecan and mulberry trees in the Wilson Park Woods and the Springfield Woods. “Where there’s food, there’s birds.”

It’s turning out to be a good birding day. The birding sheet is starting to fill up: catbird, downy woodpecker, red-tailed hawk, Carolina sparrow, turkey vulture, crow, starling, Baltimore Oriole, blue jay, white-breasted nuthatch, cardinal, song sparrow, mockingbird, robin, house sparrow.

Then a yellowish-brown bird flies out of leafy branches and settles on a branch on a dead tree in the sunlight, in clear view. It’s a northern flicker. Dan sets up his tripod and trains his scope on it. Everyone gets a close look at the flicker’s yellow-brown chest with brown dots, facial mustache, and bright red spot on top of its head. Then it flies away and disappears for a minute. Then it flies back, and away again, but it keeps returning to the dead tree. Someone spots the reason why the bird keeps coming back: a baby flicker has stuck its head out of a hole in the tree.