Big Sit 2015 Results

Well, it was close.

The 2015 Whipple Bird Club Big Sit in the birding tower at Indigo Hill started off slower than expected. Snowy tree crickets and other assorted singing insects created just enough white noise to make it hard to hear the calls of night migrating birds overhead. Then, about 4:30 a.m. the wind picked up and took over the job of keeping our heard-only list short.

By the time dawn crept in and the first Big Sit guests began arriving, the bird list total was in the low 20s and the outside temperature was in the high 30s. Brrr.

Yours truly, Captain of the Indigo Hill Big Sit, in the freezing cold pre-dawn.

The morning bird action was hot. Lots of expected resident species: northern cardinal, eastern towhee, Carolina wren, blue jay, American crow, red-shouldered hawk. This was augmented by some expected fall arrivals: yellow-rumped warbler, dark-eyed junco, yellow-bellied sapsucker, white-throated and white-crowned sparrows. We also had a few hold-outs—birds that should have been gone by now: gray catbird, brown thrasher, chipping sparrow, house wren, tree swallow, And then there were the surprises: six thrush species, including gray-cheeked and veery,  Philadelphia vireo, red-headed woodpecker, green heron. We did better on warblers than we did in 2013—a decidedly down year for us. This year we had six warbler species: Tennessee, Cape May, magnolia, blackpoll, yellow-rumped, and black-throated green.

We passed 50 species, then 60. Things were looking really good. Then the cloud cover blew in from the Southeast and it began to drizzle. it continued on and off from about noon until 4:00 p.m. This killed the bird activity more or less. Leaving us stranded at 68 species. Our all-time record for this Big Sit is 72. We could practically smell and taste 73. A palm and magnolia warbler had been our last two adds. One found by Julie Zickefoose, one by Kyle Carlsen. We were hoping that the lifting of the rain would lift the bird activity and our list of sightings, and thus our spirits.

Shila in her rain poncho.

Late in the day in a Big Sit is when you really need to concentrate. However circumstances are conspiring against you. You're tired. You haven't added a new bird to the list in an hour or more. The beer and wine are flowing. You're tired. Now you have to repatriate some of that beer or wine. Your optics are covered in orange Cheeto dust. You're tired.

Kyle and the hands of others toasting a great day before it was over.

David "Tools" Wesel demonstrating how to eat Cheetos, official snack for of the IHBS.

Just when we thought it was all over, longtime Indigo Hill Big Sit participant and the Royal Meteorologist of The Whipple Bird Club Steve McCarthy pulled one out of his bag of birding magic. Scanning a hillside more than two miles away, Steve got a flock of turkeys out for a dusk feeding, before heading to roost. That got us to 69.

We could feel the magic. We could DO this!

We never stop looking.

Alas, a flyover Cooper's hawk in the gloaming (#70) was the only additional species we could muster. As our group began to dwindle and dear friends headed off toward their homes, I remained in the tower hoping for a flyover American woodcock or a late common nighthawk. Nada.

Most Big Sits are full of "what ifs." This Big Sit was prevented from being a record-setter by the afternoon drizzle. But that didn't stop us from having a record amount of fun.

Official beer mug makes the Big Sit beer taste better.

Late in the day the sun came back to taunt us.

Thanks to all the friends near and far who made it to our Big Sit, held their own Sit, or merely participated vicariously via social media (#bigsit). You can see some of the results at both the Big Sit Live page and at the Big Sit results home page.

The official/traditional date of the 2015 Big Sit will be Sunday, October 11. Some sitters will elect to Sit on Saturday, October 10, and that's OK, too.

While the sun never sets on the British Empire, it did set on the 2014 Big Sit.

Autumn Eye Candy

 An anvil thunderhead catches the evening sunlight.

Looking through my iPhoto library I realized that I had some very nice eye candy images. Here are a few that I collected in recent weeks.

 Macro shot of a past-its-freshness-date purple coneflower.

 Macro shot of daughter Phoebe's eye—she leaves these on every camera in the house.

White hibiscus flower—from the plant along our garage wall that the indigo buntings nested in very late in August.

Glory rays—that's what my Great Aunt Lolly called them—coming from the cloud-covered sun.

This image, taken with my iPhone 4S, looks almost like a painting. The blood moon was rising over the neighbor's pasture and the low-light gives the image a pleasingly grainy feel.

Soon the broad-winged hawks will all be well on their way to South America. I digiscoped this one from our tower using my iPhone.

Another iPhone digiscoping capture of a brown thrasher from the tower.

Streaks from the West, heralding the end of another beautiful August day at Indigo Hill. How I wish I could stay home and never miss another sunrise or sunset!

The 2011 Big Sit Part IV: A Broken Record

Here's the final chapter in the 2011 Big Sit report from the Indigo Hill Birding Tower, home of The Whipple Bird Club. As the day wore on toward afternoon, the bird activity really tailed off, as you might expect. Our list was at 66 at 11:00 am. By 11:30 am we'd added a distant osprey (67) and northern harrier (68).

Just before noon I saw a bird flying to the northeast of the tower. It was a mid-sized bird, with an undulating flight pattern—definitely a woodpecker. Then it dipped sideways in flight and I caught a flash of large white wing patches! YES! A red-headed woodpecker! My favorite bird species of all and it moved our Big Sit list into a tie with our all time record. And it was not yet noon!

At 12:05 pm a red-breasted nuthatch called from the pines along the meadow. Jim and Julie heard it and Julie called it in—red-breasted nuthatches must be lonely little souls since they always respond to imitations of their calls. That was species number 70! A NEW BIG SIT RECORD for our circle!

There was copious jocularity and riotous rejoicing!

Then came hours of no new birds—plenty of neat birds to see, but no new species for the list. These were the wasp-swarming hours I mentioned in my previous post. Most sitters left the tower to eat, rest, rest stop, refit, leave, or go bugging in the meadow.

Binocs up! Few birds escaped our watchful eyes as we scanned the sky from the Indigo Hill Birding Tower.

By 3:30 pm our eyes were starting to blur and the beer in the cooler was starting to sing its siren song. Just when we though we were stuck with a tie, I hear the familiar rattle of a wren from the brambly wildflower meadow to the east of the house. I heard it several more times—enough to recognize it as a house wren. Julie and Shila went out from the house to ground-truth it and caught glimpses of the bird and heard snatches of its rattle. That was yet another new record: 71 species, breaking the old record of 70 which had stood for, ummm, about 3.5 hours!

Sometime between 4:00 and 5:00 pm I spotted our final bird species of the 2011 Big Sit. A lone rock pigeon flew past the north side of the tower, headed east. Not a very glam bird for a new Indigo Hill Big Sit record of 72 species, but a record-setting bird nonetheless! As if all of nature was smiling on us, the sun broke through the clouds and gave us a nice sunset for our group picture taking.

We chatted about the day's birds, as we always do near the end of The Big Sit: favorite bird of the day, lucky "gets", hard-to-believe "misses." Some of the species I dream about adding to our Big Sit and farm lists at a future Big Sit: anhinga, sandhill crane, snow goose, and others.

Anhinga is a dream bird for the Big Sit list, but probably not likely.

Palm warbler was a big miss from the 2011 Big Sit list.

As we wound down, the jokes began to flow. A few birds still visited the feeders and the eastern phoebe that had been around all day was sitting on the telephone wire, tail flicking back and forth.
Our local phoebe put on a good show in the late afternoon.

The final gang at the 2011 Big Sit—those who stayed until the bitter end, from left to right: Jason, Julie, Chet Baker, Jim, BOTB, Evan, Steve, Shila, Wendy, Nina, Daniel, and Kelly. Photo by Phoebe Thompson.

The rising moon made a light squiggle in the night sky behind our plastic great horned owl decoy.

The final PlantCam shot from the 2011 Big Sit.

About 7:30 pm the wind picked up again, making hearing difficult. It was almost completely dark so we began to tear down. The last trip down from the tower, I grabbed the PlantCam and turned it off. The final photo had been taken at 7:52 pm.

It had been a great—a record-setting—day! I love The Big Sit.

The 2011 Big Sit, Part III

Moon at midnight of the 2011 Big Sit.

We left our story last week with me racing (carefully) through the foggy and winding country roads from the high school homecoming dance back home to the farm and the Indigo Hill Birding Tower for the midnight start of The Big Sit!

Well, we made it with 10 minutes to spare. Just as I was about to scramble up to the tower, I spied the homecoming princess heading to the master bathroom for a shower. Knowing this would mean 40 minutes of showering and 50 minutes of the roar of the water heater trying to keep up, I begged like the desperate birder-parent I was for a delay in the hygiene-based activity so that the night would remain quiet enough for me to hear passing migrant birds overhead.

The princess in her regal ballgown and one of her loyal footmen.

This was met with the soul-withering, resistance-is-futile, how-dare-you-even-THINK-that I'm-not-showering-now-you-complete-loser-stare from my adorable and indulgent 15-year-old daughter. I tucked my tail between my legs and climbed into the tower, dented not daunted.

In addition to the roar of the water heater rising skyward on the south side of the tower, there was the surprisingly loud burble from the bird spa on the north side, and coming from all directions was an impressive wall of insect sounds. Hearing the soft seet of a Savannah sparrow overhead was going to be impossible.

Midnight. The hour of enchantment. When everything in the coming day seems possible—even probable! The 2011 Big Sit was ON! My first sound was a nearby ATV. Then some dogs. Then a mufflerless truck. Then coyotes. Plus the shower-bird spa-cricket noise. Then some distant shouting followed by the boom of a large-caliber gun. Then lowing cows. Then coyotes.

This went on for nearly 20 minutes before I heard my first bird: a black-crowned night-heron (actually at least three of them) flying in the darkness overhead, occasionally uttering their tell-tale quock!

Whoa! That's a species we've only had one other time on our farm and it was on a Big Sit about a decade earlier. I remember it clearly—a line of migrants flying slowly southward against the western sunset. A very auspicious start to the 2011 Big Sit!

I smiled as I snapped on my headlamp to tick the night-heron off on the official checklist. Then I pulled out my phone to post the Big Sit's first sighting to Facebook and Twitter. I got immediate reactions from all over the world! Neat! Even though I was alone up in the tower, and would be until just before dawn, I had a digital posse of bird watching pals along with me, connected by satellite-tossed data.

Shortly after 1 am the wind picked up suddenly out of the southeast. Weird! Without being able to hear at all now, and with the night being so dark, there would be no new birds added to the list. I headed back downstairs to catch a few winks.

I was back in the tower at 3:45 and the wind was gone. Almost immediately I began adding birds as flyovers uttering call notes. Many of them I could not identify, but those that I could (indigo bunting, Savannah sparrow, Tennessee warbler, Swainson's thrush, gray-cheeked thrush) I added to the list. The owls started up, too. A great horned owl hooted from the northeast for the next two hours. And two eastern screech-owls whinnied from the meadow's edge.

Julie and Jim (right) joined me in the tower before dawn.

About an hour before dawn, Big Sit stalwart and Mr. Ohio Birding Jim McCormac showed up to join me in the tower. Jim is fun to bird with and always adds a number of species to the list. Sadly most of these are insects and plants which don't actually count on the Big Sit list, but I smile and act like I'm checking them off on the list, which seems to make Jim happy.

Seriously, though, Jim's strong birding ears nailed us veery, black-throated green warbler, chestnut-sided warbler, and chipping sparrow. As dawn hinted at its imminent arrival, the resident birds began stirring: northern cardinal, song sparrow, eastern towhee, mourning dove, Carolina chickadee.

Actual sunrise on Big Sit day.

By the time the sun was up, we were pushing 30 species and already draining a second pot of coffee. It was time for more visiting sitters to arrive. Julie (a resident sitter) came up from the main house and threw her birding powers into the mix. Soon Jason arrived, followed by Nina, and Jen, and Bob and Mimi, and then the day became a blur of birds and shouts, and quick hugs hello, and more coffee.

Early sitters in the birding tower, from left: Jen, Jason, Steve, Evan, Julie, Jim, Nina.

On any given Big Sit (always the second Sunday in October) we're struggling to delay the end of the summer seasons, to find the last migrant songbirds—hoping for a late wave of warblers similar to those we enjoyed just a few weeks earlier. We're also tugging the season in the other direction, hoping for the later migrants and winter visitors to arrive on time or even early, birds like dark-eyed junco, swamp sparrow, Lincoln's sparrow, northern harrier, pine siskin. We got some of these species this year, but missed some, too.

Some birds seem to know you are looking for them and they hide out on Big Sit day. This year it was the juncos and Lincoln's sparrows that gaslighted us. I saw them the day before and the day after. But not on the day of the Big Sit.

View from the tower looking ENE.

By mid-morning we had a list full of birds (62 species at 9:45 am) and a tower full of bird watchers. And a driveway full of cars. It was pretty clear that it was shaping up to be a good day–perhaps even record-setting, if our luck held out. I reminded my fellow veteran sitters that we'd been here before (literally and figuratively). Many times in the past we'd race out to an amazing start for the sit, holding a list of 60 species by 11 am, only to spend the next nine hours adding a paltry few to the list.

The Big Sit is not a competitive event at all. We compete against ourselves and against all the totals seen our previous Big Sits in this spot. There is a prize for The Big Sit, however: The Golden Bird. The Golden Bird prize is awarded each year based on a random drawing of one species from among all of the bird species seen during the Big Sit by North American Big Sit circles. Then all the teams that saw that species are put into a hat and one team's name is drawn at random. That team wins The Golden Bird prize: $500 from Swarovski Optik to put toward a local conservation cause of the team's choosing. Swarovski has generously sponsored The Golden Bird prize for many years, and we Big Sitters really appreciate their support!

The sky made a frowny face.

At 10:30 am a frowning face appeared in the northeastern sky, made from cloud bits and jet contrails. I chose not to take this as an omen.

Monkey-cam shot of the Big Sitters just before the wasps became active.

As the day warmed up, the tower's other residents became menacingly active: wasps! Dozens of wasps of two species swarmed about us, never stinging, just making everyone feel on edge. Within 30 minutes I was alone in the tower, wondering about the effectiveness of my deodorant, but hoping it was the wasps that drove people away.


While I maintained the Big Sit vigil, Jim organized an insect walk around the farm. He knows more about insects and their sounds than most people know about themselves, so he drew quite a crowd of bug-seekers.

Bugging out in the meadow.

I watched them sidle out the middle meadow path and tried not to let the swirling cloud of wasps drive me nuts. The plastic owl we'd mounting on a pole above the tower (in hopes of attracting a stooping attack from a passing merlin) was also being plagued by the wasps, though it seemed less perturbed than I was.

Waspy the owl.

The afternoon doldrums descended upon the Indigo Hill Birding Tower. I lay down on the tower floor and scanned the sky for high-flying raptors. Chimney swifts, turkey vultures, and monarch butterflies were all that passed overhead.

The awesome loneliness of command.

We had eight more hours of sitting. The count was 66. The all-time record Big Sit total for this site was 69. Three more birds did not seem like too much to hope for....

to be continued.....

The Indigo Hill Big Sit 2011 Slide Show

Our friends at Wingscapes have been touting their PlantCam as a neat way to take timelapse photographs of plants or anything else. I decided to set my PlantCam to take a photo every 10 minutes during the 2011 Big Sit. And this slideshow is the result. Pretty neat if you ask me!

More on the Big Sit in the coming days.

Reflection Time

We've had a nice stretch of beautiful sunsets recently. The good ones call us out onto the back deck, which faces west, to ogle and sigh. The truly wonderful sunsets send us sprinting up the tower stairs two-at-a-time, wanting not to miss a single second of color as the sun's fading light plays across the clouds.

While up in the tower for a tower-worthy sunset a short time ago, we found a new way to enjoy the spectacle. The top rails on our tower are made of cedar and the years of weathering have made them cup slightly. This cupped shape retains water (and further ages the wood, peels off the paint, etc).

Phoebe noticed that the water that pools on the rails catches the sky color quite nicely, and she called it to our attention. So we spent a happy hour trying to capture this interesting reflection with our cameras. Here are the results:



It used to drive me nuts to see that water pooled on the rails. In fact there's a squeegee stowed in the tower cabinet to push the water off. Now I find the reflections to be a perfect excuse not to do this small maintenance chore.

I guess what I'm taking away from this reflection time is that the only thing that beats a good sunset is....more sunset!

Big Sit! Wha Hoppen?

For the first time in, like, 10 years, I won't be doing The Big Sit from my birding tower at Indigo Hill in southeastern Ohio. This officially bums me out.

I will sorely miss all my Indigo Hill Big Sit buddies this October 10. However, I will be someplace birdy on Planet Earth, and I shall endeavor to conduct a Big Sit if I possibly can.

Details to follow as I am able. Happy Big Sitting to all my fellow sitters around the world! May the birds pass by your circle in great variety, wearing their least-confusing plumage.

Traditional Welcome Ceremony

The birding tower at Indigo Hill as seen from the western side.

When special guests come to our rural farm in southeastern Ohio, we welcome them in the traditional way of our people: we throw rotten pumpkins from the top of our tower. This is the primary reason we mortgaged our childrens' future to build this giant structure: to throw things off it that will go splat and make us laugh.

That and because it increases our Big Sit numbers.

From left: Kevin Sibbring, Shirley Stary, Wendy Eller—all from Lakeside; Chet Baker, Julie Zickefoose and Jen Sauter.

No, we don't throw the rotten pumpkins AT the arriving guests (although that's not a bad idea, come to think of it!). We invite our honored guests up to the tower top to witness the grunt-toss-thunk-splatter action first hand.

So when our friends from Lakeside, Ohio came for a visit, we rolled out the pass-the-freshness-date pumpkins for them.

Three potential victims, resting in their decrepitude. We chose the middle one, originally a pig.

The ceremonial carrying of the pumpkin up to the tower is performed by a specially trained member of the tower staff.

Carrying the mushy pumpkin (carved into the likeness of a pig) to the tower presented a challenge. Have you ever smelled rotten pumpkin juice? By comparison, Limburger cheese smells like Chanel No. 5.



And speaking of Chanel No. 5, Kevin Sibbring was standing by to help me wish the pumpkin a toothless goodbye.


Ready? One.....Two.....Three.......

Ooof! Thar she flies!

Inches and milliseconds before impact.....

And the post-splat money shot of the final carnage. Pumpkin tossed. Honored guests properly welcomed. Skunks and opossums happy.

Just another reason to love Halloween.