A Trip to the Finger Lakes

By Bill Chaisson
OF A FEATHER
On the NH Bird Forum people are reporting they are not seeing species they usually see in places where they usually see them. The impression that there are fewer birds overall is a growing one. Habitat alteration on their wintering grounds and obstacles on their migration routes are decreasing many bird populations. The increasing wackiness of the weather does them no favors either. The hard frost we got two weeks ago didn’t just kill the fresh leaves on most of the oaks and beeches. It killed a lot of insects as well. I know the black flies disappeared abruptly. Birds will not wait for their food supply to recover; they will move on rather than starve to death.

Although I am fond of visiting the same locations over and over through the seasons in order to see the individual birds who live there, it is nice to get out on the road and see a different place with different birds. If for no other reason than to make sure the lack of birds isn’t universal. Last weekend family duties called us back to the Finger Lakes region of New York. It is a 7-hour drive to the west and a bit south, but when we arrived we could see that the hard frost had devastated that area too. The grape-growers had been hit particularly hard.

One of the most obvious differences between central New Hampshire and central New York is that there is a lot more farming in New York. In addition to the growing wine industry—which requires grapes—breweries and distilleries are proliferating throughout the region, demanding a steady supply of corn, hops, barley and other grains. For many decades, Finger Lakes farmers focused on corn, soybeans, and hay. This new diversification isn’t just good for them, it’s good for the birds because birds eat the seeds of all of the above as well as the insects that eat (or just live on) those crops.

We found an AirBnB on a farm in Danby, a rural town south of Ithaca. The Finger Lakes are carved into the Allegheny Plateau, so the land rises fairly steadily from the Ontario lake plain to the Pennsylvania border, where you encounter the ridges of the Appalachians. Our accommodations were in a high valley at an altitude of 1,520 feet above sea level. The tops of the surrounding hills climb to about 1,650 feet, which is equivalent to being about two-thirds of the way up Mount Kearsarge here in Wilmot. As such, spruce trees here and there join the hemlock and hardwood assemblage.

But outside the Danby State Forest, much of the landscape is a checkerboard of agricultural fields and woodlots. These are family farms, and many of the farmers are Cornell educated. While Cornell was one of the architects of the green revolution of industrial farming and slow to join the sustainable farming movement, they are now on board and producing progressive-minded members of the ag community. Our hosts were graduates who had been doing silviculture research in Costa Rica when the pandemic forced them to change course. They are now raising sheep, turkeys and a variety of crops far from the rainforest.

On the evening we arrived, we took a walk down the road and were passed by exactly no cars at all. The birdsong that filled the air was familiar but with a local accent. The song sparrows, for example, had a simpler song than the ones along our stream back home. They had the same ringing initial notes, but the middle and end passages sounded very much like a savannah sparrow. Yellow warblers, which prefer shrub-scrub borders around neglected meadows, are absent in my own neighborhood of mowed grass, shorn hedgerows, and dense woodland. In Danby, they were everywhere.

The next morning we took a walk in a different direction and a large gray hawk with a white rump flew by, a mouse dangling from its talons. I had not seen a northern harrier (marsh hawk, we used to call them) since we lived on Martha’s Vineyard. As their old name implies, they live in open country. On the Great Plains studies show that they disappear if woodlands are more than 30% of the landscape. On Nantucket they have been observed to stay away from mowed fields.

On Saturday afternoon we visited the city park in Ithaca, which is right on Cayuga Lake. It was filled with people, but it was also filled with birds. Part of it was put aside as a bird sanctuary 100 years ago, but Cascadilla Creek also enters the lake here creating a quiet stretch of water away from Cayuga, which is over a mile wide and 39 miles long. Osprey nesting platforms have been erected here (and in many places around Ithaca) and the one on Cascadilla Creek was occupied. Ospreys are not particularly bothered by the presence of people. Literally hundreds of folks were fishing, golfing, boating, playing, and walking around right under the nest.

An even rarer delight was a martin box that was actually home to purple martins. We only saw one pair, but it was more than I have seen in many years. Their liquid calls are like normal swallow sounds dipped in honey. The box was mere feet away from the creek and the frequent presence of people probably discouraged many of the usual martin predators.

The next morning I flushed a male bobolink from a field behind our bed and breakfast. Like the marsh harrier, this is a bird of open, somewhat unkempt country. We do have them in one place in Wilmot, but they are common in central New York, where informed farmers delay their hay cutting to let the birds finish breeding.

On our way home a black vulture, looking like an animated box kite, lumbered across I-88. The future may or may not hold fewer birds, but they will be different.