Mid-April birding

In Johnson City, there are a couple of good spots to bird watch. Be sure to take your mask, however. And most of the more active places are already on e-birds. We are also lucky that living on the edge of slopes of the southern Appalachians and near a couple of TVA lakes, we can get to or have come our way a good variety off birds over the course of the year. Check your e-birds for Washington County, Tennessee.

Some of the places: Boone Lake Dam, Davis Dock (near Beaver Creek on Boone Lake), Jacob’s Creek (on King Springs Road in the southern part of town almost in Carter County), Winged Deer Park, Buffalo Mountain Park, Cherokee National Forest (south side of Washington County), Osceola Island (or Weir Dam, they are the same place, in Sullivan County at South Holston Dam). Access will remain iffy for the time being.

Boone Lake is still down but you can work the shoreline from many places. The city parks are hit and miss but early mornings are pretty good. Winged Deer offers probably a better variety (best is weekday mornings). Buffalo Mountain has the better hiking. Jacob’s Creek has the most fun bridges, if you like that sort of thing!

Use Google-maps to find many of these and their access roads. It’s a beautiful time of the year to be out in the county. The birds pretty much ignore the coronavirus.

And then you get kind of lucky, too. Out taking my “essential” walk around the Liberty Bell Complex (Science Hill High School and Liberty Bell Junior High School on Roan Street), at the drain pond between SCHS’s parking lot and the Skate Park, I had a green heron, solitary sandpiper, and a female mallard with chicks. The mallard family drew the most attention if only because the heron was still as a stone and looked a lot like the accumulated vegetation trash it was standing on. The next day I tried this route again with high expectations: nothing.

Last year, one of our members spied a gaggle of great egret on the pond. Most of the time it’s kind of empty.

Days before posting this club members spied a sandhill crane in the parking lot at one of our grocery stores. It seemed very unconcerned at traffic and asphalt. The stranger part might be is that my photo was taken about 6:00 p.m. and it had first been reported along about 9:00 a.m.
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Spring Birding amongst the mayhem

Here we are in the midst of this quarantined times and the birds just keep on coming into the landscape. Bird counts and club meetings are going to be delicately planned if possible at all.

Group outings are on the forbidden list, as they should be. Four people in a car is a problem waiting to happen.

But, spring has arrived, if you can think of it substantially different from winter which was probably a warm one for us. Negligible snow. Hardly got below freezing air temperatures. The non-winter might cause us a very buggy summer.

I load my sunflower feeder pretty regularly even with all the flowers and plants starting to bloom. The one bag of thistle got demolished by the finches. Once they start it becomes a crowd. I think they even chased off a squirrel. But thistle bags are expensive and the older the bag, if you’re using refills, the more stained it gets. Don’t know if the stain is a problem.

So far the customer base at the feeding is routine: cardinal, house/purple finch, titmouse, white breasted nut-hatch, downy woodpecker, red-bellied woodpecker, chickadee, towhee, mourning doves (on the ground below) and robins out in the yard. A mockingbird has discovered my suet feeder but the woodpeckers have not.

The Johnson City city parks are “accessible” and with the weather starting to change the bird watching ought to pick up. Winged Deer Park has some waterfowl although they are usually confined to Canada geese and Mallard. Birding across the road from the river in the wooded park(and doing about anything else there) is best in the mornings during the week. Winged Deer gets lots of bicycle traffic in the woods during the weekends. Jacob’s Creek on King Springs Road is very small but a variety of birds show up. I haven’t made it to Buffalo Mountain nor Willow Springs in a while so no reports there. Roan Mountain State Park is accessible but the bathrooms are closed. Just be careful about being in groups.

Under the new rules of safer-at-home in Tennessee and Johnson City just be advised to know those rules and be prepared.

Likewise, Boone Lake dam and Fort Patrick Henry dam, in Kingsport, are good birding spots. Big Springs Road along the South Holston River upstream from Bluff City is always good. And easy to get to.

The eagles have chicks but this year’s fledge I think is uneven compared to last year’s. You can always check the eagle-cam at East Tennessee State University’s home page (www.etsu.edu).
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