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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