Songsters breed in the quiet woods.
The black back of this northern woodpecker gives the species a name, but the scene of a mother tending its eggs or its young is universal. Three days in the Adirondacks began with a leisurely walk through a spruce-fir forest just south of Long Lake. It was already past the heavy singing hours that start each bird’s day, but they had not quieted completely. Most of the voices here are delicate, befitting the dark, quiet woods where these songsters breed.
These northern nesters are tiny, even though clad in a fluff of feathers to keep the blood warm and the heart beating. One of the smallest is the brown creeper, a bird that clings to the tree trunk while dropping sweet notes down the scale. The bird itself ascends the trunk, poking at the hard bark where its food lives.
Kinglets flash their golden crowns as they flit among the needles at the ends of branches, sending their song up the scale, then down again in a final twitter. Red-breasted nuthatches emit their single buzzy note, clear and insistent, a scold that rarely ends.
From the forest floor comes the most melodious voice of all, clear tiny whistles that go up, then down, and on and on. It is not a song, but a symphony, the amazing performance of the forest wren, known in the books as the “winter” wren.
These woods are the stronghold of the warblers, and we listened carefully to each one. More than a dozen different species of warbler is common throughout the Adirondack forest. Most are also found in the hills of southern New England, but a few are rare or absent that far south, birds such as the northern parula and the Nashville warbler.
In the afternoon we saw one of the birds we especially sought, residents of the North that do not migrate and are almost never found farther South. We were on the boardwalk at the edge of a place called Ferd’s Bog, when a pair of gray jays appeared. They sat briefly in the open, but did not come close.
The next day we stopped by a swamp on the edge of Tupper Lake and enticed two American bitterns to come take a look at us. They landed and posed, offering every angle as they strode through the low grasses, then paused to consider us. One of the bitterns focused two large yellow eyes on me, trying to stare me down - and succeeding.
Next on our bird-finding route was the Massawepie Mire, a familiar place where palm warblers and Lincoln’s sparrows nest. Both of these birds migrate through southern New England, but they rarely sing when they are found here, especially the sparrow. It would be a treat to hear their strange, chortling song again, and we did.
Later in the day we visited a new place, the hamlet of Paul Smith's in the town of Brighton, where the College of the Adirondacks owns an enormous wilderness area of ponds and woods, with trails and an impressive visitor center. There we learned of a black-backed woodpecker nesting in an area of dead spruces at Bloomingdale Marsh, a place we had visited before.
We found the dead trees in a flooded wetland, and soon enough the female woodpecker flew out of the hole and alighted barely 20 feet away. She tapped on and under the loose bark, searching for tidbits of food for only a few minutes before returning to the nest, but without any food in her bill.
Three times she repeated this process, and we guessed there were still eggs in the nest that needed warmth, causing her to take short trips away to feed herself. She seemed totally oblivious to us as we stood admiring her amid murmurs of appreciation. The male was not seen, and was likely searching for food farther afield.
We left in time to escape the heavy shower that pelted us during the return to the motel. From our rooms that night we watched the mountains across the lake, where huge bright lightning bolts flashed between earth and sky.
Our Adirondack farewell the next morning was atop Whiteface Mountain, where the wind whipped the cliffs and fog shrouded the valley. On mountains like this, the rare Bicknell’s thrush can be found, but this time we heard only a few notes whispered in the dark. May it come to light when we return.
Seth Kellogg can be contacted at skhawk@comcast.net
The Allen Bird Club website can be found at massbird.org/allen