By Howard Williams

An all-too-common refrain from both children and adults is: “do we have to there again, we’ve been there twice already…” after a suggestion for where to go for a walk or nature study. When it comes to being even a dilettante naturalist, I consider it important that repeat visits to a place, like voting, should be undertaken both early and often. Why? Because nature evolves throughout the year, a snapshot in Spring is very different from one taken in Summer or Fall, or even a few days after your last visit. As a practising geologist I soon learnt that repeat visits to exposures of complex rocks, under different lighting conditions, often allowed repeated observers to spot new mineral growths, structures or fossils, and that’s for things that don’t move or hide.


I have been dipping into an interesting and stimulating book these last few weeks that illustrates this point. The book title is: Light rains sometimes fall: A British year through Japan’s 72 seasons; written by Lev Parikian. In this book, Lev uses a traditional Japanese technique whereby the natural year is divided into 72 equal portions of about 5 days each (see: https://www.fieldandnest.com/journal/japans-72-poetic-micro-seasons). In fact, back in 1789, Gilbert White, England’s first ecologist did a similar thing in his book: “The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne”, wherein he recounts a mass of phenological data in the form of collected letters to friends. The process of providing a description of the environment for each short time segment encourages an observer to be more aware of small changes in the environment, just like Feederwatch.


I like Feederwatch because it encourages the discipline of making observations on one or two days a week – keeping a lookout for birds, counting the number of each species, watching them interact, noting when in the day they arrive and depart. One of the advantages of being gracefully retired is that bird observation time is more available. The key is to have feeders that are easy to see from the house.


Here are some local examples of observations taken during a year or so in Jackson Park where I walk every morning with Douglas the greyhound. I can watch maples and oaks colouring; sudden influxes of gangs of white throated sparrows and yellow rumped warblers; the massing of robins and starlings; hearing and then seeing the Cooper’s Hawk return to an existing nest.


We can start to hear chickadees say their “Hi sweetie”, listening to White-throated Sparrows warming up their “Oh Canada Canada” song, or watch American Goldfinch gradually become a stronger yellow, or the arrival of migrants from the north, such as Redpolls.


Each day it seems as if something different is happening in the park: homeless people leaving their tents and hammocks because the weather is now cold; or the arrival of Red-winged Blackbirds. This Fall there were very few of them and they have long gone. Last Fall (2021), there were dozens of them that perched on the wires and fence posts. Why the difference? Fall of 2021 followed a very wet September, this year it was very dry, so perhaps food was not so available.


One of the joys of watching birds is the anticipation of the arrival of Northern Mockingbirds, or warblers.
It is through repeated walks through a specific place that one can begin to understand how variable the flora and fauna are, both in space and time, and hypothesize about the reasons for these differences.


The website in the following link is a pathway to discovering the migration patters of birds across North America: https://explorer.audubon.org/home?threatOverlay=expand&zoom=3&x=1306099.1620122588&y=2810864.562197212. This website is useful to predict when birds might arrive or depart in your area. An alternative way of doing it is to look, through eBird, at what is being noticed. For example, there is an expectation that Evening Grosbeaks may be making a journey south into Essex this year, driven by food shortages further north.


Another example of repeat visits. When we lived in Stratford, Ontario, an average of 10 members of the Stratford Field Naturalists used to walk for two hours each Sunday morning at 9 a.m. in The Dolan Conservation area, a riparian, woodland and grassland area located beside the Avon River. In winter, rain, snow or shine, birds would be identified, while for the rest of the year, birds, wildflowers and insects would also be identified. Each visit would be concluded by restorative coffee and pastries.


In conclusion, I fully support making multiple pop-up trips to local birding and wildflower watching spots – Essex has so many, and they can teach us a great deal about biodiversity. The ECFNC does not seem to do this as a recognised group – I wonder why not?