A Sunny Winter Interlude
Bare branches bring better birding
Place: Downtown Columbus, Ohio, USA
Time: February 2024
A Silver Lining in the Gray
When I was living in Columbus during my 20s, I always thought the grey skies were what caused central Ohio winters to feel so long and trying. Later, however, I would have an epiphany after spending a few weeks of winter in Nordsjælland, Denmark: it was greenery that I truly missed. I don’t mean the Scots pines, even; just give me some mossy or lichen-covered trunks and branches back in our small fragments of deciduous woodland. In the bryophyte-poor ravines and riverside trails of Columbus, the first greenery to manifest in March was always the leafing of the deuced Japanese honeysuckle — that omnipresent invasive. There were a few years when I passed bleak Ohio winters peeping for moss in sidewalk cracks.
That strategy wasn’t fully satisfying, as it turned out, and it took a bit longer to find a brighter silver lining amid the gray and brown. What finally helped was becoming a bird noticer. What helped even more was becoming a mediocre bird photographer. The worse you are at locking your camera’s focus on a bird, the more you start to genuinely appreciate branches that are free from foliage.
Winter at the Scioto Audubon
These days, when I am in Columbus, I reside downtown, where house sparrows exhaust the birding interest on most blocks, during most months of year (although spring and autumn migrations bring waves upon waves of avian lives tragically cut short by glass buildings; see Lights Out Columbus for information about the problem and what can be done). Fortunately, the Grange Insurance Audubon Center sits at reasonable walking distance or very easy biking distance — right along the Scioto Greenway, a riverside multi-use trail. A former brownfield site, the Scioto Audubon Metro Park is now a beloved eBird hotspot boasting observations of over 200 unique species. All bird photos in this post were taken there, during a sunny winter interlude in February 2024 (and, yes, I admit that I still prefer the rare sun to the thick clouds).
Some photographers maintain that cloudy days are better for photography than full-on sun. I maintain that the best day for photography is any day on which the weather is enticing enough to get yourself out and photographing things.
Bird Photography as Distraction
It’s fabulous for residents of downtown Columbus that we have access to an area as biodiverse as the Scioto Audubon Metro Park. At the same time, however, the park’s setting poses significant challenges to both the park’s wild inhabitants and the nearby human residents who come to enjoy them, and the big one I have in mind is noise pollution. Traffic noise is a constant intrusion at the Audubon Center and adjoining segment of the Scioto Greenway. I’m not even sure if many visitors are aware of this, but take out your damn earbuds and listen; it’s there. Listen to the birds too, yes, but don’t miss the perpetual rumble of engines and tires on pavement. Awareness is important, because noise pollution is more than an annoyance: it’s a health hazard to human beings, as well as a threat to the health, communication, and reproduction of the birds we’re there to enjoy (well, I am there to enjoy them, and I hope you are too).
This isn’t an activism blog, so I won’t presently harp on about the harm caused by noise pollution to people and birds. If you want to learn more, the previous link will get to you started on the human health impacts, and I have written twice about the impact of traffic noise on birds for Columbus Audubon’s Song Sparrow newsletter: “Quieter Skies for Urban Birds” (October 2020) and the final paragraphs of “Learning to Sing: New Findings in the Study of Birdsong” (October 2021). Both articles contain numerous links to research articles, which I would advise the reader to supplement with a Google Scholar search; research continues at a fast pace, and I have fallen behind, no longer following the topic in depth. (That said, one recent publication that fell across my desk was “Pre- and postnatal noise directly impairs avian development, with fitness consequences,” published April 2024 in Science.)
Anyhow, I believe it’s my right to loathe traffic noise, due to the harm it causes not only to us but also to the birds I love. I refuse to follow the standard advice to habituate myself to it like a good modern human. Unfortunately, I can’t snap my fingers and make it go away. Thus, there remains the question of how to find some peace and happiness when stuck somewhere that traffic noise is inevitable (e.g. across the river from I-71). I find it salubrious to divert my attention to beauty that still exists despite it, and that’s exactly what bird photography helps me to do. When you set your mind to photographing a small flying object moving about the trees — flitting from place to place with no regard for your perspective, or the angle of the light, or the presence of obstructing twigs and branches, etc — then your attention had better stay on that small flying object. All other sensory phenomena fade into the periphery.
Sometimes people ask me how long I wait for the birds to come out. The short answer is that I don’t. When I am in a particularly intoxicating setting — which usually means one in which the sights, smells, and especially sounds of modern society are out of range — I often tarry for the sake of tarrying, simply to absorb it. Sometimes, as a byproduct, unseen birdies will emerge as I sit. In some places, however, I have no desire to tarry for the sake of tarrying. This is the case, for example, wherever my ears are blasted with incessant noise from a nearby motorway. What makes me stop and linger at a place like the Scioto Audubon park are the birds themselves: they’re hard to miss, especially when the branches are bare. And when you stop to stalk one with your lens, it’s not unusual that more birds will appear in your peripheral vision too.
So it is that I often stop to photograph even the common garden-variety birds, like the evil-eyed robin above. Not always, but often, it’s when I pause for such a common bird that I discover rarer feathered treasures. A few highlights of my sunny February 2024 Scioto Audubon saunters included several Brown Creepers, a Northern Flicker, a Carolina Wren, and a couple of Eastern Bluebirds — a particularly special treat, since I seldom see them anywhere in the city, and never previously at the Audubon Center.
Whatever Birds May Come
My spark bird was Frank, who happened to be a Great Blue Heron. Although Frank himself did not live on the Scioto, I am always drawn to herons; I always stop to pay my respects to them. Perhaps my favorite photographic moment of my February 2024 Audubon Center treks — or perhaps tied with the tongue-flicking flicker, despite the poor light — was the ring-billed gull fish-fight that I caught from the corner of my eye, just in time for a couple of shots, while I was chillin’ by the river with my herons.
Come for the first bird you see; stay for the other birds, whatever birds may come.
…and that’s all for this round. Stay tuned for the next fortnightly installment of Nonmotorized Trails: An Ex-Driver Searches for Wild Things, wherein I reflect on formative bird-noticing experiences when living in another Columbus neighborhood.