Nature Moncton Nature
News
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**Lance Harris in Dieppe has a group of woodpeckers that act very fast when he puts out fresh bird pie.
Lance put
out a new bird pie on Friday morning, and his photographs show it near demolished by
Friday afternoon. The star of the show is a female pileated woodpecker
with several hairy woodpeckers that immediately compete for the booty. The big
lady is boss!
**Jane
LeBlanc hadn't seen her northern cardinal pair lately, but they both
appeared separately on Friday. The male was enjoying the Nature Moncton
bird feeder, along with a female purple finch. The female cardinal
arrived later and was feeding on the ground under the feeder.
**John Inman
comments that he is still seeing the occasional little crane fly.
(Editor’s
note: the crane fly John photographed is very likely the winter crane fly. They
do their adult mating flights this time of year. They obviously have incredible
natural antifreeze in their makeup for a fragile insect to choose this time of
year to be out on their mission.)
Along the
road, Shannon Inman saw a few pine grosbeaks picking up grit, allowing
close-up photos characteristic of their calm attitude.
Shannon photographed
some lichens, including the lung lichen and others appearing to be in the
shield lichen (Parmelia) group.
Shannon also
photographed a brown creeper in its favourite habitat of deeply furrowed
bark searching for insects. She also got a nice photographic angle of a sharp-shinned
hawk preening itself to nicely show some of its ID features. In addition, she got a photo of the
resident white-tailed deer now starting to forage on yard cedar tree
foliage, which is popular on their winter menu.
**On Friday,
Brian Stone walked trails on the Riverview Marsh to check for winter visitors.
A few minutes along the trail, Brian was surprised by a sudden flurry of small
birds that flew en masse from some bushes beside the trail and landed high in a
tree up beside Hawthorne Drive. Brian was unable to react fast enough to get
close photos as the birds zoomed past, but after they landed in the tree, he
got some distant photos that revealed the birds to be a group of at least 100 common
redpolls.
(Editor’s
note: this significant numbered flock of common redpolls is enjoying the catkin
seeds of grey birch which they will continue to forage on until the supply
dwindles, at which time we can expect them to visit our bird feeder yards.
American goldfinch
and pine siskin can also enjoy birch catkin seeds in flocks at this time of
year.)
Brian
continued his walk in Riverview but saw nothing else worthy of a photo, and so
he decided to go over to the Moncton side and try his luck at photographing the
red foxes that Georges Brun has made famous with his recent series of
photos showing them hunting along the edges of the river. Brian was lucky and
saw two foxes in the same area, one sitting and resting, and one walking along the
edge and hunting successfully.
Brian also
stopped briefly beside the Assumption Building to get a photo of one of
Moncton's peregrine falcons perched on the side of the building logo.
Nelson Poirier
Nature Moncton
