A few days ago, as I was coming home from work, I saw a Raven feeding on a roadkill squirrel in front of our neighbor's house. I think the pair of ravens are back to the ridge behind our house. 20 years ago you only saw Ravens in Connecticut in the extreme northeastern and northwestern corners of the state. In recent decades they seem to have expanded their range.
I've seen a few other early spring birds back in our area. The phoebes have been back since the beginning of March and the Louisiana waterthrush has been singing down by our creek for two weeks. This next week should bring a big push of neotropical migrants.
A good way to explore the birds in your area is ebird, a project that allows birders to enter their observations and generate reports. These reports are combined to give a big picture of what the birds are doing. For example I can generate a map of Connecticut and see where all the reports of Raven have been since 2002. I can also generate a map of a particular month or week and watch were the arriving migrants are being seen.
2 comments:
You're probably already aware of them, but if not, I thought I'd turn you on to two really good books by Bernd Heinrich. One is called "Ravens in Winter" and the other "Mind of the Raven."
Apppreciate your blog post
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