Welcome to Suburban Birbs!

Welcome to the Suburban Birbs blog and the first real blog post of the site!

This site has been a long time coming…I have ruminated on writing about our wildlife habitat here for ages. After building a website for this purpose—and then having it deleted by Wix before making it live (*insert a crying sound*)—I embarked on an absolute mission to just GET.IT.DONE.

So what’s to see here? Well, poke around and have a look—you’ll find our wildlife lists, some photo galleries of the species we see here, and videos sprinkled throughout. There are also links to my two online shops where I sell very cool nature & bird themed merch to help support this blog and the wildlife habitat. My goal is to document our ever-changing landscape here as well as recount how this project evolved over the years—it’s been a 23-year experiment! I hope to share insights and ramblings that hopefully might inspire some of you to take the plunge and start a suburban habitat of your own, as well as serve as a helpful resource for anyone who endeavors to share a patch of their yard with their region’s wildlife.

The posts previous to this one are examples of some of my recent writings and should give you an idea of the type of content I’ll be sharing here, so be sure to check them out!

Soon I hope to have a Forum page available where like-minded folks such as gardeners, birders, and naturalists (from Bridgewater and beyond) can connect and discuss anything and everything about the environment, our local/regional concerns, and habitat building. I also plan on developing a Resources pages where I’ll be sharing some of my favorite suppliers for native plants & trees, materials, and tools. Before spring, I'll incorporate some neat features like links to our area Birdcast from Cornell Lab of Ornithology and live links to AllAboutBirds.org so users can jump directly to bird information from our bird lists.

So, check back often...I expect to post at least weekly and remember...this website is a work in progress and I'm still finalizing its final layout and presentation--so there will be a lots of changes to it over the coming weeks and months (and disclaimer--I have never built a website before, so that may be more obvious than I'd like!)

Thanks for reading and I hope you'll stop by Suburban Birbs again!

Excuse me, is this Venezuela? Because it seems awfully cold for Venezuela.

[note: this was a post I previously shared on NextDoor for my area neighbors]

Ready for a thrill? Ok, maybe not so much a thrill, just something that’s arguably more interesting than watching the snow melt? 

I thought you’d like to see this photo of a rare bird visitor to Bridgewater.

This is a female Dickcissel.  She’s been calling my backyard “home” since mid-February (at least)—which is when I first noticed her sometime after our big snowfall. I was birding from my kitchen window, dutifully counting White-Throated sparrows, when I realized— {curse you, Sesame Street!}—one of these things is not like the others.

While Dickcissels are a somewhat uncommon bird in NJ (although they might be seen July-October), for them to be here in winter is very rare as they normally spend their winters in South America (with Venezuela being the most common location).

How rare? When I checked the eBird data in mid-March, only 8 Dickcissels (including mine) were confirmed & recorded anywhere north of the Mexico border!

As I’m a birder, I log my daily bird lists & counts into the eBird app. So, every time I add this Dickcissel to my list, a “Rare Bird Alert” gets sent out by the ABA (American Birding Association). I did not know this at the time. This has made my life very, very interesting over the last month.

I’ve received phone calls…voicemails…texts…emails…Twitter DMs! —all from people wanting to come see it. It’s humorous (and disconcerting) to receive texts from phone numbers you don’t know, with messages that start with “I’d like to see your Dickcissel…”

Uhh, EXCUSE ME? 

I mean, for real, THIS BIRD HAS PAPARAZZI!

So far, I think 14 people have come to see it, with two more already scheduled for next week. I’ve given the same spiel to looky-loos so many times that if this bird stays much longer, I’ll need to record one of those self-guided audio tours! I can’t help but feel like some sort of booking agent, scheduling appointments and meet & greets with “The Bird.”

Overall, it’s been blast meeting so many different people from such diverse areas and backgrounds—all because of this wayward little bird. I don’t know how long she’ll stay, but I just wanted fellow Bridgewater folks to get a chance to see our own bona fide bird celebrity!

Morning coffee on the patio (with a side of weasel)

When I turned my property into an Audubon/NWF Certified Wildlife Habitat years ago, I didn't know that encounters like this would occur.

Having a re-wilded space is genuinely the gift that keeps on giving. That is, if you're into gifts like hearing blood-curdling fox screams in the dead of night, or being startled by very fast and blurry things running past you outside, or often finding yourself proclaiming things like "Whose poop is this?" or, of course, my favorite— (an oldie but a goodie)—"It smells like something dead out here."

But then you have these moments….

This video was taken a few years ago here. This is a Long-Tailed Weasel who had decided to hunt newly-fledged House Sparrows on my patio—all while I was sitting there drinking my coffee!

No, I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE THINKING—this was NOT a ferret! It’s a weasel.

They’re native to New Jersey and they are common; we just don’t get to see them much (they’re a sneaky bunch). It was incredible to watch this little guy/gal up close and personal. Observing this behavior became a somewhat frequent occurrence for us; wherever we went on the property, there was a chance we’d run across this bouncy, supercharged creature—and as it didn’t really seem to care one whit about our presence, I was almost waiting for it to sigh or yawn, as if it found us just, so…boring.

I've lived in New Jersey all my life and spent countless hours in/around rivers, creeks, and streams—and I’d never seen a weasel in person until we built our habitat here.

My first sighting was on my property approximately 5 years ago…a Short-tailed weasel who I’d sometimes spy patrolling and snooping around the pond. Then, there were the increasing sightings of Mink—and what sly creatures they are!---here and gone in a flash. I didn't see anything for about two years, but then this feisty thing showed up and had been constantly out and about. Cute as a button and crazy as all get-out.

It even managed to instill some comic relief into an incredibly painful and somber moment. Our beloved cat Bea had passed away, the victim of a profoundly aggressive and untreatable cancer. We had a casket hand-crafted for her and had dug an appropriately-sized hole in the side yard (which she was fond of watching from her favorite upstairs window seat). As we prepared to lower her casket in—the weasel popped its head out from one of walls of the hole!

Apparently, when my husband dug the hole, he intersected a series of chipmunk tunnels, which the weasel had found---and was busily looking for either the current occupants or their food stash (and succeeded in the latter). Watching this creature dart in and out the exposed tunnels, stopping occasionally to give us a looking-over, and then madly tossing out piles of stored seed brought a welcome moment of joy and laughter. When it had finally finished and taken off up a nearby tree, we were left to complete the ritual of burying Bea, albeit with hearts which were now a bit less heavy.

The gift that keeps on giving.