Sudbury Valley TrusteesConservation, Collaboration, and Community since 1953

Carol Levin has been visiting SVT's Waters and Weir Reservation in Framingham regularly for more than a year now, focusing on bird activity at the field.  Read more to learn some of her highlights and results from those visits, during which she has seen 72 species of birds.  Thanks, Carol!

Waters and Weir Field is one of Sudbury Valley Trustees’ reservations, created in 1990 of approximately six acres in north Framingham, not far from Callahan State Park.  It includes wetlands in early succession, with areas of bushes and trees.  Baiting Brook runs through it, making this site useful for flood control.  The field is mowed annually to permit enhancement of the wet meadow community at the site, a rich habitat which is fast disappearing across the state.  The mowings are left in place.  By early summer, the grasses and other vegetation are so high in much of the field that it is difficult to walk through.  There are some invasive species in the field.    

The attached bird list is the result of a term project I did for the Birder’s Certificate Program, a college-level ornithology course offered by Mass Audubon.  One of the homework assignments was to develop an eBird trail by walking a trail three to four times in the course of a month, counting every bird you see and summarizing your observations, noting the diversity, abundance, and changes in the checklist.  Data is then entered into eBird.org (a checklist program, launched in 2002 by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society.) 

The assignment was so enjoyable that, I decided to develop a bird checklist for the area over the course of a full year, with SVT’s permission.  Between March 2010 and the end of April 2011, I visited the field over 180 times.  A typical visit (usually wearing muckboots and other protective gear; this winter I often visited on cross-country skis) involved walking around the fields for an hour.  There were times, especially with inclement weather, where I just stayed in the parking lot for a few minutes. 

I divided the fields into ‘Fields 1, 2, 3, and 4’ for my own purposes.  I also observed an adjacent field, Moore’s field, which is fenced in and usually home to a horse named Penny but sometimes has milk cows.  Anything flying overhead or observed while I was in the fields was counted.  During the spring months, I also tended the bluebird boxes.  In 2010, one pair of bluebirds nested and laid four eggs and a pair of tree swallows fledged five chicks.  In 2011, although I prevented the house sparrows from successfully nesting, they in turn prevented any of the native birds from doing the same. 

The field changes from season to season (and sometimes from storm to storm.)  There are places I have come to know to expect certain species to return to but there are always surprises.  One highlight was discovering a woodcockdoing his mating ritual in the spring at dusk; the lowlight was finding two bluebird eggs in the nestbox with their shells pierced (by the house sparrow.)  My biggest adventure was, while trying to ford the stream on cross-country skis, falling face first into the snow, bridging the stream but being unable to go forward or backward, and then once out of the stream finding that I didn’t have the leverage (the snow being soft and foot deep) to push myself up or remove my skis.  In the end, I did manage it by pulling my feet out of my boots. 

I have become a more confident birder since I am usually on my own in the field.  I have also developed the ability to recognize many of the birdcalls.  I have also worked on ‘pishing’, a way to attract birds, generally Passerines.  I was fairly certain it was working with song sparrows last year but this year, not so sure.  I have watched a pair of chickadees going in and out of a hole in a dead birch tree, removing reddish sawdust and flying it away from the tree for over an hour; I had ravens ‘croak’ while flying overhead, making them identifiable as not a crow; I’ve watched the pussy willows turn into catkins, and watched the trees leaf out with joy (at the true arrival of spring) and a certain sadness (much harder to see the birds.) 

The bird checklist is based on the reporting that comes out of eBird.  Down the left side of the chart are the species seen.  Across the top is a calendar (cumulative over the years) by month which shows the number of that species seen that month as well as the number of visits I paid to the field that month.  The chart also contains the number of individuals counted within a given species. 

As an example, if you look at Canada Goose in the ‘March 2010 thru April 2011’ spreadsheet, I saw two in the month of March in the course of two visits.  Note: I was away for extended periods (June/July 2010; January 2011.) As those parts of the year roll around again, the data will be incorporated and present a better perspective. 

The SVT information about the field provides a map and other useful information. 

Carol Levin

May 2011

See Carol's bird checklist below, or download a PDF version.