It’s time to hang up my waders for the season, although we have one nest still active to be checked in the next week or so. This morning was a day for surprises, not all of them happy.
When I opened one of our newly-placed boxes, which had had an active nest with 12 eggs last month, I found a bird-shaped bowl in the down and wood chips, but no eggs and no shells. My best explanation so far is that the nest has been clean-picked predated over several days by one or more snakes.
As Myra and I worked our way down lower Barnyard Run, we heard our happiest surprise: a Wood Thrush (Hylocichla mustelina) singing full-voiced in the woods.
New Box 67, which had seen some dumping activity (our last count for the box was 22 eggs), hatched out all but three. But unfortunately, the nest in Box 77 was a near-complete failure, with numerous half-hatched chicks. Unlucky Myra had to clean that one out.
But the big surprise was the abrupt drop in water level along lower Barnyard Run. The dry conditions in the main wetland we expected: at this time of year the mud flats are giving over to grasses. But we expected the substantial beaver dam across the run to be holding back much more water than this. (The green vegetation running horizontally in this image marks the top of the dam.)
Box 60 is usually sitting in about two feet of water (you can see the rust marks on the support pole), but at the moment it’s high and dry. Well, mucky, at least.
The dry conditions made for good viewing of snapping turtles. We found three of the these critters, half-covered in mud, as we walked back. Ours is the Common Snapping Turtle (Chelydra serpentina), ranging from Nova Scotia to the Rio Grande, according to Roger Conant and Joseph T. Collins’s Peterson field guide. They describe the family Chelydridae as “Large freshwater turtles with short tempers and long tails…”