Birding at Bucktoe Creek Preserve

I missed the Naturalist Certification Series birding field trip, so I made it up by joining a small group on the weekly Sunday morning bird walk at Bucktoe Creek Preserve, in southern Chester County. It was a great experience, and because it is regular and open to the public, I can wholeheartedly encourage anyone who wants to try this themselves to go! We had a friendly, funny and knowledgeable guide, and the half dozen of us along for the walk rounded out a good group from neophytes (my mom and me) to people who could have been guides themselves.

29 June Bucktoe Creek Preserve, Kennett Square

7:55 a.m. 70 degrees F sunny, not a cloud in the sky

We arrived just a few minutes early and found one person had already been sitting at the shelter by the parking lot for a while. It wasn’t a bad place to watch birds even without walking, in fact, as the expansive meadow in front of it, with forest to the left, provides good ecotone habitat for a diversity of birds, and they have set feeders near the shelters that bring near the less shy birds. Before we even set out we had seen a number of red-winged blackbirds, probably nesting in the meadow, tree swallows, barn swallows, and a red-bellied woodpecker that flew overhead.

There was also a bird singing in the nearest tall tree, a song I felt I should know but couldn’t place. When I gave in and asked, a more experienced birder told me it was an American robin - not the first time I have asked someone about a song to be told it’s a robin, which kind of sums up my experience with birding so far - I’m eager to learn, but I’m starting at the beginning. It’s also indicative of another aspect of my experience so far, actually, which is that people who are very into birds are happy to share and don’t seem to have any problem with people asking very basic questions.

As we started down the trail, Mike, our guide, explained the bare tree trunks and branches standing in the field were placed there to provide perches and help attract birds. I saw them being used primarily by the red-winged blackbirds, but one had a large birdhouse on it in which American kestrels were nesting. As we passed, a young kestrel stuck its head out for a look around. Kestrels are the smallest falcons in eastern North America with a length of 9 inches and a wingspan under two feet and eat primarily insects and small mammals, so the meadow provides good habitat for them.

American kestrel box above a field of milkweed 

From the woods to our right we heard the call of a yellow-billed cuckoo, birds with which I was not familiar at all prior to our bird lecture in the naturalist certification class, when I learned that they form a large part of the diet of the peregrine falcons nesting in downtown Wilmington. Shortly after hearing the cuckoo we came up to the first thicket emerging from the meadow, a few young trees with some heavier brush underneath than the meadow. Here we found indigo buntings flying over, a catbird and orchard orioles, which we could just see through the bushes.

We continued along the path to where it ran between the woods and the meadow, which provided even more opportunity to hear and see some different species. One interaction that was particularly interesting was hearing a series of loud chips coming from our right in the woods, some from a bit above head-height in the trees and some from the ground in the thicket. The calls were from yellow warblers, probably nesting in the area, and the one on the ground may have been a fledgling. We stopped and listened, which of course made the birds continue to call about our presence. Eventually an adult warbler flew from the trees where we had been hearing it over our heads to another tree across and further down the path, possibly trying to attract our attention away from its young.

We hiked through forest for quite a ways afterwards and heard many different birds: both the alarm call and the song of wood thrush, ovenbirds, red-eyed vireo, a blue-grey gnatcatcher, white-breasted nuthatch, and downy, hairy and red-bellied woodpeckers, the last of which make a distinctive “chuck chuck” noise. It was hard to see any of the birds in the woods, though, and Mike had just commented that it would be nice to see some birds as well on our bird walk when we began to have some luck. We were also just about out of the strictly forested area and into a stretch where the creek, some woods and a lowland meadow were close together.

In addition to the mix of habitat, the area also had a number of dead branches on the trees, which made it much easier to see the birds who perched on them. Suddenly not only were we seeing many more birds, we were seeing species we hadn’t come across yet as well. There was a great crested flycatcher high in a tree, and we saw northern rough-winged swallows flying over the meadow. (I had gotten so accustomed to tree swallows and barn swallows everywhere that I was surprised to find a third species in the mix at Bucktoe. Northern rough-winged swallows are less common but similar to tree swallows in their shape. All three species have different tails, however, with the barn swallows’ long and deeply forked tail the most distinctive. Tree swallows and northern rough-winged swallows have much shorter tails, but while the northern rough-winged swallows’ tails are almost squared off, the tree swallows have a notch in theirs.)

Back over the creek, we saw a female cardinal fly by and caught glimpses of orange moving up and down the far side of a tree on the far side of the water - a Baltimore oriole doing a pretty good but not perfect job of staying out of sight. A cedar waxwing landed on a dead branch and let us all have a good look before flying high into a sycamore. Across the creek two other native trees were attractive to the birds; we saw a titmouse, a female cardinal and a goldfinch all in a wild cherry tree. And one of our fellow hikers, Julie, spotted a ruby-throated hummingbird as it alighted on a dead branch high in a walnut tree. That was an exciting find for everyone. I don’t think I had ever seen a hummingbird perched before, and only rarely in flight at feeders.

The ruby-throated hummingbird is the only one seen with regularity in eastern North America, where it breeds during the summer, but it is also the hummingbird with the largest range, which stretches from the entire East Coast west through Iowa and even into Texas. In Canada, they range almost to British Columbia. Like all hummingbirds, their flight is their most remarkable characteristic; ruby-throated hummingbirds can stop from fast flight extremely quickly, hover and fly in any direction. They beat their wings about 53 times per second, and defend their territories aggressively. The male’s courtship display involves a U-shaped dive from as much as 50 feet above the female.

All hummingbirds strike me as kind of unusual or precious given the combination of their tiny bodies and incredible flight ability, and I would guess most people with only a passing knowledge of them have somewhat similar thoughts and feelings about them. But I was happy to learn that the ruby-throated hummingbird, at least, is actually relatively common, and populations of the bird, estimated at 20 million,  increased every year from 1966 to 2010.

The stretch of creek where we scared off a wood duck

As we continued along the trail, we soon went from seeing our smallest bird of the day to one of the largest we would see when a wood duck took off from the creek. The duck’s wings made a great deal of noise and we saw its back as it left the area. There were a couple of wood duck boxes placed down in the valley near Burrows Run, and Mike told us at one point by a very small pond that he has seen as many as 20 or 30 of them on the water there in the past, although a collection of that many wood ducks is unusual.

We saw a veery that was cooperatively flying from downed log to downed log, making himself easy to see, and an Acadian flycatcher over the creek a bit down from where the wood duck was, although in motion and at a distance, I have trouble making out more than the family a bird is in, if I’m lucky enough to discern that, and benefited greatly from the experienced birders around me. From prior hikes I thought I had picked up that flycatchers tend to live along creeks, but I learned different species within the family prefer different habitat. The Acadian flycatcher tends to favor tree canopy in mature forest.

As we continued along, a group of carolina chickadees fussed and flew after one another ahead of us, and we heard a scarlet tanager. Someone in the group had a great description of the scarlet tanager’s call, saying they sound like a robin with sore throat, but we all know how much that will help me in the field. Perhaps I can learn to identify robins when I start to hear particularly smooth scarlet tanagers singing.

We came out of the forest along the creek to start up a hill that was a young thicket of tulip poplars packed in tight, where we got to see a pair of kingbirds chasing a red-tailed hawk. Seeing the smaller birds harassing the hawk, I felt lucky and excited - I have read about how various birds will mob hawks and owls in an attempt to get them to move along, but it was impressive to see birds that could be prey not only not avoiding a predator but acting aggressively towards it. (Red-tailed hawks primarily eat rodents, but they do take some birds.) I had seen a red-tailed hawk on my way to the bird walk that morning when one eating roadkill nearly flew in front of my car - they are apparently known for becoming roadkill themselves - and I was doubly grateful not to have hit it.

Although we were nearing the end of the hike, we continued to have great luck in seeing, if not new species for the day, more visible or active examples of many: house wrens, chimney swifts, orchard orioles, common yellowthroats, indigo buntings and red-eyed vireo. We got a clear look at one of the red-eyed vireos as it flew from one treetop to another, and I was surprised it was such a grey little bird; something about its name, its song and its being so often hidden in the canopy had led me to expect something more colorful or eye-catching.

I had the exact opposite reaction when we located an Eastern towhee we heard calling - it was much more colorful than I had been picturing, as for some reason I apparently thought I knew what a towhee looked like and was completely wrong. The bird we saw was an adult female, and I was very struck by how red she looked. The field guide tells me the proper term for what was so impressing me were “rufous sides.” I think birding is the only place I have heard the color rufous used, but it’s actually a very useful word, indicating a reddish brown.

Despite having had a tremendous three-and-a-half hour bird walk, Mike somehow managed to have a finale lined up. As we approached the parking lot, we could hear a black-billed cuckoo, and the experienced birders in the group got excited. Black-billed cuckoos, unlike the yellow-billed cuckoos we heard at the beginning of the hike, are rare for the area, and we stood staring at the treeline from the parking lot for at least 10 minutes, hoping to glimpse it. We did eventually find it, and they are interesting birds to see - long tails, distinctive markings and beaks. After we watched it a while, the bird actually flew over us to another tree, and the group headed up to the shelter where we had started to tally the birds we had seen for eBird.

This was also an interesting process I was not expecting. I knew of eBird and that people track what they see for both their own satisfaction and as citizen science, helping provide information that can be useful in conservation and other research. But I had never been part of a group actually doing so, and it was fun to see how it worked. Mike went through a checklist, calling out species, and the group would call out estimates of how many we had seen or heard. It is by no means an exacting process, but it provided a surprisingly helpful gauge of what we had found. Red-winged blackbirds? Lots of those, no doubt. Ruby-throated hummingbird? Just the one. It gave a sense of what birds were common in the area and which were not. And it was amusing because we added two species while working through the checklist (a house sparrow flew to one of the feeders, and we heard a Northern flicker from the trees).

For all the incredible things we had seen, the bird walk ended with something of an encore when one of the adult kestrels flew over us and landed at the top of a dead tree on the other side of the parking lot, allowing us a good look. It appeared to be a female because I could not see any of the blue-grey the males have on their wings. She dropped to the ground as we watched, but when she returned to the perch, she did not appear to have caught anything, or nothing we could see through binoculars.

At the end of the tally, Mike let us know we had seen or heard 58 different species during the hike. Going over my notes, I came up with 56, listed below.

Species list

red-winged blackbird

tree swallow

barn swallow

American robin

red-bellied woodpecker

American kestrel

yellow-billed cuckoo

indigo bunting

catbird

orchard oriole

cedar waxwing

common yellowthroat

red-eyed vireo

blue jay

towhee

house wren

yellow warbler

cardinal

mourning dove

chickadee

white-breasted nuthatch

yellow warbler

cowbird

house finch

common grackle

turkey vulture

ovenbird

downy woodpecker

wood thrush

hairy woodpecker

scarlet tanager

veery

brown thrasher

blue-grey gnatcatcher

great crested flycatcher

warbling vireo

Eastern kingbird

Northern rough wing swallow

American crow

Baltimore oriole

American goldfinch

Eastern wood pewee

titmouse

ruby-throated hummingbird

wood duck

song sparrow

black vulture

chimney swift

Eastern bluebird

field sparrow

Acadian flycatcher

red-tailed hawk

black-billed cuckoo

purple martin

flicker

house sparrow

saddlebags dragonfly

ebony jewelwing damselfly