The birds think it’s spring, even if it did snow here on Saturday. Steve covered as much of the vegetables in the field as he could to guard against the frost, and he has loads of starts in the greenhouse that he was too nervous to put out during this cold snap. Everything in the field seems to have come through alright; now we just need some warmer days so it can grow!
Winter is a good time for bird watching at our home farm. The slower pace and lush cover crops attract the hawks, black-shouldered kites, kestrels, and northern harriers. The kites are particularly rewarding to watch, with their beautiful hovering and playful acrobatics between mates. On Valentine’s Day the kids saw one kite pass a mouse to the other mid-air in a sweet love offering (we were skeptical until Steve saw the same maneuver a couple days later). We’ve had a little Cooper’s Hawk terrorizing the song birds around our house all winter. It’ll perch on the end of the greenhouse and then dive into a bush full of chirping sparrows and finches. We feel like we get to know some of the local birds personally. There’s a single great egret that is always in our fields these days, catching frogs and mice. A few days ago our egret brought a friend; we’ll see if it lasts.
Even while the large birds enjoy the last quiet days of winter on the farm, the spring birds are starting to show up. The swallows came back early, a couple weeks ago, before the cold weather moved in. They are darting over the fields by the dozens. So far we see mostly violet green and tree swallows, who overwinter in the area — the cliff swallows and barn swallows should be here soon. They make the trek from central and south america and nest here in the eaves of our house and outbuildings. We feel a special kinship with the swallows because it seems that their frenetic pace in the springtime matches ours. They dart around so quickly about their business of building mud nests and catching insects that it’s hard to feel that we’re working harder than we should be as the pace picks up on the farm. Work is what spring is all about–all this renewal and rebirth doesn’t happen all by itself.
A pair of osprey also have been spotted this week, preparing to nest again on their perch next to the power pole in the slough. These are the first nesting pair of osprey to hatch out chicks in the Watsonville sloughs since they’ve been taking records–apparently the only recorded historic nesting record for osprey in Santa Cruz county was in the early 1930s in Corralitos, until they began nesting in the Santa Cruz mountains in 1997. The first year here they built their nest on a power pole in the slough where Harkins Slough Road used to go through. Unfortunately the nest caught fire that year, but PG&E put in a second pole with a platform on top next to the working power pole and the osprey actually built their nest on it in 2008. They have had only one successful hatching in the past 4 years–in 2009 two baby osprey made it to adulthood–so we’ll be watching eagerly to see if they manage to raise some chicks again this year.
Well, enough talk of birds, time to get to work.
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