COMMUNITY JOURNALISM: Keep up with birds and plants

Editor's note: Rick Hollis, 64, of rural North Liberty, has been watching birds since his childhood. He's past president and newsletter editor for the Iowa City Bird Club.

The names came fast and furious.

“(Grey) catbird, house wren, (rose-breasted) grosbeak, hummingbird right over your head, chipping sparrow,” Chris Edwards was calling out the birds he heard and I was furiously scribbling them down.

“Tufted titmouse,” I added.

Chris' ears are better than mine, but I heard some of them.

“(Baltimore) oriole, red-bellied (woodpecker), (eastern wood) pewee, (northern) flicker, robin,” Chris paused for a minute, “Downy (Woodpecker), great-crested (flycatcher), wood thrush, brown-headed cowbird, white-breasted nuthatch.”

We were now done at one of our seven listening posts.

Last Sunday, Chris and I were helping the Johnson County Conservation Department learn what plants and animals were found at Ciha Fen, an unusual landform recently acquired by the department. Teams of professionals and amateurs are conducting the Ciha Fen Multiple Species Inventory and Monitoring Program.

We started our day early. I got up at 4 a.m., in time to meet Chris in Solon and get on site by sunrise. There are seven stakes, marked with the latitude and longitude, carefully placed at surveyed places on the southern half of the property. Our plan was to visit all seven posts and listen and record the birds we heard or saw in 10-minute periods. Then we hiked on to the next post.

We also recorded birds we saw and heard between posts and on our way back to the car.

After listening at our first post, we began walking to the second post. On the map it looked easy. We knew right where it was and I had seen most of the posts on earlier trips. Finding it was more difficult and required practically crawling though a thicket of head high honey locusts and their nasty thorns.

Just because we were there for birds did not mean we did not pay attention to the rest of nature. We did some botanizing, too. Chris showed me wild petunia, which I had never seen before, and I showed him deptford pinks. Deptford pinks are aliens and ideally would not be found at Ciha, but are found in the eastern half of the country mostly on spaces with thin or poor soils. They are tiny (the flowers are 1/2 inch across), exquisitely beautiful and remind me of going to college back east.

I was surprised to see hairy puccoons still blooming. They have been blooming on the sand prairies for a month and a half. We looked at butterflies (Chris runs the Johnson County Butterfly Count.) We saw a surprising 10 species - cabbage white, clouded sulphur, orange sulphur, American copper, eastern tailed-blue, great spangled fritillary, meadow fritillary, pearl crescent, painted Lady and common buckeye. The number was surprising given it still was early morning when we finished.

We also looked at odes (odonates = dragonflies and their kin) and I found a number of widow skimmers, a new species for me. We looked for snakes under metal sheets set out at each post, but failed to find any. The fawn that suddenly jumped up and ran off from about three feet away almost stopped my heart. And in the northern half, which has been pastured relatively recently, I was amazed at the number and size of the pocket gopher burrows.

The northern part of Ciha is in the Iowa Breeding Bird Atlas Block 523 (Cedar River), so we made every effort to record evidences of breeding in addition to merely occurring. From a standpoint as interesting birds, the best birds were grasshopper sparrow and bobolink. Both are grassland species that, although not listed as threatened, are certainly declining in Eastern Iowa.

With fewer and fewer large fields of small grains or alfalfa, and fields being hayed early, these birds are having trouble. The red-tailed hawk that circled nearby, screaming for 10-plus minutes, was marked as probable-adjusted behavior. This is the last year of the second IBBAB and this block is underworked.

After we left Ciha, we drove some of the gravel roads in the block and filled in some holes. We confirmed orchard orioles as breeding when we saw a female flying with food in her mouth.

Although getting up early is not easy for me, it was worth it. It was a beautiful day to be in the field. We were done by 9 a.m., just in time for a second breakfast and before the worst of the day's sun and heat arrived.

We provided useful data for Johnson County and for the IBBAB - and donated blood for a few of the county's mosquitoes. Best of all we experienced nature in a beautiful place. We found 57 species of birds, 48 on Ciha and checked off 11 species as confirmed or probable breeders.

All in all, any day in the field is better than a day indoors.

Visit www.icbirds.org for information about the annual butterfly count sponsored by the North American Butterfly Association.