Birds and Friends Meet as Summer Turns to Fall

By Brian Kluepfel  

Last Friday, Saw Mill River Audubon (SMRA) held its annual dinner, this year at the Kittle House in Chappaqua. During the outdoor hors d’oeuvres hour, as I approached the bar, I spotted a ruby-throated hummingbird circling the lantana bushes directly behind. I joked with friends that since this was an Audubon-sanctioned event, I had paid the tiny bird $5 in the parking lot to convince it to attend our party. We all had a laugh while observing this awesome, tiny creature, our only species of hummingbird in the northeastern U.S.

The evening was a joyful reunion of birding friends who had been unable, for the most part, to meet in great number since the pandemic hit in 2020. We shared stories, listened to local authors Scott Craven and Caroline Ranald Curvan and honored three wonderful women who are stepping down from their roles in local conservation this year: SMRA office manager Ellen Heidelberger, Croton Point Nature Center educator and photographer Bonnie Coe and SMRA educator Patricia Mutolo.

They have been crucial to Westchester’s enjoyment of birding over the past several decades; it would be hard to say enough good things about them.  

We also honored Ardsley teen Adella DaPice who spent the summer working on the bountiful Bronx River. She is part of the Bronx Zoo Teen Program, learning about local wildlife under the auspices of SMRA’s Larry Light Scholarship. To listen to a young woman so poised and positive about the future really lit up the room. Certainly, the Audubon Society can use more young people interested in the preservation of our natural spaces.  

On Saturday I joined friends at Innisfree Garden in Millbrook, N.Y. Innisfree is a once-private estate that was owned by Walter and Marian Burt Beck, devotees of Chinese and Asian gardens, and it’s now open to the public as a lovely place to picnic and stroll.

After some tasty Portuguese pasteis de nata (custard tarts) and black coffee, we walked around the expansive lake. Looking up, two things caught our attention: a massive eagle’s nest set into a copse of pines and a kettle of Turkey vultures riding the thermals of the hot September afternoon. We joked, as the kettle grew to a sextet, that there was a vulture for each of us, should we perish in the heat. It never came to that, thankfully.  

Sunday morning began with a gaggle of geese, perhaps 20, noisily arriving, flotilla-like, beside the train tracks, then just as suddenly taking off in squadron formation. Nobody seems to know what stirs these large groups of Canada (not Canadian!) geese to take off in sonorous synchronicity, but it’s pretty special to experience. Honk if you love Canadas.  

Next it was time to stroll around Mariandale Center in Ossining with my favorite birding partner, my wife Paz. We saw an osprey eating a fish and pondered if it was the same one which had soared over our porch just an hour earlier.

Indeed, Croton Bay is filled with ospreys, herons and egrets these days, and it’s not uncommon to have an osprey fly-by, with a wiggling fish still in its talons. To see such things is, to me, beyond cool.  

We also saw a couple of hawks zipping around Mariandale. (I take this opportunity to shamelessly plug Anne Swaim’s Sept. 22 Zoom call on “Raptors for Rookies.”) I myself am a bit of a novice at identifying any raptor other than a bald eagle, red-tailed hawk, turkey vulture or osprey. One great aspect of birding is that there’s always more to learn, and birders as a rule are very generous in sharing information. Just come to a SMRA event listed in the ad below to find out.  

At last, collapsing into a comfy chair at the close of a rainy Sunday, my wife pointed excitedly to our porch. “Colibri!” This is the Spanish word for hummingbird, and sure enough, a pair of the enigmatic mighty mites of the avian world were circling our potted lantana. I had placed it closer to the edge of the porch after Friday’s Chappaqua incident in hopes of history repeating itself.

Although nature can be unpredictable, in this case the plant placement worked like a charm, and we allowed ourselves to be gobsmacked for another moment at these thumb-sized flyers, zooming helicopter-like around the lantana’s orange-red-yellow umbel and (hopefully) pollinating our nascent cucumber plant’s yellow tubular flowers.  

So was it a good weekend for birding? Yeah, it was a great weekend.  

Brian Kluepfel of Ossining is a proud member of Saw Mill River Audubon and an author for the Lonely Planet travel book series, Westchester Magazine and Birdwatching Magazine. His article on birding Newfoundland will appear in October’s Birdwatching. Check him out at birdmanwalking.com.  

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