Birds for All Seasons

Watching birds is a delightful activity at any time of the year - provided, of course, that the weather conditions are not too severe! Particular habitats or regions may have more to offer at certain times of the year, however, and a little insight and planning can help decide the potentially interesting areas to visit on a trip at any particular season. Birdwatching is an amazingly popular pastime in Britain. Hence, individuals of all ages are involved, and the degree of eagerness and promise ranges from casual appreciation to nothing short of fanatical pursuit. While many are happy to enjoy the birds that they encounter on their travels, 'twitching' or the pursuit of rarities is an increasingly popular form of modern birdwatching. 

This is fueled by the well-developed twitchers' grapevine, which is centered on various recorded- message bird information telephone lines. While finding or seeing unusual species is exciting, it should not detract from the satisfaction to be found in close, careful observation of common species - for birds of all kinds, be they common or rare, are fascinating and more than repay the time spent observing and studying them. Spring is a wonderful season for the birdwatcher. In woodlands everywhere, it heralds the start of the breeding season, and the songs of the resident species are augmented by those of newly arrived migrants. Dawn is the best time for hearing the widest range of birdsong. 

Migrants and the flow of migrating birds are also clearly seen in spring along Britain's seashores, where headlands and estuaries offer excellent opportunities to see the birds. Summer is a comparatively quiet time of year for the birdwatcher. although not without its highlights. Family parties of songbirds may be found in woods and hedgerows - those migrant species feeding eagerly on ripening berries are storing energy for their forthcoming travels. 

Lakes and reservoirs often attract large numbers of swallows, martins, and swifts which feed on the the abundance of insect life, while estuaries around the coast witness the first gatherings of migrating waders and wildfowl. This is probably the liveliest time to visit seabird colonies on the cliffs: ravenous, fully grown young are being fed continually at this time of the year, so there is plenty of activity. For the birdwatcher with access to the coast, autumn is perhaps the most exciting season: everywhere there are signs of migration and the estuaries begin to fill up with ducks, geese, and waders. 

As the weather deteriorates towards winter, inland birds of many kinds tend to move out to the coast, where the proximity of the sea moderates extremes in the weather. Winter can be an unexpectedly good season for the woodland birdwatcher. The lack of leaves makes observation among trees and bushes relatively easy, and many of the smaller birds band together in roaming flocks, often being joined by winter visitors. Grassy downs, heaths, and marshes can harbor birds of prey at this time of year, and estuaries and wetlands are often outstanding. Birds may appear quite different at changing times of the year and life-cycle. 

Though a puffin is most familiar in its bright adult, summer colors (left and bottom), these illustrations show the changes from four weeks old, at around six weeks, during a first winter, an adult in winter, and an adult in the summertime. No matter in which season, it is always worth keeping a cautious eye on the weather, for abrupt changes or extremes can have a dramatic influence on the numbers and species of birds to be seen. For example, westerly gales in the autumn will initiative migrating seabirds, usually only seen well out to sea, near to the shore, making them easy to observe. 

However, the longer periods of southerly or southeasterly winds in spring can result in admirable conditions for migration, with large numbers of birds arriving overnight; in the autumn these same winds can result in all sorts of interesting and unusual sightings, as birds are blown off their regular migration routes. Sudden and prolonged periods of severe cold in winter can cause large numbers of birds to move towards the warmer south and west of the country, with even more individuals arriving here from Europe.

A Wheel to Watch the Heavens

 High in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming, on the stony surface of a windswept plateau, lies the ghostly outline of a spoked wheel eighty-two feet in diameter. Similar rocky circles appear in Saskatchewan, in Arizona, and at some fifty other sites across the North American plains. Some are a few feet in diameter, others are hundreds of times as large. All lie on high ground. 

The wheels are built simply: Thin ridges of stones formation, hub, and usually several spokes. Some have rocky piles, called cairns, in their centers and around the outer circles. The Bighorn medicine wheel - so-called because, to the American Indian, any object with spiritual properties was said to have medicine - is the best preserved and best known.

Historians guess that Plains Indians made this circle as early as the 1100s, but they cannot be certain Not do investigators know the exact purpose of any of the wheels - though clues may lie in their orientation. At the Bigham wheel, for instance, an observer who sights over the cairn in the foreground (above) toward the hub will look into the rising sun on the morning of the summer solstice. A second cairn would mark sunset on the same day. Other rock piles point to the rising and setting of three brilliant stars during seasonal changes.

Such alignments lead some theorists to believe that the medicine wheels like their huge megalithic cousins in Europe, were in fact astronomical observatories. This contention is strengthened by the fact that all such wheels are carefully positioned to offer clear views of the horizon. Furthermore, cairns in some wheels cover postholes that may have held upright timbers, so that the original sites would have looked almost like wooden versions of Stonehenge in England.

But critical questions remain. Why would Plains Indians need to watch the sky? Agricultural tribes might have wanted to keep track of growing seasons, but the nomadic Plains peoples lived by hunting bison. Could they have remembered an earlier age when they planted crops? Or did the solstice mark the turning point of the summer for them, a time to begin counting the days until the start of their southward migration?

Such questions may never be answered. Like the builders of so many of the earth's markings, those who laid out the medicine wheels have vanished, leaving later generations no key to their strange monuments. Desert. Near the small town of Blythe, California, he happened to glance down at the arid landscape. I could hardly believe what 1 saw," he said later. Sprawled across the desert, far from civilization, were the gigantic figures of a man and a long-tailed animal.

Reports of the so-called Blythe Giant continued in the decades to come, prompting scientists and other investigators to take a closer look at the little-known southwestern desert. There, along the arid lower valley of the Colorado River, they have discovered some 275 geoglyphic, obscure symbols, and bizarre, childlike drawings of humans and animals. The Mojave's surface, like that of the Nazca desert, is covered with rocks varnished to a dark sheen by the sun, apparently, the Mojave artists used the same rock-removal technique as the Nazcas to create their enigmatic messages.

Most of these desert markings have been discovered since the 1970s, thanks to the tireless efforts of California archeologist Jay von Werlhor and his collaborator, a local farmer and pilot named Harry Casey. By plane and foot, they have reconnoitered thousands of square miles of the blistering ground that early Spanish explorers called tierra del muerto, "land of the dead." The collaborators' goal is to catalog and describe every desert marking in this vast region. "It's absolutely addictive," Casey has said of his quest. "the more you learn, the more you want to know."

Von Werlhof and his fellow archeologists believe the figures found on the Mojave were created for mystic purposes by the Indians who have inhabited the desert for more than 5,000 years. The date the oldest of the figures to 3000 Bc and the most recent of them to the late eighteenth century AD More primitive configurations, known as rock alignments-twisting lines of boulders set side by side in abstract patterns -may be as much as 10,000 years old.

The investigators offer several interpretations of the weird tableau at Blythe, whose age is variously estimated at between 200 and 1,000 years. According to legends passed down by the Mojave Indians, the manlike form represents an evil giant who terrorized their ancestors. The animal figure, which seems to float upside down over the man's head, is said to be a mountain lion imbued with great power from the Mojave's creator god, it was placed there to weaken the giant's spirit. A less dramatic theory suggests that the giant is a kind of graphic "no trespassing" sign placed by Hopi Indians to keep intruders out of their territory.

Many of the animal figures seem to have retained a spiritual significance to the desert dwellers. A 180-foot-long rattlesnake with basalt eyes, according to Mojave medicine men, has powers of good or evil that can be passed onto humans. A figure near Yuma, Arizona is clearly that of a horse, an animal unknown to the southwestern Indians before the coming of Europeans. 

Archeologists believe that the Indians created the image sometime after Spanish explorers rode through the area in 1540 and that they subsequently used the desert drawing as a ceremonial meeting place. Another figure, not discovered until July 1984, is a startlingly animated rendering of a fisherman who appears to be dancing on the water while aiming a spear at two fish. The tip of the spear is made of hundreds of pieces of glittering quartz and may have been designed to bestow magic powers on real fishermen.

Like their counterparts at Nazca, the Mojave figures apparently served a variety of purposes, and at least some of the drawings may have been astronomical markers. A rock alignment along the Gila River in Ari zona, for example, points precisely to the sunrise at the summer solstice. Another, known as the Black Point Dance Circle, may have been designed as a map of the sun, moon, and Milky Way. Knowledge of the heavens could have given Indians a calendar with which to plan their farming and irrigation-vital information in a difficult environment.

Whatever the purpose of their elaborately drawn geoglyphic, the Indians of the Nazca and Mojave deserts were blessed with ideal natural blackboards upon which to scratch out their designs. The natives of the temperate forests of the American Midwest and South was not so fortunate, but they still managed to mark the landscape with impressive animal figures Like their desert counterparts, these images can best be appreciated from the air.