All I really want this week is my favorite birding spot back. For the past couple years I’ve enjoyed going down to the riverside of the St. Joe on IPFW’s campus (that’s Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne) and observing the waterfowl, shorebirds, gulls, and songbirds that live in the mixed habitat there. There’s a wooded peninsula that shelters a marshy inlet on the opposite side and a grassy parkland on this side that provides ideal grazing for geese. At night white-tailed deer are a common sight too. Now, though, a good bit of the area is under major construction and development. They’re building a $2.8 million mammoth pedestrian bridge to connect the old part of the campus to some new bits that are going up on the opposite side, including a hotel. It’ll be a nice convenience and, I suspect, not too intrusive to the wildlife when it’s complete, but for now, much of the area is inaccessible and a mess, and I rarely see any great numbers of waterfowl there anymore.

In particular, the remaining Honkers (my name for the feral domesticated Greylag family) have been driven off, and I haven’t seen them in several weeks. So in memory of better times, here’s how it used to be:



That’s how Whitey and the Honkers used to react when they saw me, especially when I had my backpack with me, which they associated with getting fed. On this occasion (the video was taken on 28 March of this year) I hadn’t displayed any food and in fact didn’t even have any with me; the reaction is just a consequence of operant classical, probably, (see here) conditioning and the fact that these birds are brave and aggressive. Note also what appears to be a bit of decision-making going on: after taking only a few seconds of begging to figure out that I’m not going to be giving them anything, they walk over by the bench where I’d been sitting, where the ground typically ends up littered with seeds and crumbs on the occasions when I do have something with me, and then, after finding nothing good there either, they saunter away and begin grazing on their own. The Honkers were usually clever and comical like that, and they were always there (being fat domestics, they weren’t inclined to get airborne much, though I’ve seen them do it). I miss them.

According to the press release about the bridge project, construction is supposed to be complete by the end of the year; I hope they find their way back, and that the area in general goes back to being as birdy as it used to be.

Tags: Birds, Wildlife