The really warm weather that we’ve been having has enabled me to go out onto the front porch with my morning coffee like I’ve been doing for years. I pretty much know what to expect at this time of the year, but sometimes I see things I don’t. One morning there was a great-crested flycatcher in the shrubs above the feeders.
Flycatchers are agile birds that come north to breed in summer. But these birds with quick, buoyant moves that let them catch insects in the air go back down to Central or South America for the winter. The great crested is one of the bigger ones at 9 inches tall.
It’s unmistakably marked with a dark grey head and lighter gray at the top of its breast. And from there on down it’s bright yellow with a bright rufous tail. The great crested flycatcher only stayed a minute before flying into the tree canopy of the front yard.
As I watched it fly off I saw orange color on a tree that I hadn’t noticed before. Sometimes you don’t notice things right in front of you. That tree is a Norway, or European, maple that was brought to North America in the mid 1700s.
It quickly became a popular deciduous tree, and even George Washington planted some. But it has naturalized so much in the Northeast that it’s considered invasive. Upon closer inspection the orange I was seeing was really the brownish orange bottoms of its seedpods.
The seeds in the middle at the top of the seedpods, though, were still green. But right before I got up to walk closer to that tre.
