By NANCY JANE KERN
IT HAS BEEN A WARM FALL and it is late this year to look for ducks and geese passing through our area on their way south. If you visit Copake Lake, there may be some little ruddy ducks that cock their tails to show off. A raft of about a hundred common mergansers often stretches out in a line in the middle of the lake. Along the eastern shore mallards, a few black ducks, and buffleheads like to hang out. The bufflehead male is a beautiful black and white duck with white patches on the cheeks. A kingfisher may fly by with its noisy rattling call while a great blue heron may hug the shoreline. What you see depends on ice formation and we are finally getting winter cold.
Cornfields around the county provide feeding stops, and attract many geese near Kinderhook, Germantown, and Copake. About a thousand Canada Geese were feeding at harvested cornfields west of Kinderhook in the past weeks. Binoculars and scopes are used to systematically comb through large flocks for rare geese, color oddities, and marked birds. Colored collars are used to track migrating flocks and if you get the colors, numbers, and letters from one it should be reported to the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center Bird Banding Lab at the website www.pwrc.usgs.gov/bbl. The center is in Laurel, Maryland, and has been in operation for over 75 years. I find several collared geese each year and use a telescope to get the information from them. It takes patience because a large flock of feeding geese constantly move around and often the collar is blocked by another goose. The recent Kinderhook birds would suddenly disappear into the deep tractor ruts in the wet fields which was an added challenge. They also love to put their heads down and present a rear view which is most unhelpful. Taking numerous photos of the flocks helps too. I review them at home, and it is exciting to find a collar or a different bird that was missed on site. It is fun to see how many days they feed in a certain area and sometimes it has been a week or more. One year a Kinderhook goose was relocated in a Copake cornfield. I guess we are good hosts, and they like to extend their stay. As we fatten them up their chance for survival improves. Then we may have the pleasure of seeing them again when they return in the spring.
