Visitors in the Snow: The Dark-eyed Junco

This website belongs to my wife Jackie. She writes all the articles, takes all the pictures, and does all the research and planning for the outings that she writes about here. That is, until recently. About a year ago, Jackie put up an article explaining why she hadn’t posted anything in quite some time. You can read all about that here. What proceeded from there were a flurry of articles about trips we had taken well before her surgeries that she had not gotten around to documenting here. Her most recent location article was for Maine, and that trip took place in August of 2019 – just before her first surgery – even though the article only came out in April of 2020.

Last week, GoDaddy kindly reminded me that the domain registration for findingfeatherli.com was expiring. I never considered not renewing the registration, but Jackie’s struggles continue, and as of right now, she isn’t capable of going on new adventures, or writing about them for that matter. The articles may only take 20 minutes to read through, but I can tell you from watching her toil, that many hours are put into each one, and she is simply not up for anything like that at this point.

One of My Favorite Birds

With Finding Feathers Long Island fresh in my head, I was reminded of something else last week. We had just gotten our 2nd major snow storm in as many weeks. Like so many other times the snow coats the ground, I woke up the next morning looking for one of my own favorite birds – the Dark-eyed Junco.

Dark-eyed Juncos are year-round residents of our area. You can spot them whenever you’d like if you look hard enough while birding Long Island. However, these little members of the Sparrow family tend to be ever more present in the winter months, and I personally take the most notice of them when there’s a solid coating of the white stuff blanketing the island. They’re like many of the human residents of Long Island – they’re snowbirds, and have been nicknamed as such. The National Audubon Society says that we see them more in the winter time because to the Dark-eyed Juncos that live to the North and in the mountains, our winters are basically a cake walk, and that the feeders that people like us put out are a welcome benefit to the ravenous flocks’ migration to relatively warmer areas. Long Island may not seem like it has mild winters, but for the birds living in the Adirondacks, or perhaps even Canada, it is much easier living.

Jackie knows about my fondness for the Dark-eyed Junco. My personal description of them is that someone took a White Sparrow and dipped it upside-down in chocolate. So whenever I see them, I tell Jackie I saw a chocolate-dipped bird. While driving a few days ago, we saw a particularly attractive specimen, and she informed me that it was a Slate-colored Dark-eyed Junco. This is one of several sub-species present, and a pretty wide spread one in fact. There’s a few other types, and you can check out more information on eBird here.

I think I’ll stop here because like I said earlier, this is Jackie’s website. I just thought it could use a new post, and wanted everyone to understand, that new content will come as Jackie continues to heal. We’re doing everything we can to make sure she feels better.

-Steve

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