Photo: Derek Hayn
This post is about cormorants and kingfishers. It is not a metaphorical rant by a disgruntled employee. I am, in fact, more or less gruntled. One of the appealing aspects of working here is the attractive campus and the concomitant avian activity about the Falls River, which bounds the offices of Centerbrook Architects.
The first specimen I saw in July, when I joined the firm, was a great blue heron plying the shallows of the millpond above the dam. They are hard to miss, these elegant creatures, fully three-feet tall, with astounding patience, and a long beak designed for plucking small fry from the shallows. I saw one flying by at the turn of the year, during a cold snap, lumbering upstream. I wish it luck and open water.
The other day Leslie, my neighbor in marketing, spied a hawk swooping just outside the window, and most of the department repaired to the green roof to see if it had landed on the building. It had, atop a decorative spire, pioneering a new genre: performance architecture. Best I could tell in the fading winter light, it was a red-shouldered hawk, a large, low-flying denizen of swampy and wet places.
The smaller sharp-shin hawks, the size of a blue jay, come around periodically and will try to imitate the call of a red-shouldered, albeit a high-pitched version. The reason it does this is to clear the neighborhood of feathered riffraff, I’m told. Before the weather set in, I heard and then saw a kingfisher angling above the pond. For a good three weeks this fall, a cormorant set up shop across the water on a neighbor’s dock. Canada geese are regular visitors. American egrets appear sporadically. Derek in Graphics took a beautiful photograph of one in flight that graces our internal website.
This mid-January morning it was about 15 degrees and a group of hooded mergansers had joined the flotilla of mallards patrolling below the dam (the millpond above is frozen solid). The “hood” is a patch of white on the bird’s otherwise jet black head, and it can expand to gaudy prominence or contact to a subdued thick line as the mood strikes. A Paris designer could hardly improve on this variable look.
The other day, a white-winged duck fled down river before a solid identification could be made. Methinks it is either a common or red-breasted merganser, two species that look annoyingly alike in flight. A birding friend tells me it was probably the former, since it is the one that frequents fresh water. While skating on the pond at lunch in early February I heard and then spied a pileated woodpecker squawking overhead, its white under-feathers the color of the ice.
For all the wildlife on parade, our neighborhood is hardly pristine wilderness. The dam site has been generating power for various purposes since 1689. Commercial development – a pizza parlor, the post office, our offices, more – is a stone’s throw away in two directions, and there are riverfront houses across the way, too. But the birds appear undaunted by kilowatts and capitalism, returning daily to keep their claim to the river active.
I have brought in an old set of binoculars to work. Colleagues are invited to share their sightings, contemporary or historical. Spring should be lively hereabouts when, among others, the much anticipated black crowned night herons return.
