They have discovered that it is at least as easy to make a living here in January as it is in their ancestral habitat along the Bay, and I have recorded them around here in each of the past four years. A couple of the other birds on my list are the result of ecological phenomena 1,000 miles north of here in a way, the stuff of legends. They are eaten in great quantities by a number of predators, particularly the Snowy Owl, a beautiful bird with a wingspan of about 4 feet. Most people have heard the fantastical stories of lemmings committing mass suicide by migrating down the mountains in Norway and jumping into the sea stories that are exaggerated, though not entirely untrue. In Canada, lemmings don t migrate, but they do reproduce with remarkable enthusiasm, so that every three or four years there is a population explosion.
Lemmings are everywhere.
This is apparently such a year. During the same week, alerted by some Audubon Society friends, I was lucky enough to see four short-eared owls, another boreal species that had wandered south to the Gettysburg area for the same reason. The rest of my list was comprised of species I have seen regularly over the past two decades, though never before all in the same month. The flood plain along Toms Creek is such a place, and I visit it frequently. This month it yielded a yellow-bellied sapsucker, numerous myrtle warblers and an extended family of bluebirds, in addition to the usual chickadees, titmice, nuthatches and woodpeckers.