Fresh Pond: The Real World by James H. Barton
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I've continued looking for rarities, vagrants and accidentals at Fresh Pond, following the discovery of the Redwing in l986. I continue to see them in Fall, but in Spring I'm still looking for my first Blue Grosbeak, my first Kentucky Warbler and my first Worm-eating Warbler, neo-tropical migrants that reliably draw crowds at Mount Auburn Cemetery not far away.
That's where you should go, to add such birds to your life list, state list or year list. My friends and I go to Fresh Pond in Spring not hoping for the rarity that may briefly be showing, but rather for the birds that give expression to the place from day to day and week to week; hoping, in April, that by June we'll find Cedar Waxwing nesting for the third time or American Redstart for the first time; wondering, when our one pair of Pine Warbler arrives in April, whether by June we'll reach nine pairs of Northern Oriole, two pairs of Orchard Oriole, five pairs of Eastern Kingbird, five pairs of Warbling Vireo, sixteen pairs of Yellow Warbler, five pairs of Gray Catbird, five pairs of Tree Swallow, one pair of Willow Flycatcher...
Mount Auburn's exquisite settings recall the other worlds of quiet galleries in great museums of art, and so much of what you see is worked in stone that the cemetery seems timeless, however transient its birds and flowers.
Fresh Pond is time seen and heard proceeding to fruition,
not time that must be snatched at hurriedly in a fleeting passage.
Time at Fresh Pond proceeds
yearly to fullness in the creation of new life. It ends in a
passage to be welcomed, not regretted--a long journey of adults
and young from here to Cuba, to Mexico and to Venezuela. From
that journey we can expect a continuing return.
Unsheltered against the prevailing northerly winds of late April from the north, Fresh Pond comes into leaf and bloom a week later than Mount Auburn. Beginning the first week of May, the place that I've been watching and listening to since mid April or late in March becomes visibly and audibly more and more articulate, like small child I've been watching and caring for. During the second and third week of May the numbers of breeding birds build, the locations of breeding pairs become evident. Nests can be seen. Young can be seen looking out of them.
By the end of the third week in May, when Mount Auburn goes
quiet, the trees and bushes along the perimeter road at the
western edge of the pond have filled with nesting birds from the
municipal golf course clubhouse on Huron Avenue around to Little
Fresh Pond and beyond to Black's Nook. The song is deafening in
the Aspen grove and the meadow at the northwest corner of the
pond, near Black's Nook. Several Northern Oriole nests hang over
the road by the meadow and along the road to Black's Nook, where
more Baltimore Orioles and Yellow Warblers can be found, along
with American Robins and a host of Common Grackle, wheezing in
the White Pine.
More is to come. The frantic Willow Flycatcher doesn't begin staking his claim to the meadow until the first week of June. The American Goldfinch doesn't nest until July because it waits for the thistle to set seed. Young Warbling Vireo can be heard practicing their singing as late as the first week in September.
I can only begin to describe the experience for you here.
To learn more: study Don Stokes' A Guide to the Behavior of Common Birds;
listen to Lang Elliot's Know Your Bird Sounds, Volume 1 and 2;
and read Franklin Russell's Watchers at The Pond
and Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac.