Winter is Coming

Before winter arrives, whether on the calendar or with snow and freezing temperatures, I’ve been enjoying the outdoors. I’ll still enjoy the outdoors when it’s covered in a foot of snow and everything’s grey, but the fall colors are nice while they last. I closed out October with a couple last bike rides/walks to some of the parks I’ve been frequenting. As it turned out, on the very first day of November, Ann Arbor got its first snowflakes of the season. The ground and air temperature were too warm for anything that could even be called a coating to stick, but winter is coming.

As we headed into the second half of October, I biked over to the Barton Nature Area to check on the colors by the river. The Border to Border was still well-trafficked by exercisers, but the number of people just hanging around at the parks along it was on its way down. I was hoping for blue skies and bright colors over the Huron, but got a grey sky and a scattering of yellow and brown trees instead. Oh, well. It was still nice in person.

Kayakers on the Huron River

By the end of the month the temperatures started dropping from pleasantly cool to uncomfortably cool without a jacket. So I put on a jacket, but held off on pants. I made the rounds through some of the parks that I’ve been circling through for the past nine months, for which I have coronavirus to thank, in more ways than one. Firstly, for being the reason that I’ve been wandering through the woods unaccompanied instead of going to band rehearsals, church events, and seminars. Secondly, for being the reason I discovered the parks in the first place and ended up exploring large portions of Ann Arbor.

Fall colors

There was a good mix of color when I was out at the end of the month. Some of the trees were past peak and turning brown or dropping their leaves, but enough of them still had leaves on their branches to make it feel fall-ish and not dead and winter-ish. From the pond, I made my way to some beech woods, which were very yellow. On the way back to my apartment, I encountered a mushroom growing out of a tree. I’m pretty sure it was real, but this is Ann Arbor so it could be an open-air art installation contemplating the decay of civilization juxtaposed with the endurance of humanity. Or something like that. I also met what looked like a really fat, round bird that was actually a hawk. The picture below is blurry because it’s extremely zoomed up. Guess who still doesn’t have a telephoto lens?

Beech forest

Mushroom growing out of a tree

It’s either a Cooper’s hawk or a sharp-shinned hawk, which even birdwatching sites will admit look very, very similar (see what I mean?). The Cooper’s hawk is bigger, but a male Cooper’s hawk can be about the same size as a female sharp-shinned hawk. Plus, you try figuring out what “bigger” is when you’re hiding in the bushes thirty feet away. The tails of the two species differ in shape; the Cooper’s hawk has a rounded tail while the sharp-shinned hawk has a squarer or notched tail. The Cooper’s hawk also has a bigger head that can look a bit block-like, and the sharp-shinned hawk has thin, “stick-like” legs. Both have reddish barring on their bellies and black and white striped tails, and can be found in Michigan. My bird has a rounded tail, but I can’t say it looks particularly block-headed, and I don’t know if I would or wouldn’t call those legs stick-like either. If I had to say, I’d go with Cooper’s hawk, but I wouldn’t bet any money on that. So far during coronavirus I’ve identified (okay, attempted to identify) wildflowers, wildlife, fungus, and now birds. Why not trees, you ask? Already did that in seventh grade science. (And we did rocks in eighth grade science.)

Either a Cooper's hawk or sharp-shinned hawk