October Big Day

Today, in the birding world (a world I discovered thanks, in part, to the pandemic) it is Big Day.  This is a worldwide effort that runs, in your own time zone, on Saturday from a second past midnight to a minute to midnight.  24 hours to bird and record your sightings.

All you need is an eBird (a worldwide bird checklist and database account.  We had the mobile app for a brief time, but both my phone and my spouse's, are pretty stuffed and the app takes up a lot of room.  But eBird works if all you have is a computer, browser, and Internet access.

They said even 10 minutes in your backyard helps (if I can figure out how to enter our findings on eBird)  but we decided to go down to our local park.  Right now, I'm fighting an infection I'm prone to, and seasonal vertigo. The antibiotic for the infection has me a little unsettled, so I'm not much into travel right now.

But the wonderful thing about distracting yourself with Nature is that you make unexpected finds.

Watching at least 18 Canada geese float down the Susquehanna River was good for the soul, but, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a large butterfly fluttering over a large grassy area.  I decided to follow it and whipped out my iPhone SE 1st edition (yup, still agonizing over a new phone).

To my delight, it alighted on a dandelion but would it stay along enough for me to get a photographic capture?

It did!

 

I figured out it was a kind of swallowtail, but didn't know what kind.

So intent on feeding that I was able to get these shots

Back home, I did some searching and finally (I think) have an ID. Drum roll:

Giant swallowtail, which was mentioned as the largest butterfly in North America.  I didn't think it was that much larger than a monarch, but maybe it was a male (which run smaller than females).

The horizontal band looks white in some of these pictures but in the field, it was yellow.

Anyway, so far, our bird count is 3 house finches (2 females and a male), 2 tufted titmice (fed several seconds apart), and at least 18 Canada geese.  We usually have black capped chickadees and sometimes white breasted nuthatches at our feeder this month, along with Northern cardinals and downy woodpeckers, so maybe we'll have better luck this afternoon.  The ground feeding mourning dove usually shows up in the afternoon, too.

But in the meantime, if I hadn't been a bit under the weather, I never would have seen the giant swallowtail butterfly.  I probably would have been going on an art trail about an hour away, and enjoying that.  But, I've learned, there is always a silver lining somewhere when things don't go as expected, if you look hard enough.

That, I guess, is the lesson in today's Big Day.