8 Miles Continued....

Please visit the Nahanton Park Blog for the beginning of this trek.

Even though I was bundled up I was loosing feeling in my fingers so I stopped to break out a hand warmer set to stick between my gloves and over-mitts. Then I managed to look upstream on the Charles into the heart of the largest stretch of fresh water marsh on the Charles. Some distant dark smudges promised some water foul and I kept my hopes up for mergansers as I continued down the street into Needham and Cutler Park.

As soon as Kendrick Pond (aka Culter Pond) came into view I found some common mergansers working the edges of the pond along with some gulls sleepily floating in near the center. But what really caught my eye was the swan. Now I am used to Mute Swans having an orange bill, but this swan definitely did NOT have an orange bill and almost looked black. Could this be a Tundra Swan? I circled the pond, and circled back, trying to track close enough to the swan to get a really good, definitive view with my binoculars.

Mute Swan

I was almost dismissing the song sparrows and robins out of hand. Our paths finally managed to converge enough that my binoculars could resolve the details and this bird had a pale ivory bill, a young mute swan. While not what I was hoping for, still some good birds for the pond. I headed further south in the woods of Cutler and the path narrowed between I95 and the wetlands. With the proximity to I95, I feel even luckier that this great marsh wasn't covered over when the highway was built. While the noise of the traffic is a distraction, the park is still quite large and offers great habitat. I continued to follow as the path dipped and raised, while chickadees and juncos called marking my passage.

Cutler Park wetlands

Just as I reached the boardwalk across the marsh to Powell's Island- there I heard it! That high pitched thin trembling whistle of the brown creeper! I searched and searched the woods and yet all I could see was a passing glimpse of a bird in flight. Eventually I realized that I had completely lost the creeper (I have yet to see one in MA) only when the bird I was tracking resolved into a American Tree Sparrow. I carried on to the canoe landing at Powell's Island always feeling as though there was a bird hiding behind the next tree. I was hoping for some more mergansers and ducks at the canoe landing, but as I approached, I heard a different high thin whistle "see see see" of the Golden-crowned Kinglet. And indeed a small group of them were in the shrubs occasionally stopping to flash their yellow crowns at me. I carried on and was finally rewarded with hooded mergansers on the Charles. When I reached the train tracks I turned onto the trail that parallel to the tracks hoping to use the bridge to cross into Millennium Park. On this path only birds were a flyby crow and a close encounter with a Downy.

Upon reaching the bridge I looked both ways for trains before heading across. Unfortunately I thought that there was going to be a pedestrian partition, but there was none, so this is not a recommended route. Millennium Park was remarkably un-birdy this day, or maybe I was just starting to move quicker as I realized that my allotted hiking time was dwindling.  Millennium is an old dump, now capped off and offering great views of downtown and lots of grassland habitat. This park is probably one of the best birding spots in Boston, particularly as one of eBird's team members, Marshall Iliff, lives close by and frequents the park and reports his sightings. Now out on the open paths around the park the sun was working its fullest, so I paused to stick my coat and over-mitts into my backpack. I did manage to score a new bird for the day with a white-throated sparrow before taking the foot bridge across Sawmill Brook and into Brook's Farm and heading up the Helen Heyn Riverway back into Newton. By now I was mostly hiking, but still managed a Hairy Woodpecker and  next to one of the parking lots that the H.H. Riverway crosses I found a muskrat. I was half hoping to see a heron or bittern, particularly after a recent report of a Least Bittern in this section of Newton. But it was not to be. This was my first visit to the Helen Heyn Riverway, and was hoping for a little less parking lot, but I will have to return when I have time to explore a little more.

To hear the very end of this adventure head back over to the Nahanton Park Blog. Stay tuned to future posts about Hammond Pond, Houghton Gardens, and a tentatively named idea for a post "A tale of two owls."