Traveling – Page 27 – Birding Boomers

Birds in a Garden – Netherlands Trip Notes (May 26, 2013)

May 27, 2013June 21, 2023joannie65352 Comments

Everyone has, or should have, a place they go mentally, spiritually, or physically to relax and find peace – a place that you call to mind when you close your eyes, slow down your breathing, and calm your mind of all the clutter and chaos you’re bombarded with on any given day. A place to bring your soul to stillness. For me, that place is a garden – not a particular one – just bits and memories of many gardens I have visited, gardens I have seen on television or in books that I would like to visit, and even flower beds I have planted and nurtured over the years. The Bible traces our beginnings to the garden of Eden where all creatures, great and small, lived out their lives in harmony and beauty. This I know — where there are trees and flowers and plants of all shapes and sizes, there are also bees and butterflies and foxes and raccoons and salamanders and there are birds. So it should not come as a surprise that, finding ourselves as “stranger[s] in a strange land” [1] and wanting to do a little exploring and maybe a little birding, we would find a garden and head out for some peace, serenity, blooms, and birds.

The Amsterdam Botanical Garden is not listed or described in the guidebook that I purchased for our trip. I found the garden by looking for green squares on the street map of the Canal District that was given to us by the concierge at the hotel. The “green” had all the right characteristics – It was in the old town area; it was relatively close to the hotel, i.e., within walking distance for even me; and, it was located on a main street and canal and the directions were pretty straightforward, i.e., not too many turns. We set out about mid-morning on a sunny but still chilly April day. Who knew it would still be so cold in April? We had a few hours between checking out of the hotel and boarding our cruise ship so things seemed pretty much perfect for heading to the garden. It was still very early in spring so I didn’t expect we’d see too many flowers but that was okay – our objective was to see birds, pure & simple – not religion or culture – just birds and maybe a few tulips or crocus or daffodils. Set your expectations broad enough and you are rarely disappointed.

We had seen Mute Swans (Cygnus olor) and Mallards (Anas platyrhynchos) and thousands of pigeons on our walking tour of the district and were now hoping for something more – birds that were a little more “native” to Europe and that would be “new” to us. We had also seen quite a few Coots (Fulica atra) around the river basin. The Coots looked quite similar to the American Coots (Fulica americana) and I found myself checking the bird books to make sure they were actually different species. Yep, they are and when you check the books, the differences are easy to see.

I have to stop and add a note about pigeons. They seem to be everywhere on earth and they seem to come in all colors which might imply that there are thousands of different varieties of pigeons. After all, it takes a birding expert (as far as I am concerned) to differentiate between a Carolina Chickadee (Poecile carolinensis) and a Black-Capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapilla) with some experts only willing to firmly identify a Black-Capped if they hear the song. And these are recorded as two different species. On the other hand, there are pigeons that look absolutely and radically different in terms of coloring and plumage but they all seem to be lumped into the category of pigeon. I asked some members of the local bird club why they did not “count” the pigeons on their bird walks or, if there were people who specialized in pigeons and pigeon watching who did note the differences or see them as different bird types. I was told that there were people who did this but most folks just call them pigeons. At any rate, I note that the guidebook we used on our trip (mostly), “A Naturalist’s Guide to the Birds of Britain & Northern Europe” by Peter Goodfellow and Paul Sterry [3] included the Rock Dove (Columbia livia) and noted that it was the ancestor of all domestic pigeons. And I believe I have found my answer – most pigeons we see are probably domestic pigeons that escaped their confines on farms and rooftops and multiplied exponentially and now inhabit every city and town in most parts of the world. And, although some birds that “escape” and become “non-native invasives” are still counted and photographed and added to life-lists and reported to eBird in regional reporting, most pigeons do not seem to be counted and added to life-lists. But, having said all that, we did spot what we thought was a Wood Pigeon (Columba palumbus) which is similar to a mourning dove in coloring but decidedly bigger…and is called out separately in the guide book.

As we neared the Botanical Garden, we spotted our first interesting birds of the day – a pair of Egyptian Geese (Alopochen aegyptiacus). These waterfowl were totally new to us and exotic looking to say the least. Checking a different guidebook later, “Birds of Britain and Europe” by Jim Flegg and David Hosking [4], I noted that this too was a domestic bird gone rogue. That guide lists an “escape” as a domestic bird or pet that has been accidently or deliberately released into the wild. I am sensing a theme here and probably not so unusual for urban birding.

Next up, a delightful Magpie (Pica pica) – a common bird here in Amsterdam but another life bird for me and another check mark on my list. Awesome! We had spotted our first magpie on the way in from the airport a couple days previous but here we had an opportunity to see one relatively close up and for some minutes before he flew on up the canal. Of course, every time you see a new bird, you have to stop and ponder and study and check the guidebook and try to get photos…..only to find later that you will begin to see them everywhere. I think once you notice something, it becomes common. It is not that there are more of the birds about; it is just that you have noticed them and become sensitive to them and you begin to see them more. Such is the case with the magpie – our initial delight faded into complaisance such that by the end of our vacation, we were apt to say, “Oh, there goes another magpie,” and hardly stop to notice.

The Amsterdam Botanical Garden is a place of study of all things botanical and associated with the University in Amsterdam but does open for visitors. Although the garden itself was not too large, it had attracted quite a few visitors on this Sunday morning. We found our way to the entrance, paid the fee, and headed inside.

As we moved past the tropical green house, we spotted a pair of beautiful green Ring-Necked Parakeets (Psittacula krameri) – yet another example of a domestic pet that has been released into the wild or somehow made their way many miles north from their native territories in Africa. At some point, it definitely occurs to me that the theme for the day might be about these escapees or transient migrants. We were seeing birds (not just the avian kind) that had previously lived in cages, whether physical or emotional or cultural, that were now “set free” to wander happily throughout their chosen gardens for the remainder of their lives. And why shouldn’t they? The world is made more beautiful for every bird and every creature in it regardless of how exotic or common they may be. Of course, I have to retract that statement when I start thinking about the European Starlings that have become quite invasive in America…and I’m sure there are quite a few problems associated with those pigeons that roost on buildings everywhere. But this day, I am feeling open-minded and thinking a few more birds in the garden won’t hurt anything.

But where were the native birds? We had spotted mallards (Anas platyrhynchos) but these too seemed to be a mixed breed with coloration similar to domestic ducks, possibly a Blue Swedish (Anas platyrhynchos domesticus) considering the brown and white patches on their breasts and around their heads. And where do mallards originate anyway? They are pretty much found everywhere too.

Finally, we spotted a small bird that looked very similar to a chickadee but with different coloring. I chased the bird through the garden, past the beehives, across a bridge, and through the hedges trying to get a good look and a decent photograph. I was only partially successful. Do understand that “chasing” a bird means I’m moving slowly and stealthily trying not make a sound as I creep closer and closer only to find the bird is way too quick and sits still barely for a moment and then dives deep in the tree or bush leaving me with the barest glimpses and totally blurry pictures. I know for a moment there you visualized me as running around like a crazy woman waving my arms frantically and screaming, “bird, bird, bird” but it is not the way it goes. We were able to identify the little bird as a Great Tit (Parus major) so all was not lost. That sounds a lot bigger than a chickadee, now doesn’t it? I often wonder at the names that were given birds. The same folks probably wanted to call a California Condor a “little vulture”.

We sat on a bench enjoying the sunshine and a couple mallards swam over, hopped up on the bank and came close, possibly hoping for a few crumbs of bread of which we had none. We had cameras, cellphones, and binoculars but no cookies – of what possible use were we to those mallards? They gave up on us, probably doing duck sighs and wondering why we would head out for a day trip without any cookies or granola to share. They waddled on back down to the canal and soon were back to business as usual ducking and diving looking for tidbits here and there.

We strolled around the garden enjoying the few flowers and birds that we saw pausing quite often to sit on a bench and contemplate the peacefulness in spite of the many people also enjoying the day there. We admired a brown bird that looked and acted similar to an American Robin (Turdus migratorius) from back home (only without the red breast) scratching the dirt looking for bugs and worms. She (and I say she now that I have looked her up in the book) was later joined by a Blackbird (Turdus merula) which clinched her as his mate and not some sort of weird European robin. We tracked the pair across the garden or, maybe, they were tracking us…probably the latter since they would be so much better at it than we are.

The stork nest on the institution’s chimney was empty (alas) as it was still too early for the storks to have migrated back to the area. I would have loved to see one of those but I contented myself with taking several photographs of a gull, the familiar Herring Gull (Larus argentatus) perched nearby and several pigeons, what else? Then it was back to trying to sneak up on the Tit again which turned out to be another Tit entirely – this one a Coal Tit (Periparus ater). Both looked quite a bit like a Chickadee as noted previously, but the former having a lemony breast and the latter having rust colored sides. We watched the Coal Tit as he flitted back and forth between trees near the tropical green house. He patiently bided his time until someone opened the door and left him an opening – then like a flash he was inside. It seems that some birds like to escape their cages and others look for the opportunity to go back inside where it is warm on a cold day and possibly safer. We had not intended to go inside but, like Alice following the white rabbit down the rabbit hole [2], we followed him inside hoping to get that elusive photograph. We lost him in the foliage inside but did see our first real blooms of the day. Appropriately, it was the “bird of paradise”.

One last look around the garden and we headed out and back to the hotel and our cruise ship. Stopping along the way at a pub for lunch, we didn’t see too many birds but did enjoy a burger and some iced tea. As we walked back down towards the docks and rounded the river basin, we were provided one last treat – a beautiful Great Crested Grebe (Podiceps cristatus), another life-bird and a great ending to a good day of birding in a very nice garden.

[1] Bible, King James Version, Exodus 2:22 – “And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.”

[2] “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”; by Lewis Carroll; 1865

[3] “A Naturalist’s Guide to the Birds of Britain & Northern Europe” by Peter Goodfellow and Paul Sterry; Beaufoy Books; 2010

[4] “Birds of Britain and Europe” by Jim Flegg and David Hosking; New Holland Publishers; 1990

Wind and Water – Netherlands (May 15, 2013)

May 14, 2013joannie6535Leave a comment

In a previous blog I stated that “all” of the Netherlands is below sea level. Well, that was a bit of an exaggeration that I will correct with this entry. I looked it up – yep, I googled it – just to get a fact or two straight. Per Wikipedia ₁ (whatever did we ever do without Google and Wikipedia?), about 20% of the total area of the Netherlands is below sea level with about 50% of the land being less than 1 meter (about 3.28 feet) above sea level and 21% of the population living below sea level. There is a mountain named Mount Vaals (Vaalserberg) that is 322.7 meters (1,059 feet) above sea level. Mount Vaals is shared by Germany and Belgium so it is not totally within the boundaries of the Netherlands but it does mark the high point for that country. To give you some perspective on that, Mount McKinley in Alaska (highest point in North America) is 6,194 meters (20,320 feet). Closer to home here in Maryland, Sugarloaf Mountain is 391 meters (1,282 feet). So, if you have visited Sugarloaf, you can imagine that it is slightly higher than the highest point in the Netherlands. And Mount Vaals is not representative of most of the landscape in the Netherlands…there is a reason the Netherlands are call the Low Countries. Most of the land that we saw on our recent visit was below sea level or just at sea level and all of the towns visited were filled with canals and dikes. It was definitely a case of “water water everywhere”. So what do you do if all, or most of the land, available for living and farming, is either underwater or very, very wet? If you’re in the Netherlands, you build dykes and you harness the wind to help you move as much as you can. Which brings us to two of the three reasons anyone might visit the Netherlands, namely to see windmills, check out the dams and dykes, and to see tulips. I am sure there are other reasons to visit, maybe buy some diamonds, but, for me, these are the big three – windmills, dykes, and tulips. And if you want to see windmills, you go to the UNESCO historical site Kinderdijk where there are 18 windmills still working and you can learn everything you ever thought you might want to know about them.

Before I go further, this blog is not intended to be a tutorial and I am certainly not the authority on anything related to the Netherlands or my big three interests from my visit there. I only share some of the things I learned from the trip, most of it gleaned from the information provided by the various tour guides and from my aforementioned sea level data check using Google and Wikipedia on the Internet.

Growing up in the south, I am very familiar with grist mills and have visited a few that are preserved – some still working grinding meal for tourists to see — over the years. I suppose, in my mind, I associated windmills with grist mills and somehow figured that windmills would be pretty much the same. Of course, that is nowhere near the truth. Grist mills in the US are water driven mills whose function is to grind grains, mainly corn, into meal to be used for cooking bread. But windmills in the Netherlands use the wind to power screw technology to move water from one area to another. About the only similarity is that the mills use natural power sources, wind or water, to provide the power. I do believe the Dutch also used a type of windmill to grind grain but they mainly used windmills to remove water. And they were doing it from way back in the 13^th century.

But, back to windmills…..as noted, as early as the 13^th century, windmills were being used to pump the water from one area (usually a lower lying area) to another area (a river or lake). The land that was created is a polder which seems to be an island that is below sea level. As more land was cleared, the polders became bigger. A row of windmills would be built on the dykes to keep the water cleared from the polders. As one canal became filled with water and prone to overflow, another row of windmills would be built at a higher level with another canal or man-made lake until the water could be pumped to the main river and eventually out to sea. As such, the windmills are built on tiers of land so that the water is gradually raised to the sea level and can flow out to sea. Although the old windmills are not used today (except those at the UNESCO site at Kinderdijk) for this purpose, there are modern pumping stations that still use the old Archimedean Screw ₂ technology to keep the land dry. Essentially, the technology involves the use of a very large screw which is placed inside a hollow pipe. The whole thing is placed in the water on an angle with the bottom of the screw in the water and the top of the screw at the higher level where the water is to be dispensed. As the screw turns, the water is pulled into the bottom and moves up the screw until it comes out at the top.

While the Archimedean Screw is still used for pumping water, the windmills are not. The industrial revolution brought in the use of steam engines and, now huge diesel engines provide power to the pumping stations. But, with all the wind still readily available for use in the Netherlands, no one has given up on the use of windmills. They just changed the design and function. Huge modern steel windmills dot the landscape generating electricity. Having used windpower for hundreds of years, it was probably a no-brainer for the Dutch to graduate to generating electricity using the technology….and from the number of windmills in the countryside, I do not believe there was as much controversy about using the new windmills in the Netherlands as there has been in the US.

One final thought about windmills. Like lighthouses where the keeper lived inside the lighthouse, the miller also lived inside the windmill. The accommodations were pretty tight and pretty rustic considering that the parts of the windmill pretty much filled the windmill. The windmills at the UNESCO site are also inhabited by the “millers” who operate them. However, I do not believe the millers actually live solely within the windmills; I suspect that the furnishings we saw in the windmill were for our benefit and the miller and his family live in the outbuildings nearby. The guide told us that there are 2 professional millers at Kinderdijk and the rest were in training. She mentioned that there was a waiting list to become a miller and to live in the mills and operate them. We were lucky enough to see a windmill operating (at tremendous speed) and to see the miller come by to stop the mill before he left for the day.

Okay, that’s windmills but what about those dams or dykes? The Dutch had “water management councils” or waterschappen from as early as the 12^th century. We were told that the “water manager” for a town was much more important than any other Government official for the farmer’s livelihood and even the lives of the people depended on the keeping the water at bay. The mayor might have thought he was the big cheese but he pretty much did what the water manager told him to when it came to the dykes and the windmills and keeping the town dry.

Basically, water management consisted of the dikes, canals, and pumping stations (windmills). The earliest water management methods consisted of trying to block the water from coming in from the North Sea and the Zuiderzee or Southern Sea. At first, I think it was a case of a little here and a little there…..block this stream, build up that bank, add a little dirt here and a little there. Smaller and simpler dams were built in the beginning and made bigger and stronger as time passed. Dykes were connected to create much bigger dams. Canals between the dykes were built to allow water to flow out at low tide but blocked to prevent water from coming in again at high tide. Dams were high ground so people settled and built their homes on the dams. And so you have Amsterdam which was built on the dam on the Amstel River. And, yes, that is the river which has a beer named after it. Similarly, you have Rotterdam which was built on the dam(s) on the Rotter River. In Amsterdam, the main part of the original dam is called the Dam Square. And all the trams run through it and all the tour groups meet there. After a long day of walking on uneven cobblestones, it is not unusual to hear the tourists walking around lost going up one canal street after another looking for that “damned square”….then again, maybe it was just me that said that.

Clearly over the years the bigger issue was not allowing the water to go out to sea with the low tide but stopping it from coming back in with the high tide. And over the years, the dykes failed and had to be rebuilt which was made more difficult because every time the tide came in while the dyke was being repaired, it breached the dyke again. This went on for centuries. And each time the land was flooded with salt water, it took years for the land to become suitable for the plow and growing crops again. I found myself wondering if this is why the Dutch say that they “reclaim” the land implying that they had to keep clearing the same land of water over and over again. The last big natural flood was in February 1953. Prior to that some areas of the southwestern part of the Netherlands were flooded by the Allies in their efforts to stop the advance of the Nazis in World War II. I’m sure it made sense to the Generals and tacticians to breach the dykes and flood the land but it must have been devastating to the people trying to survive anyway to have their farms and fields flooded leaving them without homes during this war. Then, less than 10 years later, they’re flooded out again with hundreds lost and drowned when natural forces broke the dams.

Today, there are two main systems of dykes in the Netherlands. The Zuiderzee Works on the Zuiderzee (Southern Sea) in North Holland and the Delta Works in South Holland and Zeeland. The Zuiderzee Works was built in 1932 in the north and created the IJsselmeer (IJssel Lake). Interestingly enough, we were told that the water in the Ijsselmeer is fresh water and that closing the lake off to the tides of the Zuiderzee effectively destroyed the fish and seafood industry in that area. The water runs into the lake from the rivers and streams and is carried out to sea with the low tide but blocked from returning with the high tide so it remains essentially fresh or only slightly briny. The Delta Works in the south was begun in 1958 and finished in 1997. It was the Delta Works dykes that we visited and photographed. You can see on the photograph included that the dykes consist of a series of gates that can be opened in different combinations to control the flow of water into and out of the area.

While we were touring these areas, I just could not help thinking of the islands in the Chesapeake Bay that are slowly being eroded away and wondered if the Dutch would not have taken a different perspective on whether or not to let nature take its course. I also pondered whether or not New York City and particularly Manhattan Island would be the metropolis it is today had it been originally settled by some group other than the Dutch East India Company. It is my understanding that the southern end of Manhattan Island was originally very swampy and prone to floods of the surrounding rivers. Where other colonists might have seen too much swamp and not enough landmass, the Dutch were probably not the least bit put off by the marshes and wetlands. They had access to the Native Americans for fur trading and access to the sea for shipping the furs….what better place to build a town. I found this photo of an old map on line – check out the canals — of course they would build canals; it was technology they knew well. And they called it New Amsterdam, what else?

If you’re still interested and looking for way more information on dams and dykes and windmills –