Where the birds are!
Ranger Wilde's Nature Center...
by Kirk House

Montezuma

At first you don't see Montezuma so much as you hear it. Armies of geese, fleets of ducks, flotillas of coots, and squadrons of swans cover acres and acres of flats. Sometimes you drive for several miles without seeing another visitor, and it's like having your own private refuge. On one trip

drove past an odd sight, hit the brakes, and backed up, at last processing what

had seen. I got out of the car, delightedly confirming my suspicions. I had heard of this, but never seen it before. Dangling from the wire fence was half a mouse, the open-air larder of a northern shrike.

Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, bisected by the New York State Thruway, lies near the outlet of Cayuga Lake. The long drive around Montezuma's Main Pool (a vast pan created for the benefit of migrating waterfowl) is well marked with educational stations. You need a brochure to actually get anything out of these, but the stations are also spots where visitors are welcome to get

out of their cars. Some of the distances across these flats are considerable, so we'd have been seeing more if we'd had a spotting scope. But we don't need scopes as we watch an osprey, hovering on great broad wings above the Cayuga-Seneca Barge Canal. Binoculars and naked eye do a fine job identifying wood ducks, pintails, blue-winged teals, green-winged teals, mallards, black ducks, black-backed gulls, whistling swans -- we counted nineteen species on one drive. Besides the ospre y we spotted redtails, a harrier, and several raptors too distant to identify. But Montezuma's marshes are also home to New York's largest population of bald eagles... in fact, they're the state's prime breeding spot. We don't see them every day, but we always drive away happy, satisfied with the wings of the osprey, the sign of the shrike, dozens of muskrat lodges, and the glorious clamor of geese, gathered in thousands.