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A flickering flame - red in the west, yellow in the east...

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For several weeks this fall we have caught glimpses of an interloper among the flocks of robins forming up to move further south for the winter. As birding neophytes, we did not recognize this shy and skittish bird - catching sight only of a flash of white over its tail as it flew away. Like amateur detectives we pieced together the evidence - about robin-sized, ground feeding, white rump patch. And then, in a hastily captured, blurry photo of a departing bird we saw the flicker of yellow flame beneath its wings. Of course, a northern flicker - named for that flickering of color as it flies away - yellow for the northern flicker in the north and east and red for the western variety. Or maybe they are named flicker because it sounds like one of their songs, a repeated wicka-wicka-wicka. I prefer the flickering flame version.

Flickers are woodpeckers, the only woodpeckers that frequently feed on the ground like their American robin companions. Flickers have over 100 common names, more folk names than any other North American bird, some of which are attempts to mimic their distinctive song. It is the state bird of Alabama where flickers are known as yellow-hammers as were the Confederate soldiers from Alabama during the Civil War. They love ants, which make up 45% of their diet. And I’m told that flickers possess the longest tongue among North American birds (can that be true? what about herons?) - a full two inches of barbed and sticky mayhem when poked into an ant colony searching for the especially delicious and nutritious larvae deep inside. Like many other birds, flickers engage in anting. You know, anting, not to be confused with the ranting of some other birds and humans. Without destroying this tiny morsel of food, flickers carefully extract formic acid from a gland on the ant’s abdomen and use it to preen their feathers and maybe to kill otherwise harmful parasites. Flickers mate for life and are among the only migratory woodpeckers - moving south from the northern tiers of their range in the fall and tending to return to the same nesting territory the following spring.

Northern yellow-shafted flicker drinking from our koi pond. Moments later the pond’s homicidal bull frog tried unsuccessfully to grab him.

These lovely birds may be just passing through our area from further north to further south. But maybe the warming climate means that central New Hampshire is already “further south,” and we’ll have them all winter - or maybe they will return to breed here in the spring.

Where have all the swallows gone...

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Individual swallows arriving from a 50 mile radius to join the murmuration

Probably hanging out with friends on Goose Island near the mouth of the Connecticut River. Discovered in the late 20th century, the annual murmuration of tree swallows beginning their migration from breeding grounds further north to winter refuges in the southern United States occurs at sunset over this reedy, river island most late September nights. Recently we had the good fortune of a gracious invitation to join family members on a Connecticut River outing to witness this astonishing spectacle. We assume our very own tree swallows were among the throng but failed to spot them.

500,000 tree swallows starting to spiral down for the night on Goose Island in the Connecticut River at Old Lyme

Juvenile bald eagle photographed on our way to the Goose Island murmuration

What brings our tree swallows to this gathering? The prevailing theory is that there is safety in numbers, that local raptors like this juvenile bald eagle would not venture into such a swirling mass of avian life to select a single victim for dinner. After gathering overhead, as if on cue, the swallows funnel down to roost on Goose Island, spend the night, and at sunrise repeat the whole display in reverse.

The estuary of the Connecticut River is a bird lovers paradise, so much so that none other than Roger Tory Peterson, author in 1934 of the first field guide to birds, moved here in 1954 to spend the rest of his life. So no wonder that the tree swallows eventually discovered the area as well and established one of the largest murmurations in the region. Usually associated with starlings, the word murmuration has its roots in a similar Latin word meaning grumbling or murmuring. It is actually the word used for a group of starlings and probably relates to the noise made by a huge flock of murmurating starlings. In contrast, the swallows’ murmuration seemed relatively quiet at least from our vantage point. Maybe swallows are more content and less inclined to grumble. Here’s a video version, but cameras, video or still, even in the hands of Alfred Hitchcock, are challenged to capture this visual phenomenon, which is so large that it shows up on weather radar hopefully not mistaken for the meterological tornado that it resembles. We were joined by kayaks, canoes, powered boats of all sizes, and the Becky Thatcher riverboat’s murmuration cruise sponsored by the Connecticut Audubon Society as viewing of this amazing show has become ever more popular.

Three balls and no strikes...

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As iconic baseball announcer, Red Barber, would have said - “The batter’s in the catbird seat” meaning that he is in an enviable position to control what happens next. In my formative years as a baseball fan (and never much of a player) and long before moving to Red Sox Nation, I was an ardent Brooklyn Dodgers fan and strident foe of the New York Yankees (as I am today). This was odd in Peoria, Illinois, where you had to be for the Cubs, White Sox, or Cardinals. In those days in the 1950s, the World Series often meant the Dodgers versus the Yankees, and I routinely developed a severe sore throat and cough at that time of year in order to stay home from school and listen to the games - with Red Barber doing the play-by-play, first for the Dodgers and later for the Yankees. Red is credited by some with coining “the catbird seat” expression along with other folksy descriptors like “rhubarb” for heated on-field altercations and “tearin’ up the pea patch” for a team on a winning streak. He is even credited as the “catbird seat” source by James Thurber in his 1942 short story titled “The Catbird Seat.” However, Red’s daughter later claimed that her father did not begin using this phrase until after he had read Thurber’s short story. Red himself remembered that he first heard the phrase in a poker game in Cincinnati. My last fond recollections of Red Barber were his weekly NPR radio conversations about sports, gardening, and other topics with Bob Edwards in the 1990’s.

Last week I blogged about the northern mockingbird, probably the most notorious mimic among North American birds. As I mentioned then, I have only seen two northern mockingbirds near our home all year. But, the grey catbird, another member of the mimic thrush family, has been in abundance including in the thick shrubs next to our screened porch. So much so that my morning coffee seems always accompanied by a large pack of mewling cats. The catbirds turned up in early May to compete with the Baltimore Orioles for the grape jelly that I put out and have been with us ever since. Soon our catbirds will be moving south to Florida or the Caribbean, but research suggests that the same birds will return to our yard next spring.

The catbird seat expression seems to relate to the image of the catbird perching at the top of a tree and singing his mimicking, mocking song to proclaim his control over his own fate. But maybe the expression should have been the “song sparrow seat” or the “cardinal seat” or even the “titmouse seat,” all of whom are more likely to sing from the tops of trees. Catbirds tend to skulk about in dense underbrush like that around our porch. In fact, their scientific name, Dumetella, means “small thicket.” Their most common song, which can go on for as long as 10 minutes, is truly catlike, but it can be accompanied by a large repertoire of other songs and sounds. When I said that I wanted to learn to recognize more bird songs and calls, someone advised me to start with the catbird because surely I knew how a cat sounds.

At times I have found my new familiarity with the catbird’s song annoying. However, reflecting on the string of associations from catbirds to Red Barber to the Brooklyn Dodgers to PeeWee Reese and Duke Snider to my first baseball bat, a Jackie Robinson Louisville Slugger, I find my heart warmed drinking my morning coffee surrounded by cats in the bushes. That’s being in the catbird seat for me!

Hush little baby, don't say a word...

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Momma’s gonna buy you a mockingbird. And if that mockingbird don’t sing… *

Northern mockingbird having breakfast in our backyard this week

Whoa, wait a minute, a mockingbird that doesn’t sing?? Singing is what mockingbirds do!! They can not only imitate almost every bird in the neighborhood, but all sorts of other non-bird sounds. Mockingbirds have been known to imitate machinery, human music, car alarms, crickets, and up to 12 species of frogs and toads. It’s scientific name is Mimus polyglottos meaning multi-lingual mimic. It’s a male’s repertoire of over a hundred songs and his own lovely song that wins him the heart of a female mockingbird in the spring.

There are 17 species of mockingbird in the world, but only one, the northern mockingbird, in North America where they are found nearly everywhere. In the 18th and 19th centuries, mockingbirds were popular pets leading to so much trapping that they became threatened in eastern regions. Thomas Jefferson’s pet mockingbird named Dick would sit on his shoulder and sing along when he played the violin. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 put an end to capturing and selling mockingbirds (along with many other species) and allowed them to flourish throughout the country. So it’s not only against the law, but it’s also a sin to kill a mockingbird. According to Ms. Maudie, "Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

In recent times, mockingbirds have shown a preference for urban environments, especially in the South, where they can be heard both day and night singing their hearts out from wires and lamp posts. They are the state bird in five states. A mockingbird was the first bird I saw on our first birding walk of last spring, and it looks like one of the last of the early fall unless this one hangs around for the winter.

When the sun in the morning peeps over the hill

And kisses the roses 'round my window sill

Then my heart fills with gladness when I hear the trill

Of the birds in the treetops on Mockingbird Hill

Tra la la, tweedle dee dee dee

It gives me a thrill

To wake up in the morning

To the mockingbird's trill

Tra la la tweedle dee dee dee

There's peace and good will

You're welcome as the flowers On Mockingbird Hill

Listen to Mockingbird Hill sung by Burl Ives

And here’s YoYo Ma and Bobby McFerrin doing Hush Little Baby.

The dove she is a pretty bird, she sings as she flies...

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7 o’clock (AM or PM) like Sunday when there was school on Monday has a melancholy association for me. That’s because our kitchen clock has long been one of those Audubon clocks with bird songs heralding each hour. The 7 o’clock bird is the mourning dove whose very name arises from the feelings its song inspires. Fortunately, the gloom is short-lived because 8 o’clock brings the more chipper chickadee and the cardinal sings at 9. But real mourning doves in the wild cause me no such grief - I find their song calming, peaceful, reassuring, and evocative of childhood memories.

Speaking of songs, doves (the turtle variety in Europe and the mourning variety in North America) have inspired hundreds of songs and poems and appear 60 times in 22 of Shakespeare’s plays. (Compare that to the starling, who appears only once.) Judy Collins sang a lovely antiwar ballad called The Dove in 1963, and the Roche Sisters a quite different one, A Dove, in 2010.* Most such musical and literary references associate doves with love and with peace - great companions to have in the backyard!

Mourning doves are found throughout the United States, southern Canada, and Mexico. Some migrate thousands of miles while others migrate only a few hundred miles or don’t migrate at all. We are grateful for those hardy ones who bring peace and love to our yard throughout the winter. With a population of 350 million, mourning doves are one of the most abundant of North American birds. They are also by far the most popular game bird with hunters harvesting over 20 million each year.

Predominately seed eaters, mourning doves can store thousands of seeds in their crop, an appendage of their esophagus, for later digestion. And they can produce “crop milk” as a creamy nutrient rich food for their nestlings. The crop is also known as the craw - the source of the expression “sticks in my craw” when you have been confronted with something, perhaps in a White House briefing, that you just can’t swallow. My craw has been pretty full in recent years.

  • Another dove song from Mark in the comments below - La Paloma

Willet, or won't it...

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…stand on one leg. Every yoga class that I have attended has always included the dreaded (for me) balance poses, which the willet seems able to maintain for hours. But why? No warrior or downward dog for the willet, just this, well, bird posture. Sometimes when one leg is drawn up so far as to disappear, I have thought this poor one-legged willet must have lost a leg to a predator or an accident until the missing leg emerges and joins its partner on the sand. But, there’s a reason for most everything in nature, why the one-legged stance?

As I am sure you have already guessed, it relates to the “rete mirabile” in the legs and feet of many birds, especially those with longer, unfeathered legs subject to heat loss to the environment. Rete mirabile, coined by the Roman physician and philosopher, Galen, means “wonderful net” in Latin and refers to physiologic arrangements in many creatures in which vessels carrying blood in opposing directions exchange something - gases (fish gills), ions (mammalian kidneys), or, in the case of willets, heat. Warm outgoing arterial blood runs very close to cooler returning venous blood. For the willet, this brings the temperature of the legs closer to the ambient external temperature reducing heat loss from the bird’s warmer body. And, pulling one leg up close to that warmer body further cuts the heat loss from the exposed legs in half. Somehow this has never worked to my advantage in yoga class maybe due to the heat lost through embarrassment.

Willets are among the largest of the North American sandpipers. The eastern version breeds in the summer in coastal areas from the Canadian maritimes to the southern tip of Florida and along the Gulf Coast to Mexico. In winter the most northern flocks join their non-migratory brethren south of Virginia or on the islands of the Caribbean. Western willets breed on in-land marshes and wetlands across the Great Plains then winter on both the west and east coasts. Willets tend not to socially distance, and their congregations are sometimes called “contradictions” or “binds” or “flings.” (Though I have come to believe all of the far-fetched names for groups of birds to be suspect products of idle minds.)

Willets are fairly nondescript birds. But, you can recognize them by their size, by the striking white stripe across their wings when they take flight, and by their distinctive “pill-will-willet” song.

Casting a critical eye at an idle willet warming his legs

Let's party!

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Male or female blue jay

Well, we can’t right now, but blue jays can. In fact, a group of blue jays is called a “party.” Or, maybe, it’s a different kind of party. Would blue jays caucus as democrats? Seven states have red cardinals as their state bird, but there are no blue (jay) states. (Somewhat fittingly in this vein, New Hampshire’s state bird is the purple finch.)

Whatever their political leanings, blue jays are social birds and like to hang out in groups even when they are courting. And once they have a mate, it’s a partner for life, which can be a long time. While most song birds live around 5 years, one banded blue jay in Newfoundland survived nearly 27 years! I wonder if the fact that they don’t migrate regularly or over long distances has an impact on their longevity.

Or, maybe it’s their intelligence. With ravens and crows, blue jays belong to the corvid (not to be confused with covid) family of birds, and they share the intelligence and problem solving abilities of their family members. They use objects as tools and will patiently wait out humans to get to scraps of food. Blue jays can also mimic the sounds of predators like hawks warning their brethren and other birds of the danger. Sometimes they will “cry wolf” making hawk sounds to scare other birds away from a food source. They also exhibit “anting” behavior in which they rub ants against their feathers to remove the ants’ formic acid protective shield. Formic acid protects the birds from fungi, bacteria, and mites, and its removal from the ants makes them much more tasty to the blue jays.

Do you remember the second blue bird blog? Like the eastern blue bird (and all blue-colored birds), blue jay feathers are not blue. If you grind up a blue bird feather, you will have brown dust. Red birds like cardinals have actual red pigment from the carotene in their diet in their feathers, but blue jays are blue because their feathers absorb all colors except blue. Blue is reflected “tricking” our eyes into seeing blue. Frankly, I still have trouble getting my head around this.

And speaking of appearances, male and female blue jays look alike. The males are a little larger and they behave differently during courtship, but otherwise they can’t be distinguished. With most species of birds, males and females are distinct - that’s called sexual dimorphism. Blue jays exhibit sexual monomorphism.

Blue jays aren’t everyone’s favorite backyard bird. They’re regarded by some as loud, raucous bullies around feeders, but I find them to be majestic, confident survivors. If you are in the “bad bird” camp have a look at my Bad Birds? blog or maybe check out Lesley the Bird Nerd’s video on reasons to like blue jays. Or maybe just relax and listen to Caspar Babypants sing Bad Blue Jay about a blue jay’s redemption.

A rush of cochineal*

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Male ruby-throated hummingbird at our feeder

OK…. hold your arms straight out to each side and flap them like wings for a few seconds. Now instead of flapping them, rotate them in a figure of eight. Now pin your elbows to your sides and rotate your forearms and hands in a figure of eight. Finally, do this 80 times a second. That’s how a hummingbird flies - and he or she can fly forwards, straight up or down, or hover in place. Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backwards and, even at times, upside down! Hummingbirds can actually rotate their wings in circles unlike all other birds. Of course, we humans only learned how to fly a little over a hundred years ago. Birds have been flying for more like 90 million years since they left their dinosaur ancestors behind, so there has been time to perfect and vary the technique.

In the 1980’s my parents began wintering in Green Valley, Arizona, south of Tucson to escape midwestern winters. Our family spent many April vacations visiting them enjoying the warmth, the sun, and the dramatic change in landscape from New England. East of Green Valley are the lovely Santa Rita Mountains where Madera Canyon is one of the prime stopovers for migrating hummingbirds of the western United States. In the spring it is deluged with hummingbirds - and birders. There are 16 species of hummingbird in North America with 15 of them found west of the Rocky Mountains and only one - the ruby-throated hummingbird found east of the Mississippi.

Hummingbirds can perch, but they can’t walk on their tiny legs

Most hummingbirds winter in Mexico and Central America. The Madera Canyon western birds fly overland to their northern breeding grounds. The tiny ruby-throat flies up to 900 miles non-stop over the Gulf of Mexico on its 2000 mile journey to our backyard. To do this, they increase their weight by 50%, all of it fat. (If you weigh about 3.5 grams (1/10 of an ounce), that’s a 1/20 of an ounce weight gain!) Hummingbirds have the highest metabolic rate of any animal on Earth with a heart rate of around 1200 beats per minute. If my energy output were the same as a hummingbird, I would have to consume and burn off 285 pounds of hamburger, 370 pounds of potatoes, or 130 pounds of bread - every day! But they are not all brawn and no brain. With a brain weight that is 4% of its body weight, the hummingbird has the largest brain size to body weight of all birds.

Female ruby-throated hummingbird stretching her wings

I’ve enjoyed the challenge of photographing these tiny birds if only to capture their “true colors,” which are almost invisible when they are zooming around. Unfortunately, they are a little scruffy right now because, like all birds, they are molting - shedding all of their feathers and recreating a new wardrobe for their upcoming trip to the tropics. Emily Dickinson had the following observations about hummingbirds presumably without a telephoto lens or even binoculars:

A Route of Evanescence,

With a revolving Wheel –

A Resonance of Emerald

A Rush of Cochineal –

And every Blossom on the Bush

Adjusts it’s tumbled Head –

The Mail from Tunis – probably,

An easy Morning’s Ride –

Emily Dickinson, "A Route of Evanescence"

*The cochineal is a scale insect in the suborder Sternorrhyncha from which the natural dye carmine is derived.

A Resonance of Emerald

Do bees have knees?

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Of course they do. They have six - one for each of their legs. Bees have a femur and a tibia in each leg just like us - and the joint in between is a knee - just like us. But this is a bird blog, not a bee blog, so what about birds? Take a look at this great blue heron. He seems to have knees, but they seem to be “on backwards” - right? If you said “right,” you’d be in good company, but you’d still be wrong. Even the venerable Scientific American magazine got this wrong in an article about turkey tendons. This great blue heron like most other birds and many mammals have knees that work just like ours, but in the case of birds, the knees are hidden up under the wing feathers close to their body. The “backwards” joint that you see in this photo is actually the ankle. The same is true of your dog or your cat or your pet giraffe, but not the bear at your bird feeder.

Waiting for lunch on the gulf coast…

Great blue herons are digitigrade animals meaning they walk on their toes (like dogs, cats, and giraffes). We humans, except perhaps the ballerinas among us, are plantigrade animals, walking on our whole foot (all 26 bones, 33 joints, and a hundred muscles, ligaments and tendons). But, before I begin complaining about my knees, let’s get back to the great blue heron.

Ahh, lunch is served.

The foregoing was actually a test of your patience and tenacity. Because the great blue herons have mastered these skills. You have only to watch one standing like the one above, waiting for a tasty morsel to swim by for lunch. In fact, as a further test of your patience, see if you can watch this video from beginning to end. Talk about mindfulness! Could you do that every day? Well, the human fishermen among you probably understand.

Get thee to a rookery!

Herons always prefer to hunt and dine alone. In fact, if you have a koi pond in your yard, a life-sized replica of a heron will repel real herons looking for solitary hunting. But when it comes to nesting and raising young, herons prefer company - sometimes a lot of company - in a group called a heronry or, in more general terms, a rookery, where dozens of birds often of different species nest together in a small area.

Great blue herons are the largest herons of North America with a height of over 4 feet and wingspan often over 6 feet. Herons are not as numerous as starlings or house sparrows, but they are certainly as widespread. East of the Rocky Mountains, they tend to migrate in winter towards Florida and the Caribbean, while in the far west they tend to remain throughout the year.

Their majesty on land and in flight should make the plantigrades and digitigrades and even the bees among us feel weak in the knees.

Heron Rises from the Dark, Summer Pond - Mary Oliver

So heavy
is the long-necked, long-bodied heron,
always it is a surprise
when her smoke-colored wings

open
and she turns
from the thick water,
from the black sticks

of the summer pond,
and slowly
rises into the air
and is gone.

Then, not for the first or the last time,
I take the deep breath
of happiness, and I think
how unlikely it is

that death is a hole in the ground,
how improbable
that ascension is not possible,
though everything seems so inert, so nailed

back into itself–
the muskrat and his lumpy lodge,
the turtle,
the fallen gate.

And especially it is wonderful
that the summers are long
and the ponds so dark and so many,
and therefore it isn’t a miracle

but the common thing,
this decision,
this trailing of the long legs in the water,
this opening up of the heavy body

into a new life: see how the sudden
gray-blue sheets of her wings
strive toward the wind; see how the clasp of nothing
takes her in.



The hawk comes.

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His wing

Scythes down another day, his motion

Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear

The crashless fall of stalks of Time.

from Evening Hawk by Robert Penn Warren

Red-tailed Hawk

Watching a Red-tailed Hawk soar in circles over our backyard eyeing, no doubt, our chickens or, God forbid, our small dogs, I think of Harlow, my late father-in-law. Harlow always said that he would return as a hawk so that he could soar freely in the currents of air and continue his keen-eyed wonder at nature. And whenever we see a hawk, we naturally think of Harlow - and, with that, of course, his wish has been granted.

In fact hawks have for all time and by all people been considered messengers from the spirit world or the gods. They are also symbols of wisdom, vision, and leadership - traits that seem in short supply in some sectors of our national scene these days, but hopefully kindling among new leaders.

The hawks nesting near our house seem to be red-tailed hawks doing their summer breeding. In the fall, they and their brethren will rise up and fly thousands of miles to the south - as far as southern Brazil. Unlike many species, they will make this journey entirely over land - the “long way” as it were - avoiding any flight over salt water.

While solitary birds, migrating hawks along with other raptors can be seen “kettling” up into groups called, well, kettles, in which as many as a thousand birds will seem to soar, climb, swoop and dive as one. In fact, each bird is following its individually most efficient path through the currents and funnels of wind and air giving only the illusion of an amazing synchronous swim. With luck, maybe I can share some photos of a kettle of hawks in the fall.

Look! Look! he is climbing the last light

Who knows neither Time nor error, and under

Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings

Into shadow.

Good night, Harlow.

Broad-winged Hawk

Murmuring Mortimer - the plot to torment a king

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European starling in non-breeding plumage

“Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but Mortimer, and give it him to keep his anger still in motion.” So imagines Hotspur in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I, Act I as he fantasizes a plot to torment the king with repetition of his enemy’s name and the only reference to starlings in all of Shakespeare’s work. But, it seems to have been enough for Eugene Schieffelin, an early pharmaceutical entrepreneur in New York City. Schieffelin was president of the American Acclimatization Society, a group dedicated to introducing European flora and fauna into the United States. He also had a personal passion for Shakespeare and, allegedly, a goal of bringing to America every bird mentioned in the bard’s work. So, in the early 1890’s, Schieffelin imported about 100 European starlings over two seasons and released them in Central Park - the sole ancestors of the 220 million starlings found throughout North America today.

Starlings cause $800 million a year in crop damage. In 1960, an Eastern Airlines flight out of Boston’s Logan Airport flew into a flock of 20,000 starlings and crashed killing 62 of the 72 people on board - still the worst bird strike induced airplane crash in aviation history. Should we designate the European starling a “bad bird?” (See my April 23, 2020 post “Bad Birds?”) Even the Audubon Society has debated the possibility of “hating starlings.”

Many of Schieffelin’s attempts with other birds failed, except, notably, the ubiquitous house sparrow. In 1852, Schieffelin released 16 European sparrows in his Brooklyn neighborhood spawning the 540 million house sparrows that we have today including the 5 million living under the solar panels on my roof. (Hamlet, Act V, Scene 2:  “There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come - the readiness is all” - shades of Baba Ram Dass teaching us to Be Here Now.) 

Speaking of “murmuring Mortimer,” starlings are known to congregate in enormous flocks called murmurations. These dramatic and almost creepy avian formations inspire memories of Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller, The Birds, in which multiple bird species attack humans in the sleepy northern California coastal town of Bodega Bay. You’ve got to have a look at this mesmerizing, short film of a real life murmuration.

Off with your head! Is every king a tyrannt?

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Eastern Kingbird after seeming to have beheaded this red-tailed hawk

The Eastern Kingbird has a reputation for the fearless defense of his personal kingdom with aggressive stunts no matter what the odds seem to be. Little wonder that his scientific name is Tyrannus Tyrannus - like a character straight out of Shakespeare (or today’s newspaper). The Kingbird even has a red or orange crown hidden beneath his black cap that is brandished when he’s really upset.

A member of the flycatcher family, the Kingbird eats mostly insects and occasionally berries. They have even been known to eat small frogs - swallowing them whole after beating them to death against a perch. While highly territorial against their own kind during summer breeding, in winter they will head for the Amazon river basin where they live peacefully in flocks eating mostly berries.

Eastern Kingbird at rest.

Unlike most passerines (songbirds), Kingbirds don’t have a very complex song - mostly a repeated series of high-pitched whistles and buzzes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51s1bh6BAeU And what they have seems to be innate rather than learned since their young can produce the sounds within two weeks of birth.

What an earful !!

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An earful of waxwings

Not even the slightest breeze, yet it’s not my imagination that the leaves in the flowering tree beside our pond are rustling. And not just a little, but all over the tree. Then I catch a glimpse of shiny yellow or some waxy red like the sealing wax on a love letter or a lemon yellow underbelly, and I know that for a few days we will be treated to an earful of cedar waxwings. Eyeful would be more apt, but, oddly, a flock of cedar waxwings is known as an earful. (Such a flock may also be a called a museum for some reason - maybe shades of Madame Tussaud). Earful as a collective name is also odd because cedar waxwings don’t have much of a song - mostly a very high pitched sound not unlike a dog whistle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMvJL_GXIlc These beautiful birds swallow berries whole off of the tree. Their winter diet of cedar berries together with the red pigment from the berries that reaches their wingtips account for their name. They don’t hang out in bars, but occasionally an earful of waxwings will land in a tree with overripe, fermented berries. While this can be seriously toxic for some, it mostly may lead to FUI - flying under the influence.

Honey, I'm home...

in

Sadly, the pair of Eastern Bluebirds that moved into the house in the back corner of our yard in early spring have departed. For reasons known only to them, they simply disappeared about two weeks ago leaving a beautifully built nest in the house. Hoping for their return, I left the nest in place. Now, I am pleased to report, a couple of Tree Swallows have moved in. While I might have preferred bluebirds, I can’t complain about the 2000 insects that each adult Tree Swallow consumes each day PLUS the additional 6000 insects per day that they feed to their brood of nestlings. That adds up to nearly 200,000 insects per breeding season, though, trust me, I won’t be keeping track. And, they do most of their feeding within 40 feet of the ground, eating the black flies and mosquitoes that would otherwise be eating us.

Though they lack the romantic legend of the San Juan de Capistrano Cliff Swallows, Tree Swallows are beautiful birds both in repose and in flight. Like groomsmen at a wedding in their iridescent, blue jackets and buff-colored vests, they swoop and glide around our backyard from dawn until dusk. Apparently, they also bathe in flight, an activity that leaves me speechless! At times the air is filled with their cheerful, repetitive calls. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6Jpi3TEQXI

While we have only the pair of swallows in our backyard, there are more in the field beyond, and they all seem to play with one another in flight. Did you know that a collection of swallows is sometimes called a “flight” and sometimes a “gulp?” Makes me think of cold craft beer on a hot day! However, a group of Tree Swallows is known as a “stand” - just like a copse of their namesakes.

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