Proud papa

Every year, we have a nest full of house wrens in our yard. I like to think of them as the same devoted pair coming back every year, but this is not actually too likely. The male travels all around the perimeter of our yard, singing a pretty, warbly song at each stop he makes.

This year the male built a dummy nest in our other nest box (which we'll remove, now that we know it's not being used). The female chooses the nesting site from among the incomplete nests, and then finishes the job with soft material like moss and feathers. According to the Cornell Ornithology Lab, house wrens stick a spider egg sack down in the nest box. When the spiders hatch, they eat the little mites and other parasites that can attack the baby birds. Clever!


This year there seem to be 4 chicks in the nest. They look maybe a week old aready -- eyes open, feathers developing, looking around alertly. Both parents are busy bringing food all day long. We picked a moment when both parents were out foraging to snatch a picture.


No wonder papa's so proud!

April chores

Now that we've all filed our taxes (you have, haven't you?!), it's time to think about a much more pleasant chore: hanging out the hummingbird feeders. In the midwest, tax day is the cue to clean out the feeders, make nectar, and watch for hummers.

According to the hummingbird migration map, they've already been seen in Indiana, and as far north as Chicago,
http://www.hummingbirds.net/map.html

There haven't been many sightings, but even a few are enough to get me excited. These plucky little guys are a real inspiration -- and a photographic challenge. I must have hundreds of photos of hummingbirds, many of them blurry, or showing just a bit of bird in the corner. They're a real test of my reflexes. I have a few that I really like.

Some other April birding chores:
--make sure the birdhouses are cleaned out and ready for new tenants. Some people put wood chips in the bottom of houses to give cavity nesters something to excavate.
--clean out the bird feeders. In Bloomington Indiana, the local Audubon society chapter hosts a feeder cleanout each spring, if you need help.
--we're hanging some new housing options -- gourds raised by my father. I'll post the results later in the season.

And then there are the gardening chores....but that's enough chores for one day!

Yard Alarm

A lot of people don't like blue jays. They can be aggressive toward smaller birds, and are known to eat the eggs of other birds. They're loud, raucous, in-your-face birds.

But sometimes that's a good thing. Yesterday, we suddenly heard a blue-jay commotion out in the back yard. It sounded like every jay in the neighborhood was right outside our door. Cat? I wondered, as I peered out the kitchen window. No, not a cat -- a HAWK! Sitting in our woodpeckers' favorite tree, big and supremely confident, he surveyed our yard, looking for an easy meal.

All the birds had long since scattered. Not a bird to be seen anywhere, and none to be heard, except for those blue jays. They kept up the alarm until after the hawk had flown off, still hungry (thank goodness).

As for me, since the birds were safe, I made a grab for the camera, but missed him. He came back later in the day, and once again, the yard alarm went off, but I missed him again. It was probably a Cooper's Hawk, as far as I could tell, although there are a few hawks that are similar. Here is one I photographed last year in Illinois.

I would feel terrible if our bird feeders turned into hawk feeders. As far as I'm concerned, the blue jays are very welcome at our place!

Sleepy Finch

Birds sleep in the oddest places. Spurning our attempts to provide a warm place to sleep, they prefer an open branch out in the cold.

Several months ago, my mate-4-life designed and built a roosting box for the little birds in our back yard. It's a beautifully constructed box complete with heating coil embedded in the floor, and it keeps the box about 30 degrees warmer than the coldest nights, with an upper limit of 50 degrees (we wouldn't want to toast the little guys, after all). It is an engineering marvel. But the "Birdie Hotel," as we call it, seems to remain unused.

I hung a little plant saucer from the hotel and filled it with sunflower seeds, thinking that the free food might draw attention to the comfortable roost just above. So what do we find? The hanging saucer itself has become a favorite roosting spot for this little house finch. He sleeps, fluffed up against the cold with his beak tucked in, on the edge of the dish, or sometimes inside it. Go figure.

Hummingbird season

It's time for hummingbirds! This is the height of fall hummingbird activity in our area. They're stopping by our back yards and gardens to fuel up before making the long journey to Mexico and other southern areas, where they winter.

The photo above was taken in my butterfly bed, and shows a hummingbird on a Tithonia flower. (The bird is either a female or a first-year male; the ruby throat appears after a male's first winter.) They're also visited cardinal climber flowers, zinnias, and our snowball bush. All the books advise planting red petunias and other trumpet-shaped flowers, but I've seen them visit a wide variety of flowers. This is the first year I've planted Tithonia, and I had intended it to draw butterflies, but the hummers were an unexpected bonus.

We have 3 feeders, spread out so that one very territorial male can't monopolize them all. We occasionally see a mid-air encounter near one of the feeders, involving spread tail feathers and lots of chattering. We keep the feeders up through the end of October. Although most hummers will have migrated south by then, there could be a few stragglers who will need the extra fuel. There is a common myth that keeping feeders up too long will discourage hummingbirds from migrating -- this is not true! They hang around just as long as they need to, and will migrate when they're ready.

I stopped writing this blog when we went on vacation, and it's been hard to get back in the groove. Over the next few posts, I hope to write about some of the birds we went looking for last month.

Empty nest

I thought I would write about butterflies next, but there is a robin update. The baby robins have grown up and gone off to college. We didn't see them fledge, but after examining the nest and the area around it I'm pretty confident that they made it out on their own without mishap. The nest is intact and undisturbed.

This nest is a work of real beauty. I'm amazed at the carefully molded mud layer pressed against the grass outer layer. It's hard to photograph even now that I'm free to get up close, because it's so well hidden.

It's best to leave it undisturbed. I've read that birds may come back and reuse it for the 2nd brood of the season, building a new layer on top of the old nest first. I've never seen this myself.

Other birds have been carrying nesting material around the yard, so we know there's a lot going on in the nearby bushes and trees, mostly out of sight.

Mr. Lonelyhearts, the little house wren, is still trying to get a date. He's been singing and putting twigs into the birdhouses, but we still don't see a mate.

Nesting update

Robins

Baby robins! We see three tiny beaks in our robin's nest. One looks bigger than the others, but this may be because of its position in the nest. Other (fuzzier) pictures show them all about the same size.


All day the parent robins gather worms and bugs from our back yard and ferry them to the nest. The lawn and especially the flower beds seem to offer a birdie buffet. When they're not feeding the nestlings, the parents are often standing guard in a nearby tree or on the fence. They chase away blue jays who wander into the area. The jays may only be after the peanuts at the feeder, but our robins are taking no chances, since jays are known to eat eggs or prey on nestlings.



Wrens
We're watching our little house wren with some puzzlement. Will he ever get a date? He's put some sticks into all 3 of our birdhouses, and last weekend we saw him fly to each house in turn, perch on the top, and sing. ("Oh, what a beeea-u-tiful nest; I made it just for you-ooo...") But we haven't seen a mate. Last year we had wrens nesting in 2 our of birdhouses, and we saw the pairs together. But we're not sure whether we have a pair, or a lonely bachelor.


This house shows the largest nest of the 3, and so we think they'll nest here, if they nest in our yard at all. The nest is bigger than it was last week, but we're still not sure what they're up to. House wren nests are practically all twigs -- and if you ask me, they could use a few lessons in interior decorating. But the mama wrens seem to like it, and I guess that's what counts.






Chickadees

I have no idea where these little guys are nesting, but we think it must be nearby. I enjoyed watching this chickadee pulling fibers out of my planter--he worked at it for several minutes, and then flew off with a beakful of them. Later, I watched as the pair pulled little vine bits off the brush pile. Chickadees are cavity nesters, so they'll excavate a hole in a tree, or nest in a birdhouse. (Pick ours! Pick ours!)


Visitors of note this weekend included a grey catbird and -- to my utter astonishment -- a cedar waxwing. Butterflies have started appearing too -- and they will be the focus of my next post.

A bird bonanza

Our back yard is full of birds! I am too tired to write much, and besides, the pictures are the most fun. So here is a photo album of visitors to our back yard. Please excuse the awkward placement & uneven sizing.

Female (L) and male (R) Rose-Breasted Grosbeaks. The photo of the female was taken a couple of weeks ago, but they are abundant in the yard.



This weekend we saw 3 Baltimore Orioles (L) and one vibrant Indigo Bunting (R).



Although others in our area have reported seeing Indigo Buntings, we were still a little surprised to see them this early. They usually begin visiting our yard in late May or early June. I love them just for their color. Buntings belong to the finch family and visit the thistle feeders along with Goldfinches.





Of all our back yard birds, I think I love woodpeckers the most. We had downy and hairy woodpeckers over the weekend. After this female Hairy Woodpecker (L) had eaten, she packed her beak with suet and flew away with it. Babies?




The most exciting visitor we saw
recently was the red-headed woodpecker.
It's been a long time since I was able to admire the rich colors of this bird in person. Male and female look alike, so we're not sure which this is. This bird, too, was taking suet away.

By the way, woodpeckers like both plain and flavored suet. But the kind with lots of seeds in it is less useful -- they pick the suet out and leave the seeds. We use plain in one feeder and "Peanut Butter and Jelly," which has peanuts and berries in it, in the other.

That's the back yard bird news. Next time, I'll give a nesting update.

Tenants!

I hadn't seen our back yard for 2 weeks and on Saturday was amazed at the glorious color. The crabapple trees, the dogwood, and the lilacs were all blooming, and everywhere there was the most beautiful green I've ever seen. It's been a very long winter.

House wrens are building in one of our birdhouses. All afternoon we watched as twigs were stuffed through the entrance hole. Sometimes the wren would go back up onto the roof of the house and try again from a different angle. Sometimes, he'd lose the twig altogether. We still don't know if we'll have eggs in the birdhouse. A male house wren will fill several cavities with twigs, and then take the female around for a real estate inspection. She picks out the one she likes, and adds a soft lining of feathers or moss to the nest. We're waiting along with the male to see whether our house will be approved!

In the kids' old playhouse (left) is a robin's nest, the one I wrote about April 7. If you look closely at the photo below, you can see her sitting on the nest. I took this photo with a 300 mm lens from about 25 feet away to avoid disturbing her. She was absolutely motionless and difficult to spot. This nest is fairly close to our back door, and to one of my flower beds. We're trying not to startle the robin, but she seems undisturbed as I work on the bed.

Some interesting birds came to the yard this weekend. Rose-breasted grosbeaks (below) were everywhere. They nest farther north, but pass through Indiana in the spring and fall.

We had 1 oriole, who took some nectar from our young pink dogwood tree. This bird is a rarity in our yard and visited only briefly. My photos were taken from some distance and are not quite as good as I'd like - but I feel lucky to have photos at all. It's gratifying to know that he found nectar in our little tree.

My only disappointment this weekend was that, in spite of 3 feeders, vibrant pink crabapple blossoms, and lots of welcoming hummer- thoughts, we still haven't seen any hummingbirds in the yard. Hurry up, guys! (Please?)

Busy robins

In southern Indiana, it's finally spring. Sunny and in the 60s, perfect weather for gardening. I started clearing the dead foliage from the flower beds, and my mate-4-life mowed the grass for the first time this season. We use a push-mower (no gas), so we can't let it get very long.

There are quite a few robins who hang out in our yard. They hop through the back yard, flicking the leaves aside with their bills and digging worms or bugs out from underneath.

One robin was building a nest somewhere nearby, and kept returning to the back yard for dead grass and plant matter left from last year. The robin in the photo above has a mouthful of old plant fluff and grass; the robin below has strands of grass. Both photos were taken on Sunday in our back yard.

According to my handy reference sources, female robins build the nest in layers: 1-a foundation layer of grass, leaves, and twigs; 2- the mud layer, pressed into a bowl shape on top of the grass layer; and 3-the soft inner lining. Our robins were working on that first layer over the weekend. Robins lay 3-4 blue eggs, and they usually raise 2 broods in one season. They stick with their mate for the season, but not for life.

I think I know where these robins are building, though I haven't been able to spot the nest yet. We put out nesting material in net bags and also on the ground. Feathers, straw, short (3") bits of string or yarn, dog hair, bits of wool -- all make good nesting material. Some we gather from around the house, and some we buy from the local birdwatcher's store. I think it would be cool to find some of my old yarn in a robin's nest. But it looks as though we're producing good nesting material just by not raking the lawn!

She's back.....

.....but without her mate. The female pileated woodpecker (March 26 post) came back Sunday for a brief visit to one of the suet feeders, but the male wasn't with her. What does this mean? Well, it probably means that they are nesting, but taking turns on the eggs. (In this photo, taken in January, the male is on the right. He has red moustaches along the side of his face, but they're hard to see here.)

My reference book of choice, for all questions relating to woodpeckers, is Woodpeckers of North America, by Frances Backhouse (Firefly, 2005). According to Backhouse, pileated woodpeckers mate for life and stay close together all year long in their permanent territory. When they nest, they excavate a cavity in a mature tree and the female lays about 4 eggs. The parents take turns on the nest; they may trade off several times a day, but the males always stay on the nest at night. Woodpecker chicks hatch in 10-14 days. They're naked, blind and pretty helpless, but they double their weight in 24-48 hours. (No wonder it takes both parents to keep them fed!) Pileated chicks leave the nest in about 27 days. After the nesting season is over, those old holes are still useful--the woodpeckers don't reuse them, but about 38 species of birds and animals do.

I've filled the suet feeder favored by the pileateds with peanut & berry-flavored suet, everybody's favorite. I hope someday they'll bring the kids by for dinner. Until then, I'm studying my book, a gift from my own mate-4-life, and enjoying their visits.

The hummingbirds are coming!

The hummers are coming! Hummingbirds are making their way north from the south where they've spent the winter. You can see their progress on this site:

http://www.hummingbirds.net/map.html

For the last couple of weeks, they've been in northern Georgia & Alabama. This weekend, they've moved into Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina, and they're not far from Kentucky. They should reach Bloomington, Indiana around April 15, give or take.

It's a long and exhausting journey, and there aren't many nectar plants in bloom just yet. They really benefit from all the feeders people hang from their porches or in flower beds.

Last year, we had many hummingbirds in our yard. They're not shy -- if you stand still near the feeders, they'll buzz around you without paying you much attention. They can be very territorial about feeders, especially the males. Last year, we had one male who chased off every other bird until we put out a second feeder.

In our area, the bird everyone sees is the ruby-throated hummingbird. Mature males have the red throats; females and first-year males are green and white. We make hummingbird nectar as follows: put 1 part white sugar and 4 parts water in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, cool, and fill the feeders. No need to put red coloring in it, but most feeders are made with red plastic, which helps to attract them.

Hummingbirds are attracted to red or orange flowers, especially those with trumpet-shaped flowers, like honeysuckle. In our garden, the hummingbirds were enthusiastic about my zinnia bed. The photo above was taken in my zinnia bed last September. But the red petunias everybody said would attract them were a bust--I never saw a hummingbird near them, and hardly any butterflies.

It looks as though we'll need to put out feeders in about 2 weeks. I can't wait to see them again!

Signs of Spring

I've never written a blog before, though I've kept a journal for years. I thought it might be fun to put together some of the things I've learned, read, wondered about, gotten mad about, or otherwise encountered. In any case, if you're an actual reader, welcome!

I only see my garden on the weekends. We have 8 bird feeders in the yard, and all week I look forward to watching many types of birds come and go. They perch on the feeders, or in the branches of the pine tree, or on the trunk of our walnut tree. They chase each other through the branches and zoom by the kitchen window. It's like watching a game of musical chairs.

This past weekend, I saw the usual assortment of chickadees, titmice, goldfinches, blue jays, cardinals, house finches, and -- best of all -- woodpeckers. But the big news was the absence of the female pileated woodpecker. For weeks, we've been thrilled to see the male and female coming to the suet feeders together. The male goes to the suet first, while the female waits on the tree trunk below, calling and watching. When he moves up the trunk, she takes his place at the feeder. They may stay for as long as 15 minutes. (And I hang out the kitchen window with the camera for as long as they're here.) But this weekend, he came without her. WHERE IS "MRS. BIG BIRD?" To my ever-hopeful mind, there can be just one explanation: maybe she's on the nest! Pileateds are early nesters-- they can nest as early as February. Last year, the 2 parents and 1 fledgling visited our yard in June. So I can't say for sure, but I imagine her keeping eggs warm somewhere deep in the trees. Perhaps "Mr. Big Bird" is feeding her bits of suet gathered from our feeders. Live long and prosper!