Birding Notes

After a hot, gusty, cloudy day, by evening the wind had died down, the clouds had dispersed, and the air was calm and almost sultry as a big full round orange moon rose and shimmered behind the dark outlines of the trees. Two bats swooped low over the grass and all around us as we walked up to the top of the driveway in deep twilight to see the moon and watch the bats appear and disappear and the last light fade from the sky. It felt like a preview of summer.

Late yesterday afternoon when gray clouds finally broke up into warm, humid sunshine and blue sky, I went out to have a look at the Eastern Phoebe nest – from way below its perch in the elbow of a gutter pipe, just below the roof – and found three big, healthy-looking Phoebe nestlings there, crowding the nest, all of them easily visible with binoculars, and even better through a scope. They all sat with bills gaping open, showing the orange insides of their mouths, panting, and a couple of times one snapped up an insect that got too close.

This afternoon when I looked again – they were gone. So I hope they’ve fledged successfully.

Meanwhile, the Eastern Bluebird pair continues to make frequent trips to the nest box with caterpillars and other insects. Both parents carry in food. The female seems to go in and out more often when I’ve been watching – but I haven’t watched long enough or consistently enough to say that for sure. Several times I’ve seen the male fly to the top of the nest box just as the female flies into the entrance with food. He waits there until she comes back out, then flies away with her.

The nest made by the Ruby-throated Hummingbird, though, has been empty every time I’ve looked at it for the past several days. It’s been 13 days since I first watched her constructing the nest, and she continued to work on it for at least three days more. On these following days, she seemed to work at a more leisurely pace and spent a lot of time sitting in the nest and looking around. Periods of rest like this alternated with periods of work, when she would fly away, bring something back, and add it to the nest.

As before, when she brought back material for the interior, she perched on the rim to poke it in, then sat in the nest and wiggled around, maybe working with her feet, and often poking at it with her long bill.

Once, after sitting for several minutes looking around, she whirred up to perch on the rim and look down into the nest, then flew up and down the pine branch, as if searching for something or checking out the immediate surroundings, then back to the nest where she settled down onto it, wiggled, fluttered her wings, poked with her bill, and slowly made a complete 360-degree turn, all the way around, wiggling the whole way – then whirred out onto the rim and flew away again. She was very pretty, iridescent green where the sun struck her feathers, striped with gray where the pine needles cast shadows.

By the third day, the nest had become much larger, rounder and deeper, extending further up the branch, and much more thickly covered with lichens. That was the last time I saw her in the nest. After then I was away from home for a couple of days and since then have not been out on the deck often, but have checked now and then and see only the empty nest – and we’ve not yet seen a male Hummingbird, though that doesn’t mean for sure there’s not one.

The highlight of the morning was a glorious and completely unexpected view of a male Scarlet Tanager perched in the top of a pecan tree flooded in sunlight. A red so clear it looked like glass with light pouring through it, and with the ink-black wings there was no doubt at all what it was – but at the same time, coming from what seemed to be the same place, was the unmistakable song of a Robin.

For a minute or two I couldn’t figure it out. The Tanager was preening, but it even seemed to pause and open its short, sharp bill, lift its head, and the Robin’s lyrical cheer-up – cheerio notes spilled out. Then the Tanager flew, and I saw that, of course, a Robin was perched just below it and to the left in the same tree, still singing.

A slow gray dawn began the day, with rainwater dripping from the trees from showers overnight, and a burst of birdsong that reached a peak about 6:15 – 6:45, led by the lisping songs of a Northern Parula and a Phoebe, both in the trees right outside my bedroom window. Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Great-crested Flycatcher, Chipping Sparrow, Red-eyed Vireo, Yellow-throated Vireo, Cardinal, Chickadee, Bluebird, Brown-headed Nuthatch, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Downy Woodpecker . . . . and then a song I’m not so sure of, but think it may have been a Palm Warbler, a string of notes with a slightly ringing quality, but not loud. It drifted away, and I’ll never know for sure.

It’s the laziest way to go birding – and one of my favorite ways at this time of year when so many birds are singing, with new arrivals almost every day – just lying in bed with the windows open, listening as the different singers come and go. Getting up and being outside early is much better, I admit, but it kind of depends on your mood.

By 7:30 I was outside, with sunlight breaking through the clouds, a Red-eyed Vireo traveling through the leaves of the water oaks overhead, a Yellow-throated Vireo singing down the street, Summer Tanager, Scarlet Tanager and Louisiana Waterthrush songs from somewhere deeper in the woods, along with the calls of an Acadian Flycatcher, the twitter of Chimney Swifts passing over, and the weesa-weesa-weesa of a Black and White Warbler in the oaks on the edge of the yard.

Then a loud, rising and falling ca-ca-ca-ca-cawwp-cawwp-cawwp from the woods across the road – a Yellow-billed Cuckoo, the first time I’ve heard one this season.

A Summer Tanager has been singing in the woods often since its arrival in mid April, and the pik-a-tuk calls of a pair frequently lace through the leaves of the trees around the house, but I hadn’t been able to see one until today. This morning after breakfast, the rumors continued. Through the kitchen window I saw movement in the big, floppy green leaves of the white oak branches that hang over the deck and went outside – and could hear the pik-a-tuk calls and see the rustling movement as birds moved through the foliage, but they remained mostly hidden still, moving further and further away.

It was late in the morning as I walked up the driveway toward the mailbox – when my mind was on something else entirely and I least expected it – when a male Summer Tanager appeared right in front of me, perched on a low branch of a pecan tree. It sat there, calm and quiet, stretched out in its typical, rather low posture, giving me a beautiful close-up view, deep blushing-red all over, with darker, shadowed red wings and long, heavy bill. The feathers on his crown were fluffed into a crest.

A little further up the driveway, in accidental contrast to the sturdy, handsome, deliberate Tanager, a female Ruby-throated Hummingbird hovered like a whisper, low over a carpet of tiny, low-growing wildflowers that spread in a yellow-spotted cloud over an open stretch of the yard. Many of the flowers have gone to fluffy seeds, like dandelions, and she was gathering the fluff.

It was a warm, sunny, perfect May Day with a soft blue sky thickly scattered with loose white clouds, and lots of birdsong and activity.

Early in the afternoon, I was sitting out front after lunch for a few minutes – much too nice a day to stay inside – listening to the calls of a Great-crested Flycatcher, Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Phoebe, and a couple of Brown-headed Nuthatches, and the songs of a Yellow-throated Vireo, Red-eyed Vireo, Northern Parula and Chipping Sparrow, and watching our Bluebird pair continue to bring food to the nest box – when I heard a buzzy song in the treetops that caught my attention – trees-trees-whispering trees. I’m not good at recognizing most wood warbler songs, but this is one I’ve always especially loved – a Black-throated Green Warbler, a small, vividly-patterned woodland bird that looks like its name – with a greenish back, bright yellow face, olive crown, black throat and bold patterns of black and white in its wings and flanks. Its song is usually described as something like zee-zee-zee-zooo-zeet, but somewhere I heard the more poetic description, and that’s what I’ve always remembered. Trees-trees-whispering trees.

I could see it rustling through the highest part of the treetops, but the most I could make out was a glimpse of black as it moved, so I never really saw it, and then it disappeared and I couldn’t hear its song anymore, so it must have flown on.

A little before 7:00 this evening, the weather was warm, murky, cloudy, and humid, and the woods were mostly rather quiet. But a Great-crested Flycatcher put on quite a show at the edge of the woods, flying from low limb to limb, calling whreep in a clear, sharp way, and sometimes whrrrreeep in a deeper, rolling, burry way, and sometimes a short, gurgled burrt. It perched on broken-off dead snags in full view, looking all around, showing off a long-necked regal profile with the fine crested head, long bill, pale yellow breast and long cinnamon tail. Directly from the front, it looked comical, its eyes tiny in a big head that looked like a beehive hairdo, turning sideways as if to peer down at me. It moved from branch to branch, hawking insects, and once coming out of a cluster of oak leaves with a wriggling caterpillar, which it snapped quickly down.

The day ended well after dark with the call of a Barred Owl, something we have rarely heard the past few months. It only called three or four times, a simple, long HOOO-oooawww, ending in a long, rumbling vibrato. I made the mistake of going to the window and pushing it open a little further, and heard no more after that.