Birding Notes

Early this afternoon, Tufted Titmice and Carolina Chickadees were taking turns bathing in a shallow clay saucer on the rail of our back deck, when two small round yellow-green heads and gray faces emerged among the leaves of the white oaks just above the rail. They were Chestnut-sided Warblers, each face marked with a crisp white eye ring, and their fall colors neat and fine – olive-yellow back, two distinct cream-yellow wing bars on dark wings, and a clean white breast. One dropped down to the deck rail and sat there for two or three minutes, waiting its turn among the low-hanging leaves. Unfortunately, the Titmice and Chickadees were in no hurry. One after another – sometimes two at once – they took their time fluttering and splashing and thoroughly soaking in the water. Meanwhile, three Ruby-throated Hummingbirds zipped and twittered around the feeder that hangs nearby, several times startled away by splashing water or the other birds, but always returning. Finally the warblers gave up and flew away. Maybe they came back later.

It was an active half-hour or so in a back yard that has seemed more often quiet than not for several weeks. The Chestnut-sided Warblers are among the few neotropical migrants we’ve seen so far this migration season.

Early on a quiet, almost cool gray morning, a Pine Warbler sang in the woods. A Carolina Wren burbled and another trilled. Carolina Chickadees and Tufted Titmice made small, high, chipping, ticking sounds in the treetops. A Northern Cardinal peeped. A Downy Woodpecker whinnied. Two Red-bellied Woodpeckers flew from tree to tree, making churck-churck calls and stopping to work on a trunk here and there. An Eastern Bluebird murmured. Distant Crows cawed, and a Blue Jay squawked. A Mourning Dove I hadn’t noticed flew up suddenly from the ground on whistling wings, and away.

Under a tall, dense hedge of wax myrtles, a pair of Eastern Towhees hopped and scratched up leaves. Even in the gray light and shadows, their colors stood out – the male a bold black, red-orange and white; the female warm, suede-brown, orange and white. Two American Robins and a pair of Cardinals flew in under the shrubs to join them. A Northern Mockingbird sat near the top of one of the wax myrtles, head high, tail lifted slightly, looking alert, watching the yard. A Brown Thrasher lurked near the bottom of the same wax myrtles, looking handsome and strong as always, with its long fierce bill – but hiding cautiously there. It always seems interesting and almost a paradox to me that, except in the spring when they’re singing, Thrashers are so skittish and shy.

On the other side of the shrubs, in an open area of grass, one small, brown-streaked Chipping Sparrow hunted, apparently alone, almost invisible except when it moved. A Brown-headed Nuthatch arrived in some pines with squeaky chatter. An Eastern Phoebe sang. A Ruby-throated Hummingbird zipped over the street and shrubs, through the trees and over the roof, heading for the oaks and the feeder out back.

Then a quiet Summer Tanager flew into the branches of a tall, slender river birch – one of three that grow together gracefully on the edge of the yard – and remained there, glowing rose-red, among the small, shimmering, yellow-green leaves of the birch for several minutes.

A profusion of white and deep-purple morning glories has begun to spill out and over a roadside ditch choked with tall grass, kudzu, and other vines and weeds along the edge of the old field. I’ve been watching for them to appear – it’s a spot where they usually bloom in late summer, gracing the grass and weeds with unexpected color. The vines of hundreds of tiny bright-red morning glories also twist among them and spread even further out into the field. A burning-orange Gulf Fritillary, several lemon-yellow Cloudless Sulphurs and Sleepy Orange butterflies and a Red-spotted Purple flew over the field, some stopping on the yellow blooms of dandelions. A few early Foxtails have begun to appear. From the shadows of dense privet thickets came the raspy mews of a Gray Catbird and the song of a White-eyed Vireo, which for some reason sounded more musical than usual, a tumble of whistled notes between the beginning and ending tchick!

In a ragged old pecan tree just down the road, a female Black-and-white Warbler crept lightly over the limbs, looking for insects, her black-and-white striped coloring slightly muted, not as bright and crisp as a male’s. Among the dull-green and brown leaves of some privet nearby, a flash of yellow showed another warbler, though all I could see was a small, fluttery bird with a grayish back, very yellow throat and chest, clean white on the lower belly, and some kind of facial marking that might have been an eye-ring. My best guess was a female Magnolia Warbler – but I’ll never know for sure.

September has begun with a return to very warm, humid, muggy weather. Late this morning, cicadas and grasshoppers sang under a sunny blue sky with big white clouds, and butterflies flew, but birds were remarkably quiet, even for this time of year. At first I heard not one at all. Then a few Cardinals peeped. Chickadees and Titmice fussed in the woods. The potato-chip call of a Goldfinch passed overhead now and then. The soft pik-a-tuk of a hidden Summer Tanager, the whispered spee of a Blue-gray Gnatcatcher. But mostly, the memorable parts of the day were seen, rather than heard.

In a large, grassy yard, in the shade of several pecan trees, four Northern Flickers raised their heads above the tall yard-grass to look around, like watchful grazing animals. Foraging with them in the grass were Mourning Doves, American Robins and Eastern Bluebirds. From where I stood, the Flickers’ heads looked round and mostly gray, with long pointed bills. Red crescents marked the nape of two, and a black moustache distinguished the cheek of one. Black bands on the chest curved above a warm-tan belly, thickly spotted with black. The backs were richly patterned with black on brown. They hunted in the grass, walking, leaning down to probe and feed, pausing to look up again. Chipping Sparrows flew up from grass along the roadside, and one quiet Northern Mockingbird perched in a shrub on the corner of the yard.

As August drifts to an end, with many of the birds of summer now quiet and maybe even gone for the year, this morning in a warm, light rain, the electric chick-brrrr call of a Scarlet Tanager moved through the wet green leaves of the woods, in the same area where one often sang a month or two ago. An Eastern Wood-Pewee sang puh-weee in the trees around a meadow-like yard. A White-eyed Vireo continues its brisk chick-a-perioo-chick in the old field, one of the last singing birds of the summer.

Toward the end of the day, we began to get good, hard, steady rain, probably coming from the outermost bands of a tropical storm moving in from the Gulf.

This morning – a warm, sunny, blue-sky day, with cicadas and grasshoppers singing loudly – an Eastern Wood-Pewee sang a clear, dreamy puh-wee from the branch of a pecan tree on the edge of a thicket. It’s the first one I’ve heard this season. It sang several times as I watched – flying off to catch an insect and returning to the same branch.

A small, neat gray flycatcher, an Eastern Wood-Pewee looks pale on the throat and around the neck, has dark gray wings with two white wing-bars; a dark, slightly crested head and sometimes a very faint eye-ring. I wasn’t close enough to see an eye-ring, but the song and the flycatcher’s neat, crisp shape were both familiar, and its way of flying is distinctive, too – frequent flights from a branch to catch an insect, focused, quick and efficient, somewhat in contrast to the languid song.

Eastern Wood-Pewees used to be here around our neighborhood all summer, and their sweetly whistled, rising and falling songs – pee-a-weeee; wheeee-oo – were among the most characteristic sounds of summer. Unfortunately, the past few years I’ve heard them only in migration, though during the fall, especially, we usually are lucky enough to hear and see them for three or four weeks, as they pass through. Their fall puh-weee, sung by migrants, is different from the summer song, but the quality is so much the same it’s not hard to recognize the singer.

“Although still considered common in most of its range, this species declined significantly on its breeding grounds over the last 25 years,” says the species account in Birds of America Online, “perhaps in part because of heavy browsing of forests by white-tailed deer.”

In the woods around our neighborhood, the browsing of white-tailed deer has almost completely eliminated the usual vegetation that makes up the understory of the forest, so this change may well be at least one of the reasons Wood-Pewees are missing here in the summers now.

*John P. McCarty. 1996. Eastern Wood-Pewee (Contopus virens), The Birds of North America Online (A. Poole, Ed.) Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

This morning dawned beautiful, clear, sunny and cool, in the sixties for the first time in a long while, and birds seemed more vocal than for the past few days, maybe welcoming the weather, too. The quiet’s not unusual for August, with the songs of cicadas, grasshoppers and other insects often drowning out most other sounds. Many mornings lately, I could stand on the porch and hear only one bird or two, at most. Very, very quiet. But this morning, even before leaving our own front yard, I heard an Eastern Bluebird’s blurry call, the song of a Carolina Wren, an Eastern Towhee, a Red-eyed Vireo’s song, the caw of a Crow, the squawk of a Blue Jay (and another Blue Jay doing a pretty good imitation of a Red-shouldered Hawk). American Goldfinch called as they flew over, and a Red-bellied Woodpecker rattled.

On the edge of a neighbor’s yard, four Chipping Sparrows flew up from the grass into a small tree, their bright reddish-brown crowns glowing. A Northern Cardinal ducked into the dark green depths of a Leyland cypress.

For most of a walk through the neighborhood, the usual suspects were around, widely scattered – the spee calls of a Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, the WHEET-sit of an Acadian Flycatcher, a Downy Woodpecker’s silvery rattle, the soft pi-tuk calls of one Summer Tanager; the chatter and songs of Tufted Titmice, Carolina Chickadees and Carolina Wrens; a scattering of quiet American Robins, the coo of Mourning Doves, several quiet but active Northern Mockingbirds, and the song of one White-breasted Nuthatch. A Red-shouldered Hawk sailed silently, suddenly just over the treetops ahead of me, and disappeared into the woods. The long, dry, percussive call of a Yellow-billed Cuckoo came from very far away.

In the old field, the vines of small deep-red blooming morning glories have begun to twist and spread through the tall grasses and other weeds near the roadside. A Red-tailed Hawk sat on the top of a pole. A Gray Catbird gave a raspy mew from a perch on the edge of a ragged privet thicket, well camouflaged, a dark-gray shadow of a bird among dull-green leaves.

As I walked along the field toward its southern end, two tiny field mice ran out of the grass and weeds onto the open pavement in front of me, pretty close, and froze there. They were so very small, barely an inch or two long each, plus thread-thin tail, light brown and frail looking – they looked like little cartoon mice. I stood very still for several seconds, then stomped a foot lightly – and they both scurried off into the weeds again.

The sky was beautiful, blue and all but empty, with one Turkey Vulture the only soaring bird until I was almost back home, when two Mississippi Kites appeared, dark slivers of wings, soaring high in the southeast, and soon drifting away, out of sight.

At 7:00 this morning, when I stepped outside, our yard and street were shrouded in a warm gray fog. Two Red-eyed Vireos sang from different directions in the woods nearby. After listening for a minute or two, I started down the steps and ran face-first into a spider web strung between the two big shrubs on either side of the porch. Combing sticky strands of silk away from my eyes and nose and hair, I walked on up the driveway, without binoculars today, and ducked under the heavy, wet, low-hanging branches of crape myrtles, the ground and pavement beneath them scattered with white petals, washed down by yesterday’s rain. The sun was up, but not yet visible behind the fog and clouds.

An Eastern Phoebe sang, an Eastern Towhee called, Northern Cardinals peeped. Crows strutted around grassy yards and cawed and croaked. Several Eastern Bluebirds sang – four perched in the bare top branches of one pecan tree, waiting to welcome the sun. An Acadian Flycatcher sang a sharp WHEET-sit from the woods along a creek. A Blue-gray Gnatcatcher called its raspy spee from the thickets of trees and vines around a corner where they usually are, and a Great Crested Flycatcher called whreep from a big Red Oak.

The morning seemed very quiet, no sounds of traffic or people, maybe muffled by the fog, with my own footsteps sounding on the pavement. Crickets chirped. A lone cicada buzzed as it flew a long distance from tree to tree – it looked more like a hurtle than a flight, a desperate plunge from one spot to another.

Up a steep hill in a wooded stretch, Tufted Titmice fussed their day-day-day; Carolina Chickadees sang a more relaxed fee-bee, fee-bay. A Downy Woodpecker whinnied. A Carolina Wren sang – and another sang in response. Several Carolina Wrens trilled, burbled and buzzed. At this time of year they always seem to become more vocal, as other birds become more quiet, and their songs on a morning like this are especially musical, expressive and welcome.  Two Brown-headed Nuthatches chattered high in some pines. One White-breasted Nuthatch called a nasal awnk-awnk from further away. An American Goldfinch called as it flew over.

A Red-bellied Woodpecker rattled and chucked. A Summer Tanager called pik-a-tuk from the leaves of a tall tulip poplar. Mourning Doves cooed. A Northern Flicker whistled a loud kleer! At the crest of the hill, several Crows noisily cawed and croaked and flew from spot to spot among some trees. I couldn’t find a hawk, but suspect there might have been one hidden there. A quiet Northern Mockingbird perched in its usual large, rambling bush along a wooden fence, where I’m pretty sure a pair of Mockingbirds has had a nest. A Chipping Sparrow trilled a long, level summer song from a low branch of a tree in a large yard. Several American Robins were scattered out in the grass below.

Just outside our subdivision, an Indigo Bunting chanted its sweet-sweet, chew-chew, sweet-sweet from the top of a dead tree on the edge of the power cut that runs through the old field. I could barely see it, and not its color at all – just a tiny dark dot. Eastern Towhees called chur-whee. A White-eyed Vireo sang. Mockingbirds and Mourning Doves perched on the wires. Though often there’s a Red-tailed Hawk sitting on one of the poles overlooking the highway below, the poles were all empty this morning. Fog hung over the highway, and cars and trucks streamed by with headlights shining.

Late in the morning the day became sunny and clear, with a bright blue sky and rain-green trees. Ruby-throated Hummingbirds came often to the feeder that hangs from the deck out back.

Eastern Bluebirds are among the least hidden and most flashy, colorful, active birds right now – they seem to be everywhere, all through the neighborhood. In the early mornings, several perch in the bare branches that stick up from the tops of pecan trees, facing the sun, and sing their chorry, chorry songs. Several days ago, on a warm early morning after an overnight rain, I passed many Bluebirds hawking insects in the air, almost hovering over the road and around treeetops and over grassy areas, catching insects in flight. The air was full of tiny, swarming insects. One caught in my throat, and after that I tried to keep my mouth closed, but the Bluebirds looked like they were enjoying an easy feast – or maybe it was just a snack.

As July comes to an end, with hot sunny days, broken often by afternoon thunderstorms and soaking rain, Ruby-throated Hummingbirds come and go from the feeder on our back deck all day, at least one male and three or four females or juveniles, maybe more, in constant humming, zipping, swinging motion except when perched in the limbs of the nearby oaks or resting briefly on the feeder, in uncontested moments, to sip.

An Indigo Bunting and White-eyed Vireo still sing in the Old Field, but Mockingbirds and Brown Thrashers are quiet now – or at least not singing. Cicadas sing loudly all day, and Katydids all night.

When I first stepped outside early on a warm, humid Sunday morning in late July, the only sounds were the background buzzing and chirping of insects. Not a single song or call of a bird. The woods and yard seemed very quiet. It was about 15 minutes after sunrise, the sky a pale silk-blue, with rumpled morning clouds spread across the east and a red-gold sun behind a screen of trees. Then crows cawed in the distance. An Eastern Towhee called to-wheee.

As I walked down the street, a Northern Cardinal fled without a peep into a bush. An Eastern Phoebe hunted from low branches of oaks. In the leaves of two persimmon trees at the first corner, several small birds rustled around, among them two tiny, silvery Blue-gray Gnatcatchers, flashing the white sides of their tails.

And that’s the way it was – though the morning seemed so quiet on the surface, all along the way as I walked, birds appeared in the grass and shrubs and trees, preening, hunting, foraging, calling in chips and peeps, mostly quiet but a few singing here and there. And for every one I saw or heard, I’m sure I walked past many more without ever knowing they were there – like a Red-shouldered Hawk perched low in an oak in a wooded yard. I wouldn’t have seen it if something hadn’t caused it to fly, low across the road in front of me and into another stand of trees, a brief but clear view of broad dark-brown wings and back checkered with white, ruddy breast and banded tail, before it disappeared into the shadows of leaves again.

A White-breasted Nuthatch called a nasal awnk-awnk-awnk, and two Brown-headed Nuthatches chattered in some pines. A Red-bellied Woodpecker rattled. A Downy Woodpecker gave a bright whinny from the top of a tree. A Carolina Wren sang jubilee-jubilee-jubilee, and another wren answered with a trill. A Mourning Dove cooed.

From the highest part of a tall tulip poplar tree came the ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-cawp-cawp-cawp of a Yellow-billed Cuckoo, a dry, exotic call that cracked the hazy quiet of the morning like a shell. I could see the dense green leaves shudder as it moved, but could not see the Cuckoo. A tall, slender, elegant bird with creamy-white breast, smooth brown back, down-curved bill, and long dramatically spotted black and white tail, the Cuckoo is a beautiful example of how much stays usually hidden behind the screen of the summer woods.

An Acadian Flycatcher called a sharp, crisp whit-seeet from down in the woods along a creek, the kind of sound you wouldn’t notice unless listening for it. It was too far away to see – though if I did walk into the woods and down toward the creek, it probably wouldn’t be hard to find. A small jewel of a bird, greenish-gray, with a slightly crested head, pale breast, white wing bars and a thin white ring around the eye, it sits in low branches in the lowland along a creek and gives its quick call often. Because they usually stay secluded in the woods, Acadian Flycatchers are not often seen, but they’re not really shy. Often when I walk near a creek an Acadian Flycatcher comes around to check me out, seeming as curious about me as I am about it.

Further on, two Summer Tanagers called back and forth to each other from opposite sides of the road, on either side of me, soft, repeated calls of pi-tuk, pi-tuk, as they moved through the trees. Then one of them came out into view near the top of a pine, a male, rose-red all over, with a large, heavy bill, and a quizzical tilt to his head as he looked around.

In the rather tall green grass of a yard, lush from a good bit of rain this month, four Common Grackles, two Starlings, five Robins, two Mourning Doves and two Northern Flickers were foraging, widely scattered and almost hidden in the overgrown grass. The Flickers were especially nice to see – recently I’ve been hearing their kleer calls and long, trumpeted rattles more often than earlier in the summer. In the deep grass, I could barely see the round, handsome gray head of each, brown back barred with black, and a red crescent on the nape of one.