The day ended after dark, with the raucous calls of two Barred Owls that sounded as if they were in the branches right outside our windows. They didn’t stay long. We may have frightened them away when we turned out the light and walked to the window to listen. But it’s nice to know they’re around.
Late this morning three Chimney Swifts passed low over me, flying close together and twittering loudly and constantly, with stiff wings fluttering. They swept through the trees and down over open grassy yards, then streaked back up again high, swooping over me several times while I was walking, always twittering and flying fast, diving, climbing, and weaving in and out of trees.
This “trio-flying” is a common behavior of Chimney Swifts at this time of year – something I have noticed in the past and sort of halfway wondered about, but never took the trouble to learn more about or question until now. There was something about their constant, expressive twittering calls that made me stop and watch them more closely this time, and the fact that they swept so low and in such dramatic patterns – quite different from the way they might pass over much higher on a lazy summer day.
The Birds of North America species account says trio-flying seems to be performed by one female and two males. Its function is not known, though apparently it’s a part of aerial courtship displays early in the season. It’s “characterized by three swifts following each other as they thread their way among buildings and trees, with incessant, louder-than-normal Chipper Calls . . . At peak intensity, trio-flying results in the most rapid flight speeds, ascending to much greater heights than normal, and flying horizontally great distances.” *
Learning about “trio-flying” is another reminder to me of how much I often take for granted – how much there is to learn about things I see and don’t think to question, or to really watch and listen carefully and with an open mind.
In the course of looking for this information, I also discovered an interesting description of Chimney Swift voices by Winson Marrett Tyler, in A.C. Bent’s Life Histories, which reveals that what I’ve always heard as just a rather nondescript “twittering” actually consists of a surprising variety of calls, though I have to admit it’s hard to imagine hearing these variations in the rapid-fire chatter of the birds as they pass so quickly overhead.
“The notes of the swift remind us of the bird itself – energetic and quick; sharp and hard like the bird’s stiff wings,” Tyler wrote. “The note most commonly heard as the birds shoot about over our heads is a bright clear, staccato chip or tsik – whichever suggests the sharper sound – often repeated in a series and sometimes running off into a rapid chatter. . . . Simple as these notes are, the birds introduce a good deal of variety into them by modifying the interval between them, thereby changing the expression of their lively theme.
“One modification . . . serves to illustrate this ability and may be regarded as representing the song of the swift. It is made up of a long series of notes in which the birds, after giving several isolated chips, change abruptly to a series of very rapid notes, a sort of chatter, then with no pause between, change back to the chips, then back again – chips – chatter – chips, and so on. We may term it the “chips and chatter call.”. . . Another modification of the chip note, often heard in summer when the birds are in a comparatively quiet mood, is a long chatter in which the volume increases and lessens, suggesting the sounding of a minute watchman’s rattle.” **
*Calvin L. Cink and Charles T. Collins. 2002. Chimney Swift (Chaetura pelagica), The Birds of North America Online (A. Poole, Ed.) Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
** Winson Marrett Tyler, Chimney Swift (Chaetura pelagica) in Life Histories of Familiar North American Birds. Arthur Cleveland Bent, 1940, United States Government Printing Office. Selected and edited for online publication by Patricia Query Newforth, 1996-2009.
The soft, clicking pit-oo, pit-oo calls of a pair of Summer Tanagers have been traveling through the trees all around the house for the past few days. These are quieter, more intimate calls than their usual, conversational pik-a-tuk.
Late this morning the pair were calling softly like this and going from place to place among the lower branches of trees in the back yard. The female emerged to sit on a bare stretch of a branch alone, where she swallowed something she had caught and wiped her bill on the branch. Her coloring was very deep, dusky yellow, almost orange, a shade darker on her head, with yellow-brown wings.
The rose-red male flew to the branch beside her and presented her with an insect in his bill, which she took and ate. He flew away, and after only a few seconds she followed him, and I could hear their pit-oo calls again. One of the nicest, most peaceful and pleasant sounds on a warm summer-like morning.
A flash of black and orange wings fluttering in and out of thick green leaves, and a high, clear song in several different variations – American Redstarts seemed to be almost everywhere today. The ones I saw were all males – small active black birds with splashes of orange in the wings and tail – in treetops, shrubs and thickets. The gray and yellow females are equally colorful and eye-catching, fluttering like moths among the leaves, nothing shy or reclusive about them, looking as if they twirl around like children, purely for joy, as well as for catching their food. They are said to fan their tails and spread their wings, flashing their colors, to flush insect prey from the leaves.
An American Redstart’s song always gets my attention, but I never recognize it at first. I just know it’s something different, something I should recognize but can’t quite place – so I have to learn it again every year. But it sounds like a Redstart looks – bright, animated and changeable, reflecting its lively behavior. Though its voice has a unique, consistent quality, it songs can sound a little like several other warblers, and instead of having one easily-recognizable pattern, it varies the phrasing in several ways.
It’s been another warm, humid, windy day with a damp blue sky full of huge, restless gray and white clouds. An Indigo Bunting – the first of the season here – sang from somewhere among the tangle of weeds in the old field just outside the entrance to our subdivision. I couldn’t see where it was, but its chanting sweet-sweet, chew-chew, sweet-sweet mixed with the songs of White-eyed Vireo, Mockingbird and Eastern Towhee, and the spees of a pair of Blue-gray Gnatcatchers. Two Red-tailed Hawks soared low over the field and over the busy highway just beyond it.
The wild grasses, weeds and wildflowers along the edge of the field have made a flowing tapestry of colors and textures for the past two or three weeks that’s a pleasure to walk by. The mixture changes gradually, some plants fading, others appearing as the days go by, and I don’t know the names of most of them, only a few. Clouds of tall white daisies, Queen Anne’s lace, low-growing deep-purple verbena and a graceful, coral-colored, branching sort of weed, speckles of yellow dandelions, furry pink rabbit-foot clover, tall feathery grass-tops, tan brushy grass, fresh, new-green grass, and the crusty brown and rust of old grasses and tiny wildflowers. Puffs of filmy panic grass hover like mist over several kinds of twisted, tough-looking plants. Tiny yellow balls of blooms hug the ground, clumps of tall, harsh, spiky purple thistles, lush honeysuckle vines and flowers and white blackberry blossoms, the soft dusty lilac of Chinaberry trees in bloom – and on the other side of the road, a riot of sunny pink roses tumble over the banks of the ditch.
Indigo Buntings love shrubby, weedy old fields like this. As the species account in Birds of North America notes, “Their colorful appearance and cheerful songs are good reasons to fallow old fields and to spare (not spray) herbicides along railways and roads.”*
*Robert B. Payne. Indigo Bunting (Passerina cyanea), The Birds of North America Online (A. Poole, Ed.). Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
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.