Color an Osprey Sky

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Finally, it is autumn on the Arroyo Colorado.

We really do have four seasons, though first-time visitors sometimes think it's just one long summer.  (I thought so, too, that first disorienting year we were here, twenty-one years ago.)  The leaves of only a few trees change color. Our Rio Grande Ash, for example, sheds yellow leaves sometime after Thanksgiving and is budding by Valentines' day, and Mesquites sprinkle leaves on the ground in a windy cold front--here one day and gone the next. Many of the trees keep leaves all year; flowering shrubs and wildflowers bloom almost continually.

But small things mean a lot here, and for that reason I like the subtly changing seasons, and especially autumn when that first "cool" day is such a relief.  

That first hint of coolness crept in this week.  Tuesday morning we awoke to low humidity and temperatures in the 60's!  One step onto the back porch reminded me that it was autumn indeed, not just on the calendar.  A familiar bird call made me look up:  against the clear cool blue sky, an osprey glided over the river, home from his northern summer.  Our autumn and winter skies are seldom without an osprey and his loud whistle as he soared was musical and welcome. 

Ospreys are not the only birds above the river these days.  Cattle Egrets fly low over the water, especially in the evenings;  small shore birds fly with short direct wing beats,  moving too quickly to identify.   (An occasional Spotted Sandpiper stops to teeter-totter along the dock, the slower movement making him just about the only sandpiper I can ID for sure.  Here's one that stopped by yesterday. His spots are gone, another sign that autumn is here.)



Long lines of larger shore birds are also a sign of fall.  I haven't seen returning ducks or geese yet, and the White Pelicans are still up north, but today a line of dark ibises flew by, silhouetted against another blue blue sky. 

White-faced Ibises fly in groups of all-dark birds, not the mixed dark and light of the White Ibises with their darker juveniles.  The sky in this picture is lovely. When I saw this photo, and the Osprey sky above,  I  starting wondering just what shade of blue "Sky Blue" would be on one of those little  wheels or cards that paint companies display at building supply stores. I can't pass by that aisle in Lowe's without browsing through the color palettes.

Because color intrigues me,  one of my favorite  Iphone apps is Sherwin-Williams'  "Color Snap."  You can snap a picture with your Iphone, or use a photo you have already saved, and learn what Sherwin-Williams paint color a certain area of the photo matches.  Now, of course, I know that photos vary from printer to printer and the world has many more colors than a computer or camera has, but let's forget all that and pretend that a sky really can be matched through a photo to a paint chip.  According to my Iphone app, the Osprey sky and Ibis sky are both Danube, color # 6803.  Or at least the upper right part of the Osprey sky is Danube.  The bottom left is Jacaranda, #6802 and the part that is covered with wispy clouds just above the Osprey is Notable Hue, #6521.  Certainly it is notable as well as beautiful.  I may just paint the ceiling of  my porch Danube or Jacaranda or Notable Hue.

Okay, this is getting fun.  I'm sending photos via email from my computer to my phone and color-snapping away.  I tried this photo of a Tropical Kingbird that perched on a palm tree in the yard.  Yesterday I snapped a dozen pictures, marveling at the clear colors in the cool morning, and now I am curious about labels for those colors.  (In another life maybe I'll be one of those people who make up color names for paint companies.)

 Again, the sky is Jacaranda.  The lovely shade of yellow on the  kingbird's breast is part Jonquil and part Daisy.


Here's another colorful photo.  The butterfly is a Two-banded Flasher, its back appropriately labeled Flyway on the color chart.  The butterfly is like one my neighbor  carried over from the Esperanza shrub between our houses.  It flew away before I answered the door, but when we returned to the Esperanza, others were there along with  three different species of long-tailed butterflies.

This Flasher looks stunning on the yellow petals of the Turnera diffusa (Mexican Damiana), a small shrub  that blooms randomly along the walkway, wherever it can find a patch of sun, and folds its petals as dusk approaches.

Below is a  Long-tailed Skipper sporting a lovely shade of green (Rook Wood Dark Green) that nicely complements its brown wings (Rock Garden).

My handy Color-Snap app would identify complementary colors for any color in my palette, but I think Nature does the best job of that.  What could be more complementary than the yellow hues of the kingbird's breast against the blue of the sky,  or the blue of the flasher against the bright blossoms of the Turnera?  I'm inspired to paint my porch ceiling Jacaranda and my porch swing Daisy--a lovely combination.  Nature is a pretty good exterior decorator.


My last post (a month ago! I apologize for being lazy about writing) chronicled the abundance of late summer in the yard.  I thought then the hummers were thick around our feeders and nectar plants, but this first week in October seems the height of their migration. We have mostly Ruby-throated with a few Black-chinned and the resident Buff-bellied Hummingbirds. 

The colors of these hummers look washed out in the photo because it was late in the day, and I used a flash, which disturbed the hungry little birds not a bit.  They ravenously drink the feeder dry in just a day and a half.  All of these are female or immature Ruby-throated Hummingbirds.  I haven't seen an adult male for a couple of weeks.  I'm reminded of Emily Dickinson's description of the fleeting brilliance of a hummingbird: 

 A Route of Evanescence
 With a revolving Wheel --
 A Resonance of Emerald --
A Rush of Cochineal --

 I just checked Color Snap to see if Sherwin-Williams uses Emily's labels for their colors (by chance, of course).  But no, the hummer's throat is Vermillion, not Cochineal. (Another wonderful color, vermillion:  I'm anxiously awaiting the return of our winter Vermillion Flycatchers. I'll let you know if a photo of the male matches S-W's vermillion.)

Out of curiosity, I just looked up cochineal on the web.  I knew it denoted red, another word for carmine.  What I didn't know is that it is a red made from natural dyes created from smashed up cochineal bugs!   The tiny bugs live on nopal prickly pear cacti.  In the fifteenth century the dye was extremely valuable, second only to silver as the most valuable export from Mexico. (I'm pretty sure we have those little bugs here in the Rio Grande Valley.  I'll have to check with a bug expert.)

Once again, Emily Dickinson has chosen a perfect word to describe the ruby throat of the hummingbird, accurate in color and connoting a sense of treasure as well.  The photo here does not begin to show the glittering iridescence of its ruby throat, but Dickinson's poem almost does.

Finally, here's a photo that I think captures the color of one tiny bit of the yard.  I won't even try to label its colors with Sherwin-Williams' clever marketing tool.  Indeed, the colors may exist only in my mind. You may not see them as I do.  What I'm trying to say, as I look at this perfect bee, is what I think Emily Dickinson means in another brief but memorable poem:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,---
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.

This bee and fiddlewood are not of the prairie, but are a small corner of  what botanists call the Arroyo Colorado brush.  Like Emily's prairie,  I can "make" the brush in my mind by evoking the colors of the golden-winged honey bee and the green/white petals of the native fiddlewood.  I can snap photos and look at the brush from my deck if I'm here--but if I'm away from home, I can make a little patch of South Texas brushland and the Arroyo Colorado with the colors in my mind.  Reverie will do.

*********************

I wrote this entry a week ago and then forgot to post it, but  I'll go ahead and date it as though I posted it then.  The weather continues to be lovely and the skies are just as blue. Hummers have decreased in number but still swarm the nectar a dozen or so at a time, competing with bees and each other. 


The Arroyo Colorado Audubon Society had its "Big Sit!" here on Sunday and counted 86 species of birds, including some I hadn't yet seen this fall--Merlins, Kestrels, Gray Catbird, White Pelicans to name a few.  I'll write about the Big Sit later.  Right now I hear  the unmistakable call of an osprey.  I am going right out to sit in a lawn chair under the blue (Jacaranda or perhaps Danube) Osprey sky!

After the Storm

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I'll start out with the good news:  the storm is over and bird-watching along the river is good.   The storm surge made the river itself very full, especially at high tide.  With nowhere to stand,  wading birds flew by in a steady parade: Roseate Spoonbills, Green Herons, Great Blue Herons, White and Snowy Egrets, Tri-colored Herons, Reddish Egrets.  Black-crowned Night Herons perched in trees. Several kinds of terns cruised the river and sometimes swooped low to scoop up a fish:  Least, Caspian, Royal, Forster's, even a Black Tern or two. Brown Pelicans fished and Laughing Gulls stole their catch.    

But the Star of the day was a bird I had never seen from our yard--one I  see infrequently in the bay:  the magnificent Magnificent Frigate Bird. An adult female flew fairly low (for a frigate bird) over the river as I watched from the porch.  Strangely, I was expecting it.  I told myself I wanted to see one today, went out on the back porch, and twenty minutes later there it was!  (I've had these intuitions before:  see the post "No Sooner Said..." for one example.) 

The photo I managed was from far away (I was looking the other way when it first passed the yard and I had to run down the stairs for a clear shot), but it is clearly a magnificent bird, number 262 on our Yard List!

Hurricane Alex, after drawing a bull's-eye on us for a few hours Tuesday, moved its course to the south and went into Mexico instead of South Texas.  Outer bands of rain and wind hit us yesterday, but the wind never blew here stronger than 60 mph and the rain in our area was less than four inches.  I was relieved that there was no damage to our "nest"--but some of the birds were not so lucky.

The Brown-crested Flycatchers may have lost their chicks.  Early this morning I saw them near the nest site in the cottonwood stump, just sitting.  Not rushing in and out of the nest with bugs.  Not singing as they do when waiting for their mate to vacate the nest. Later I walked over to the old cottonwood and for the first time could see nest material hanging out of the stump as though they had pulled some of it out.  Though "hope is the thing with feathers," as Emily Dickinson says, I'm not too hopeful about the nestlings.

A neighbor told me that she found a Great-tailed Grackle's nest with two dead nestlings in her driveway.  This morning I looked at the retama tree where I had photographed a grackle nest a couple of weeks ago, but the nest was gone.  It was probably the one that blew into the driveway next door.

The Kiskadees were also unlucky. In the last post is a photo I took a few days ago of the nest in an ebony tree.  Today, it looks like this. The main part of the nest is half the size it was and the blown-away part is lodged in a fork of the tree a couple of feet below it.

The wind blew all day yesterday, first from the north as we were catching bands of the storm circling counterclockwise around the center of the hurricane, and then from the east as the outer bands north of the storm accompanied it to land.



The good news from the yard is that the little mockingbird I talked about in the last post apparently survived the gale.  I saw two juveniles near the nest today. I was so glad to see the survivors that  I snapped a picture though the light was not good enough to get a good photo.  Notice the speckled breast:  that's how I know this bird is a juvenile.

Watching the young mockingbird battle the storm as the hurricane's winds began on Tuesday, I kept thinking of Emily Dickinson's poem about hope and the storm.  (I didn't quote it in the last post because I suspected I might do too much of that, but now I'm thinking, why not?  I taught literature for over thirty years and old habits are hard to break!)

"Hope" is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—

I've heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.

I keep disagreeing (at least in part) with Emily Dickinson even though I love her poetry.   She seems to say that hope doesn't ask anything of us.  If she means that hope exists in the world despite all the things we humans seem to do to defeat it, I guess she's got a point there.  But at the same time I think we need to sprinkle a few crumbs for that bird to eat!

I keep thinking of those birds in the eye of the man-made storm in the Gulf of Mexico.  We can't do anything about hurricanes but we can take care, as best we can, of the natural world. If hope is the thing with feathers what are we doing to deserve hope?

"for every Bird a Nest"

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The story of the yard in June is always a story of nesting.  I haven't been outside as much in the last two weeks as I was during migration (the heat index is over a hundred by late morning) but I have been looking out the windows, and even from limited views the nesters can be seen going to and fro or overlooking their nests from a high branch.

Some of these busy nesters remind me of a poem by Emily Dickinson in which she wonders why ("wherefore" in her archaic 19th century English) a little wren continues its search for the perfect nest spot, even though there's one in every tree:

For every Bird a Nest --
Wherefore in timid quest
Some little Wren goes seeking round --

Wherefore when boughs are free --
Households in every tree --
Pilgrim be found?   
. . . .

(click the link above for the whole poem)

Watching a pair of Brown-crested Flycatchers, I'm thinking the same thing.  Why continue the exhausting quest in search of the perfect spot (as though on some sort of pilgrimage) when there are perfectly fine nesting spots everywhere and every bird seems to be guaranteed one.  Why all the fuss, just build the nest! get on with it already!!

Really, I'm just kidding.  I love watching birds search all around for the best place to build.  They seem so human.  I can just imagine what they could be thinking.  

I'm fairly certain this is the same pair of flycatchers that so steadfastly built and tended a nest in April and May,  even though they disappointingly (at least for me) seem to have raised Bronzed Cowbirds instead of flycatchers.  Watching from the front deck for a few days last week was entertaining.  Here (photo on right) one looks over the dead cottonwood stump that has already this spring proved a successful home for European Starlings (though, really, who needs more of those to compete with our native cavity-nesters?) and Golden-fronted Woodpeckers.  (The woodpeckers had chiseled out quite a few holes in the two old cottonwoods during the winter--a few in our house, too! Golden-fronted wp's are the contractors who provide housing for several species.)

Here (left) the lively brown flycatchers  flutter excitedly over the birdhouse that's already been used by Brown-crested Flycatchers for many years.  Though not a great photo, it does capture the flurry of activity as they "quest" for that perfect spot. 




Flycatchers are not the only birds on a quest for the perfect nest in our June yard. These Black-bellied Whistling Ducks, if not still searching out nesting places, are certainly searching for something.

In tall Washingtonian Palm trees they look high...

they look low....

Once called Tree Ducks, these guys favor the palms and sometimes even sit on the electrical lines.  Every day we watch them on our dock, preening and sunning themselves.  And early in the morning, before the heat is oppressive, we watch their pilgrimage.  Emily would certainly be wondering the whys and wherefores of their constant search.

The Northern Mockingbird nest in the neighbor's small Anacua tree that a few weeks ago contained a single nestling (see posts from May) was empty by early June without my seeing any newly fledged Mockingbirds. The quick glimpse I had one day of a nestling with dark feathers was too brief to say for sure it was a cowbird. 

[I'll repeat again my disclaimer about bothering nests.  It is something I am super careful about.  I don't want to  move branches to get closer looks or disturb the nesters.] 

Two weeks ago the neighbors discovered a mockingbird going in and out of the Cenizo shrub that is less than ten feet from the Anacua where the first mockingbird nest was. (Cenizo is the native "purple sage" that blooms so beautifully across the river a few days after a summer rain.  Its ashy-green foliage and soft purple blooms  decorate the wild thorny brush along the Arroyo Colorado and are often used in landscaping.)

I think this second nest, fastened like the first to  forking branches about four feet above the ground, may have been built by the mockingbird that sang day and night during the time the other pair were nesting. (See this post for a picture of that nest site.)

It surprises me that the nests are so close together.  The neighborhood gossip in me is starting to speculate.  Did the pair, to make up for the first possibly cowbird-infested nest, start a new one nearby before the cowbird had left home?  Or is this a case of Big Love (one of my favorite television shows) where one male has actually two adjacent homes and two ladies?   Hmmmm.   (I read an interesting article the other day, while throwing out old birding magazines, that cited DNA studies showing supposedly monogamous nesters sometimes having multiple mates.  Some males father broods with more than one female and sometimes eggs in one nest have more than one male parent. )

Whatever the parentage, nestled in the cup of coarse twigs, lined with finer vines and palm tree fibers, were six eggs, four of them light blue blotched with reddish brown.  According to my nest book  (Nests, Eggs, and Nestlings of North American Birds by Paul J. Baicich and Colin Harrison) those are indeed mockingbird eggs.  Hooray!  Unfortunately,  two more eggs were the pale blue-white of the Bronzed Cowbird. (No adult mockers were in sight, so my neighbor removed the two interloper eggs which, being tall,  he could do without touching the nest or the branches.)

A couple of days ago the eggs began hatching. The state bird of Texas, once again, is increasing in number!   And the neighborhood cats are running for cover as the Northern Mockingbirds begin their assault.  My hope is that the intense heat as well as the protective instincts of the birds will keep the cats indoors where domestic cats belong. 

I've been promising a photo of a Hooded Oriole nest and finally have one.  Woven of the finest materials, soft gold fibers from the palm tree, this is a nest I think Emily would call "of twig so fine," an achievement she guesses the wren aspires to.

On a frond of a Washingtonian (non-native) Palm tree, this nest is in the usual kind of tree for a Hooded Oriole but is not typical because it is on the top, not the underneath, side of a dried, not a green, palm frond.  The day following our discovery of the nest, high winds twisted the leaf so that the lovely little woven nest is now out of sight.  I was concerned that the winds would blow down the dried frond, but luckily it's still there, more hidden now from the marauding Bronzed Cowbirds. Woven of fibers pulled from the leaves and bark of the tree, the nest is perfectly camouflaged. 

Hooded Orioles, like Emily's nest-questers, seem always to be in search of a more perfect "household" even though every palm tree looks to my un-oriole eyes to be a perfectly good place. At least twenty palms are in--or within a short distance of--our yard, and at least two pairs of the little orioles continually fly from palm to palm.  I suspect the building of superfluous nests is a reaction to the overabundance of Bronzed Cowbirds.



I'll note just a few more of the active nests:

Another of our common nesters, Great-tailed Grackles, typically build large nests of twigs and weeds, sometimes several in the same tree or nearby trees. The one in the photo above is in our lovely blooming Retama tree.  Others are in an Ash tree and several are in two Live Oaks. The nests are usually pretty high in the trees and are apparently vulnerable to large birds of prey that fly over the yard, judging by both the fact that  Harris's Hawks have already raided a nest of young birds this spring,  and also by the reaction of adult grackles when vultures, hawks, and even gulls fly over the trees.  

The Turkey Vulture being chased by the grackle here was followed closely by a Black Vulture that was likewise harassed by the protective parents.  Male grackles don't seem to help build or sit on nests, but they do keep watch and go into action when necessary!


Curve-billed Thrashers have fledged already from the nest in the native Spanish Dagger Yucca.  You can tell this is a young bird because its spots are smaller, its bill slightly shorter, and its eye pale yellow rather than orange.  Curve-billed Thrashers have always nested in our yard and have had as many as three broods per year.  I've found their nests in several kinds of native trees including Negrito, Esperanza, and even one year in a metal Purple Martin house.  The house was no longer occupied by martins because it had become overgrown by small trees.

                                                                   
The last photo is of one of the Couches' Kingbirds that are nesting in a Live Oak tree. Their dawn song, longer and slower than their other calls and songs is one of my favorite sounds of a spring morning.

Our small Rio Grande Valley yard is filling up with more and more nests.  In such a place where "boughs are free --- / Households in every tree," our spring birds could indeed be described as a " throng -- /  Dancing around the sun." 

Nature's People

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Just in case you think all we have in the yard are birds, or in case you are tired of photos of orioles, I'll begin with a beautiful fellow I found in the neighbor's yard yesterday morning, a Texas Indigo Snake.  Moments before this photo was taken, the snake was winding its full four or five feet at a leisurely pace along a flower bed and water sprinkler.  But  when I rushed over with my camera, it quickly slithered away under a plumbago shrub against a fence. Like poet  Emily Dickinson's  snake in "A narrow Fellow in the Grass" :  

"it  wrinkled,  and  was  gone."

I thought I'd been foiled again, but I took this picture anyway, aiming the camera back in the shadows.  Surprisingly, the photo turned out okay.  You can see the deep indigo blue of its back end coiled up by the lighter face with the little whisker-like marks radiating out from the eye.  I love these creatures and think they are among the most beautiful in the yard.  I've seen pictures of them eating rattlesnakes,  and I'm always ready to tell that to people who declare they hate snakes and have guns to kill them with (unfortunately I've heard that said a surprising number of times around here). I don't think Dickinson would kill a snake, but even she who can describe one so well says they make her feel "zero to the bone."  She's one of my favorite poets, but I'll disagree with her on that.

Now to the orioles!  I've spent the weekend watching  Hooded Orioles that returned just a few days ago.  At first glance they look like the resident Altamira Orioles.  When we first moved to the Rio Grande Valley and I had never before seen either species, I confused the two.  The Altamira is a little larger, a relative field mark not too helpful if  the two birds aren't side by side.  In the photo to the left here is a Hooded Oriole and to the right an Altamira Oriole. You can see two distinguishing features easily -- the Altamira has an orange shoulder patch notching a little "v" in the top front of the black wing, and the Hooded does not.  That's probably the most helpful field mark, the one a field guide would point an arrow at.  The shape of the black facial patch is different, too.  Some field guides say the Altamira has a mask because the black goes from the beak back to the eye and is narrower on the throat. On the Hooded Oriole the black goes down from the eye, covering more of the face and throat--see what I mean?

If you look closely at the Hooded Oriole on the left, you can see that the beak is slightly decurved, or pointed downward, another distinguishing mark, but it's the orange shoulder patch that I always look for first.  Of course, once you have welcomed these guys to your home and hung around with them, you know them from a distance just like you know each of your grandkids running  towards you,  even from way across the park.

Using those two field marks, you could answer the photo quiz from my last post, right?  And a special "GOOD JOB!" to  Caleb, my smart grandson who may have also had help from his equally smart younger siblings.  (Not his baby sister, though--she hasn't looked through a pair of binoculars yet,  but just a few more months and she'll be birding with the rest of us.) I think most of you identified the orioles correctly-- Orioles A and B in the quiz were Hooded Orioles and Oriole C was an Altamira Oriole, all eating nectar in the bottlebrush tree in our yard. (If you're not sure what I'm talking about, see the post below that I wrote a few days ago.)

The Hooded Orioles were busy this weekend checking out the prime real estate in the neighborhood-- the tall Washingtonian Palm Trees where they  make nests every summer.  Here's a photo of one male that perched on a palm above our deck yesterday afternoon and called out "wheat!" over and over.  He was repeatedly answered by two other "wheat!"s  from two other palm trees.  This went on for quite some time. 

I don't know if other male orioles were answering the calls.  I'm assuming a female Hooded Oriole was within hearing distance, since the male I watched was being such a show-off.   At one point he fanned his tail, making it look in miniature like the palm frond he perched on. I hope this photo shows up well enough for you to see the black tail feathers---it  was extremely neat to watch.  (Click on the photo to enlarge it.)  

Today I finally saw a female Hooded Oriole,  first in a shrub near the palm where she looked very lemony yellow below, more greenish yellow on her back.  Then later I photographed a male and female together eating an orange half.  Unlike the Altamira Orioles whose males and females look pretty much alike, the male and female Hooded Orioles are distinct.  Aren't they a cute couple?

I'm still on the lookout for migrants,  but so far most of our birds at the baths and feeders have been birds that show up here only in the winter.  The Gray Catbird is still here and the Black and White, Orange-crowned,  and Yellow-rumped Warblers. This weekend's new birds for 2010 were  a Yellow-throated Warbler and an American Robin, both brief winter and early spring visitors.

April begins in a couple of days, a fabulous birding month here at home.  I love to see the exciting birds that pass through for a day or two--I'm still fluttering about last week's close encounter with a Swallow-tailed Kite--but I also especially love the ones that stay awhile and  build nests, raise young. I like to get to know them, not merely tick them off my list. I understand why Emily Dickinson refers to them as  people:

"Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality"

         (click this link to read Dickinson's "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass")

I don't share Dickinson's view of a snake that made her feel such a cold uneasiness, but I too know "nature's people." I look forward to the just beginning nesting season when I am a nature watcher and not just a lister.  I think getting to know nature does transport us to a better world.  We could sometimes use a little more "cordiality."