Kiskadees, Kids, and the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival

Tweet

The Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival last weekend was, as always, a great success.

I can't imagine a better way to learn about birds if you're a backyard bird-watcher just beginning to distinguish a kiskadee from a kingbird,  or to immerse yourself in the particular  (I didn't say peculiar!)  birding world if you're an expert birder.

Hundreds of birders, butterfliers, nature photographers and artists come to Harlingen TX every year in November for field trips, workshops, seminars, and not least of all the trade show where colorful brochures and knowledgeable enthusiasts peddle all things birding: from binoculars and books to xeroscaping plants and zoos.  You can buy (or put on your dream list)  scopes, feeders, and travel packages. Valley residents and world travelers alike can learn where in the Rio Grande Valley they can go to find its avian specialties such as Green Jays, Chachalacas, Northern Kiskadees, Buff-bellied Hummingbirds, Clay-colored Thrushes, and Altamira Orioles.  Now, I can find all of those in my yard--but I still like to discover the dozens of locations around the valley that attract our special birds.

And it makes me especially proud to see hundreds of people from all over the country and around the world marveling at our Rio Grande Valley.  When my husband decided twenty-one years ago that he wanted to come coach high school football here in the tip of Texas, I had never heard of the Rio Grande Valley.  I was a birder but a stay-at-home kind.  On one of the first days of school at my new teaching job,  I heard the raucus call of a Kiskadee and caught a glimpse of its black and white "hat" as bright yellow and rust flashed by my open classroom door. I  realized that this was more than a place to make a living.  It was a birder's paradise.  We spent weekends driving to the many refuges, parks,  and sanctuaries in the area and finally moved outside of town to the banks of the Arroyo Colorado where the birds and all of nature were right outside our window. 

Kiskadee!  Kiskadee!

As education chair of Harlingen's Arroyo Colorado Audubon Society, I spent two afternoons of the RGV Birding Festival tucked away in Kiskadee Korner, the bustling area of the festival that drew kids like a magnet (or I could say like a  dripping bird bath draws migrating warblers or ripe fiddlewood berries draw Kiskadees).

It was so much fun.  Area refuges, clubs, and environmental groups lured the kids with crafts, critters, face-painting, a five-foot crab (or a five- foot person in a crab costume), and a lady who could imitate (loudly!) just about any bird you could name. At our ACAS corner of the Korner, with helpers from  the Fun 'n Sun RV park, we made masks of Northern Kiskadees, the "official" bird of Harlingen and mascot of our Audubon group.

  I'm not an artist, but  I looked at photos I'd taken of Kiskadees in my yard to sketch the pattern for the masks. The kids were wonderfully creative in creating their masks, don't you think?

Most of the the kids first said they didn't know what a Kiskadee was, but when we played recordings (thanks to the I-bird Pro app on my iphone) of Great  Kiskadees, most said something like, "Oh, yeah--I've heard that in my neighborhood!"  Looking at photos of the birds around the table, they hoped to find a Kiskadee  in their yards.  The idea, of course,  is to not only have fun crafting a mask, but especially to learn about a really cool bird that they can see and hear in their yards and parks.

Kiskadee Kids Korner became Kiskadee Parents.

Parents like coloring as much as kids.

Below I'll share the photos I used to decorate our craft area and to introduce the kids to the  Great Kiskadee. All the photos were taken in the yard.  The one where the bird is gobbling a berry made a good pattern for the mask.  Lots of our little artists made a berry to put in the beak.

One little birder spies a Kiskadee

Great Kiskadees build large, messy football-shaped nests of grass, twigs, and vines in native trees such as this Ebony.  The side entrance makes it easy for the parent bird to look out for pesky cowbirds that would like to lay eggs in its nest or Harris's Hawks that raid the nest and prey on nestlings.

 

Ripe berries from a Manzanita (Barbados Cherry) shrub is a favorite food for this Kiskadee.  The feisty bird chased away a Northern Mockingbird and a Curve-billed Thrasher for its place at the feast.  In addition to fruit, Great Kiskadees will eat insects, frogs, and fish.  They also eat mealworms from feeders -- and Meow Mix from the Cat's dish.  Omniverous is a word that describes them well. 

 

Great Kiskadees used to be called “Derby Flycatchers,” perhaps in honor of the Earl of Derby and perhaps because they look like they’re wearing derbies or round black hats! The gold crown on the top of the head is usually hidden.

 

This Great Kiskadee is definitely not hiding its gold crown!  Raising its crest, flapping its wings, and calling loudly from the electric wires, the bird seemed to be celebrating the New Year when this photo was taken on January 1, 2010.

Kiskadees like to visit birdbaths on hot summer days.  Water dripping into the bath from a hose or plastic jug will make it especially attractive to these colorful birds.

Great Kiskadees, like this one that nested in a yard beside the Arroyo Colorado, often live near water where they can catch small fish, crawdads, or tadpoles.

Coloring page from the Arroyo Colorado Audubon Society

This photo would make a good caption contest.  What do you think this guy is thinking? I'm sure he's asking a question, but I'm not sure what one.

I like that this shows the yellow edge of his beak opening and even the little whiskery feathers beside the beak.  Most flycatchers seem to have those. (Ornithologists call them rictal feathers.)  I've read that the purpose is unclear and even ornithologists disagree:  some think they help the birds catch insects by in effect making the mouth larger; some think they augment their sense of touch; some think they keep insects away from nostrils and eyes. 

For now, it's a mystery.  Perhaps some of the young visitors to Kiskadee Kids' Korner at the the Rio Grande Birding Festival will grow up to become ornithologists and solve such mysteries.  

 

Sometimes it takes just one bird (or snake or insect) to make a kid a lifelong lover of all living creatures.   

Happy Halloween!

Tweet

In our neighborhood we seldom see Trick or Treaters knocking on doors and asking for candy. But when I look closely, I see that Nature itself has done a pretty good job of celebrating Halloween.  In fact, here are quite a few spooky characters I've seen around the yard.

Can you tell what's making this scary face?  It's a pomegranate hanging from a bush in the yard.  (I flipped the photo upside down so that you can appreciate the Halloween mask. )

Cactus blooms can also make faces worthy of Halloween!

This Fungus Face was hiding on an old tree stump--

Talk about disguises:  the Walking Sticks in the photo below came to the party as, well...walking sticks!

What's a Halloween party without a few well-dressed spiders?

Another Silver Argiope is spinning her web.

(A flash from the camera lights up this Wolf Spider's creepy eyes.)

(What's in this web--is it spider or prey? No matter, the web is a masterpiece, a fine Halloween decoration!)

(Click to enlarge:  you'll see the hundreds of baby spiders creepy-crawling out of their pod.)

Other guests at the Halloween costume party:  a butterfly dressed in ghostly garb...

and another appropriately named the Funereal Duskywing, just perfect for Halloween haunting...

Some little goblin  (bee or butterfly?) dressed up in a Flower costume:

and a Black Witch Moth (yes, that's really its name) flew with five-inch wingspan into our house and slept on the curtains:

Last, but never least,  a night-time owl prowls the neighborhood on Halloween night:

Color an Osprey Sky

Tweet

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!

Increase

Tweet

Late summer is a time of abundance.  Where there were two or three Green Jays at the feeders, there are now six.  Where there were a few butterflies basking in the sun or flitting from lantana to plumbago,  there are now dozens.  Four Kiskadees have become eight; eight White-winged Doves have become sixteen. One or two Buff-bellied Hummingbirds at a feeder have become a swarm of Ruby-throated migrants buzzing like bees around any available nectar.

A few days ago I heard a distinctive Green Jay racket. Out on the fishing dock, a family of six of these bright, cheerful, and noisy natives of South Texas lined up on the railing. Four of them were probably newly fledged; all were excited.  Ruffling their feathers and bobbing up and down in a funny dance, they were belting out the  strangest clicks and whistles.

I love these birds and never tire of watching their noisy antics.  When they fly into a tree, they alight on a low branch and hop their way to the top.  Though I don't put out their seed at regular times, they always discover it within about five minutes. With the sudden increase from two to six jays, I'll have to increase my supply of corn, peanuts, and bird seed.

Migrants  that disappeared in late spring are back as fall migrants, bookending summer with bright color and enlivening what had become a very lazy time in the yard.


Black and White Warblers, Yellow Warblers, Prothonatary Warblers, Hooded Warblers, and Canada Warblers began visiting oak trees and bird baths last week.  Summer Tanagers and Indigo Buntings added a splash of color as did migrant Baltimore and Bullock's Orioles that joined the summering Hooded Orioles and native Altamira Orioles. Though not as brightly colored in fall as in spring, these are still pretty spectacular birds. 

A little empidonax flycatcher entertained me all one afternoon catching small insects above the driveway.  I usually don't presume to distinguish between Willow and Alder Flycatchers, identifying them all as just Traill's Flycatchers, the name these two almost identical birds used to be called, but this guy sang and called a number of times, giving me a definitive clue.  Consulting the voice recordings on the Ibird Explorer Pro app of my Iphone, I'm pretty sure this was a Willow Flycatcher.  Its mostly three-syllable song and whit call  was convincing to me, anyway.  For a while earlier in the day, I had wanted to say Yellow-bellied Flycatcher, but the lack of distinct eye ring made me decide this was a Traill's with a lot of color. 

Tropical Kingbirds have been singing in the backyard.  They fly from across the arroyo in the early mornings and announce their identity with song.  The otherwise identical Couch's Kingbirds are more often in the front yard where they nested earlier in the summer.  These look-alikes are native residents unlike the Eastern and Western Kingbirds that have been migrating through.  Great Crested Flycatchers (right) are similar to the Couch's/Tropical Kingbirds and in some ways to the  Brown-crested Flycatchers but with a deeper yellow belly and more rusty color on their tails.  There's an abundance of the latter this week, probably birds that nested farther north as well as our yard nesters.


Meanwhile, a little  Screech-owl sat unperturbed in the pine tree, enduring constant scolding by what seemed like a treeful of wrens and titmice.

I think even the person least inclined to anthropomorphism would call this a "wise old owl."  Or at least a curious and patient one.

Birds and bird activity are not the only increase in the yard.  Butterflies are thick among trees, shrubs and flowers; and blooms are abundant even as rain diminishes.  These three Giant Swallowtails were in a lineup of ten on a  fiddlewood shrub.  I would have needed a wide lens to get all the rest of them in the picture!

Another illustration of burgeoning life around the yard can be seen in the photos above of a Queen butterfly and a Queen caterpillar, both on milkweed plants.  Look closely--do you see what I am talking about? It's not the butterfly or the caterpillar.   That's right--the tiny round white specks are eggs! Click on the photos to enlarge them if you can't find the eggs. 

 I've cropped and enlarged this photo so that you can see the egg better.   The eggs are actually ridged, something my maturing eyes can't tell,  but the photo shows.  This one was on a yellow milkweed (butterfly weed) that is not native to south Texas but it grows well here and spreads easily from seeds that burst out of pods, and with the help of silky white filaments, float on the wind until they lodge in another garden or roadside. 

I have taken many, many butterfly photos in the last couple of weeks and then spent hours looking over guide books trying to identify them.  I used to classify butterflies in such categories as "yellow ones" "white ones" and "little skipperly things."  Now with the help of my camera and guide book (I like Kaufman's because of the maps and indication of size) I'm doing a better job, but my learning curve is slow.  A camera really helps me identify these guys, as it does with other insects and dragonflies.  I think my next blog will be devoted to the various butterflies and dragonflies I've been able to put a label on.

Speaking of increase (and also of insects), I have more photos of the spider I blogged about yesterday.  In the late afternoon sun, it is obvious why this spider is called a Silver Argiope. Notice that the little mate I worried about yesterday was back today, snuggled closer.  I laugh whenever I see this unlikely pair.   There I go anthropomorphizing again. 

Our population of Silver Argiopes has doubled:  today I found another one not far from the first.  Its web is also on the side of the house but separated from the other by a bump-out for the water heater.  This spider is only about half the size of the first one and not so spectacular.

But isn't the shadow cast by this smaller Argiope amazing?  Though the web's stabilimentum (zigzaggy web things) can't be seen well on the web, they are obvious in the shadow.

I'll keep watching these fascinating spiders and learning more about them.  And about the other creatures around the yard.  What's really increasing is my attention.   I'm sure the spiders have always been here.