Blind Spot

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Today was so lovely that I spent much of it outside.  It was just cool enough (high somewhere in the 70's) that I could sit in what is becoming one of my favorite spots:  a chair blind under the anacua tree beside the driveway.  It's a little folding lawn chair enclosed in a small attached tent with zip-out windows.  The birds can't see me--or if they do they are not alarmed--and I can get pictures of them at the birdbaths close by.  The Northern Mockingbird above was one of my first visitors. He's taking a break from defending the ripening fiddlewood berries on the shrubs near the deck.

Another bather was this stunning bird--a Yellow-throated Warbler that hung upside down on a branch of the oak tree and then flittered in to the terra cotta saucer-baths.   A common yard bird for us in the winter, it's nonetheless a special guest.

Green Jays are all over the yard, having had an apparently very successful nesting season.   Even noisier today than the Kiskadees, with buzzy croaks and snores and cheh-cheh-chehs, the jays ruled the yard.  The bather above looked unusual with its outer yellow tail feathers being the only ones in its tail! The jay below, messily eating the orange suet cake,  displays the blue/green tail that is typical. 

Green Jays don't seem to fly long distances.  They fly from tree to tree, landing near the bottom and hopping to higher branches. They follow one another, tails flashing yellow V's of those outer tail feathers,  and make a ruckus with their odd sounds.

Black-crested Titmouse

Other birds I saw at the baths from my "blind spot" included Carolina Wrens, Black-crested Titmice , a White-throated Sparrow, a Baltimore Oriole, Orange-crowned Warblers, an Ovenbird, Great-tailed Grackles, Red-winged Blackbirds, Lesser Goldfinches, and lots and LOTS of House Sparrows.


Since the wind was relatively calm today, I could hear birds all around me as I sat in the blind.  Once, as  I played my Ibird Pro app to hear the call of a White-throated Sparrow, the sound of wings and feet on the camouflage tent fabric startled me.  I think it was the titmouse pictured above but I was "blind" in my blind, at least to what was going on over my head.

While I was trying to get a picture of the warbler I heard loud familiar calls clattering overhead.  It was a sound I knew I should know--but since it was out of place in that part of the yard, I couldn't quite figure out what it was.  To get a good look at the noisy mystery birds, I would have had to climb awkwardly out of the little chair/tent contraption I was in, a  move that would scare all the birds at the baths, so I remained where I was.

Later, when my neighbor told me he had seen five large Ringed Kingfishers flying over our yards south of the houses calling loudly their wild clattering rattle, I realized what I had heard.  We usually see this largest of our three species of kingfishers on the north side of the yards, along the river, in ones or twos, but today they were flying high in a group over the front yards. Later from the deck I took a photo of one of them. He's just a dot above the palms, but that shape is unmistakable.  I missed the parade of five of the chattering giant kingfishers, but I didn't miss their chatter! 

The most contant bird sound of the day was one that might be my favorite:  the resonant rolling call of the Sandhill Cranes as they fly overhead to the fields across the way.

When I wasn't in the blind, I was on the deck that overlooks the front yard, another favorite viewing spot, especially nice since it's attached to the upstairs of the house and is convenient for viewing birds before I'm even dressed for the day--pajama birding.  This morning I was rewarded for putting niger thistle in the finch feeder by a visit from American Goldfinchs and Pine Siskins.  The siskin is especially welcome since it is not often here and because it reminds me of bird-feeding in Oklahoma when my children were young.  Whenever it snowed, and the finches were thick around the feeders, my son would stand with arms outstretched and birdseed in his upturned palms, waiting for almost-tame-with-hunger pine siskins to eat from his hands.

A Carolina Wren serenaded me from the bougainvillea nearest the deck, the reddish-brown of his breast especially bright, maybe because of the morning sun and maybe because it echoed the deep apricot of the nearby blooms.


Out by the road a small brown bird with a white eye-ring called to an echoing bird in a brasil tree.  It was too far to see just what it was though its call was distinctive.  I'll figure out what it is and maybe post that later.  For now, I'm including its picture because the background, so different from the wren's blooming backdrop, looks almost like trees in winter in northern climates.  Of course, what it's actually perching in is not winter woods, but a brush-pile of dead branches.

Our trees are still green with foliage, but the winter of my imagination (where branches are bare and snowy Pine Siskins eat from a little boy's hand) can almost be seen in this picture.

Moon River

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The Arroyo is so beautiful tonight, as ripples on its surface catch the silver of a full moon, that I stepped outside on the stair landing to see if I could capture it in a photograph.  Of course, I couldn't.  This is as close as I could get. But you can see the glittering of the river and the black bank beyond.

A few years ago I tried to capture the beauty of the arroyo and the full moon with these words:

 Invitation

I want you to see the moon rise full 

over the Arroyo Colorado.

At first huge and red like a distant fire
behind the line of ebony and  mesquite,
it will slowly rise to a silver globe,
pouring light across the water
in broad bands of sparkling waves
that narrow to a  point
at the corner of my dock.

I want you to see dolphins touched with the moon’s silver,
roll up through the surface
of wind-rippled waters
and disappear in widening circles of light.

I want you to see,  above shadows at the bank’s dark edge,
a deer, head lifted high,
glowing with moonlight
caught in the silver cup
of its velvet antlers.

I want you to see shining minnows burst in circles of sparks
across the dark waters
and hear pauraques call across the fields.

I want you to see the Arroyo Colorado in moonlight.
I want you to see
my South Texas home.

(Kay Baughman, 2002)

It's hard not to wake at night and go upstairs to look outside at the river.  I'm glad I'm no longer working so I can stand by the window as long as I want, as long as there are palm trees catching the silver of the moon and owls that silently glide across the river on velvet black wings.  Even on moonless nights the fishing lights add glittering highlights--but my favorite nights are the ones when moonshadows and moonlight embellish the landscape. Tonight is one of those.

Kiskadees, Kids, and the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival

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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!

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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

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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!