Patchwork

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Sometimes it's hard to know when spring migration is over, when the birds in the yard are staying for the summer and the visitors have flown north.  Take, for example, the Yellow-billed Cuckoo in the photo above.  Is it a late migrant lingering for a few days into June or a summer resident setting up housekeeping?  I'm pretty sure it's here to stay, but only time (a few more days) will tell. 

And the buntings that took shower baths in the sprinklers yesterday -- are they already nesting close-by?  Or are they the tail-end of the bunting parade that comes through the yard every spring?  


Painted Buntings are the patchwork quilt of the bird world.  Red, green, blue for the male and a lovely green female--I am as excited each time I spot one as I was the first time.  

When I first spotted yesterday's Indigo Bunting sitting in shadows in the persimmon tree, I thought it was a female Painted, and I thought just maybe they were a nesting pair.    But when I look at the photo I took, the coloring looks more like a female Indigo Bunting.  If so, I would guess these to be migrants though it's late in the season.  


Again, only time will tell.  Sometimes I see both of these species late in the summer.  According to my favorite local reference book, Tim Brush's Nesting Birds of the Tropical Frontier,  Painted Buntings are uncommon breeders in the Rio Grande Valley. 
I've observed young Painted Buntings coming to bird baths in late afternoons during July and August-- though I've never found a nest. Hopefully, these are here to stay for the summer,  but probably they just late migrants. Anytime I see a bunting in the yard I count it a special day.




I didn't turn on the sprinkler yesterday specifically to draw the birds in--but it certainly worked to do just that.  

I seldom see Brown-crested Flycatchers in the bird baths but they certainly enjoy a shower bath.  This one prefers to sit in the persimmon tree letting the sprinkles refresh him.  

Across the yard, a male Lesser Goldfinch catches a shower bath from his perch in the bottlebrush tree.

Drops of water from the sprinklers shine in the sun and wash the dust of drought from the butterfly garden.   Lesser Goldfinches can often be seen at the baths and sprinklers on hot days when the temps climb near 100.

A Carolina Wren sings from the top of a feeder just out of reach of the water.  Now that their young have fledged, they are singing more than ever, and will probably be nesting again soon.

This week, in two different contexts, I encountered a phrase I hadn't heard before: patch birding.   Though I hadn't  heard of patch birding,  I certainly understand the concept:  knowing one patch of land well, which birds are there and when to expect them, knowing their songs and their nests.  That's what I do-- I'm a patch birder.   Who knew there was a term out there that describes me to a "T "?  

My patch, of course,  is my yard.  I know it well and  am obsessed with knowing it better.  It's not large, probably less than a third of an acre, only fifty feet across and several  times as long, bordering the Arroyo Colorado on the back (and beyond that thorny scrub and then farmland) and a cotton/sorghum field across the "farm-to-market" road in the front.  I bird my patch every day, walking the drive, sitting in the yard or on a deck or on the dock, peering in the trees and shrubs to see what nests have been constructed when I wasn't looking.  (Those birds can be very sneaky about building a nest, even when a patch birder has been patrolling the patch.)

So what else (besides shower baths from the sprinkler in our rainless yard) is going on in my patch this week?

Northern Kiskadees are still in their nest in the Ebony tree, busily going back and forth feeding  young that are getting bigger and bigger.  A week or two ago I found two dead hatchlings under the nest.  They looked like cowbirds to me, not kiskadees. 
If so, I'm proud of the parent kiskadees for ejecting the parasites that can end up starving the rightful nesters. I see kiskadees chasing cowbirds all the time, but I've never seen an adult kiskadee feeding a just-fledged cowbird, so maybe the bothersome Bronzed and Brown-headed Cowbirds are seldom if ever successful at parasitism of kiskadee nests.  (I wish I could say the same for their parisitism of  Hooded Orioles and Cardinals.)

Look closely at the photo on the right and you will see the tasty morsel--a large caterpillar or fuzzy moth--that the parent Northern Kiskadee has for the hungry babies.  














The baby Kiskadees are already quite large.  I'm looking for first flight this weekend.

Bronzed Cowbirds can look downright demonic sometimes.  

Northern Mockingbirds are not any more friendly to cowbirds than kiskadees.  They are fussy with almost all birds, but cowbirds, owls, and hawks in the yard really incur their wrath.  Above an irate mocker divebombs a Crested Caracara that sits across the road in a cotton field.  

Ladder-backed Woodpecker

Another bird that is often scolded by other birds in the yard is the European Starling.  They are beautiful birds but their tendancy to chase off other cavity nesters when competing for nest sites doesn't endear them to me. When we moved here 15 years ago there were no starlings but now two pairs have already nested in the dead cottonwood trees in the vacant lot next  door.  But since we already have Golden-fronted Woodpeckers mating for a second time and Ladder-backed Woodpeckers checking dead branches of the Royal Poinciana for insects, I guess we still have cavities to spare.  The GF Woodpeckers are usually the excavators of the holes in dead trees and the starlings move in later. 

Golden-fronted Woodpeckers

The yard is not large, but it's big enough for me.   I could never get to know a larger patch as well as I want to know this one.  

I'm reminded of what William Faulkner once said:   "I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it."  Postage stamp or patch, my yard is small but filled with drama.  It's a patchwork quilt of color, a crazy quilt of drama.  

Brown-crested Flycatchers: Let's Do Lunch

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Brown-crested Flycatchers are quickly becoming one of my favorite birds.  Right now they are our closest neighbors.  Every time I sit on the deck or walk out of the house, they are the first bird I see.

Our pair of these lively brown, gray, and yellow flycatchers built this year's nest in the bird house that hangs from a branch of the fiddlewood that grows in a patch of shrubs and small trees near the corner of the garage.  When they first set up housekeeping, I was afraid the hanging house was too close to human activity to make a good nesting spot, but they persevered.  (Here's a link to an earlier post about their arrival for the breeding season.)  Looking at the first photo above, it's obvious how they got their name: the hapless fly grasped in the flycatcher's strong fly-catching beak looks like one I photographed a while ago (the photo is in this post) and the brown crest, unlike the crests of some birds,  is always standing tall.

When we got home from vacation last weekend, I knew these guys were feeding young birds because of the constant comings and goings of the adults, legs and wings of some unfortunate insect poking out of their mouths.  It looks to me like the baby food of choice is katydids and mayflies, although any kind of flying insect seems to be attractive to them.  They perch and "pose" for a minute or so before flying into the bird house, probably checking for predators (me with my camera, I suppose).  As often as not, they sing or call, talking with their mouths full!

That's what this one to the left is doing. (You can tell it's singing because of  its puffed up throat, what poets call "full-throated.")  I love the song.  It sounds to me like "come over here; come over here!", with kind of a warbly and rolling, but at the same time slightly buzzy, quality. The call is a short "whit!". It's puzzling why they sing so close to the nest.  Sitting on a branch within just a few feet of the nest, They sing and then quickly slip into the box, brown tail sticking out slightly from the entry hole.  Click on the photo to see what treat this bird has for the babies.

Last summer Brown-crested Flycatchers nested in a birdhouse further out along the drive, a location they have chosen for about ten years.  Before that they nested in railroad ties turned on end that decorated the end of the drive by the road.  The first site was abandoned because it became so overgrown with bougainvillea and esperanza.  I can't see an obvious reason for abandoning the second site except that this new box must have just looked homier.

I just looked up information about the flycatchers on my iPhone Explorer Pro, a great iphone app, and found that a collective noun for them is a zapper of flycatchers.  That's appropriate!  They are better than a bug zapper, for sure, returning to the nest every few minutes with a katydid or cicada or fly.  (Cicadas here are called chacharras, which in Spanish is  onomatopoeic for the buzzy sound the insect  makes.  Here in the Rio Grande Valley the chicharra is so loud on summer nights that I have no hope of hearing Pauraques calling or coyotes howling. iPhone Bird Explorer says the flycatchers will catch female cicadas rather than males because of the loudness of the male's buzz.)

When Summer Tanagers migrated through the valley a couple of weeks ago, they sat in the same fiddlewood tree as the flycatchers and snapped at bees, which seems to be their favorite food.  Here's one of my favorite pictures (taken the first week I had my camera last fall) of a female tanager eating a bee.  You could clearly hear her strong tanager beak snap snap snap as she sat there in the tree.

I'm glad this is one photo I had saved already to my Picassa album, before the big computer crash.  It's another instance when I didn't discover what I was looking at until I examined the photo.  For some reason (maybe because I was struggling to figure out how the camera worked) I thought I was taking a picture of a female oriole and never even saw the bee in  the tanager's obviously tanager-beak until I looked at the photo!

I'll finish with another bird beak perfectly adapted to the task of getting its favorite insects, in this case smaller non-flying ones.  This is one of a pair of Ladderback Woodpeckers that are busy all day long in the yard, probing for insects under bark of mesquite trees and some non-native pines. The strong pointed beak is perfect for getting ants and other small bugs and larva.  I've also seen them eating cactus fruit after carving out a big piece with that perfectly adapted  beak.

I still haven't found what nest cavity the Ladder-backs are nesting in, but I'm on the trail and am sure it is close by.  I'll probably find it when they start bringing home carry-out  for the hungry nestlings.