Another Tree Problem

“Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.”
― Khalil Gibran, "Sand and Foam"

At this time of year things have settled somewhat in the yard. Catbirds fly around looking for food to feed their young. I am serenaded by one singing from my hedge, where I'm sure there is a nest. Less than 24 hours after the wren young left the box, a male wren, possibly a different bird, started singing its territorial song. It was not the only one. On my street alone I've heard three others, one of them two yards over. The male hasn't drawn a mate yet but he is fierce in protecting the nest box.

The dead part of the tree against the living rest
of the apple tree. (Margo D. Beller)

The fledged wren young were noisily following their parents in and around shrubs at the periphery of my yard for a couple of days but lately I have not heard them.

The gnats continue in ones and twos rather than a bagful, and I am still not sure how they are getting inside the enclosed porch. Every day I play whack-a-gnat. There is no longer anything on the porch that would allow them to eat or breed. If they are coming in through small spaces around the windows, I may have to turn to chemical warfare again.

Currently, however, my main attention is on the apple tree.

We had a lot of rain this spring, and the tree was full of blossoms, which meant it would be full of apples. Then, suddenly, one third of the tree died. This is an old tree. It has a hole in its trunk big enough for a chipmunk to hide in. It has a ring of little holes from a yellow-bellied sapsucker that visited a few years ago. And yet, the tree continued to bloom and produce apples.

Dogwood blossoms in 2016. (Margo D. Beller)

When half the dogwood tree died in 2023, I asked the yard man I was using at the time to bring his chainsaw. He cut the dead parts into stackable pieces. I waited to see what would happen. The next spring the dogwood not only lived, it put out flowers.

Last year, the problem was the tree-like house plant that was getting too unwieldy to transport in and out of the house. I agonized over whether to kill the plant, but when it began growing from the bottom my decision was made and I chopped down the top. The two parts growing from the bottom are healthy (see below) and, I hope, won't grow too much.

These are a little bigger now. (Margo D. Beller)

Now it is the apple tree's turn. 

There are no lack of sites on the internet explaining what can happen to an apple tree. Here's what Tree Fluent has to say: "Environmental changes can significantly impact apple trees. Temperature fluctuations, excessive rainfall, or drought conditions can lead to stress."

Well, that sums up life in my area in a nutshell. This week alone we started 20 degrees colder than average and expect to jump to 20 degrees hotter than average by the weekend. A major fire in the New Jersey Pine Barrens in April was finally put out with help from a series of heavy rain storms. But last summer was so dry we had drought emergencies that didn't end until last month.

What else could've affected the apple tree?

Couch to Homestead lists a variety of causes including over- or under-watering, the wrong growing environment, a lack of nutrients, pests and diseases. The diseases have such charming names as apple scab and fire blight. There are also various parts of the tree that can be prone to rot, starting with the roots.

Apples growing on the living two-thirds of the tree.
(Margo D. Beller)

I did not plant this tree. It is the last of five apple trees standing, four of which I've taken down and one taken down by stags rubbing velvet from their antlers too many times. I left this one tree because its apples taste good as apple sauce. (Unfortunately, the squirrels and the deer also like them.) These apples usually have more bad than good parts, requiring a lot of cutting to use. In summer the apple leaves seem to be the first to yellow and fall. I thought this was a natural thing. Now I am not so sure.

My remedy for this problem is to rent a chainsaw, cut down the dead wood and hope that allows the tree to recover and grow next spring. It worked for the dogwood. It worked for the big plant.

I haven't gotten around to doing it yet because it has been too wet, yet again. If this remedy doesn't work the tree, like the diseased ash tree we had to cut down years ago, is history. 

Aw, Gnats!, or When the Outside Comes In

A lot of people like summer. They want the heat, they want to wear as little in the way of clothes as possible and they want to go to the beach. They enjoy working in the garden, harvesting their vegetables and cutting flowers. 

I do that, too, but I do not like summer. I do not like heat and humidity, I stay covered to avoid skin cancer and, after once nearly drowning in a pond, I stay away from the water unless it is to stand on the shore and look for seabirds on or over it.

A fungal gnat that crawled through the screen but
could not get through the glass on the back door.
(Margo D. Beller)

Also, I don't like most insects, especially the biting kind. When I went to Troy Meadows the other week, during the waning spring migration time, I was set upon by black flies as I tried to step carefully around lakes of muddy water in the middle of the main, unpaved road. This week was no better at Great Swamp, when I took a friend there on her day off. When we weren't roasting in the sun we were waving away insects in the shade.

And I'm not even talking about mosquitos, the unofficial state bird of New Jersey. After all the rain we've had the mosquito eggs should be hatching just about now and the young will be hungry. 

But what I especially do not like is when certain insects make their way onto my enclosed porch, where I sit in my chair with my coffee and enjoy the breeze (including from a fan) without worrying about being bitten - unless something gets inside.

Mosquitos that get in are caught and killed. Large flies are shown an open door and encouraged to leave. Spiders are left alone because their webs catch the smaller bugs. Lady bugs are put outside where they can eat the aphids that bother some of my flowers. But the black blister beetle, which unlike the many other types of beetles in this state I find on the porch, are removed in one way or another. No-see-ums? Well, there's not much I can do about them except keep the fan blowing on me.

And then there are the fungal gnats.

Until last August I had never heard of these flying pests. They don't bite but they do lay eggs - a lot of eggs. I would catch a gnat and put it outside. Then I'd find more. Finally, I discovered an infestation of gnats in the bag of sunflower seeds I'd been using when I had feeders out. This caused a lot of bother. I stopped releasing the gnats and turned to smashing them. I dumped soil out of the plants I had put on the porch for the summer and repotted them before taking them into the house. (I did not do this for one unwieldy plant I put outside, then took inside, then had to decide whether to kill it, then cut it down after it put out new growth from the bottom.)

Going to extremes last year.
(Margo D. Beller)

Finally, I turned to chemical warfare. That did the trick, but I could not sit on the porch for a week.

So imagine my dismay when, a day after putting my plants on the porch earlier this month, when it was finally warm enough to do so, I started finding gnats again. How were they getting in?

When I had bought fresh bird seed I had also bought a pail with a lid that locks, so they weren't coming from there. Any pot that had even a trace of soil in it was in a corner of the porch under a tarp. Could they be squeezing through the mesh screens where I had windows open? That was likely. I closed all the windows and took the plants back into the house after spraying them with a solution to kill any possible eggs.

There is not much more I can do now except to kill what I can reach or hope they get stuck in a spider web. 

Last year's spiders helping me out with the gnats.
(Margo D. Beller)

Why are the gnats trying to come onto the porch, months ahead of when they infested my porch last year? Are they trying to get away from hungry birds like the house wrens? Has it been too hot or too wet for them this year? Is it global warming? We're not even in the heat of July yet.

When we had an infestation of carpenter ants in our bathroom in 2022, which I wrote about in September, that had been a particularly dry season and the ants were looking for water. This year we've had plenty of water, maybe too much so, and twice I've caught an ant in the bathroom. My husband has put out poisoned bait and we've had no problems since then.

With the plants safely inside I didn't feel the need to nuke the porch again. But when one of the gnats somehow came inside the house and into my den the other night I went nuclear, making sure the den doors were closed so I could kill it before it could go to where I keep the plants. I thought I was successful but a night later what I hope was the same one flew across the room, attracted by the lights. This one I know I caught, with a well-aimed paperback book. But I'll be spraying the plants and using yellow sticky tape for the rest of the summer.

How did the gnat, or gnats, get into the house? Probably hitched a ride on me. I'll have to be vigilant about that now, too.

The Dangers of Youth

"The energy of youth is infectious, but its inexperience is dangerous."

-- Charles de Gaulle

As every parent knows, there are many dangers out there. You give birth, you feed your young, you keep them clean and you try to protect them from predators as best you can. But in the end there is only so much you can do to prepare them for leaving the nest. The young will have to learn to fend for themselves and, with luck, survive to create a new generation.

This is true for all creatures, including birds.

Parent feeding young (This and other pictures from 2020.)
(Margo D. Beller)

The other day, from my porch, I saw two male house sparrows attacking the house wren nest box hanging in my dogwood tree. Had the opening been large enough, one or the other would've gone in, dragged out the wrenlets, killed them and taken over the box. Why there were two males instead of a male and a female, as I saw a few weeks ago, I don't know.

But there they were, so here I went outside to clap my hands to chase them off. When they were gone I heard an angry chittering from the box and then one of the parent house wrens flew out - it had blocked the opening to protect its young. "You're welcome," I said as I walked away. Soon the parents went back to shuttling food to their young.

I did not immediately go back on the porch. I walked to the driveway because I heard the high-pitched screaming of a robin and I sensed something was wrong. Two birds were going at it across the street, or so I thought. I've seen robins fighting each other before in territorial disputes but this turned out to be different.

One of the birds, a young robin (the breast spotted rather than red), flew across the street to the bottom of my yew hedge and hid under one of the small, bare branches near the ground that stick out and prevent me from weeding in that area. The other bird flew at it and I knew by the fanned, striped tail it was no robin but a similarly sized male sharp-shinned hawk. It must've seen me standing there because after the one attempt it took off. Then the chickadees and titmice in the neighbor's walnut tree started their alarm calls. I walked around the hedge and there was the hawk. It was a brown juvenile. Had it been a gray adult that young robin would've been supper. I clapped my hands, the hawk flew off and the little birds went quiet.

(Margo D. Beller)

Hawks have to eat, too, I know, but not in my yard.

Which brings me back to the house wrens.

For the first time since I started writing about the house wren nest box (in 2011; unfortunately, the link no longer works), I happened to be on the porch and saw the young fledge.

I knew that time was coming soon. The young birds had gotten so big they were being fed by the parents from outside the box. It must've been very crowded and uncomfortable in that box, especially when the temperature soared into the upper 80 degrees F to 90 degrees this week. A parent would occasionally push the young aside to go inside the box to remove poop. When an adult was near I could hear the young begging for food. Lately, the head of a curious wrenlet had been coming partway through the box opening.

I watched this last part with trepidation. Years ago, when the nest box was in the apple tree, a wrenlet fell out of the box and was snatched up by a jay before I could get outside to rescue it. Jays, like their cousins the corvids (including crows and ravens) are among those that will eat young birds. So will squirrels, one of which I saw being harried all over the yard by an angry house wren parent.

So when I saw the little head looking so far out of the box I was concerned, especially when a male sparrow flew to the dogwood. 

I walked to the window and rapped on it. The house sparrow left. That was when I saw that along with the house wren looking out was another small house wren on top of the nest box.

Close to leaving.
(Margo D. Beller)

I had no camera with me. The best I could do was take a picture with my phone from the porch. (It was easier photographing the nest box from outside when it was in the apple tree, and the pictures for this post are from 2020, before I moved the box.) I wouldn't have dared missing anything for a camera anyway.

The first wrenlet flew to a higher branch of the dogwood. The second got closer and closer to leaving the box. A parent came to feed it, then the adult flew to base of the bushes on the other side of the flood wall. I could hear the male parent calling to the young. Finally, the second wrenlet left the box and jumped to a side branch, where it did a little climbing and pecked at leaves. It stumbled a bit but did not fall.

Then, a third head poked out of the box. 

One by one its siblings flew from the dogwood down behind the flood wall, where I'm sure at least one of the parents was waiting. The third one didn't bother jumping to a branch, it flew directly to where the others had gone. No doubt it was hungry and the male's calls told the three they had to fly out if they wanted to be fed.

Now the box is quiet, unless there is a second brood later in the summer. 

The wrens aren't the only young in the yard, of course. I've seen a male cardinal fly to the feeder pole with one of its young, which was the same size and brown like a female but without the red crest and beak. The scared chickadees and titmice were the first indication there were families in the vicinity of my yard since I stopped putting out bird food. 

Not the greatest picture but if you look close
you'll see one wren in the opening and
another atop the box. 2025
(Margo D. Beller)

And, of course, there are young deer. Earlier this week a doe was in the next yard with a tiny fawn drinking her milk. When the doe saw me standing in my yard and looking at them she led the tiny fawn away. For now my yard is safe from curious young nibbling at my plants, learning what tastes good.

Like the fawn, the young birds will be fed by their parents for a time and then will have to fend for themselves. Some, like the juvenile hawk, will need a lot of practice grabbing supper. Others, like the wrens, will be helping my yard by catching a ton of insects. But the young birds will also learn they must avoid predators to survive, and that includes other birds, cats, dogs and humans. 

They will travel with their parents for a time but eventually they will be on their own.

Sliding Into Summer With the Wrens

The year has been going quickly. On the cusp of Memorial Day the daffodils and very early blooming flowers in my garden are long done. When I pushed down the daffodil foliage I exposed the other plants that are now growing thanks to all the rain we've had lately - butterfly weed, liriope, purple coneflower, sedum. The azaleas bloomed nicely, as did the hellebore. The flowers on both are fading but the foliage is growing. 

(Margo D. Beller)

The rhododendron (above) is now flowering the best I've ever seen it and all of the potted cannas are growing lush foliage behind the protective enclosures used to thwart the deer.

The migrant birds I had heard in my yard are mainly gone now, taking advantage of the north wind lessening to go elsewhere. I can still hear plenty of birds during the day but they are no longer setting territory, they are quietly building their nests and creating the next generation of birds.

One of those birds is what is now known as the northern house wren.

(Margo D. Beller)

Sometime in mid-April - unfortunately I did not note the day - after reading reports house wrens had returned to my area from their wintering grounds to the south, I hung the wren box (above) in the dogwood tree. I was hoping to draw a breeding pair for another year.

On Monday, April 21 - which I noted - a house wren was singing from the locust tree in the front yard closest to the driveway. I had taken out the garbage pail so the bird was over my head. I knew to start watching for action.

Nothing happened for three days. Then, on April 24, I saw a pair of house wrens investigating the nest box. They looked inside and outside it like any couple investigating a prospective residence. Then they left. It did not take long before they started bringing nesting material - twigs - to the box. 

The activity brought a pair of house sparrows to the dogwood. Sparrows will nest in anything - any opening in a street light, for instance - and they will also try to take a nest away from another bird, in this case a house wren.

The wooden nest box was made with a small opening to let in a house wren and keep out a bigger bird like a house sparrow. After a few attempts, plus my going outside to chase them off, they stopped bothering the box. That is when the nest building began in earnest.

After my husband and I returned from a family visit the second weekend in May I sat on my porch and watched the nest box. I noticed the male would sing from a nearby shrub. The female would come out of the box. Was she sitting on eggs? Very likely. To me the wren call was the same as the "this is my territory" call but apparently the female heard something different. He would call, she would fly out to get food and then return to the box. 

A few days later I noticed she was making more trips out of the box and then flying back with food. If the Cornell bird people are right about the timing, the eggs likely hatched. Mom would fly in with food, then maybe brood her young if it was cold out. Sometimes the male flew to the box and gave the female food, presumably to feed a chick. He would fly to another branch in the dogwood or a nearby shrub and sing, presumably letting his mate know he was watching for predators.

One of the parent wrens, as photographed from
my porch chair through a screen.
(Margo D. Beller)

House wrens are tough little birds when it comes to protecting their territory. When another house wren was in the yard it was quickly chased off. When a gray squirrel climbed the dogwood looking for something to eat, the male wren flew at it, pricking the much bigger animal with its sharp bill. The squirrel left in a hurry. The wren chased off any downy woodpecker using the tree as a staging area before flying to the suet feeder. (I've since put all the feeders away.)

Some birds it left alone because they have no interest in baby birds - the yard robins and catbirds, which flew to the dogwood to scan the lawn for something to eat or bring back to nearby nests. The wren would fly to a nearby branch and watch until the larger bird left. Then the wren flew off.

Today I noticed from the porch that both parents were bringing food and going into the box to feed a chick. When they left they would take a small amount of poop to keep the nest free of bacteria. At this point the young - two or three chicks, I'm guessing - are still small. In the next two weeks the baby birds will get so big their parents won't be able to get into the box. These birds will be hungry and loudly begging when a parent arrives. The chicks will jostle each other to get to the front and grab the meal. If a chick can't fend for itself it will die.

The nesting period is 15-17 days, according to Cornell. That means at some point in the next 10 days or so, likely when I'm not on the porch watching, the male will call to the young and draw them out. One day the young are squawking in the box as usual, the next I can tell by the silence the birds have flown. Maybe for a few days I will hear the young begging for food as they follow one or the other parent around the fringes of the yard. Then they will be gone, maybe to start their own broods. The parents will go their separate ways, unless they decide to have a second brood in the nest box. At the end of the summer the birds will face the perils of flying south again.

When hot, humid summer comes I try not to do much in the garden aside from the necessary weeding. The perennial flowers and shrubs I planted will take care of themselves with little assistance from me until it is time to cut them back for the winter. 

At this point I will acknowledge that, once again, another year is ending and take the nest box out of the dogwood.

An Assessment of Unusual Bird Activity in a Suburban Yard...or Why I'll Never Be the 'Scientist' My Husband Is

On yet another very rainy and windy May morning this week I sat on my enclosed porch with my first cup of coffee, as usual. I could hear the house wren that took over the nest box this year, the catbird, the robin, even a red-eyed vireo singing, as usual.

Then I heard something else, a sharper tone with a cadence of 2, 2, 2. That's not a catbird, I realized, that is a brown thrasher.

The Cornell Bird Lab people say brown thrashers "are accomplished songsters that may sing more than 1,100 different song types and include imitations of other birds, including chuck-will’s-widows, wood thrushes and northern flickers." The male sings a loud, long series of doubled phrases.

An unusually visible brown thrasher (RE Berg-Andersson)

They are also usually secretive, which is why I could hear the bird in my yard but couldn't see it.

This is not a new yard bird. I've heard them calling from the Community Garden area bordering the backyards of my neighbors across the street. However, this May I've been hearing a lot of migrating birds I usually don't hear in my yard - Canada and magnolia warblers, for instance - which I could identify when I was using the Merlin app on my phone.

My theory is that when the southerly winds blew warm air into my area, the migrant birds came with it. Then the weather changed. The cold winds blew from the north. Those birds that had not made it to their breeding areas hung around to rest and eat ahead of eventually continuing their journey. 

But the wind was still coming from the north and the rain was still falling hard, with flash flood warnings in my state. So after hanging around one area for a while the birds move to another, and that has included my yard. 

I made the mistake of mentioning the unusual bird activity to my husband (MH).

"You should write a blog about it," he said. "Look in your records and see if this truly is an unusual year."

Now, you have to understand that MH thinks more like a scientist than I do. It is one of the many differences between us. He is a researcher. When he wants to know about something he takes a lot of time to go through the many, many volumes he has piled throughout the house. He keeps records of weather, sports and other events in neat column rows in ledger notebooks. He can look up what happened on a particular date in a particular year in minutes.

One of many notebooks I've kept over the years.
(Margo D. Beller)

This is something I can't do. I keep records as journal narratives in my notebooks. A lot of notebooks. To find something, such as how long ago the Nashville warbler showed up in the apple tree, means I would have to skim through years of notebooks.

In doing this project I learned a lot of things, and not all of them were about birds.

First, I realized yet again I will never be able to think the way MH does. My brain just does not work that way. Second, the way I keep records is not useful. It was hard for me to read more than a page of my handwriting because I tend to write quickly before I forget details. Some people keep journals to remember. I seem to keep them to do a brain dump. Trying to read through all the scrawled words I had put down over the years made me frustrated.

Third, until recently I had been using Merlin to alert me to birds singing around me. Merlin would hear things I didn't or couldn't. So every day I would stand in the yard to find out what was calling.

Which leads to: Fourth, I can be obsessive about spring migration birding.

I learned from my scrawls that when I could, in the past, I would do most of my May birding away from home. When I was working in an office that meant going out on the weekends, or very early in the morning if I was working from home. 

Now I'm retired and that has made a big difference. I no longer feel the need to "get it in" before giving my time to others. I can bird any weekday I want. However, there are many mornings when I rise early and can't get myself going for several hours. Those times are when I sit on the porch or in the backyard with my coffee and listen to what is singing or calling around me. Over a recent 10-day period that has been a lot of birds.  

Back to my research. 

(Margo D. Beller)

Years ago MH had given me a book where I could record a week of bird sightings (see photo above), a variant of what he does with his weather and other data. So in looking at bird patterns for past years I started with this because I had crammed years of sightings onto each page and it was far easier than trying to get through over 10 years of bird notebooks.

I restricted myself to data from my front or back yard for the month of May. I noted obvious migrants, particularly the colorful, singing warblers. For most of the years there would be one or two unusual yard birds, but occasionally there would be a lot of birds. For instance, in mid-May 2016 there were three types of warblers plus a blue-gray gnatcatcher and a rose-breasted grosbeak. Unfortunately, I did not note the weather conditions for the period.

More recently, on May 24, 2020, a new bird came to the yard - a singing bay-breasted warbler male I could easily see in one of the lower tree branches. Four years later, several birds were in the yard in mid-May including northern parula, yellow and myrtle warblers, indigo bunting, rose-breasted grosbeak and, another first, a female summer tanager - a type of bird usually found in the south but increasingly showing up in bird reports for my area.

The migrant birds would usually pass through my yard for a day or so on the way to elsewhere. That's in addition to the regulars - the crows, woodpeckers, wrens, catbirds, red-eyed vireos, finches, sparrows and others - that either stay in my area all year or end up here to breed, such as the house wren. 

Screenshot of BirdCast migration radar from just after sunset on May 1.
The brighter the yellow, the more birds.

Then I turned to what I recorded in my most recent notebook for this month. On May 2 of this year I saw on the radar there had been a big flight of birds the previous night thanks to the strong winds from the south. That day the yard had yellow, myrtle, parula, black and white and magnolia warblers. According to the NOAA weather data MH collects of Newark, NJ, the temperature on May 2 reached near 90 degrees F. No surprise that with these warblers I could also hear nearby singing rose-breasted grosbeak, chipping sparrow and scarlet tanager. On May 8 the yard hosted American redstart, yellow, myrtle, parula and blackpoll warblers. Many blackpolls, usually one of the last of the warblers I hear, passed through the yard for over a week. (I found an abundance of migrant birds in other areas, too.) 

Then the temperature went down to more seasonal levels because of a cold front and the wind picked up. May has been particularly windy, according to MH's records, with gale force winds (39 mph or more) for several days and on at least one day reaching storm force (55 mph or more) mid-month. No wonder the Canada warbler that showed up on May 17 hung around for a few days until the wind was light enough for it to continue flying north.

More recently, it has been unusually cold with a strong wind out of the east and rain - nor'easter weather, not conducive to bird migration. Nor is it conducive to sitting in the yard.

So were there more unusual birds than usual, or was I spending more time in the yard than usual with an app that let me know what I was hearing? My best non-scientific guess? Both.

The Breakup

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

(attributed to Albert Einstein, but maybe not)

Merlin and I are no longer together.

As in any relationship, when it worked things were wonderful. I opened the birding app on my phone, Merlin started, it listened, it identified what we were hearing. It was still good when I would have to restart the birding app six or seven times to get it recording.

Birding without Merlin (RE Berg-Andersson)

Thanks to Merlin I knew to look for the Canada warbler hanging around my property, a first for my backyard. Another day Merlin told me there was a magnolia warbler somewhere, and then I found the bird. 

But Merlin could also be frustrating. It would hear things I didn't, or couldn't. It would also hear things that weren't there. If a police siren sounded Merlin reported a screech owl, thinking it was hearing its whinnying call. If a mockingbird was singing, Merlin would report the various calls the bird was making as actual birds - Carolina wren, cardinal, killdeer, even an osprey. (Sometimes, in the case of the wren, the actual bird would answer.)

Then, for some reason, things came apart. Once I could turn on the app and it would work just fine. Then it started crashing several times before it would work. Did the techs at the Cornell University Birding Lab change something to make it incompatible with my old phone? Whatever the cause I would go out, hear things in the field and Merlin wasn't helping me until I could get it to work. Then everything would be fine.

I knew there was a problem but I didn't want to face it.

The parting became inevitable, however, when the app stopped working completely at Great Swamp the other day. The swamp is a very large piece of property, most of it administered by the federal government. There is a "managed" area and a "wilderness" area. I had gone to the wilderness area, not to hike in the mud but to listen from the parking area. Lots of singing birds including several types of warblers. I knew what they were but put on Merlin to hear if there was anything else. It crashed. I tried several times and it continued crashing. I thought I was in a dead zone so I shut off the app. 

Then I drove to the managed area, where Merlin had worked before. I heard a bird I didn't recognize from the lot. Merlin let me down again, and again, and again. It was taking up a lot of my time, energy and bandwidth to try to get it working so I finally gave up. 

I heard close to 50 birds in my travels, but without Merlin it wasn't the same. Not knowing that one bird ate at me for the rest of my time in the field. (All the people who showed up on a nice weekday didn't help either.)

Goodbye, Merlin (RE Berg-Andersson)

When I got home I uninstalled the program, waited, then reinstalled it. I went into the backyard. Merlin crashed again. So I uninstalled it for good. 

My husband (MH) shrugged at this news. He had given up on Merlin some time ago, depending on me to identify what he was hearing. That made Merlin's failure all the more aggravating for me. "We need new phones," MH said, thinking maybe Merlin needed more than I could provide. Well, we need a lot of things but a phone is not high on the priority list at the moment.

To identify the unfamiliar bird I went back to what I would do pre-Merlin. I noted how the song sounded, then eliminated all the kinds of birds it likely wasn't. I noted the surroundings where I heard it - wet swamp. My best guess: prothonotary warbler, a bird of wet swamps I last heard in Florida in 2010. But was that what it was? It would've been nice for Merlin to confirm this for me but I'm tired of putting up with failure.

If we do get new phones, maybe I'll try Merlin again. Maybe.

UPDATE: My guess was wrong. I did not hear a prothonotary warbler. In a very different habitat recently I heard the same call and saw the bird making the call - an American redstart.  

Birding as a Competition

On Saturday, May 10, hundreds if not thousands of New Jersey residents will rise and seek out as many birds as they can find. But this will not be the usual weekend during peak northbound migration when the warblers, vireos, tanagers, flycatchers and many, many others are passing through on their way to breeding territories.

(Margo D. Beller)

This day will be the World Series of Birding, started in Cape May, N.J., in 1984 by Pete Dunne and others as a charitable competition with the aim of finding as many birds as possible in a day and collecting money based on how much is pledged per bird. The winnings go towards bird habitat conservation.

There will be teams starting off at midnight and traveling from High Point at New Jersey's northwestern tip to Cape May in the south. There will be people sitting in one place and tallying what they see and hear. There will be yet others who travel to bird specific areas, such as my home county where Great Swamp, Troy Meadows and Jockey Hollow are located. They'll compete, raise money, then report their findings on eBird in the name of "citizen science."

No thanks.

Charitable as I try to be, I tend to avoid official competitions like this. Too many people zooming around, ticking off birds on a list and trying to find more birds than anyone else. It reminds me very much of the narrative of "The Big Year," a nonfiction book (later made into a movie) describing how three guys competed to get into the record books for seeing the most North American birds in a year. 

This is not birding, this is listing.

I admit to some competitive spirit. If I look at the eBird reports for my county and see things listed in places near me, I'll go out and try to find them - strictly for my satisfaction and not to report to eBird because I don't like counting how many birds I'm seeing. Like ticking off a list without looking at the birds for more than a second and a half, counting how many robins or whatever I'm finding detracts from my enjoyment of being outside with my binoculars.

I also admit to using the Merlin app, when I can get it working, to help me hear and/or identify some of the sounds I hear if they are not familiar to me. I have to take Merlin with more than a grain of salt because it is not always correct in its "suggestions."

World Series of Birding "Big Stay" team at Scherman
Hoffman, 2012 (Margo D. Beller)

I am a Luddite compared to others. Ever since Covid got people outside and noticing the singing birds, birding has become more popular. I am seeing more people when I go out. I am reading more posts on eBird. I wonder how they are finding the birds.

They have help.

We are far beyond the time when all you needed were binoculars and a pair of eyes (and maybe a spotting scope). Besides apps like Merlin there are social media feeds where someone finding a rarity can send out an alert and 100s of people will be at the spot in a matter of minutes. Gadget technology is big, too. Hang a bird feeder with a camera on it that connects to your phone and you can get information on what you are seeing with the push of a button. Field guides? That's so last century!

Every birding organization from magazines such as Birds and Blooms to the National Audubon Society will be more than happy to show you the latest gear including camera attachments, gloves that will allow you to use your phone's touchscreen without removing them and the most effective mosquito repellent.

To me this is a bit much. As I've written before, there are limits to technology.

In years past, when I've seen Pete Dunne in the field, he has his binoculars and his decades of experience to guide him. Too many newbies think they have to become instant experts. When I see them in the field, more often than not they are holding cameras with long lenses rather than binoculars. They are going off the path, bushwhacking, destroying habitat and risking tick bites. 

Pete Dunne at Scherman Hoffman, 2019
(Margo D. Beller)

I can be obsessed about birding at this time of year now that I have the time to rise most weekday mornings and travel to where I (and Merlin) can hear the birds that will soon either be gone or sitting quietly on nests. Seeing what Merlin heard and I didn't can be humbling. It makes me want to listen to the calls more often so I can learn them. In that, I am competing with myself.

So have fun with the World Series of Birding, fellow birders. Raise untold thousands of dollars. Find rarities that may be passing through the state on May 10.

I wish you all luck. But this birder will be back in the field on May 11.