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.