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.

Summer Doldrums

This seems like more of a hellish summer than usual, which is what I think every year. Summer is always a time when I stay indoors with the air conditioner on if the heat and humidity get to extremely uncomfortable levels. Even when it is cool in the very early morning I have to dress in long sleeves and head covering, my pants tucked into my socks, to protect myself from the many insects that would otherwise bite any uncovered area.

Summer flowers - coneflower, zinnias, daisies,
coreopsis (Margo D. Beller)

This year's weather has produced enough rain to make me glad I did not call for the sprinkler to be turned on, and to produce mushrooms in the lawn. It has kept my half-dead dogwood tree alive and given my yard guy gainful employment.

The rain has been good for my cannas and my flowers, including the zinnia and marigold seeds I planted. With the daisies, coreopsis and conflowers blooming now I can finally cut my own bouquet instead of paying to make one at the farmstand I frequent for summer vegetables. The rain also prompted enough weeds to force me to pull them from all over the garden over the course of three early mornings, before the sun, humidity and my sore body drove me inside.

I gave up on what I had thought were pepper seedlings. They were weeds, so I'll be buying my peppers this year.

Not a pepper after all. (Margo D. Beller)

And then there is the continual prospect of smoke from Canadian wildfires mixing with the usual high levels of ozone each time the wind comes out of an otherwise pleasant northwesterly direction. Will the fires continue into the fall when the migrants start heading south?

It has been hard to get myself walking in this weather, even harder to go listen for birds. At this time of year it's rare I find a bird that I couldn't find in my backyard, so I don't usually bother. In the backyard the robins are going after ripe fruit in the black cherry tree, the catbird family members chase each other around the yard, and chipping and song sparrows call from the trees. I hear the cardinals in the morning and have a brief temptation to put out seed for them. But then I remember these birds eat the insects that plague me and don't need my seed now.

I could follow the usual flock of birders down the coast and look for the shorebirds that spend the summer in New Jersey. But the one time we went shorebirding in summer we were attacked by greenhead flies, which meant staying in the car with the windows up as we drove the tour road. 

So I sit on my porch in the early morning with the fan on, sipping my coffee as my neighbors go off to work or get their kids ready for camp. That is how I see the cardinals, robins, catbirds and occasional others in my yard. (The hummingbird feeder has yet to draw a single bird, unfortunately, even with the pink flowers in bloom near it.)

Wren nest box (Margo D. Beller)

Then there is the house wren box. A few weeks ago, long after the first pair of wrens and their young departed, another pair actively investigated the box and seemed ready to use the old nest inside. Then, once again, something happened. 

After a few days when I wasn't on the porch I came out one morning to find a male singing loud and long but no activity at the box. In fact, over the next few days if a female showed up he chased her away. We went away for a few days but as of yesterday he was still around, tho' not singing as loudly or as often. I am no expert on house wren behavior despite all the writing I do about them, so I have no idea what is going on. 

In a few weeks the male will be gone and the box will be brought down and emptied. The summer heat will be a distant memory, I hope.

Broken Homes

I've been watching the wren box from my perch on the back porch and I think something has gone wrong.

Robin on nest, 2019 (Margo D. Beller)

By now there should've been signs of a mother house wren feeding young. I had put the box in the dogwood rather than the apple tree as I have in the past in order to keep the squirrels (and me) from bothering the birds when we went to pick the fruit.

I thought the move had worked. The male wren has been singing up a storm from around the property, including the locust trees in front and the apple tree in back. One time I happened to see it singing from the dogwood and going into and out of the box as if feeding a mate.

Admittedly, I do not spend as much time sitting on the enclosed porch as I'd like every day - things like work intervene - so I may be missing something. It would not be the first time. 

It started me thinking about why nests fail.

I'm no scientist, and there are plenty of scientific papers on the subject, but from my observations I have a few theories.

Cooper's hawk nest after it was abandoned, 2020
(Margo D. Beller)

One of the parent birds might've been killed, either because of a predator (cat, snake, another bird, hit by a car) or disease. Maybe all the heavy rain we've had in the last few weeks created an unhealthy condition in the wooden box that made the bird sick or caused it to leave. 

Maybe the nest was in the wrong location. Was the nest more exposed to the sun because the more open canopy of the dogwood did not shade the box enough during the July-like heatwave we had in late May into early June? Or was the female wren intimidated by the larger and potentially dangerous catbirds and jays flying into the dogwood to survey the ground for food?

I think of the robin nest I discovered in my pear tree in 2019. I watched the female build it high enough off the ground that it was partially blocked by the porch roof, and I'd have missed it entirely had I not seen the pair going back and forth to the tree. Once built, the female settled down, presumably on eggs. The male would come by every so often to relieve her so she could get food. Then, the pair was gone. Squirrels would climb the tree and look in and around the nest. Eventually, it fell apart and out of the tree. 

Eggs in the wrong place, Montezuma
National Wildlife Refuge, NY, 2019
(Margo D. Beller)

Were there ever eggs? Did squirrels get at them? More recently I found a robin in her nest on a window ledge in a bird blind built high off the ground. The windows had screens on them so I could look out at her but not disturb her. This nest would be safe. (The one I and, no doubt, others found on a staircase leading to a platform at a nature center in upstate New York might not have been so fortunate.)

Another reason for nest failure? One or both birds were immature. Instinct told them to mate and build a nest but they might not have known what to do next.

An immature male Cooper's hawk may have been the reason last year's nest failed. I watched - with some trepidation - as the male called and swooped as he helped the larger female bring sticks to the top of a very tall maple tree where branches had created a V that would hold a nest. They mated - noisily - and built. The female started spending time on the nest. Then fish crows discovered it. The female chased them off, with some help from the male. Eventually, both took off and the nest was taken by squirrels.

Nest box in the apple tree, 2020
(Margo D. Beller)

Recently an immature redshouldered hawk has been flying and calling around the area and at one point I saw it flying with nesting materials. I have a rough idea where the nest is but I'm not going to search for it. If the nest is successful there will be enough stress without my hanging around.

As for the wrens, I know for sure another cause of nest failure - parasitism, such as when a cowbird puts one of its eggs in the nest and kicks out the resident eggs - is not involved because the box entrance is too small for a female cowbird to get inside, much less lay an egg. Some birds, such as the yellow warbler, build a new nest on top of the old one when it sees a foreign egg, even tho' there may be its own eggs, too.

Nature can be cruel.

House wrens are not considered an endangered species, and there is always the possibility the singing male will find another mate and the various conditions needed for a successful brood may come together. Or they may not.

I'll have to keep watching.

  

A Plague (of Grackles) on My Lawn

The invasion of my neighborhood began at approximately 3:45 on the afternoon of Friday, Feb. 7.

The day started with a heavy rain, which was predicted to end with snow showers, strong winds and plunging temperature. The change in air pressure was already giving me a massive sinus headache, which was why I was working from home.

As the wind picked up and the snow showers blew in I went out to dump a week's worth of compostable material into the pile before it froze. That's been one of the advantages of a winter short on snow but with lots of rain and, for the most part, temperatures above average - I could dump my compost into the big pile in the corner of my yard rather than start stockpiling pails on the enclosed porch until the snow melted and the pile defrosted.

Grackle invasion, Feb. 7, 2020 (Margo D. Beller)

Coming back to the porch, I saw about a dozen robins and maybe half that many grackles on my lawn. Then I saw more grackles on a lawn on the next street. Then they were everywhere, flying from tree to tree over my head, and making a ton of noise.

I expected this and wasn't happy. I don't like grackles. They will attack the feeder, and each other, as they work to get at and devour all the food, keeping the birds that usually visit the feeder away in the process. If you see one grackle, you can be sure you'll soon have more. Grackles stay in very large flocks in winter, as do many other types of birds including the starlings, cowbirds, blackbirds (both red-winged and rusty in this part of the country) and even robins I've seen following grackle flocks. There is safety in numbers, a better chance of finding food with more pairs of eyes and, when hundreds of birds huddle together in a large space like a pasture or field, warmth.

When I've had invasions in my yard they have generally been just before or just after the snowfall of a more typical winter. In autumn the birds kick aside the fallen leaves to see what's underneath. In late February or March, any snow is generally melting, the ground is softening and the rising groundwater forces worms and insects to the surface.

When I speak of "grackles" I am referring to the common, or purple, grackle, so named because when the light shines on its iridescent black feathers they look purple. There are other types of grackles, depending on whether you are near the ocean (boat-tailed grackle) or in the southwestern part of the U.S. (great-tailed).

Friday's invasion came during an unusually (for this area) less-cold period. We have not been (as yet) set upon by the polar vortex and, as I said, we have not had much snow, certainly not the heavy snow topped by ice that had squirrels so desperate for food one year they could jump over the baffles, grab the feeders and try to pry open the protective caging.

Does increasing daylight trigger these invasions? Was the less-cold weather a factor? Is global warming to blame? I don't know.

Another view that can't begin to show the large number of birds.
Margo D. Beller)

Recently, there have been reports of thousands of grackles converging on areas across the country. In New Jersey, birders from Mattawan to Madison have reported thousands on their feeders and lawns. MH told me of a very large number he saw while running errands, less than a mile away from home, in one of our town's parks a day or so before the Friday invasion. Maybe that same group decided to check out my part of town.

Because I was standing in my backyard, those flying in went to the front yard and the yards across the street and beyond to hunt for food, as you can see in my photographs. The pictures can't begin to show the full extent and, of course, you can't hear hundreds of grackles making their usual noises - a kind of rusty-hinge cackle and a sharp "chuck!" - or the thunder of hundreds of birds taking off at once.

Like the starlings you will see in winter swirling around in the sky and looking like a single organism, grackles somehow can communicate to each other it's time to move, and fast. So when I stepped out the front door to take my pictures, several hundred took off from my property to the next yard, which is where I photographed them. The sight was fascinating as well as horrifying. Had I not seen the massing while my feeders were out there would've been dozens of big birds trying to get at the seed and the suet even though, with the exception of the house feeder, the feeders I use are not configured to allow big birds that don't like hanging upside down from feeding. But that doesn't stop them from trying.

As I watched from my front door all I saw were grackles, although other smaller black birds could've been among them. If you're a smaller bird of similar habit, following a large flock of grackles feeds and protects you, too. I do know that around the side of my house was the original group of robins, doing the same picking at the ground as the larger birds while staying well away from them. Did the robins follow the grackles or the other way around?

One last thing about grackles and their cohorts that is an unfortunate truth but a truth nonetheless - if 50 robins showed up on my lawn I'd find that charming, a sign that spring would soon be upon us. If I see 50 black birds, it looks evil. There is a reason Alfred Hitchcock used a "murder" of big, black American crows to attack children in a playground in his film "The Birds." To paraphrase one birder recently on the (private) NJ birder Facebook page, I tried to turn the grackles into cardinals to enjoy the spectacle but it just didn't work. Black is associated with evil and seeing hundreds of grackles covering the lawns and creating a major din was evil.

Groups of robins don't look nearly as evil. This picture was taken on
Long Island in November 2017.
(Margo D. Beller)

This was, without doubt, the biggest invasion with the largest number of black birds on my suburban lawn since our first year as homeowners, when I went to the backyard to investigate a creaking noise and found hundreds of grackles, starlings, cowbirds and perhaps some blackbirds, which took to the trees at my approach and stayed there, making a racket, until they started flying off in small groups for other areas that could accommodate such a large flock. If I'm not around, MH is under standing orders to watch for grackles and bring in all feeders if he sees an invasion underway.

Soon, all these birds - like the other, more colorful types I go out of my way to find in the woods during migration- will pair, mate, nest and create more. Then the large flocks will regroup.

The morning after the invasion, sitting on my porch in the cold sunshine, a group of about 30 grackles flew over my yard. They didn't stop, to my relief, as I watched the cardinals, woodpeckers and titmice at the feeders.

By the way, a flock of grackles is called a "plague." That's as good a way as any to define what I saw Friday.

Abandoned Nest

The robins in my backyard pear tree alerted me to the nest being built, and they alerted me when the female was sitting on eggs and then feeding young.

Now they are gone, and that silence alerts me the nest is abandoned.

Robin nest, July 31, 2019 (Margo D. Beller)

I first noticed the nest being built by the female on Saturday, July 6, when she flew back and forth with long strands of grass or possibly the spent greenery from the daffodils I had put atop the compost pile a few days before. On July 10 she was sitting in the nest, her head barely above the rim. She wouldn't move until the male signaled he was nearby and then she'd leave for a dinner break.

I looked forward to watching the parents tend to the young, something I could never see when I was watching house wrens going to and from the nest box I hang in the apple tree.

The female returning from a dinner break.
(Margo D. Beller)

On July 26 I noticed a change. Now the male, who had been tending to juveniles from a previous brood, was spending more time at the nest when his mate went off for food, which she did for longer periods of time. He'd stand at the edge, sometimes poking around inside, until the female returned. He'd fly off, she'd stand on the rim, lean down and vigorously move. I imagined young birds, helpless but with mouths open, being force-fed as she regurgitated food directly down their throats. This back and forth went on for a few days.

Meanwhile, we went through days of intense summer heat and humidity, thunderstorms, then days of drier, more comfortable air. Through it all the female was brooding her young. When she sat on eggs, she seemed to be in a daze; when the young hatched, she sat much higher in the nest and was more alert and watchful. I was on the porch one morning when fish crows started calling from trees nearby. Crows, as well as their cousins the jays, will eat baby birds so she sat atop her young and did not move, hiding them amid the tree foliage until the crows flew off.

I can't sit on the porch all the time, unfortunately, especially in very hot and humid weather. But on July 30 I went out in the late afternoon and saw no activity at the nest. I wasn't bothered by this, figuring the parents were off getting food and the young were big enough to sit quietly in the heat unprotected. But I did wonder, and today there continued to be no activity, not even a call from a parent robin.

So I decided to take a closer look.

My attempt to see into the nest (Margo D. Beller)

I don't climb trees. However, I did take an extension pole, attached a paint roller, duct-taped a hand mirror and tried to get it up above the nest to look inside. I was not successful but the fact no parent came screaming at me told me this was no longer an active nest.

What happened?

I could be optimistic and say I miscalculated, the birds were bigger than I thought and all had fledged. But my instinct is it was something more cataclysmic: either a predator (crow? squirrel?) got to the young birds or the heat got to them or the female robin was hit by a car as she was flying low over the road and the young starved.

Nature is cruel, as MH reminded me when I told him about my attempt to look in the nest. I don't know what happened with the house wren nest earlier this year and I don't know what happened with the robins. I do know that eventually the nest will fall apart and drop from the pear tree. Perhaps I'll get a better indication of what happened then.

Family Time, Again

She is nearly invisible in the messy cup nest she built at the top of my pear tree, her yellow bill showing as she raises her head to look at me. But I am behind glass on my enclosed porch and no threat to her. After taking about a week to put the nest together, she is sitting on three to five blue eggs and will rarely move off them for the next two weeks or so unless she must.

Like the neighborhood children freed from school to run around their yards and play, my yard is filled with the sound of noisy young, in this case birds.

Robin in my pear tree, July 13, 2019 (Margo D. Beller)

The American robin female in her nest is not the only robin in my yard. There are others flying around, many of them juveniles whose breasts are mottled rather than orange to help camouflage them. Their nest was in my large yew hedge. An adult male robin is feeding them. There could be two robin pairs or these juveniles may be an earlier brood of the same female robin in the pear tree. (Robins can have up to three broods, if conditions are right.)

This is the time of year when, if you are looking for them, you'll likely see birds either holding food for young or nesting materials. Those with food will lead you to squawking young, which, when they get a little bigger, will flock after their parents and make themselves very visible.

In my yard, besides the robins, the types of birds followed by young so far have included cardinal, flicker, chipping sparrow, starling, titmouse and grackle, with large flocks of cedar waxwings flying overhead. The other morning I watched a young grackle pull a worm from the grass beneath the apple tree. The bird is completely dull brown while an adult grackle is iridescent, with a bright yellow bill and eyes. When you are a young bird, you need all the help you can get to survive into adulthood.

This old nest was within a wild rose bush I was cutting
back. It was well hid and protected by thorns. (Margo D. Beller)

Bigger birds - jays, gulls, great blue herons, crows - will eat baby birds, which is why you will often see these birds chased off by smaller birds - red-winged blackbirds, mockingbirds, Eastern kingbirds, for instance - protecting their young. Danger can come at any time from soaring raptors and neighbors' prowling cats.

Take the robin in my pear tree. According to the Cornell Ornithology Lab, on average "only 40 percent of nests successfully produce young. Only 25 percent of those fledged young survive to November. From that point on, about half of the robins alive in any year will make it to the next."  And robins are relatively big songbirds, about eight to 11 inches long. 

All these bird families passing through my yard are fascinating to watch. Small chipping sparrows land in the longish grass and seem to disappear except for the young's buzzy contact calls. Larger starlings stick with their parents as they hunt in the grass and in the winter will join with other family groups to create the huge flocks that seem to undulate in the air like a single organism. When the berries on my viburnums, dogwood and other shrubs are ready, the robins and other fruit-eating birds will feast (as will the squirrels). Then, when it turns cooler and the leaves start to fall and the insects die off, many of these birds will fly south to their winter grounds to eat there in preparation for next spring's migration and breeding.

Mother Robin coming back from a food break. When I took this picture the
male flew off to the flood wall. I am guessing he was watching things
while his mate was away. (Margo D. Beller)

Unlike in past years, I am not watching a house wren brood. The nest box I cleared a few weeks ago was visited by a singing male. I was hopeful. However, it didn't attract a mate and didn't build a nest. It used the box as a temporary roost for a few days and hasn't been seen since. But that's the nice thing about the natural world. While there are no house wrens this year, I have a front-row porch seat for when Mother Robin's eggs hatch.  

The Robin

“The robin flew from his swinging spray of ivy on to the top of the wall and he opened his beak and sang a loud, lovely trill, merely to show off. Nothing in the world is quite as adorably lovely as a robin when he shows off - and they are nearly always doing it.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden 

One afternoon last week, when the temperature was unusually mild for mid-February and allowed me to wear a light coat instead of a parka, I was walking down my street and heard the "chuckle" of a robin overhead. I looked up. First a couple flew over, heading southeast. Then another few, then more. I started counting. I stopped at 25. Altogether it must've been 100 or so flying in small groups from the edge of the Central Park of Morris County.

November 2017 (Margo D. Beller)

Robins are considered a harbinger of spring, even though there are robins that will remain in the snowy, colder north as long as there are fruiting shrubs or the ground has thawed enough for them to pick at worms and insects.

The American robin is a thrush, like the hermit thrush, wood thrush and bluebird. Its cousins are the catbird and the mockingbird. Despite having the same name it is different from the European robin, which is more of a songbird. (The English colonists likely saw one and were reminded of the robins back home.)
  
I continued my walk and turned eastward. As I approached a large white pine girdled with English ivy (not poison ivy) several robins flew in and started thrashing around in what I guess was a feeding frenzy. What could they be finding, I wondered. I took a right and started southward toward my home and more robins, likely from the same flock that had passed over me earlier, were now heading back north, stopping at every holly or cedar they could find. Unlike the pines and spruces, ivy, holly and cedar have softer leaves. So these robins were going after - what? Likely seeds, fruits or insects that came out in the milder weather. 

Why the large flock? Safety in numbers. Grackles form large flocks in winter before pairing off to mate in the spring. Sometimes the large flocks include starlings, redwinged blackbirds and cowbirds. I never know when the flocks will invade my yard but when they come down it is to look under the leaf litter for insects or probe the soft ground or mob the bird feeders. Sometimes there are robins following along. Like the grackles, the robin's bill is more suited to pecking into soft ground than cracking a sunflower seed. Unlike the grackles they stay out of the feeders, which is why I don't mind seeing large flocks of this particular bird.

Robin in fruiting red cedar tree (Margo D. Beller)

Lately I've been seeing robins on my front lawn and those of my neighbors, with some grackles and starlings. On the day before our most recent snowstorm I drove down the driveway and found at least a dozen pecking into the grass.

In his book, "What the Robin Knows," author Jon Young says the robin is a "sentry" that can tell us about the health of our environment -- if we choose to slow down, listen and observe. When a human is respectful, the robin doesn't fly away (even if it does watch warily). So when I see several dozen robins feeding while walking down a street named for our first U.S. president, I stay away a respectful distance and watch and then, when I must move, I move slowly and make no threatening movements.

You can learn a lot watching a robin. Watching these robins I learned which fruiting shrubs I should consider for my yard to draw robins and other birds. I learned that owners of even the most manicured suburban lawn can't kill off all the bugs or poison the grass since otherwise the robins wouldn't be feeding. I've also learned that when you see a large flock of robins eating like there's no tomorrow, they might know more than you do about changing weather. Luckily for the robins there are shrubs where the fruits aren't palatable until after a few frosts.

The most important thing I've learned from the robin is that no matter how bad winter can be, spring is always around the corner.

Long Island, NY, November 2017 (Margo D. Beller)

 

Saying Goodby

By the time you read this I will have worked my last day for a media company in Bergen County. It was a freelance writing and editing job, and I had hoped my boss would get me hired on staff. He had thought that too, but instead the job has been eliminated. Or so I’m told. This place is consistent in its inconsistency.

Harold aloft,  April 30, 9:40 am

What I will miss most, besides the obvious paycheck and a lot of fine people, will be the birds.

On the morning of my last day at work, I went to Flat Rock Brook in Englewood, N.J., and had the best birding in years. I will miss this place, one of the last remaining areas of Palisades forest, high above the overdeveloped streets and ostentatious homes. There had been a thunderstorm overnight and the migrating birds were forced to interrupt their flight north to rest and feed at Flat Rock until conditions improved.

I walked my usual route and heard towhee and scared up a black-throated blue warbler with a grub in its beak. I continued up the hill to a meadow and was surrounded by birdsong, so much I had to listen hard to distinguish the myrtles, the black-throated green warbler and the parula. In the trees, with my binoculars, I found magnolia warbler, scarlet tanager, warbling vireo,common yellow-throat, black and white warbler. Thanks to this fallout I was seeing two weeks of birds in an hour. Magic. I was late to work but I didn't care.

I will miss the robins that decided the rhododendron in the enclosed courtyard of my now-former office was a fine place to put a nest. I found it by accident when I took a break and watched as a male robin chased a female and mated with her, then she - holding nest material in her beak all the while - went behind that particular plant. I went inside and, sure enough, from behind the glass I could see her snug in her nest. 

Maud on the nest, April. 30, 9:40am

The other morning I looked out and the female was picking up scraps dropped by sloppy diners. In the nest were four blue eggs, robin’s egg blue eggs. Unless you see these jewels you don’t appreciate why the color was given that name. I am sorry I won’t be able to watch the eggs hatch and see the parents take care of them.

I will also miss the fall migration when almost every day one or more raptors used the warm, thermal winds off the Palisades to stay aloft and used the Hudson River as a highway pointing south. Accipiters, falcons, vultures, buteos. When I left my previous job in midtown Manhattan one guy I know told me I’d enjoy birding the Palisades, and he was right.

I will even miss the noisy, silly killdeers that call as they fly over the parking lot of my office. Last year the pair raised two chicks but this year they have been faced with several calamities - one chick fell down into a sewer, too far for me to reach it even if I could lift up the heavy metal grate. (I only know this happened because the adults and a second chick were noisily fluttering around the grate and I came over and looked down. I felt helpless.)

Killdeer on the parking lot.

A few days later the adults were flying over the lot, alarmed, and I did not see the other chick. Did it fall down the sewer, too? Or was it hit by a car? Or was it snatched up by a predator?

Which leads me to Harold and Maud. I’ll miss them the most. It was a thrill finding the redtail hawk nest and I was enjoying watching one flying around hunting while the other sat on the eggs, which must've hatched by now.

As time has gone on the trees have leafed out and it has gotten harder to find the nest, even for me. This is as it should be. This hawk nest should not be disturbed. But I did want to see the young, see Harold and Maud taking turns going out to catch some food and feed them.

Well, being an optimist at heart, I know the nice thing about birding is you can always find something good anywhere, and I will have more time - when I'm not job hunting - to explore areas closer to home or to drive to new areas and see what’s in the trees.