'Dumb' Bird Watching

This very rainy morning I sat on my enclosed porch and watched the wren box. Even though the rain had weighed the dogwood branches down to obscure most of the box, I knew what was happening because I had seen the same activity yesterday when it was merely cloudy.

The female appears to be sitting on eggs.

The male house wren would start singing from a nearby bush and the female would pop out of the box to go get some food. The male would continue singing, now from the dogwood, until the female returned and went back in the box.

'Dumb' wren nest box (Margo D. Beller)

The dogwood doesn't have the thick canopy that was once in the apple tree, where the box once hung, but the wet does not stop the house wrens from going about their business in order to survive and bring up young. The male goes up in the tree to a branch where I can see it, sings until his mate returns, then flies to the shelter of the nearest bush.

I base my presumption that she is on eggs on many years of watching house wrens using this box I hung in the dogwood, where I can see it from my chair on the porch. But even then I can't be sure what is going on. 

When we returned from a recent family visit it looked like there was no female. The "tell-tale" sticks were no longer hanging beneath the box. Did the female that had been busily building the nest depart? I have no idea, but now there is a female - possibly the same one - and she is spending more time in the box because, I presume, there are eggs in the nest.

Had I one of those tiny cameras in the nest I'd be able to see inside. But I am not a fan of "smart" technology in general, and for birding in particular.

My Facebook feed, besides items from "Friends," will sometimes send up something based on some algorithm that says I enjoy seeing things about birds. I do, but I also get ads. A recent ad appeared for a "smart" bird feeder that would allow me to "watch birds live from your phone" and download photos and videos of every bird visit, among other talents.

'Dumb' bird feeder, with titmouse and white-breasted nuthatch
(Margo D. Beller)

If there is one thing these old eyes don't need it is another reason to look at the small screen of my phone.

It is ironic that while I've been running around most mornings in these waning days of spring migration I've likely been missing "good" stuff in my own backyard. But when I am home I prefer to use my eyes and ears - albeit with some help from the Merlin app because I can't hear many calls anymore unless the bird is very loud or over my head. 

The idea of putting out a "smart" feeder that has some sort of camera in it allowing someone to see what's at the feeder every time a house sparrow or other bird shows up, even while that person is elsewhere, does not appeal to me. Too much information. Too much like one of those camera doorbells.

The birding world has come a long way from those intrepid people who would go out to distant places, see or hear something and then report back to Audubon. Merlin is helpful, yes. So is Cornell's eBird. But the social media channels - Instagram, Discord, etc. - where report of a rarity can draw hundreds of people in a pop-up flash - scare me. The coronavirus forced people outdoors, and while there they discovered birds. But binoculars and good pairs of eyes and ears are apparently not enough anymore.

Using 'dumb' technology
(RE Berg-Andersson)

I'm sure there are people out on this rainy morning looking for what migrants might still be around. But you won't find me going far from my porch.

Extreme Birding

My Facebook feed also brought me an article from NPR on three teenage boys who, with their fathers assisting them, competed in the World Series of Birding earlier this month.

My reaction to what I read was mixed. I was glad to see younger people getting involved with birding. There was a time, decades ago, when I was one of the younger ones in a group seeking out a bird. Now I'm right in there with the demographic. Birding needs younger blood.

However, I was sad to see there were no girls on the all-white team - not even a mother helping out - and I was horrified to read these kids were just as gung-ho competitive as the adults who were also running around the state trying to tick off as many birds on their list as they could in a day.

You're not seeing the birds when you are competing to see how much you can find in a day, you're seeing something - shape, sound - that allows you to claim you "saw" it and add it to your checklist.

I was amused the teenagers named their team the Pete Dunnelins, a play on the dunlin shorebird and Pete Dunne, who created the World Series of Birding as a charitable endeavor that would also contribute Citizen Science data on how well, or badly, bird species were doing in New Jersey.

The kids found 206 species of birds, but they came in second to a team that found 209.

The WSB is still an important way of recording what birds are where in a world where bird populations are in decline due to "development" and global warming, among other factors. 

But the WSB has gone way beyond its original intent. Now it is a competitive sport. The people at Cornell's Ornithology Lab - the ones behind Merlin and eBird - broadened the WSB to the world, calling it the Global Big Day. You have teams all over the world competing to find as many birds as possible. I imagine hundreds of people running into each other as they stomp on a marsh at 3 a.m. to hear grunting rails and soras, or whatever the global equivalents are.

I expect to see the WSB become part of the next X Games on television soon enough. 

No thank you.

Many Directions At Once

 ...[S]tarting a sentence in the middle, and then going to the beginning and the end of it at the same time... both directions at once.

--Liner note from the John Coltrane "lost" album "Both Directions At Once," recorded in 1963 but not released until 2018.

It is a warmish but quiet morning on the enclosed back porch, and I am catching up with the world after last week's heatwave kept me inside with the air conditioning for nearly a week, except for brief forays in the oppressive air to pick up apples dropped by the thirsty squirrels. I would hear birds but had no inclination to go looking for them until the day the heatwave ended, when it was wonderfully cool in the early morning and I could take a long walk.

Wren nest in what is now the diseased area
of the apple tree, back in 2020.
(Margo D. Beller)

This morning, however, I am sitting. In one direction I can see the house wren nest box. During the heatwave the male had been singing almost continually, and I wondered what had happened to its mate. I could not sit on the porch in the heat to watch for activity. 

Unlike the first wren brood, when it was unusually wet and cool during incubation, it must've been extremely hot in that little wooden box for this female. If there were eggs in there they wouldn't need her all the time to keep them warm. But when it turned cooler I did see her leaving the box to get food, then fly back inside for long periods of time.

As I watched today she flew out and soon returned holding a bright green insect, maybe a katydid. She took it inside. So I'm sure the eggs have hatched and she is now feeding small young that will grow bigger. 

What the hummingbird saw, which may be why it didn't stay.
(Margo D. Beller)

That's one direction I can look. If I turn around in my chair I can see the hummingbird feeder. When it turned cool I had put fresh sugar water in and hoped something would be interested.

A couple of days ago, as I was at the back door before going out to collect dropped apples, a hummingbird did suddenly appear. It briefly investigated the pink coral bell flowers, flew up to look at the red lid of the feeder but did not fly over the netting. Instead, it headed for the apple tree but a squirrel in a lower branch must've spooked it because it disappeared. I hope it returns.

Hummingbirds used to be a common occurrence in my yard, usually during July. Last year I saw no hummingbirds at the feeder but one could've come by. Same with the one I saw this week. Did it come by when I had taken the feeder inside? Did it come by when the liquid had spoiled? Was it put off by the netting that protects the plants in the shade? No clue.

Years ago a yellow-bellied sapsucker drilled these holes in
the apple tree. I didn't think they had anything to do with
the current rot. Now I'm not sure. (Margo D. Beller)

So now I'm watching for hummingbirds when I'm on the porch. That is good, because the apple tree is done putting out fruit and I will soon have to do something about its diseased limb.

There was a time, early in our occupancy of this house, when apple season was during July. Little by little apple season has been earlier and earlier. This year the tree started dropping small apples at the end of May, not long after flowering. Then one-third of the tree suddenly went black. As apples got bigger in the rest of the tree the squirrels started coming. I took my long pole out to knock down what apples I could reach. Despite one-third of the tree being dead I managed to get enough fruit for two pints of sauce and two apple cakes. 

The fruit I could not reach I left for the squirrels. Yesterday, June 28, I picked up the last little apples from the ground. Today, June 29, there were no squirrels in the tree and a chipmunk was rummaging around looking for what apple bits it could find. 

Chipmunk hunting apple pieces. (Margo D. Beller)

Apple season is over for this year and it isn't even July. If cutting off the diseased limb doesn't save the tree it could be the last apple season. We've lived in this house for over 30 years and the tree was there when we moved in. It was planted by a previous owner maybe a decade before that.

According to one website I found, the average lifespan of an apple tree is 25 to 50 years, depending on the type. Years ago I showed one of the apples to the manager of the farmstand I buy from and he thought it was a MacIntosh type, even though the tree blooms in the spring rather than fall. MacIntosh trees live 30-45 years.

Factors affecting its life include exposure to sunlight (check), competition with other trees (it stands alone) and moisture. Too little is bad and so is too much. Last year we were in a severe drought, which lasted until this spring, when we had too much rain. This is an old tree. As with the dogwood a few years ago, my hope is cutting away the dead stuff will allow the apple tree to live. But it may not.

Besides apples ripening sooner than before thanks to increasing global warming the insect population is surging earlier, too.

That's why another distraction from my chair is watching for fungal gnats on the porch. Last year the gnats started bothering me in August, at which point I brought my house plants inside and put the infested bird seed bag outside. This year they started in the spring, when it was cold and wet. Maybe they were seeking shelter and warmth because during the heatwave there were very few of them on the porch. (And I don't have house plants on the porch this year.) What I found inside during the heatwave I am sure I brought in after dealing with the apples. 

Instead of spraying the porch, as I did last year, I tried old-fashioned flypaper. 

Hanging from the ceiling. (Margo D. Beller)

I hung it on a wall near the screen door, because that is where I'd see a gnat early in the morning. But all I caught was a spider. I don't want to catch spiders. Spiders are useful insects with their webs. So I changed the location and have the sticky paper hanging from the ceiling. But unlike flies, attracted by the color yellow, gnats could care less. They seem to prefer the white walls of the porch, which is where I've continued to kill them. The one fly that got onto the porch got caught in a spider web. 

The flypaper is something else to look at when I'm not watching the wrens.  

Oddities

Roseate spoonbill, Rte, 94 NJ (RE Berg-Andersson)

What you see here is a roseate spoonbill, a bird normally found in such places as the Florida Everglades. According to the bird people at Cornell, the spoonbill forages "in the shallows of fresh, brackish, and marine waters including bays, mangroves, forested swamps, and wetlands." 

You do not expect to see this bird on the property of a New Jersey stone company along Route 94 in western Warren County. 

And yet there it was, reported by many on the various online bird lists, using that large spoon-shaped bill to root out worms that had come to the surface after recent flooding rains created a large pond in the middle of the stone company's lawn. MH and I saw this bird on May 30 in the afternoon, after we had spent many hours driving along Old Mine Rd. in the northwestern part of the state, seeing or hearing 50 different types of breeding birds including 12 types of warblers.

It's fun to find birds you normally don't see, such as we do along Old Mine Rd. once a year, but when I see a bird that was somehow blown way out of its territory, it makes me sad. I wondered where the spoonbill would go once the water receded. Would it fly south and seek another spoonbill? Would it stay where it was and die? I don't know. Most winters someone reports a hummingbird in New Jersey. Hummingbirds need a lot of food to power their wings, which beat thousands of times a second. One year a hummingbird normally seen in the west was lucky enough to find its way to a nature center in western NJ. The staff quickly rigged up a heat lamp and a feeder for the bird, which survived into the spring when MH and I saw it.

Most "accidentals" aren't so lucky if they show up at the wrong place in the wrong season. Others discover things ain't so bad. For instance, for the last several years, including this year, a white pelican has shown up at DeKorte Park in Lyndhurst, NJ., hard by the NJ Turnpike. It is hanging out in a large pool with double-crested cormorants, great blue herons and other marsh birds. There is lots of food or these birds wouldn't be there. At the same time, brown pelicans has been reported as coming farther north, too. I've seen these stately birds in San Francisco Bay and the Chesapeake Bay, following the fish. On occasion they are sighted as far north as southern New Jersey.   

Why are formerly southern birds either showing up in the north more often or have now become year-round residents, such as the Carolina wren or the mockingbird? Strong winds can blow a migrating bird off course. Global warming could make a bird comfortable in a new region. Evolution could be helping a bird adapt to a new climate. Warm waters could force fish farther north, bringing those that eat them north, too. 

There are all sorts of explanations. Pick your own. Most birders, eager to tick off an unusual bird they don't need to travel far to see for their Life Lists, don't care.

Here's another oddity.

Witch hazel leaf (Margo D. Beller)

I was taking a walk the other morning when I walked into a branch of this sapling hanging over the road. I noticed what looked like horns on all the leaves. I'd never seen anything like this before.

I asked my brother-in-law, the naturalist. He said this was a witch hazel and that the "horn" was caused by an insect boring into the bottom side of the leaf to lay its eggs - so many eggs they had come through the other side to create the "horn" I was seeing.

Many people go into the woods to look for frogs, insects, animals, plants and butterflies. I prefer birds but MH has been known to show me something interesting, such as an American toad off the path or a wooly bear caterpillar.

Tulip poplar on the road. (Margo D. Beller)

I guess I have to broaden my horizons and look down more often. For instance, it was by looking down I found this tulip poplar flower a squirrel must've snapped off - I hadn't realized the tall poplars had put out flowers to attract pollinating insects. When I was growing up my parents' neighbor had a huge tree that eventually shaded out the sun-needing flowers in our backyard. However,  the tulip flowers were at my eye level from the back porch.

According to one source I found, the tulip poplar is one of the largest of the trees native to the eastern U.S. It can grow as high as 190 feet but is more typically 70 to 100 feed. The trunk can be 10 feet in diameter. 

When I see them in my town they are usually in so-called waste areas. Few keep this as a yard tree anymore, apparently. A couple of years ago one person a few streets away cut down his stately, old tree, thus creating his own waste area.