Reconnecting

I did something radical this morning. I walked. In the suburbs. Yes.

Until the end of March I walked almost every day, most of the time to the train station in town. This was the reason we moved to this little town, the ease of walking to public transportation to my job, first in Jersey City and then in midtown Manhattan.

When that job ended in February I started taking daily walks very early in the morning through what has now become a county park, Central Park of Morris County, but used to be the nether regions of the state Greystone Park psychiatric hospital. I heard and saw a lot of birds in those early March trips.

Then I got a new job and it required me to drive to a city on the Hudson River, 35 or so miles away as Route 80 flies.

Things become a blur from the car because you have to concentrate on the road, on your driving, on other cars. The brain isn't stimulated, at least not in what I think is the right way, and the legs aren't being exercised. You get where you are going faster, but you don't enjoy the trip as much.

So this morning I decided that rather than grab the car to do all my local errands I would walk.

It was a real eye-opener, starting with my own yard. How did that butterfuly bush get so tall? Seems like just yesterday I was cutting it back the way you're supposed to in spring to generate new growth.

When did that house on the next block go up for sale? It always has a nice garden, put in with an eye to saving time and water while using plants that deter deer without netting. Will the new owner keep the garden, or will it be removed in favor of just grass or, worse, paved over?

When did that other house rip out its old, tall hedges and put in a sprinkler system that waters the public curb about as much as it waters the small, nondescript replacement shrubs? I used to hear a lot of sparrows chattering to each other from their nests in those hedges. When did that house a few streets away double in size? It's on a lot that hasn't gotten any bigger. I guess people prefer the climate-controlled, soundproofed, technology-driven great indoors and have less yard they'd only have to pay someone to take care of anyway.

I walked along the Greystone road, past the dog park that had only a couple of people letting their pets run at that hour, and found all the deer I chase out of my yard and then some - many had fawns hiding in the long meadow grass. I heard bluebirds, carolina wrens, cardinals. Once I leave my house I rarely hear birds on my drive through town and never on Route 80, where the posted speed is 65 but that is more a floor than a ceiling.

I said good morning to other walkers and waved at neighbors getting their newspapers from the curb. I felt the welcome ache of muscles being used in my legs. I felt the breeze in my hair and the sun, not amplified by the greenhouse effect of my metal car, on my neck.

I enjoyed myself greatly, and I even got my chores done.

Alot of people spend a ton of money to go to exotic locales where they can walk through a rain forest or along a beach or tour museums and historic sites.

Today I was reminded that sometimes you don't have to go far, or do more than put on a pair of sneakers, to get away from it all while reconnecting with the world around you.

This brood has flown

It was bound to happen sometime.

Things were getting loud and rambunctious at the wren box. The parents were shuttling back and forth so fast and so often I doubt they ate anything themselves. The young got so big the parents had stopped going into the box to feed them unless it was to feed one in the back, crowded out by more dominant siblings.

And the parents would not stop scolding me. All I had to do was walk out the back door and one or the other would be chittering. Much of that was to tell the young to be quiet so they wouldn't give away their position. That's instinct, although considering they were in a box I had put up in an apple tree, rather silly.

But I put up with it.

The apples in the tree where the feeder is hung were getting riper with the hot weather, and the squirrels were increasing their visits and dropping more chewed apples. This required me to go out more often to pick up the remains or pick apples I could reach before the deer came along...although based on what is under the tree my actions are also pretty silly.

Then MH and I went away for the July 4 weekend.

We came back on the 4th, a Monday this year. There were no apples on the ground when we came home but there were the next morning. The wren scolded me as usual. But on Wednesday there was silence as I picked up the apples. I reached up and shifted the box and it was as light in weight as the day I put it up.

But while out of the box the wrens have not left my yard. The male house wren will sing in the morning, particularly if the carolina wren on the next block is singing - which he does quite loudly for a small bird, to my delight.

Lately I have heard the brood but not seen them as they move among the dense shrubery. Momma wren chitters when I first come out, as if to say to her family "Be careful." But she does not come to the tree as I work. (This was a good thing because I wanted to come out and pick as many apples as I could reach or knock down with a stick, which I wouldn't do if the box was in use.)

And who knows, the male may start a second brood in the house. Wrens are not monogamous - when the young can take care of themselves, the party's over.

Whether there's one brood or two, at some point the young will start feeding themselves and will, at the right time, feel the need to head south as the air cools. With any luck one of them will remember my yard and come back.

When he returns and starts singing he will find the box - clean and empty - waiting for that year's brood.

Timing is everything

The American goldfinch is the state bird of New Jersey, so it is a particular pleasure when I see or hear them in my Morris Plains backyard.

In winter both male and female are a dull brown with large black and white wingbars. When they’ve come to my feeders they are usually in a large group.

But as spring approaches, things start to change. The female’s feathers become yellow-green to better blend into the foliage when the trees leaf out and she’s sitting on a nest.

The male makes a more dramatic change – he becomes bright yellow and takes on a black forecap. When it is time to breed, he soars, dips and rises again, a dizzying loop-de-loop, calling as he flies.

The goldfinch has a late breeding season that is directly linked to thistle seeds. What you might see as a bunch of purple weeds in an overgrown field is breakfast, lunch and supper for a goldfinch – and a reason to breed. Without seeds there is no next generation.

Consider Jersey City, the second or third largest city in New Jersey. When I started working there in 1999, there were large, weedy fields in the areas near the Hudson River that had once held factories. With the fields were large hungry flocks of goldfinches eating the seeds.

By the time I stopped working in Jersey City over 10 years later, many of those weedy fields were gone, paved over for large hotel and apartment complexes. The population of birds passing through dropped dramatically.

Some would call it progress or a boost to tax ratables. Considering none of these buildings feature any useful seeding plants in their landscaping, I would say it is a terrible way to treat your state’s bird.

This is why when I start to see the males doing the loop-de-loop, I put out a special feeder for goldfinches. To get a thistle seed the bird has to hang upside-down from the perch. Most birds, such as the larger, aggressive house finch, don’t like to do it. So it gives goldfinches a fighting chance.

Goldfinches are considered a common species by the Cornell College of Ornithology, and its breeding and migration range is within the United States.

(Here’s a fun fact about goldfinches I learned from the Cornell website, www.allaboutbirds.org: if a cowbird lays an egg in a goldfinch nest the chick will die after three days because it can’t survive on a seed-only diet. See my June 12 post "Love is blind" for more of my feelings about cowbirds.)

The suburbs being what they are, I can’t have a vast expanse of weedy field. Nor can I plant drifts of coneflowers, asters and butterfly bush to provide seeds. My neighbors would have me kicked out of town for the former, and the deer eat most of the latter.

So I pick my spots. I leave weeds in corner areas to go to seed. I grow coneflower and butterfly bush behind deer netting. And, of course, there's the feeder.

If I and the rest of the New Jersey population are lucky, the skittish goldfinches will eat the seeds provided, continue their loop-de-loops and raise another brood.

That's my reward for being a good neighbor.

It's a brood!

It has taken several weeks but there is now a noisy brood of baby house wrens in this box.

I first realized the skittish adults had settled down earlier this week when I saw a squirrel jumping out of the apple tree where the box hangs, apple in mouth, chased by a scolding wren. The wren even pecked at the squirrel as it ran up an oak tree, no doubt to its own nest.

(This will happen alot, unfortunately. Last year I was lucky to get enough apples to make three pints of apple sauce.)

Yesterday, early, I was outside and heard soft cheeps from the box. But when an adult showed up the cheeping became more insistent.

Since then the parents have been shuttling back and forth to a loud chorus of "Feed Me!!" in wren talk. Papa wren has been too busy to do much territorial singing. Mama wren has been quick to fly to a branch near me and scold if I get too close, or even if I come out the back door to dump some compost in my corner pile.

The other day I read a post on the NJ bird list from a guy in Basking Ridge whose first reaction upon seeing a bear in his yard was to get a camera. The bear had bent over the post holding his wren house, poured out the babies and ate them.

The guy's reaction? Too bad about the wrens but here are my amazing pictures.

Basking Ridge is not far from Morris Plains as the crow flies, although it is a fair piece of walking for a 200-pound bear. Had it been me and MH had been awake I'd have yelled at him to call the cops while I grabbed two pots to make noise running at the bear to scare it off. I know, I'm stupid. (I've done something similar to chase off a buck although when it put its head down to charge me I quickly backed off.)

My feeling is, if you go to the trouble to set up a habitat to protect birds and help continue the species, you protect them as much as possible. In my yard I chase off stray cats and have been known to wave a broom at cooper's hawks to keep them from the feeders. MH says even hawks have to eat and I agree but I say, let them eat elsewhere (or at least pick off the chipmunks).

It will be another week or so before the wrenlets start venturing beyond the box. Last year one fell from the box and was immediately snatched up by a jay before I could get out the porch door. Two others survived and I hope the two or three in the box this year do, too.

When autumn comes and I take down the box and clear it I will marvel that in this tiny space an adult wren was able to build a nest, lay her eggs and then feed the growing young. It's the same feeling MH gets when he thinks about growing up in a house with two parents and two brothers and only one bathroom - how did we do it?

You did it because you had to. It's why the wrens use the box and why I put the box up in the first place, my small bit to make the world a better place.

Love is Blind

I do not like cowbirds.

They are ugly birds. The male is black with a brown head that looks all black in dim light. The female looks like an oversized, gray house sparrow.

I do not like the female because she also has an ugly habit of dropping eggs in the nests of other birds. This is known as parasitizing.

The cowbird isn't the only bird to do this. Some cuckoos drop eggs into the nests of other cuckoos, for instance.

But parasitizing is the only way the cowbird can continue the species. Cowbirds don't build nests. Nor do they kick out other birds to take the nests, as owls do. It is not known why they must use the nests of songbirds.

That is why at this time of year, when I am hearing the first broods of chipping sparrows, starlings, robins and titmice making a ruckus as they chase their parents begging to be fed, I expect my annual sighting of some pair of adult birds being harried by a particularly large, aggressively hungry chick.

One year I was walking to the train and saw a pair of carolina wrens feverishly trying to fill the mouth of a cowbird chick that was double their size. Cardinal nests are also prone to parasitization and, like the sun rising in the east, I will soon hear the very loud screeching of the cowbird chick in my bushes following an adult cardinal that is desperately looking for something to feed it.

You would think the wren, for instance, would recognize the intruder in its midst. Some types of bird do. The yellow warbler will build an entirely new nest over an existing nest if it spies the larger cowbird egg, neglecting its own eggs in the process of starting over.

But most birds, like the carolina wren and the cardinal, are not programmed that way. If there is an egg, the adult sits on it. And if that slightly larger egg hatches first, as cowbird eggs do, and the chick manages to push some or all of the other eggs or hatchlings out of the nest in order to hog the food, it isn't noticed by the parents. In their minds, they are raising the next generation.

But it's the wrong generation.

In Michigan, where the population of Bachman's warbler was practically wiped out thanks to a nasty combination of habitat destruction and parasitization, it is policy to catch and kill cowbirds within the designated Bachman warbler jack-pine habitat.

It may seem cruel but that has helped the Bachman's population slowly re-grow.

This isn't a problem for the cowbird. This is one bird where the destruction of its usual habitat has helped it.

Cowbirds were farm birds, picking bugs off the cows and the fields. But with "progress" has come suburban developments built on farm fields. There may be fewer farms but the cowbirds adapted and thrived. Too well, in fact.

One thing that amazes me is that after being raised by a pair of cardinals, for example, the cowbird chick will grow up and somehow intuitively know it is not a cardinal. Then it will find other cowbirds and at the correct, programmed time mate and start the parasitation process all over again.

To me this makes the cowbird, literally and figuratively, the dark side of nature.

The Wren Days of Summer

There comes a time when you have to acknowledge spring migration is over.

No more blackpoll warbler, whose squeaky-brake call was heard for two weeks in the backyard. No more large flocks of goldfinches jockeying for position at the thistle feeder.

Far fewer birds are singing at dawn. The other day as I was hiking in the neighborhood I heard a strange song, then spotted a goldfinch. He wasn't singing but the male indigo bunting at the top of the spruce was.

But that's the exception. At this time of year birders leave the woods and head to the shore to look at the peeps and waders. The birds sit in the open and, if you can put up with the biting flies and mosquitoes, you don't have to work as hard at seeing something.

This is the season of the breeders. In my brother-in-law's New Hampshire woods, the black-throated green and blackburnian warblers still call to protect their nesting territory, the wood thrush and veery sing all day and the yellow-bellied sapsucker drums loudly on branches.

In my area, we have cardinals, catbirds, chipping and song sparrows and loads of robins. The chickadees, titmice and nuthatches sing every so often but they are more concerned with feeding young behind the thick tree canopy. If I didn't have suet out I might not be seeing downy, hairy or redbelly woodpecker.

Thankfully, there are wrens.

The carolina wren, such as this one from last winter, has a very loud song for such a little bird. If fed during the worst of winter, it will hang around all year. In the last week I have heard a carolina wren singing from the next street. One of the reasons why I love carolina wren is it sings all the time - in winter's cold, in summer, in breeding season. So this one is singing and is likely proclaiming his territory.

The other breeding wren is the house wren, which comes up in spring after wintering far to the south. (This year's current singer is at the top.) Years ago a friend gave me a small decorative bird house and for the hell of it I hung it in one of my apple trees. To my delight a house wren and mate raised a family in it. It was not meant to be a real birdhouse so it was not a surprise that it broke apart after a few years.

At that point I went to the local Audubon office and bought this wren house.

I wait for "house wren" to show up on area birding lists and then put the house up. Usually within a few days there is activity and later a brood or two. (The opening is too small for the carolina wren.)

This year, as with everything else during a cold and wet spring, things were different. It seemed to take a long time for a house wren to discover the box and then after a few days it was silent. A week would go by and then there would be early morning wren song.

If you look at the house above you'll see a bit of stuff coming out the bottom - nesting material. I see a pair of wrens going in and out of the box but I don't hear any cheeping. At this point I am just glad to have them at all. It is nice to be awakened by a house wren's bubbly song rather than the alarm clock. It is nicer to hear the house wren nearby and the carolina wren a block or so away.

As I get ready to take the feeders in for the season the wrens will be my summer solace.

Slowing down

Today, as I was working in my garden, I heard the "squeaky brake" call of the blackpoll warbler. I've been hearing Old Blackpoll alot this week, singing high in the trees near my office and around the yard.

If you can find it you would see a bird that looks a lot like a chickadee but does not flit about as the 'dee does. This is the male blackpoll and he is a slow and steady gleaner of bugs in the upper tree canopy. So is the female but she is alot plainer, as most female birds are so they can blend in while on the nest.

Blackpolls have always impressed me because they have one of the longest migration routes of any bird, including other warblers.

But here is the significance of the blackpoll for me: It is one of the last of the warblers to pass through my area northbound. That means from now on, migration is slowing down.

Oh, there will still be birds passing through for a few more weeks. Also, places like the Great Swamp and Delaware Water Gap will host numbers of breeding birds through the summer.

But for me it isn't the same as spring, when you hear your first black-throated green of the season.

This year has been different.

This year, I haven't heard a black-throated green. When I read the bird reports I learn northern New England and southern Canada are seeing influxes of birds weeks earlier than usual. Were they pushed up by the wacky weather we had this spring, strong winds from the west and south or the unexpected warm days making them think they'd better get a move on?

This year seems different for me, too.

Maybe I'M the one slowing down. I am getting older. My neck hurts more and longer when I look up at treetops for too long, my legs tire from what seems like endless stops and starts and it gets harder to wake at dawn on a Saturday after a busy, busy work week.

Are you working harder than ever to keep your family fed and bills paid nowadays? Me, too. The pressures never end.

Intense work-week pressures used to send me into the woods on weekends. But I am at another job now and, while busy, things are not as intense.

Or perhaps I am even getting a bit bored with the eastern birds I find each year. I surprised myself to realize that with the exception of the Wilson's warbler in spring and the Connecticut warbler that tends to pass through my area in fall I've seen and/or heard every Eastern warbler, including the Swainson's that I saw a year ago on a Florida barrier island.

That trip might've been the highlight of my birding life thus far. Lovely sunrises, as you can see above. Great food on the Panhandle. You could stand still and within 30 minutes see 30 birds, some at eye level. It was my first time seeing (rather than hearing) a worm-eating warbler, for instance.

After that, trying to see a flitting shape high in the leafed-out trees on a cold spring morning through binoculars you can't get focused fast enough seems very old indeed.

MH told me he is relieved I am slowing down, that I am less obsessed by birding and can "take it or leave it" and do more resting on the weekends.

My husband sees that as a good thing, but as I listened to the blackpoll today for some reason the thought left me rather sad.