Mighty mite

House Wrens are small but feisty.  Every bit as high energy as the busiest warbler, they bustle about the bushes scaring up food, and scaring off potential competitors. Put out a bluebird box, and you are just as likely to wind up with a house wren in there instead.  In fact, these little tyrants will kick out the eggs and even young of other species just to take over the nest box.  Then they stuff the box full of sticks all the way up to the entrance hole to prevent anything else from getting in.

Male and female house wrens look alike, but this bird was paying close attention to a singing male, so perhaps this is Mrs. Wren in the typical wren posture, tail pointed up.

And here he is, singing his lovely warble. Wrens usually change singing perches frequently, but this male stayed several minutes while I moved closer.

Young birds in nest boxes or tree cavities are susceptible to parasitic mites and flies; in fact, heavy parasite infestations can sap baby bird growth so much they fail to mature.  But house wrens have a strategy for dealing with this:  they capture egg sacs of spiders and import them to the nest box to feed on the parasites.  Problem solved.

Their aggressive behavior and adaptability to a variety of habitats and climates has enabled house wrens to become one of the most widespread species in the western hemisphere. It is a permanent resident throughout South America and can be found breeding from Canada south through the West Indies and Central America. The mighty mite is a big success.

Color me beautiful!

Need I say more? Scarlet Tanagers out-red even the cardinals, and the black wings and tail put the gorgeous meter over the top.

This bird was busy hunting some big bugs in the buckeye tree, but posed briefly in a slightly open area so I could take his picture.

See bug…

Grab bug…

Eat bug…

Pose, while digesting.

I feel fortunate to have gotten these photos.  Scarlet Tanagers (not members of the tanager family as the name would imply, but instead belong in the cardinal family!) are notorious for “skulking” among the large leaves at the top of tall deciduous trees.   They prefer to breed in large tracts of undisturbed forest, where they can escape the nest parasitism of cowbirds.  Cowbirds wait until the tanagers have left the nest unoccupied, then pitch out one of the tanager eggs and deposit one of their own.  The tanagers can’t tell the difference, and end up raising the interloper at the expense of one of their own young.

Like many of the spring migrants this year, the tanagers are late arriving in Minnesota to set up breeding territories.  By mid-summer, they will start moving south again, eventually making their way through Central America to western South America, where they merge with flocks of tropical (real) tanagers.

After the rain

A steady drippy rain made us all (birds and humans alike) pretty wet and cold this morning, so when the sun came out in the afternoon, the birds really went to work hunting.  There was so much action at the buckeye tree in my backyard, I managed to shoot over 100 photos in less than two hours.

One bird really stood out, because I had only seen it from about 500 feet away during the morning bird-watching session.  But this afternoon I managed to creep within 20 feet of the bird while it searched for insects in a small, almost leafless tree.

Magnolia Warblers are striking looking birds with their combination of black, white, and yellow colors.  Eyes focused upward on the prize — this is the pose the bird assumed right before launching itself at an insect flying above its head.

Why the name Magnolia?  Apparently, the bird was first collected in the early 1800s from a magnolia tree in Mississippi, but it was originally called “black and yellow” warbler.  This species breeds primarily in Canada and winters in Mexico, Panama, and parts of the Caribbean, so an unlucky migrant through the southeastern U.S. became the type specimen for its identification.

The white wing patch, black mask over the eyes, white eyebrow, and black stripes down its yellow front are key diagnostic characters that identify Magnolia Warblers.

There must have been some good bugs in this little tree, because the bird bounced around from limb to limb for at least 10 min while I clicked away.

This bird was so cooperative and so good looking, I decided it deserved its own separate post.  More of the afternoon photo shoot will appear in later posts.

Finch vs Sparrow

I see that my bird classification skills are sadly out of date.  Today I found out that the Indigo Bunting is grouped with the Cardinals, Rose-breasted and Black-headed Grosbeaks, and Flame, Scarlet, and Hepatic Tanagers.  How confusing!  For some reason, I have always lumped little birds with conical (finchy) bills into one group, when in fact, there are definitely two:  finches and sparrows (and then of course, one can further split those two categories into old world (Europe-Asia) and (New World – Americas), but I won’t go there in this post.

So, here’s the low-down on what to call the little finch-like birds in your garden.  (Like all rules, there are, of course,  exceptions to these generalities.)

1) If the male is brightly colored in his summer plumage but the female duller, resembling the winter plumage, the species is likely to be a finch, e.g., Goldfinch, House Finch, etc.

This male hasn’t quite finished decking himself out in yellow and black, but he’s close.

Male House Finches really stand out at this time of year.

Female House Finches have some nice stripes, but lack the brilliant red accent colors of the male.

2)  Sparrows of both sexes sport a mottled brown, black, and white plumage that blends in nicely with their preferred grassy habitat.  Only the juvenile (first year after hatch) birds look different than the adult plumage.

This Swamp Sparrow was singing up a storm, but it was hard to locate him among the dead cattail stems and grasses.

Male and female White-throated Sparrows look identical, but the first year birds have brown head stripes and lack the yellow spot above the eye.

3) Typically, sparrows feed mostly on the ground, scratching under the litter for seeds or insects, while finches are more arboreal, searching for food on the seed heads of perennial grasses, thistles, etc.

Even though there is a feeder full of delicious finch seed right above this bird’s head, it prefers to look in the grass for fallen kernels rather than perch on the feeder.

A photo from last summer illustrates the plumage difference between male and female Goldfinches, as well as their preference for perching on the flower heads to harvest the seed.

4) It may be difficult to see differences in the shape and size of their bills, but finches generally have a stouter, thicker bills for their body size than sparrows.  That rule seems to work if you compare House Finch bills to those of Swamp Sparrows, but it looks like White-throated Sparrows have a pretty thick bill as well.

As I said above, there are exceptions to every rule…but at least I won’t be calling all seed-eating birds sparrows now without thinking about it first.

Wondrous Warblers (part 2)

So far we have been lucky that the leaves have been slower to mature than the warblers have been anxious to migrate.  Each day I wander around a new area, hoping to get that prize-winning photo of the best warbler yet…

This morning was terrific for seeing a high species diversity, but was the poorest light (cloudy overcast) and most leafy interference, making it poor for photography.  Nevertheless I saw 15 warbler species in about 3 hours. But 90% of the birds I saw were Yellow-rumped Warblers, which have turned out to be more numerous than Starlings on fall migration.

American Redstart males are teases. They sing right in your face, and fly off when you raise the camera. That, and the fact that they don’t sit still makes it tough to get a good photo (see someone else’s photo for more detail below)

The photo I wished I had taken (by Dan Pancamo on Wikimedia Commons).  This bird is like a miniature oriole with its vibrant black and orange coloration.

One of the more handsome warblers with its bright gold crest, black and white head, and chestnut sides (finally a warbler that has a logical name — Chestnut-sided Warbler).  Believe it or not, this warbler is thought to be most closely related to Yellow Warblers.

You only get 1.5 seconds to focus on a warbler. This was a lucky shot.  Chestnut-sided Warblers prefer habitat with second growth vegetation, where the large mature trees have been removed.   Like this bird, they may forage closer to human eye-level, instead of the tree tops, making them easier to photograph.

Yellow warblers with olive green backs all look alike, until you see where the black markings are located. This Wilson’s Warbler is notable for his little black cap and black eye-ring.  They would only pose for me behind sticks!

A better shot of the warbler’s whole body, accompanied by “the stick”.   These warblers were foraging in a mixed flock with the Yellow-rumped Warblers, but stuck to lower vegetation to avoid competing with the Yellow-rumps.

This one gets the “cuteness” award — a Common Yellowthroat, which poses on branches now and then, but prefers to dig around in the tall grass for bugs.

More commonly, the Yellowthroat is found in low vegetation, searching under fallen debris for its hidden meal.

Palm Warblers were commonly seen in grassy, prairie areas last week.  In fact, they outnumbered the sparrows foraging in the same grassy areas.  They are much more scarce this week, so perhaps they flew north with the last big front that came through.

Yellow Warblers are everywhere lately — at the pond’s edge, in the forest, even in parking lots.  Their bright yellow color with red-brown streaks down the belly make them easy to spot.

Fishing opener

Two days ago was the fishing opener in Minnesota.  It was about 40 degrees, and the wind was blowing fiercely.  Some of the lakes were still frozen.  Not a good day for fishing, unless you happen to be a Great Blue Heron.

It’s always fascinating to watch these ungainly-looking birds stalk their prey, and they seem to be successful a great majority of the time.  With their eyes positioned on top of their head and without looking down into the water, they nevertheless have uncanny accuracy in stabbing and grabbing their prey, as this sequence shows.

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Cropping one photo pretty tightly, I can see there is a fish in the middle of the muck the heron brought up from the bottom. The bird calmly strolled over to the bank behind the cattails to dissect his meal away from the sludge. A fine meal for the fishing opener.

There really is a fish there.

Watching for warblers

Spring starts and stops here; it can’t seem to really get going.  As a result, leaves have been slow to develop and that makes it a little easier to spot the flighty little warblers as they migrate through.  In fact, the cold weather seems to have slowed their normal migratory rush down a little.

Our strange spring weather and the numbers of new warbler species arriving daily means that we often get multiple species flitting around in the backyard on any given day.  Watching the warblers go about their daily hunt for food is a great illustration of a classical ecological study I learned about many years ago — Robert MacArthur’s study of niche partitioning in warblers to reduce competition.  He found that several warbler species could co-exist if they harvested the resource in different ways or from different areas of the tree.

From Biocyclopedia – Animal Ecology

A few examples to illustrate how one basic body type of small insectivore has specialized to divide up the food resource:

Yellow-rumped Warblers pretend to be flycatchers, “hawking” insects from the air or gleaning them from the terminal ends of branches of shrubs or trees, often flitting from the bottom to the top of one tree, or the top of one to the bottom of another.

Orange-crowned Warblers poke around in the leaf litter on the forest floor or into the newly emerging clumps of leaves on the branches of shrubs.

Black and White Warblers are nuthatch-”wannabes”, foraging upside down along the trunk and large branches of big trees.  They are constantly on the move and really hard to get in focus.

Yellow Warblers prefer to forage among the branches of shrubs and trees along streams or other wetland areas.  Their bright color really makes them stand out among the willow branches.

Ovenbirds and Waterthrushes are the largest warblers and prefer to forage in damp, swampy marshes or moist forest floor.

Those are just the ones I have seen in my backyard so far.  There are still more species arriving to fatten up for the last push toward the breeding grounds in the Canadian coniferous forest. Hopefully, I will get some photos of them too.

Surviving the long, cold winter

You don’t appreciate the impact that a long winter and a cold spring has on wildlife until you see a couple of survivors like this.

This buck has catabolized a lot of what was probably a massive frame of muscle last fall, as he slowly starved during our long, cold winter and delayed greening-up this spring.

This animal doesn’t look quite as emaciated, but has something strange going on with its fur which has turned splotchy white in big patches.

I was out looking for warblers at one of the local parks when I saw a small herd of four deer working their way through the shrubs coming toward me.  They were so intent on grabbing every green leaf they could, they just ignored me, even as I walked closer to them.  Leaves have only just emerged from buds the last couple of days, and so it has been more than six months since these deer had anything resembling nutritious food.  No wonder they are in such bad shape.

Now, this buck needs to grow a new set of antlers for the coming rutting season, an added energetic expense for an already energy-taxed animal.  

Like a robin, but so much prettier

That’s how the song of the Rose-breasted Grosbeak is described.

With his striking black and white plumage and rosy feather boa around his chest (which continues under his wing), this guy is a backyard favorite. A bill this big and sturdy should be used to crunch big seeds, but for the past two days, he has been ignoring the sunflower seeds and pigging out on suet instead.

He’s a contortionist, hanging upside down to pick off chunks from the bottom of the suet feeder.

You’re kind of a messy eater, bud.

This is an interesting bird.  It’s more closely related to cardinals (same family) than finches, even though it looks like a big finch.  The female is streaked with finchy brown and white color and looks like a big sparrow.  It hybridizes with the Black-headed Grosbeak where their ranges overlap in the Great Plains, so these two are apparently not separate species, despite their gaudy color differences.  And to emphasize the latter point, the rose-colored breast is not the definitive signal of male-ness, the white patches on rump and wing are!

But the song is sweet and plaintive, and one of the prettier sounds of spring, as this YouTube video shows. (Lang Elliott, musicofnature.org)

 

Wistful wondering

Where did she go? She was sitting right here a minute ago.