Author Archive | Dan Greaney

Home, Sweet Home: Bluebirds in the Neighbor-woods

By Dan Greaney on December 26, 2020 in BirdWords

Western Bluebird Female

There’s a little piece of sky fluttering through the neighborhoods and neighbor-woods of the North State. Actually, many little pieces. But they are not at all Chicken Little’s nightmare; the sky isn’t falling. They are, rather, feathered beauties, and, if one is to believe the folklore, bringers of happiness.

Western Bluebird Male

Western bluebirds thrive from Mexico up through the coastal states in just about any habitat that provides a mix of open woods and small meadows – say, for instance, the neighborhood woodlands of our area. Here the birds find everything they need to prosper.

Oak trees offer low branches, perfect perches from which to scan the weeds beneath, to drop down and snatch a tasty caterpillar or beetle that shows itself. That swoop-down style of hunting, for reasons that might be discernible, is known as hawking.

Oaks also seem to die for nearly as long as they live. Old oaks are notorious for holding dead limbs, and that rotting wood, with help from the squadrons of local woodpeckers, can contain entire housing developments–cavities–that bluebirds, along with others, will make their homes.

Male Western Bluebird Feeding Nestling

Within the oak woodland numerous berries are usually available to help balance a bluebird’s insect diet. Elderberries, toyon, grapes, and poison oak are high-calorie menu items, perfect for powering through the cold winter days and nights. Mistletoe berries–toxic to people but nutritious to birds–are a special favorite. Bluebirds will often defend a rich clump of mistletoe from phainopeplas or other birds that might want to claim that aisle in their grocery store; they will perch above the mistletoe and chase invaders off to their own fortunes. No reports on what the bluebirds do under the mistletoe.

There are other birds that are blue in our woodlands, but don’t mistake scrub-jays for the real bluebirds. Both may flock loosely with a half dozen kin, but the jays are long-tailed and raucous. The bluebirds are more demure. They are thrushes, relatives of robins, but with a quieter song, a chirp with a spring in it, seemingly just to keep the friends together.

With the sun behind you, males’ topsides almost sparkle with rich indigo-blue. Their breasts are decked in rusty red. The females are similar, but much paler throughout.

Western Bluebird Eggs

Together they house-hunt in spring, as many species do. Then she will build her nest, taking two weeks for the first nest of the season but, perhaps with a fatigue-induced shift in priorities, only one week for the second. In each she will lay a handful of eggs, most but not all of which are apt to be sired by the male attending her. She will incubate them for two weeks, and both parents will tend them through their fledging, another three weeks or more.

Western Bluebird Fledglings

Even with extensive habitat changes, bluebirds seem to be holding their own. The cutting of dead limbs that could provide nesting sites has been offset by providing nesting boxes. Complementing numerous backyard bird-houses, our local Wintu Audubon has developed “Bluebird Trails,” strings of boxes used by bluebirds, tree swallows, nuthatches, and others. The Audubon chapter monitors those nestboxes and tracks the results for researchers. Last year the local Trails fledged 139 young birds.

Monitoring those nests is a fun weekly activity through the spring season. And yes, it is appropriate for doing with a child. If you would like to learn more about volunteering as a Nestbox Monitor, contact webmaster@wintuaudubon.org .

American Kestrels, Looking for a Good Home

By Dan Greaney on November 21, 2020 in BirdWords

American Kestrel Male

American kestrels are striking, with burnt-red backs and tails, steel-blue wings on the males, and bold falconid markings, black and white on the face. All this is packaged into a little hawk that could perch on your finger, and can inspire fascination in children and their attentive elders. And these rainbow dynamos are pretty to watch in action, too.

American Kestrel Female

They will leap from a field-side post or overhead wire and flap forward until, spotting possible prey, they will fly in place, maybe twenty feet in the air, awaiting the chance to strike. Their prey may be a grasshopper or spider; or perhaps a vole. Vole trails are decked with their rodent urine, making pathways to dinner that kestrels see clearly with their UV vision.

Kestrels do not truly hover, as they cannot flip their wings over like hummingbirds in front of a flower, but they face into the wind and flap at an angle to hold their heads motionless, able then to discern the important motion below them. Their descent to that prey is not a peregrine dive but rather a wing-raised drop, ending, the bird hopes, in clutching a meal with its noodle-thin but wire-strong talons.

The kestrel may dine right there on the ground, or carry the meal to a higher perch. It may stash extra food in a handy clump of grass for later consumption. Or it may feed its hungry chicks.

Kestrels nest in cavities, where for a month the male brings food to the female while she incubates four or five eggs. Both parents then feed their nestlings for another month, when the young fledge. At that point, if food is abundant, the female may start a second clutch. The male will continue to feed both the fledglings and his mate.

Many songbirds are able to keep a relatively clean nest. Their young defecate in fairly dry packets that parent birds can lift and remove. Kestrel nestlings, alas, release a more liquid poop; but they do, at least, raise their tails and squirt against the cavity walls, keeping their nestling area as clean as possible.

Kestrels live year-round along open country across most of the US. Some migrate, to nest as far north as Alaska and winter as far south as Panama. Older folks may remember them as the common “sparrow hawk” of farms and fields, but over the last fifty years American kestrel numbers have dropped by half as other Americans have paved and built on the fields, sprayed pesticides that have killed their prey, and cleared old cavity-bearing trees that provided nesting sites.

But Americans can offset these losses, too. To help counter the habitat change, you can put out nesting boxes for kestrels and other birds. Construction directions can be found at nestwatch.org; click “All About Birdhouses.” Do it now, and then see who comes along in the spring!

Northern Flicker – a Red, White, and Blue Bird

By Dan Greaney on October 31, 2020 in BirdWords

Northern Flicker Male

It’s election season, and not too big a stretch to see red, white, and blue in some of our feathered aboriginals. Many colorful birds have headed to Mexico for the winter, but northern flickers, after spending summer in cooler areas upslope, along the river, or northward, have returned to our local woodlands.

Flickers are woodpeckers, and our western version has bright red under its wings, a bold white rump patch, and, for a willing eye in good light, a steely blue-gray face, offset in the male with a red dash of a whisker.

Northern Flicker Male Intergrade

The eastern version of the flicker shuffles some of these colors around, and substantially substitutes yellow for our western red. But yellow or red, both flickers sport a beautiful black necklace, speckled breast and belly, and a list of beneficial behaviors.

Northern Flicker Nestlings

They act as partners: mated pairs share the work and, we can hope, pleasures of nest construction, egg incubation, and child-rearing.

Northern Flicker Nestlings

They get along with their neighbors. Small groups routinely stick together, flocking severally through the woods. Where red- and yellow-shafted flickers meet, they associate impartially.

They communicate with one another, singing a one-pitch staccato trill to call far and wide, or drumming on hollow wood in various cadences, or murmuring to closer birds with a silky weeka-weeka-weeka call.

Of course flickers are not immune to conflict, particularly in finding mates. But they have evolved a ritualized solution to their disputes. As in some other species, rivals face each other, bills to the sky, and they bob and weave together, perhaps calling out, until one seems to decide the other has rights and flies off with no harm done.

Northern Flicker Males In Conflict

Flickers interact thriftily with other species. Before eating ants, they may rub them over their bodies, or simply allow the ants to crawl over them. It is hypothesized that the ants’ formic acid helps protect the birds from mites and lice, and preening with them may improve the ants’ palatability by reducing their remaining acid content.

They provide for other species, however naively. Many kinds of birds nest in woodpecker cavities, but flickers, because of their large size, are crucial to other large cavity nesters. Buffleheads, the most common black and white duck you’ll see on the river in winter, rely almost exclusively on flickers for nesting cavities.

And flickers live close to the earth. They chisel at bark like other woodpeckers, but most of their foraging is actually done on the ground, where they lap up ants and other insects, as well as fruits and seeds.

Northern Flicker Male Anting

They are so comfortable with the dirt that even in nesting they will sometimes forgo a tree cavity to raise their young in a hole in the ground–say, an old kingfisher or bank swallow tunnel.

So flickers act as good partners, neighbors, and members of their larger communities and environments–making them quite patriotic, I think, even if they have no notions of that idea. The added power of voting is just our own.

The Thing with Feathers

By Dan Greaney on September 26, 2020 in BirdWords, Conservation

Female Lesser Goldfinch

Emily Dickinson famously wrote “Hope is the thing with feathers.” Now, under the oppressive disorientation of Covid-19, massive wildfires, technological manipulation, and political fragmentation, we may find that such hope can offer useful direction.

Birds suffer illness and death just as we do, but like the canaries of old, sometimes they show the environmental effects sooner and more dramatically. Pollution, hurricanes, and fires cost human lives. For birds, these and other habitat changes coincide with their 30% decline in North America over the last half century.

This month hundreds of thousands of many species of songbirds were found scattered dead throughout the southern reaches of America’s Great Basin. We don’t know why yet. A leading initial guess is that the smoke damaged their lungs– a plausible explanation considering that the death-blow hit birds that were likely migrating, and flight muscles have a high demand for oxygen. Whatever the cause or causes, something is clearly wrong.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Worldwide, the international community has failed to meet a single of this past decade’s targets to maintain wildlife and life-sustaining ecosystems. The UN’s head of biodiversity, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, reports that “Earth’s living systems as a whole are being compromised. And the more humanity exploits nature in unsustainable ways and undermines its contributions to people, the more we undermine our own wellbeing, security and prosperity.”

So we breathe toxic air, and birds fall out of it. But faced with adversity, hope cries for action. The big things for birds–designing development to accommodate biological health–are choices we make as a society, through government. The little things we can do individually and right now.

Water is needed as dry weather and smokey conditions continue. A shallow dish with a rock perch can provide both drinking and bathing opportunities. Sloping the water from shallow to an inch or so deep can allow different sized birds to use it. Refresh the water daily to clean out ash and thwart mosquitoes and disease.

Birdseed can sustain many species. Finches love black oil sunflower and thistle seeds. Sparrows, now returning from nesting grounds in Alaska and the Rockies, devour white millet and cracked grains–especially scattered on the ground. Avoid overfeeding–if the seed rots it will introduce harmful bacteria. If the birds eat the mix you offer, you’ve found a good one!

Food and water are best placed near plants that offer shelter from predatory hawks–but try not to conceal predatory cats! Cats are best kept indoors. They are one of the biggest contributors to songbird declines.

Plants, particularly native plants, offer both food and shelter for many species. Consider the birds as you design and tend your yard. Letting fall’s leaves lie will help develop a rich soil and natural bird food.

There are needs beyond what we can provide individually. Clean air is not something we can deliver in our private yards, nor can we individually protect extensive and diverse habitats. But as a society we can, and we each participate in society, locally, nationally, and globally. The UN, our body for international cooperation, plans to set this decade’s biodiversity goals next spring.

If we will deliver health and beauty for birds, we will be reaping it for ourselves, too. Those are feathers to hope on.

House Finches: Loud and Brown and Red All Over

By Dan Greaney on August 29, 2020 in Birds, BirdWords

Male and Female House Finches at Feeder

If you have a bird feeder in the continental United States you have almost certainly been visited by house finches. On both sides of the Mississippi their hungry flocks coat feeders like displays of cherry and root beer lollipops. They park themselves at providential feeding ports or flutter at their neighbors to win better ones. Off the feeders, they are singers who greet mornings with ubiquitous cheery notes, mixing reedy discord with melodious clarity, any time of year. They seem perfectly comfortable making our houses their homes.

House finches fledge from the nest dressed in brown, heavily streaked on their undersides. But as they molt, the males develop a bright red wash over their head, breast, and rump. Young females, too, may briefly wear red on their rumps. As adults, females prefer brightly colored males.

Male House Finch

Bright colors, however, are not genetically inherited. Like most birds, finches can’t actually make red or yellow pigment. Rather, these molting males incorporate pigments from the foods they eat. In addition to black oil sunflower seeds at feeders, they savor a variety of fruits and vegetables that contain the carotenoids–yellows, reds, and purples–that they absorb into feather-paint.

House Finch Male courtesy Kevin Gill creative commons – Click on photo for full sized image!

Because their food varies geographically, male finches in some areas will wear, instead of red feathers, a more orange or even yellow hue. Further, because the birds don’t migrate, you may be establishing a particular finch color in your neighborhood with your local blend of fruit trees, berries, and vegetable gardens.

Female House Finch

The males, no matter their brightness, are famous for singing exuberantly near their mates while the female does the work of nest-building, laying eggs, and incubating them. He may bring food to his mate during this period, and fully assists in tending their nestlings. The system works for them: house finches lay 2-6 eggs in each clutch, and will clutch as many as six times a year. With human help they have spread far and wide.

House Finch Nest with Eggs

Native to the western US and Mexico, these desert-lovers were introduced to New York in 1940. From there they expanded quickly throughout the east, substantially replacing the purple finch of the declining eastern forests. Before conquering the east they were introduced into Oahu, and became abundant throughout Hawaii over a century ago.

House Finch Nestlings

Hawaiian birds are famously fitted to particular plants or lifestyles, and have not done well as their world has changed. House finches, on the other hand, are generalists, typical of birds that thrive in new situations. They nest freely in not just their traditional western scrub and cacti but now in shrubs, trees, hanging plant-pots, on building ledges, or over porch lights. They readily flock to feeders when their fields of seeds are transformed. Strung wires serve for their singing posts. House finches roll with the punches, and that has allowed them to prosper.

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Author Archive | Dan Greaney