Outside My Window

American robins are amazingly hardy birds.  They now breed north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska and are found year round in most of the U.S.

Since robins eat fruit and forage on the ground for invertebrates they can put up with chilly weather, but when snow covers their food they move south in large numbers.

Visiting robins are already here.  Yesterday I saw some very pale birds among a flock eating porcelain berries.  I’ve read that the pale ones are from the West.  I wonder where…

Right now the robin flock is still building in Pittsburgh and will peak around Christmas before January’s snow.  If you’re near their roost at dusk or dawn you’ll see them swirling, thousands upon thousands of birds.

This video shows what it’s like, filmed near Daytona Beach, Florida in December 2008.

Enjoy our visiting robins now.  They’ll be heading south to visit Chuck Tague (near Daytona) in about six weeks.

Lots of robins!

(video posted by jayc28 on YouTube)

Lady cardinals like their guys to be colorful.  They prefer mates with the brightest red plumage because the color means he’s well fed, healthy, and has a good territory.

The cardinal’s color comes from carotenoids in the food he eats so it has been a good breeding cue for females.  But a two-year study in Ohio by OSU’s Amanda Rodewald and colleagues shows this cue is a trap in stands of Amur honeysuckle. 

Amur or bush honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii) is a shrub native to Asia that was planted in North America for its beauty and to control erosion.  Unfortunately it takes over rural landscapes, forming dense stands that shade out native species.  It’s invasive in Pennsylvania.

Amur honeysuckle berries provide good food and carotenoids for cardinals but the shrub is a gilded trap.  The OSU study found that nests built in it are more likely to be raided and those who choose to nest in it have few surviving offspring.

They found this to be true in rural landscapes but not in urban settings where bird feeders provide supplemental food and predators have a wide selection of things to eat other than cardinal babies.

Ultimately the low success of bright red males in Amur honeysuckle landscapes may cause rural cardinals to become duller red because only the dull guys have successful nests.

Just another reason to hate Amur honeysuckle.

(photo by Steve Gosser)

As predicted, the cold, oppressive rain that lingered for four days finally moved east yesterday afternoon.  The sun came out and so did all the migrants who’d been waylaid by the weather.  The world was beautiful again. 

On my walk home through Schenley Park I found many small flocks of warblers foraging in the trees.  Best of all, the golden-crowned and ruby-crowned kinglets were with them.

Our kinglets are Old-World Warblers similar to the goldcrest of Eurasia.  Their genus name, Regulus, and their English name, kinglet, refer to the crown of golden or ruby-colored feathers they raise when aroused or annoyed.

Neither bird breeds in Pittsburgh so their arrival marks a seasonal change.

The golden-crowned kinglet doesn’t travel far.  He breeds in the southern tier of Canada, in northern New England, in Appalachia and in the Laurel Highlands of southwestern Pennsylvania.  He spends the winter in the continental U.S., including Pittsburgh, so he’s here to stay for a while.

The ruby-crowned kinglet is a twice-a-year treat.  He breeds in the Rocky Mountains and in Canada all the way north to the edge of the Arctic and spends the winter in the southern U.S. 

His winter range curls up the East Coast enough to include southeastern Pennsylvania.  But here he visits for only a short time where I greet him with joy in April and October.

Welcome back, Little King.

(photo of a ruby-crowned kinglet by Steve Gosser)

News of the intense drought and wildfires in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona this summer has been very disturbing, especially since the forecasts indicate this could be the start of a much longer perhaps permanent condition.

Drought on such a large scale will be bad for the people who live there but even worse for the wildlife that depends on the local grasslands and forests.  What will happen to them?

Scientists from Baylor University conducted a three year study of the habitat and wildlife at 70 locations in the Chihuahuan Desert in Texas and New Mexico.  Then they used their data, satellite imagery and modeling to predict what will happen in the next 50 years.

They found that as the grasslands and forests dry out they’ll burn repeatedly, eventually consuming all the fuel.  The good news is that the incidence of wildfires will decrease in the next 50 years.  The bad news it that local species will decline or disappear because their habitat will be gone.

But there’s a silver lining.  The model shows that three species of birds may benefit.  The scaled quail, the rock wren and the loggerhead shrike will not only survive but may prosper in the new landscape.  It will be easier for them to find food.

The drought and fires are grim for almost everyone.  I hope this silver lining continues in the years ahead.

Read more here in Science Daily.

(photo of a loggerhead shrike by Chuck Tague)

Last year around this time I saw quite an example of feather molting!

I was sitting outdoors just after dawn when I heard a cardinal make warning calls behind me.  I couldn’t see her but I could tell she was upset by my presence, though I didn’t move.  Eventually she popped out and perched on a branch in full view. 

Yikes!  She was ugly!  All the feathers were missing from her head and face except for one tuft where her crest should have been.  Her skin was black.  I could see her ear holes.

I don’t have a picture of her but if I did you wouldn’t want to see it.  Way too ugly!

So you’ll just have to imagine this bird is bald.

Or if you really can’t imagine it, take a look at the cardinals on this Bill of The Birds blog from September 2008.

(photo in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.  Click on the photo to see the original)

If you’ve never been to the southwest or California, you’ve probably never seen this dainty little bird. 

Smaller than the American goldfinch, this one is called the lesser goldfinch. 

Lesser goldfinches look slightly different from the Salad Birds I wrote about on Friday.  The males have black backs in Texas, green backs in the rest of their range. 

Their food preferences are slightly different too.   In addition to seeds, lesser goldfinches eat buds, flowers and fruits.

Flowers?   Yes, they’ll eat the flowers of chaparral honeysuckle and three species of oaks.  They’ve even been known to visit hummingbird feeders, though not as a steady diet.

So I guess the lesser goldfinch can’t earn the nickname ”Salad Bird.”  Perhaps he’s a “Flower Child.”   

(photo by Julie L. Brown.  Click on the photo to see the original.)

American goldfinches have a lot of nicknames: wild canary, yellowbird, thistle bird and salad bird. 

I’d never heard of “salad birds” until Matt Sharp told this story on PABIRDS last month. 

Matt remarked, “My father has a small vegetable garden and for the last couple years around this time of the season, goldfinch, usually in pairs, attack a couple types of leafy greens. The main item is Swiss chard, but they also seem to like beet greens, and to a lesser degree lettuce (romaine or similar with red pigments and not the green varieties like iceberg). He has observed them eating the chard, biting pieces of leaf, but only seen indirect signs of feeding on the lettuce and beet greens (little beak shaped bites around the leaf edge).  So it seems that the birds are definitely eating the plant, and not preying on insects or collecting material.”

Rudy Keller replied, “This behavior is so common that it accounts for one of the Pennsylvania Dutch folk names for goldfinch — the salad bird.”

American goldfinches are vegetarians.  They’re especially fond of seeds but in the spring they’ll also eat buds and strip the bark from terminal shoots.  They’ve been known to eat green algae, maple sap, and as Matt pointed out salad greens.  They rarely eat insects and then only if the insect happens to be in the beakful of food they’re actually seeking.

This food preference protects them from brown-headed cowbirds who lay their eggs in songbird nests.  The cowbird chicks usually dominate the host’s nest and the songbird’s babies die.  But cowbird chicks fail to survive in goldfinch nests.  They starve on the vegetarian diet.

July is nesting time for goldfinches.  While other songbirds have fledglings or even second broods, goldfinches have just begun to nest.  This timing puts their hungry nestlings in synch with maximum seed production in mid to late summer. 

This month you’ll see male goldfinches but not many females.  The ladies are busy incubating, waiting on the nest for their mates to come feed them. 

Perhaps a male goldfinch will visit your vegetable garden to find a treat for his mate. 

It’s salad time!

(photo by Chuck Tague)

Sparrows are stripey, brown, boring little birds … right?

Not when you look closely.

Last weekend I saw Henslow’s sparrows at Piney Tract and because they were Life Birds I spent time looking carefully at each one.

At first they were confusing brown birds whose only distinguishing feature were their flat-topped heads and “Roman nose” beaks.  But then one paused on top of a bush with the light just right. 

His head and neck were washed in olive.  His wings were pale chestnut.  In that moment he was incredibly colorful.

Sparrows have a subtle beauty.  It just takes time to see.

(Henslow’s sparrow photo taken at Piney Tract last Saturday by Steve Gosser)

Today I’m back from a four-day weekend with my family in Smithfield, Virginia. 

While there I took long walks in Windsor Castle Park, a beautiful park with new boardwalks easily accessible from the historic downtown. 

The park has a variety of good habitat for birding: woodlands, fields and saltmarsh.    At low tide thousands of small crabs crawl the muddy banks of the saltmarsh, looking for food and becoming food themselves.  There’s a heron rookery near the Cypress Creek overlook where the “baby” herons are now nearly as tall as their parents and quite loud when they’re hungry.  I bet they eat crab for dinner.

I was happy to see many species that I never see in Pittsburgh including laughing gulls, royal terns and black vultures but the best birds by far were the summer tanagers.

The summer tanager (Piranga rubra) is a bird of southern forests.  They do nest in the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania but you have to go out of your way to find them.  At Smithfield I could hear them singing and a pair even came down to see me!

The male is all red and the female all yellow-green.  They have larger, longer beaks than scarlet tanagers and their head feathers stand up a little, giving them a Jimmy Durante look.  (Their back feathers don’t stand up. The bird in this photo has a feather out of place.)

They’re famous for eating bees and wasps and will even take the grubs out of wasp nests.  (Brave!)   They winter in Central and South America where they eat fruit as well. 

(photo taken in Manizales, Columbia by Julian Londono.  Image is from Wikimedia Commons licensed under Creative Commons Share Alike 2.0.  Click on the photo to see the original.)

Surrounded by green, the warbling vireo is gray.

He has no bold face pattern, no wing bars, no striking color on his breast but his name, vireo, means “I am green.”  

Vireo comes from the Latin word for green: virens.   The other eastern members of this genus have olive-green backs.

Do you think the warbling vireo is dull?  Not when he sings. 

Unlike the greenish vireos this one has a peppy song with a complex rhythmic structure and continuously changing set of figure patterns.(*)   He sings themes and variations all around his territory, even from the nest.

Birders have tried to describe his song with mnemonics.  The classic descriptions are: “If I sees you, I will seize you, and I’ll squeeze you till you squirt!” or “Iggley, pigelly, wigelly, pig.”

But I think of it as:  “If I see her I will squeeze her, I will squeeze her ’til she squeaks!”

Listen to him here.

His song is so fancy he doesn’t need to be green.

(photo by Kim Steininger)