Grrrr - grackles

My yard has been covered with flocks of grackles today.  I couldn't get a good picture of them because every time I crept to the window with my camera they sensed my presence and flew away.  You can see a few of the braver ones who didn't leave in the the bad photo above.

Evidently, this is a migrating group that stopped for a break in my neighborhood.  I'm not talking a few grackles, or a dozen, or a hundred.  Hundreds of them.  Covering the whole yard.  Eating my feeders clean and making a racket.  What a nuisance.

This is what they look like:

In a way they're kind of attractive, with that irridescent color.  But they're pushy, mean and commandeering birds who take over the food sources and run everything else away.  They seem to have moved on for the evening, which makes me happy.

But however many I have at this house, it's nothing to the autumn migrating flocks which used to drive the residents to distraction in the last town I lived in.  My subdivision was a couple of miles down a road that passed in front of the high school.  There were several subdivisions off this road as well as many houses fronting on it.  Every fall enormous flocks of grackles would descend on Harrison Pike and cover every wire, tree, bush and yard.  It was surreal, like "The Birds" movie come to life.  They made a terrible racket, pooped everywhere and drove the residents nuts.  Then, suddenly, they would be gone.  It happened every year.

The grackle gangs will probably be back tomorrow.  Where are the feral cats when I need them?

Native intelligence

We spend every evening after supper sitting on the patio, watering the flowers, filling the bird feeders, and watching the panoply of nature around us. Last night, we got a reminder of just how adaptive that natural life is.

One of the faucets on the back of the house has a slight leak no matter how hard you tighten the shutoff. It hardly drips at all, once every few minutes, if at that. It's the kind of small problem everyone has but doesn't hurry to fix. I didn't know until last night that someone had figured out how to benefit from that drip.

This little fellow sits in the dogwood tree until a large enough drop of water has formed on the end of the quick-connect nozzle. Then he flies over, perches and has a drink! Then it's back to the dogwood tree until another drop has collected. This time of year the water in the birdbath gets pretty hot in the sun. This black-capped chickadee has figured out how to get a nice cold sip.

On another bird front, I wasn't aware that a northern mockingbird had made a nest in one of our japonica bushes in the corner of the yard beside my neighbor's driveway. For one thing, I didn't know they nested this late. And all spring a pair of mockingbirds, probably this pair, harassed me in my side yard, so I thought the mockingbird families were all grown and gone.

Last week, I asked the lawn guy to trim those bushes because they had grown tall enough to block visibility when my neighbor backed out into the street. When I went over to pick up a few clippings after he had left, I found a bird's nest in the bush, now only 4 or 5 inches below the shorn top. I wasn't sure what kind of bird it was but was afraid the sun was too hot on the little downy hatchlings, so I gathered a few long clipped forsythia branch from the brush pile and spread them on the top of the bush to shade the nest.

The next day I visited the nest to make sure the clippings hadn't withered too much to provide shade. Mama mockingbird did not take kindly to my visit and dive-bombed me. She brushed through the top of my hair on her pass, then perched in the maple tree and began to cuss me out in strong mockingbird terms. I beat a hasty retreat from the side yard.

This morning, I was still worrying about the little birds, so I crept out to check the nest, after making sure the parents weren't around. At least I thought they weren't. This time, she whacked me in the back and was circling around for another pass when I hurried back to the house. I don't need to be concerned about the babies - these are diligent parents!

Maternity ward

For several years now, in the time period between the Christmas wreath and the hanging flower basket, I have adorned the hook on the wall outside my den sliding door with a basket containing red silk geraniums, if for no other reason that the weather is dull and dreary and I wanted a spot of color outside I could see from my desk. And, every year I remind myself I must remove the basket before nesting season begins and some opportunistic bird in passing remarks that the basket would be a cracking good place for a home.

Of course, every year I forget.

Almost every spring the occupant has been a mourning dove, for several reasons. First, they have an abnormally low fear of humans. Well, you would have to, to construct your nursery 18 inches from my back door. Then, there is the matter of the sloppy, slap-dash nests they make. In those conditions, the confining shape of the basket has been a definite plus in the construction stability department. And, it's under the eaves, so none of that distracting drip-drip on your head during spring rains while you're trying to incubate your clutch of eggs. Kind of makes my silk flower arrangement look like prime real estate, doesn't it?

So, here's what we have this year:In this photo I've circled the nest area. Enlarged, you can see the mother bird's tail against the left side of the thermometer and her head just peaking over the geraniums, wondering what the blazes crazy thing the humans are doing now.
Since I refuse to live with the den drapes closed for months during the prettiest time of the year, I've taken to slinking through the den past the door very quickly, eyes downcast and not looking her in the face. If you happen to glance up and are nose to beak with her at the glass, she takes on the most alarmed look, and once was reduced to evacuating the nest in a panic. She only went as far as the dogwood tree at the end of the patio, and then dropped down to stand on the concrete with the most pitiful expression (yes, birds do have expressions) until she was sure it was safe enough to go back. It made me feel rather like one of those home invasion criminals you read about in the papers. I am not going to be the cause of a failed incubation, so I make sure not to disturb her enough to leave again.

If I stand quietly in the kitchen doorway, I am far enough away from the glass for her to be comfortable, even though she seldom takes her eyes off me. I can then watch her arrange and rearrange herself on the nest, shifting every few hours to face outward or inward, but always keeping the humans in her sight.

One hardly has the heart to remind her that it's my house, for pity's sake, and the yard is full of trees and bushes which would have worked admirably for setting up housekeeping. It's bad for the nerves to camp on your enemy's doorstep. Nevertheless, there she is and there she will stay until the family takes wing and I can watch them grow up in my yard.

It's still better than the robin who built on the front door wreath, causing me to give up use of the main door to the house for two months.

It's tough out there

Here in the upper southeast, we don't suffer from the cold like the Midwest, for example, but it's still hard on the wildlife. Our temperatures get into the low 30's / upper 20's at night, and only up to the high 40's during the day. (I know, to some of you that sounds like Hawaii!)

The birds are finding shelter wherever they can. When I walk out to the mailbox in the afternoon I provoke a flurry of brown thrushes bursting from the holly bushes in front of my house. They flit out into the trees and wait for me to go back in so that they can snuggle down on the bottom branches of the bushes out of the wind. The birds find any sheltered spot that is accessible, but most of the bushes are bare and offer scant protection. Two sparrows had even settled into the silk flower arrangement in the basket hanging on the wall outside my back door. Proximity to humans was the lesser of the two evils.

I haven't seen a chipmunk for weeks. Probably, they're all snug in a burrow somewhere (I haven't checked under the house for a while - that becomes Chipmunktown every winter, no matter how hard I try to seal up access). Only a few squirrels are out foraging; one was industriously sorting through the mulch under my oak tree yesterday, to see if he or anyone else had buried more acorns there.

All this gets me thinking about the bird feeding. I had stopped for a while during migrations season, and then the presence of two local hawks worried me. I was afraid that I would lure the poor birds into a trap. But now I feel that we must start feeding again. Berries and seeds are mostly depleted on the bushes in my yard; probably it's the same everywhere.

And, the cat and I miss them. It was always so cheerful to sit in my den every morning reading the news online and watching the activity in the dogwood trees, while my cat peered from behind the curtains and did the "fearsome-stalking-kitty" routine. I'll keep an eye out for the hawks. I wish they'd go back to Lookout Mountain or somewhere - what are they doing in a subdivision, anyway?

The birds that work for Merry Maids

There I was in the "computer room" (third bedroom for the rest of the world), me on the laptop and the husband on the other computer with the 28" flat panel monitor (I ain't lyin', people, the thing looks like a drive-in movie screen) comparing the virtues of Fuji's itty-bitty camera with the other itty-bitty cameras -- besides, of course, that Overstock has it on sale and he has a 10% off coupon. I look up and see that two streaked sparrows have lit outside of the window, clinging to the brick, and have methodically begun to pull down spiderwebs and clean all the bugs and spiders out of them. Yum, yum. They're even reaching behind the shutters and cleaning all the webs out of the cracks.

This of course is a great service to me, since the one thing I can state about my house is that I have more spiders per square foot on this quarter acre than any other property I've owned. Well, I've also got gnats in the spring, but that's more of a regional thing -- anyway, I hate, hate, hate spiderwebs in the corners of the windows, and the way I clean them is to hold onto the tippy-end of a broom handle and try to fish them down while standing on the ground. Because ladders are pretty much a no-go with me. Too old, too clumsy, too fat. No. Just no. So anything that gets me out of this job is a Martha-Stewart-worthy very good thing. They finish with the third bedroom window and flit away, hopefully to the kitchen window because there's some really big webs in that one.

Besides being a great service, this is good because we, the cat and I, like to watch birds and lately I've been feeling guilty about the feeders in the back yard. Not about having the feeders or the cost of filling them, but about the fact that a hawk has scoped out my yard and figured out I have a higher than normal bird concentration. I've seen him circling and I saw him get one sparrow (on my patio, no less). He actually flew into my sliding door yesterday morning while I was sitting 6 feet away from it reading the web news. Scared the spit out of me -- made a huge bang. He was unhurt and flew away to perch in the dogwood and shake his head a little, like what the heck was that?

It's a bad thing to put the birds in danger's way just because we like to look at them, but I have to give the little feathered critters more credit. They've not been as plentiful in the last few days, like they know even with the veritable Shoney buffet out there it's not a safe place. We should probably put the feeders away for a month or so and let the hawk find another hunting ground. Hawk's gotta eat, but I would rather not have a relationship with his dinner.

In the meantime, the birds can check out my front porch light. I must have 20 pounds of bugs in there.

Avian Subsidy Program

I like birds. Always have. I have had pet birds (don't right now because of the feline queen of the house -- she's an indoor only cat and locking up one excitable heavy-on-the-hunting-instincts cat with a poor terrified caged bird 24/7 doesn't seem fair for either of them). So, I feed outdoor birds and create the all-birds-all-the-time channel outside the sliding door for the cat and myself. In our house, each window is a different cat-TV channel for her to watch. The chipmunk channel is out front. Danger-speeding-cars is on the bedroom window.

This bird-feeding stuff is great in theory but the suckers are eating me out of house and home. If I've let the feeders run out, the chickadees will sit in the top of the dogwoods and cuss me out while I fill them. Of course, the chipmunks and the gray squirrels are contributing to the speedy depletion of seeds, but the birds do plenty of damage. Especially the mourning doves. I must have 20,000 living in my trees alone. And the goofy things can't find a better place to nest than the grapevine wreaths on the front and back porches. I had three nests this year. But that's another post.

Anyway, all the birds in bird-dom are out back gorging on free seeds. Well, they're seed-eaters, that's the plan. But along come the woodpeckers, and that's where I get cranky. These are bug-eating birds, darn it. So why are they eating my expensive black oil sunflower seeds? Because they're lazy, that's why. Nature loves a mooching opportunity. And not just on the feeders. I had a red-headed woodpecker wolf down half a suet cake in one sitting. But what can I do?

For now, I just suffer the cost and keep filling the feeders. But, the more I feed, the pushier they get. This morning, I looked out the bedroom window to see a downy woodpecker clinging to the side of the window and industriously pecking on my brick house. Was this a protest action? A couple of the feeders are empty. I better get out there before the natives get restless.