We’ve just closed out June, and there’s lots of drama in the garden. The stakes are high everywhere. It’s the wild, wild Northeast Portland out there. Fuzzed-out birds blunder into the air on untested wings that were as airworthy as pencil erasers two weeks ago. They have nothing going for them but parental encouragement, a ravenous appetite, and remarkable bodies made from a starter-goober and about twenty-one days of non-stop caterpillars.
It’s a damn miracle, is what it is, how you take that crunkled-up gummy out of an eggshell and jam grubs and bugs in the top end, pull little diapers out the bottom end and, somehow, assemble a whole bird along the way, in a few short weeks. And all there is left for the little miracle to do is practice being an adult. Part of which involves trusting your own sense of danger. There is an ominous silhouette in the sky and a sly fanged menace skulking on the ground and, inexplicably, a little round human in the middle creeping up on them with an outstretched hand full of mealworms. None of it is to be trusted, although the mealworm dispenser is at least interesting. There’s a lot to learn.
And plenty of them don’t get to the first lesson.
A Cooper’s hawk is busy making fettucine out of one of them, high on a mossy branch, with a loud accompaniment from its mom and dad, who would have liked some return on their considerable investment of bugs and effort.
It’s a scary world out there, but still plenty of things for a new bird to enjoy. Perhaps you are a small dapper little number and you can entertain yourself singing a different song damn near every day to see how often you can get the little round human to punch her Merlin app and say Jesus Christ it’s that Bewick’s wren again.
But there’s entertainment for the human too. Never gets old: put a peanut out for her personal crow, two inches from her hand, and watch him sidle up, inch by inch, coming in sideways for a quick getaway, eyeing her the whole way, and then NAB it and hop a whole five inches away to hammer away at it. Like the only scary bit was maybe not getting the peanut.
Or she can just sit with her eyes shut and listen to the new baby crow yacketing away for food, its metronomic bleats coming in louder and quicker until suddenly they collapse into a near-fatal stranglement; and then there’s a ten-second pause for swallowing, and the whole thing starts over.
It’s a hopeful time of year. Everyone seems to be reading from the same ancient script and the score is spectacular. And then it all peters out into business as usual, for the survivors. But there’s still something for the human to look forward to.
Molting season. I love it. My god. You’ve never seen a shabbier bunch than August birds around here. Most birds are beautiful but it’s all about the wardrobe. You start to shred that up and you’re right back to being a goober. It’s very heartening, for a human female. Us? We are goobers until we’re at least forty years old, blundering branch to branch. And as soon as we figure out how to fly, we molt. Only with us, it doesn’t grow back.
Beautifully summed up, Murr. I would’ve said ‘pitch perfect’ but all the raucous squawkers are less than gentle on the ear. Our Starling, Jackdaw and Rook youngsters are belting out a tune on the theme of harsh, but the teenage gulls are just whiny. Thank goodness for the gentle twitter of Barn Swallows (or as they’re now called, X birds).
X birds?
Surely a reference to the “twitter of Barn Swallows”, now overruled by Elon whatsisname.
I am so dense sometimes.
We have a suet basket on our table-feeder that hangs on the pole, just below the seed tray. I’ve seen the baby woodpeckers fly to the pole, miss the suet, and slowly slide down the greasy tube until they bump into the squirrel baffle. Kind of a slip-and-slide for baby birds. The white-breasted nuthatch babies run around the seed tray and right off the edge until they are upside-down, pecking at it from beneath, with no apparent respect for gravity at all. Catbirds feed in the native viburnum which is just now producing loads of tiny red fruits. Bluebirds bring their babies to the birdbath, then park them on the clothesline and ferry caterpillars non-stop.
This is a delightful scene you’ve got going there. We had an ill-fated batch of baby nuthatches a while back. They were particularly appealing.
Especially to scrub jays.
Do you have catastrophic molters in your garden, Murr?
We have at least one cardinal and a jay that lose all their head feathers around now and wander around looking like tiny vultures. The neighborhood bird ladies send me photos predictably asking what is wrong with the little darling. Nothing, just over achievers in the molting department.
Wow. No. That I haven’t seen. Birds really don’t look like much with no clothes on.
Oh my I do love your nature essays. Maybe “Audubon” magazine would publish some of these.
Thanks! So, I should get off my dead ass and try to get published?
The ‘babies’ at this age are relentless, pestering the parents with the fluttery, ‘I’m-still-helpless’ thing they do. I can hear the parents thinking, ‘Get a job already!’
Last night we watched a baby hairy woodpecker repeatedly demanding that mom get it some seeds from the feeder the baby was parked on. It went on for quite a while until mom finally had had enough of the little beggar. She flew off, junior following, bellowing.
Oh yes. The little princesses can be butt deep in feeder seeds and still want that personal service.
A few years ago Daddy Hooded Oriole and New Son showed up at the nectar feeder. Daddy showed him how it’s done, and while initially puzzled Son was drinking, Daddy skaddled. Son drank his fill, then looked around and noticed Daddy was gone. He didn’t know what the hell to do next. Eventually Daddy showed up and escorted Son home, or somewhere. Lesson learned, I guess, but aside from the location of the food, I don’t know what it was.
I’m sorry, I blacked out as soon as I read you have hooded orioles at your nectar feeder.
From envy? Delight? Boredom? Do tell! We used to have Bullock’s orioles too, but not for the past couple of years.
Many years ago, we had a House Sparrow that claimed one of the nest boxes outside our bedroom window. I used to watch him periodically during the day. One day, he had THREE female sparrows on top of the nest box with him. I got the impression that he was telling them, “Okay, YOU will make the first batch of young. And YOU will make the second batch. And YOU will make the third batch.” And he DID raise three batches of young, although it was beyond me to recognize the various hens. (I hope that doesn’t sound speciest.)
At the end of the season, it seemed like all his various youngsters were in the backyard, and he dive-bombed them. They scattered. He did this a lot. I think that he was teaching them Sparrow 101.
Child 101. Unless he wants them in the basement sucking up the wifi all day long.
I only recently learned about baby bird diapers while observing a robin’s nest in a large bush outside my front porch. I was fascinating and icky to learn about.
I was able to watch a lot of feeding from both parents, and also a good bit of 2-on-1 defense against various flying predators. It was very entertaining but I did miss the actual leaving of the nest unfortunately. We had a few days of heat, humidity and rain when I didn’t hang out on the porch and once got a little nice, they had abandoned the nest.
Similar report here, after watching several years of nestlings in a box right outside my window, but you gotta be there when it’s imminent. The one time I totally saw the maiden flights, it was the nuthatch year. Bombed out. Tragedy. One bird wobbled out of the nest box and made it to a low branch. The next one wobbled harder and was headed toward a (gentle) landing in a shrub, where a scrub jay was waiting, and hauled it up to a tall tree with Mama Nuthatch screeching behind. Perfectly awful to watch!
I’m certainly sorry to learn that scrub jays take baby birds. I should have known this but I didn’t want to. My friend near Eugene, OR has a whole pack of them that eat peanuts which they will catch in mid-air. She sits on the porch and tosses them while the birds swoop and holler. It’s really quite a circus.
I used to like them quite a lot. I had them hopping around anytime I was weeding because every so often I’d turn up a rust-colored larva and lob it to them. They weren’t ‘fraid of nothin’. The Nuthatch Fiasco ruined it all for me.
“… put a peanut out for …”
My variation is a small blob of crunchy peanut butter (or whatever you call it in the USA).
Have had (so far) two seasons of two young Magpies come and snatch blobs from my hand.
(well.., they did until they got older and more wary of humans)
The worst fate of a baby bird I witnessed was one year when the Cardinals had just one baby Cardinal, and it was learning to fly. It fluttered upward toward the neighbor’s garage that backs up to our yard, and underestimated the height of the garage and instead smacked into the side, falling directly into the mouth of a neighbor’s cat lying in wait beneath him. The cat couldn’t believe his luck and took off with the baby bird, the Cardinal parents chasing after it. Then they fluttered around all afternoon chipping and looking for their baby. So heartbreaking!