Neighborhood birds – not so ordinary

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ornithology, birds, bird watching, photographs

This is how baby robins look the day they hatch. On most monitors this image will be just a little smaller than actual size.

We had the good fortune that a pair of robins built a nest on the kitchen window ledge. They anchored it to the thermometer support. Four blue eggs were followed by four pink nestlings, covered with sparse white fuzz. We kept the window shade down, except when taking pictures, to keep from spooking the parent birds, and later, the fledglings.

I am not much of a bird watcher, but I pay attention to them, particularly the ones in my yard and neighborhood. In Jack Gedney's book The Private Lives of Public Birds: Learning to Listen to the Birds Where We Live, the author wants, most of all, that we all pay attention. Birds are all around us.

When we step outside in the morning (or if we have an open window at sunrise), do we notice the birdsong? When we turn a corner at the end of the house and hear a flutter from a nearby bush, do we bother to look for the rapidly-exiting bird we just spooked? When a catbird is crying nearby, do we crane about, hoping to see it? Do we thrill to see a cardinal in the birdbath?

The book has the stories of 15 common birds of California, where the author lives. A few, the towhee and two species of native sparrow, were new to me. The rest were familiar. Hmm: Chapter 10, on the White-crowned sparrow and golden-crowned sparrow, is two-for-one, so that's 16 bird species.

Although I've lived in California three times, for a total of eleven years, I never learned of the California towhee. Gedney calls it "the brown bird", which reflects its principal characteristic. However, the average songbird is a "little brown thing"—think of common (English) sparrow and wrens—which makes sense. For prey birds, being inconspicuous is a life strategy. So I was probably in the presence of towhees daily and never noticed.

I love the way he writes: lyrically, without being maudlin. In Chapter 6, about the House Finch, he invites us to "reenchant our lives": "You can choose to peel away the concealing layer of quotidian gray and rediscover the brilliant core that's been present all along." From any distance farther than halfway across your yard, it's hard to tell this is a red bird. Particularly in fall and winter, its winter coat is more of a stately pink than this blazing red.

Writing of owls, he remarks on the way they add their own sounds to the night (the stereotypical "Hoo-hoo Hoooo!" is generally a great horned owl; hard to spot in spite of its size). Yet with the spread of artificial light, the monthly cycle of the moon's phases is lost on us, and the changes in owl song that were once so familiar: "[We] lose the evening, erase the quiet time between activity and sleep. Moonlit groves grow lonely in an age of off-and-on." He turns to a poet, Pablo Neruda, to limn the Anna's hummingbird: "You are / a seed in the sun / a fire / dressed in feathers." Although mourning doves have the fastest level flight of any bird, Anna's hummingbirds fly faster relative to their size than any other bird. Put another way, the hummingbird is a bit slower than the dove, but is 1/3rd the length and 1/30th the weight.

I suspect if almost anyone put their mind to it, they could recall at least a dozen birds with which they are at least a little familiar.

I live some 10 km west of the Delaware River, near the PA-DE state line. This is the northern end of the Mid-Atlantic region. The ranges of many populations of northeastern and mid-southern birds overlap, so folks that keep life lists have a rich harvest without going far.

The larger birds we see are typically turkey vultures, such as these two (photographed by my wife), after chopping up some small carcass in our yard, peering in the neighbor's window. I've seen bald eagles in nearby areas, but never from our neighborhood. Even from far away, it's easy to distinguish eagle from vulture. The eagle's wings are held flat and its flight is very steady. The vulture's wings are held in a shallow "V", and it tends to teeter in flight, catching every tiny shift in the updrafts that keep it aloft. The turkey vulture, if close enough, sports long, white triangles on the rear of its wings. Half the tail is also white.

We also have black vultures, with black skin on the head rather than red. Turkey vultures have the best sense of smell of any bird, and black vultures keep an eye on them because they can smell what no vulture can see.

Slightly smaller raptors in the area include this Cooper's hawk, that was sitting our our fence, and both red-tailed hawks and red-shouldered hawks. Cooper's hawks are bird hawks, but one day a friend and I were in the driveway talking, and heard a thump. We turned just in time to see the Cooper's hawk flying off with a squirrel. That's a lot of load for this hawk, for they are smaller than red-tailed hawks.

Middle sized birds are dominated by robins. In certain seasons, it's interesting to see a nearby schoolyard hosting 20 or more feeding robins, which keep 10-20 feet apart, while not far away, a flock of 100 blackbirds, with much closer spacing, could fit in the area of a garage. We also have cardinals—this picture is of two cardinal eggs in a nest in our privet hedge. There are also catbirds, starlings, mourning doves, tree swallows, blue jays, and occasional goldfinches.

Smaller birds include several "little brown things": English sparrows, Carolina wrens, and another wren species I haven't identified. We also have chickadees. Neighbors have reported seeing bluebirds, but I haven't.

That's nineteen. Not much of a life list compared to many folks I know. But for me, it's enough. I can't identify them all by sound, but with observation that ought to improve. I hope Mr. Gedney would approve.