Django and Junco

Sometimes our cat Django gives us the slip and darts outside, even though I have lectured him many times about why it's important that cats be kept indoors. He dives under the deck before I can grab him, shouting over his shoulder that he doesn't care if I want to keep birds safe. He just wants to go eat grass and drink filthy water out of a flowerpot.

Male junco on feeder pole in our yard.

But payback comes in the form of a fierce pair of juncos nesting somewhere in the yard. As soon as Django creeps out from under the deck, the two little birds perch above him and denounce him loudly. Chip! Chit! Chit! they scold, and he flattens to the ground, as much as an 18-pound cat can flatten himself. His ears stick out sideways. His gratitude, when I slide open the door, is immense, and he flees from the tirade to the safety of the back of the sofa.

Juncos are such exceedingly common birds that most people who pay scant attention to birds tend to lump them in with all the other little brown or gray things with wings that flit about the yard. They aren't really far off the mark in so doing--juncos are, after all, a kind of sparrow, and it's hard to get more common than a sparrow. (Well, depending on what sparrow you're talking about, that is.)

But I'd never seen one before I moved to the Northwest from the east coast more than 25 years ago. I quickly learned that this little gray and brown bird with the black executioner's hood was an Oregon junco--one of the many races of the species known as the Dark-eyed Junco, Junco hyemalis.

Actually, it would have been remarkable if I'd seen an Oregon junco on Long Island in New York; it's a western bird, found only casually in the East. What I would've seen back east was another race, the slate-colored junco. ("Casual" in birding doesn't mean that the bird is found in jeans and a tee-shirt leaning nonchalantly against a wall. It means "Species not recorded annually in the ABA [American Birding Association] Checklist Area, but with six or more total records—including three or more in the past 30 years—reflecting some pattern of occurrence." In other words, slim pickins.)

Dark-eyed juncos live year-round in many parts of the West, the Appalachians, and some northern states. In winter, they spill out to fill the rest of the country. This migratory habit earned them the common name of "snowbird." In warm states, the term would imply they're escaping winter's cold, but people in chillier states think of them as sticking around or arriving with the snow.

Juncos "drift into our gardens when snowy weather comes and when days are dark with rain, and winds blow cold," writes Francis Staver Twining in her book Bird-Watching in the West (1931). "I am always glad when the juncos come dancing in."

Male Oregon Junco, USFWS photo

The juncos in our winter garden join finches, sparrows, towhees, and chickadees at our feeder. Though they're ground birds, they will also struggle to snatch seeds directly from the feeder, flapping furiously as they try to cling to its sides with one foot and grab something before they lose their balance.

A junco's crisp markings stand out nicely in a snowy scene. The Oregon junco male's head is jet black, and his gray-brown wings fold neatly to form lapels on his russet sides. The female has much the same coloring but in paler shades. Both have white feathers on either side of their tails.

These white tail feathers serve many purposes. If threatened, juncos flare their tails as they fly away so the white feathers can signal an alarm to other juncos, in the same way that a raised white tail signals alarm in a fleeing deer. At the same time, the flash of white tells a predator, "I see you, you missed your chance, you've been spotted, hunt something else." Observers have also seen juncos flaring their tails to threaten other birds, including other species, in crowded feeding conditions on the ground.

Female junco, Marymoor State Park

In courtship, male juncos flare their tails to show off the white feathers as they seek to win over a female. Scientists have found that birds receiving better nourishment grow feathers with bigger white patches than birds eating merely a subsistence diet. If so, it may be that bigger white patches = more pugnacious bird = female selection pressure on male juncos to have hunky white tail feathers.

Another study seems to show that suburban juncos have less white in their tails than rural birds; the speculation is that there is less predation and competition in suburbia, and so female selection pressure is leaning more toward having a mellow dad around to help with household chores than an aggressive warrior.

Just recently, when Django the Cat made an escape and I responded to the junco's angry cheeps by stepping outside to fetch him, I nearly trod on a male junco apparently leading him up the steps by scrabbling along the deck with his tail flared, much like a killdeer feigning a broken wing. I'd heard that the white tail feathers might also entice a predator into going after the junco's tail instead of its vital head and body, so it's not such a leap to imagine the junco might likewise use its white feathers to lure a predator away from its young.

The white tail feathers, the variety in coloration, and much more make the humble junco "a rockstar study organism" for scientists. These scrappy little birds have been used in studies focusing on evolution, speciation, migration, ecology, and other topics. There's even a movie about them that can be downloaded or ordered and used in schools, museums, and other venues (find it here).

I poked around in a few old bird books to see if I could find some fascinating tidbit about these backyard birds, but without much luck.

My old reliable Birds of California by William Dawson devotes much of its account to the parsing of junco species and races. The Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds gives workmanlike accounts of each race (with an odd note in the Oregon's write-up: "Juncos attracted to warmth of caves in Yellowstone have died there from gases").

John James Audubon, however, had lots to say about juncos, which he was glad to see in winter when they migrated into Louisiana.

According to him, the junco was apparently quite well known among people in the mid-1800s:

So gentle and tame does it become on the least approach of hard weather, that it forms, as it were, a companion to every child. Indeed, there is not an individual in the Union who does not know the little Snow-bird, which, in America, is cherished as the Robin is in Europe. 

And his description of its behavior tells you exactly why a junco can put the fear of God into a fat housecat:

Although the Snow-Birds live in little families, consisting of twenty, thirty, or more individuals, they seem always inclined to keep up a certain degree of etiquette among themselves, and will not suffer one of their kind, or indeed any other bird, to come into immediate contact with them. To prevent intrusions of this kind, when a stranger comes too near, their little bills are instantly opened, their wings are extended, their eyes are seen to sparkle, and they emit a repelling sound peculiar to themselves on such occasions.

Our resident juncos are currently spending a lot of time emitting repelling sounds, because they even shout at the cat when he's indoors if they spy him through the glass sliding doors. Meanwhile, the rufous hummingbird will divebomb the male junco if he happens to be sitting too close to the nectar feeder. Which makes the other cat, Pebble, utter that weird chittering noise cats make when they gaze at birds from a window. Which  makes the dog come in to see what's going on. It's a busy season, springtime is.

A Bird in the Hand

Pacific Wren (formerly Winter Wren)

In recent weeks I've had the privilege of going behind the scenes at a museum to look at birds close-up in the form of study skins.

Poring over stuffed, dead birds might not sound like everybody's idea of a good time, but for birders it offers an excellent opportunity to observe details and compare and contrast species in a way you never get to do in the field, where birds often appear as silhouetted blobs on a brightly lit sky, a streaky dash amid branches, or a tiny speck beyond the reach of your binoculars.

A study skin is exactly what it sounds like: a bird skin complete with feathers, beak, and legs that's been stripped of all flesh and stuffed so that it can be measured and examined. The stuffing doesn't attempt to recreate the bird's form in life, as taxidermy does.

(For more information about preparing study skins, as well as some points of view on collecting birds, check out this ebird page.)

Sometimes wings are prepared separately from the study skins so they can be displayed fanned out, making individual flight feathers easy to see. A study skin wouldn't last very long if its wings were constantly being unfolded. The wings are actually threaded in place to prevent them from being spread.

A museum's collection of study skins includes the remains of many birds who were found dead and donated for preparation. (I once had a bushtit stored in my freezer for years after finding it newly dead on the sidewalk outside my house with this aim in mind.)

It also includes birds deliberately collected for study, though unlike the overzealous collectors in Audubon's time, today's scientists take legal and ethical considerations into account.

Handling and studying the skins evokes many feelings: wistfulness and a twinge of sadness at the stillness of the birds and the brevity and evanescence of life; humility at the connection between now and then, as you hold a tiny bird collected by someone who lived a century before you; and awe at the magnificent beauty and variety of species.

Northern Flicker's exuberantly spotted breast

The impressive beak of an Evening Grosbeak

The comets and stars on a Common Loon's back

The useful field mark, the "butterbutt," of a Yellow-Rumped Warbler

The tropical splendor of an American Redstart

The odd, waxy tips on the secondary flight feathers of a Cedar Waxwing

A MacGillivray's Warbler collected in 1894. Holding it makes you pause
and reflect on both this little scrap of life that fluttered long before you
were born and the existence of the person who carefully penned
the information on its tag.

Orange-crowned Warbler. The study skins of smaller birds really
demonstrate how much of a bird's volume consists of the life pulsing
in it. This is particularly true of the wrens, which resemble empty pen
cartridges in the drawer but appear much larger in life when they're
full of spunk and fury and scolding you from a branch.

The formidable talons of a raptor (I believe they belong to a Great Horned Owl).

First Bird of the Year 2016: Chestnut-Backed Chickadee

Photo from Wiki Commons

A birder in Australia once started her new year with a sighting of a wedge-tailed eagle eating a straw-necked ibis.

If I were her, I'd definitely choose the eagle as my official first sighting, and not only because the general rules of birding mandate that the birds you count on your life list must be alive, but because the First Bird of the Year is supposed to augur the sort of year you're going to have.

In that regard, this sighting of a straw-necked ibis would not seem to bode well.

Living in a suburban neighborhood as I do, my First Bird is never going to be as dramatic a species as a wedge-tailed eagle. I figured that on this frosty January 1 it would be one of the busy birds attacking our feeders, and today that bird was the chestnut-backed chickadee--a pert little bird whose cheerful, busy ways make it the very incarnation of all those New Year's resolutions about making better use of one's time and getting things done.

Chestnut-backed chickadee at our feeder, winter 2013

"Our" chestnut-backed chickadees spend these chilly days diving down from the top of the plum tree to the feeder, plucking out sunflower seeds, and then swooping away to cache them in crevices and under bits of bark. This behavior makes them highly appropriate creatures to set the tone for our upcoming year, in which we must practice austerity in anticipation of paying for the Resident Teen's post-high-school education and wishing that, like the chickadee, we'd socked away a lot more in previous years...

Chestnut-backed chickadees are West Coast birds that favor old, wet forests with lots of Sitka spruce and other conifers, but like their relatives the black-capped chickadees they're also at home in rural and suburban gardens.

Their range overlaps with that of the widespread black-capped, but where they occur together, they coexist nicely because they occupy different niches: chestnut-backed chickadees typically scour the upper branches of conifers for insects, and the black-capped chickadees prefer to glean the lower branches and favor oaks over conifers.

The two species don't even bicker at the feeder--they're happy to take turns depleting the seed supply, and both dart in and out without fussing about the finches, towhees, and sparrows also thronging the banquet.

Ornithologists named the bird for its rich, chestnut feathers, but chickadees named themselves with their distinctive "chick-a-dee-dee-dee" call. The number of "dees" varies--a truly alarmed chickadee may tack on quite a few to its call when it wants other birds to join in mobbing a perched raptor or a land-based predator such as a cat. One scientist counted 23 extra "dees" in a chickadee's call when it detected a perched pygmy-owl.

Alas, poor chestnut-backed chickadee! In many books, its vocal abilities are frequently compared, somewhat unfavorably, to the  black-capped's.

Black-capped chickadee (left) and chestnut-backed chickadee (right) at our feeder

A 1968 Seattle Audubon Society guidebook says this species produces "nasal notes," a "harsh check check chickadee" and a "more nasal pip-durr-durr." (Imagine if they'd called this species a pipdurrdurr; how fun would that be?)

National Geographic Complete Birds of North America says the chestnut-backed's call is "a hoarse, high-pitched, rapid sik-zee-zee or just zee-zee." 

In The National Audubon Society Field Guide to Western Birds, it's said to utter "a squeaky chick-a-dee, somewhat shriller and faster than that of other chickadees" and often "simply utters a thin tsee-deee and thin lisping notes."

And Sibley adds that its typical call consists of "high buzzy notes with lower nasal husky notes tsidi-tsidi-tsidi-cheer-cheer or weaker tsity ti jee jee."

Thin, nasal, squeaky, hoarse, weak, high-pitched, shrill...how long could you listen to a chestnut-backed chickadee chattering away with you in a coffee shop? (That's if you could put up with it hanging upside down half the time.)

Chestnut-backed chickadee at our feeder

But some writers were onto this nefarious Black-Capped Chickadees Set the Standard thing long ago. Ornithologist William Dawson, in his 1923 work Birds of California, pointed out that many authors wrote descriptions of the chestnut-backed chickadee's behavior that were entirely extrapolated from that of the black-capped.

He acknowledged that the chestnut-backed was "neither quite so lively nor so noisy as his giddy eastern cousin" but also that it was "one of the daintiest and most alluring of the dwellers in the redwoods," calling them "busy little midgets" and admiring "what a merry war they wage on beetle and nit." To his ears, the little birds trilled sweetee and a beakful of a phrase he rendered as a rather Croatian-looking kechesawick. He also noted that they uttered chickadee as kissadee, "the latter given so caressingly that you want to pinch the little darling."

John James Audubon didn't have much to say about the chestnut-backed chickadee, basing his account of the chickadee genus primarily on the black-capped, though he did paint a lively and charming pair of the birds. He called this species the chestnut-backed titmouse.

Titmouse is basically the Old World word for a chickadee, springing from an ancient Anglo-Saxon word tit (meaning something very small--stop that giggling, now) and another equally old word, mase (which also meant "tiny" or even "small bird, depending on the source).

The bird-word connection extends even into punctuation in an essay by one of the writers who toiled to produce the massive tome Birds of America, published in 1936 by the University Society with lots of assistance from Audubon Society and Cornell experts. In that work, chestnut-backed chickadees are depicted as "feathered interrogation points...interviewing and questioning every passer-by."

Speaking of interrogation, I think our chickadees are demanding more sunflower seeds, if the gimlet stares they're lasering through my office window are any indication....

Feathers, Kids, and a Dose of Humility

Getting lost while driving in strange places is one of my biggest fears. Never mind that the strange place may be just the local hamlet of Kirkland; I could make a wrong turn and be unable to correct it quickly because of an angry driver tailgating me, and before you know it, I would be on The Highway With No Exits Until Bucktail, Nebraska!

So I wasn't sure I wanted to budge out of my house one Thursday evening a few weeks ago.

Plus, it was dark. And raining.

Nevertheless, I decided to shake off my slothfulness and actually drive somewhere after dinner, because it isn't every day that the author of one of your favorite books is speaking practically in your backyard, unless you happen to live next door to him or her and he or she is asking you to please come get your dog out of their chicken coop.

Reader, you will be glad to hear that I made it safely to my destination in Kirkland and even found parking. The event I attended was hosted by the Eastside Audubon Society and featured biologist Thor Hanson, author of the smashing book Feathers and the newly published The Triumph of Seeds.

Feathers is the kind of natural-history book I love best--one that sweeps together a multitude of fascinating facts as well as anecdotes and snippets of cultural as well as natural history and compels you with the same narrative drive that a good novel does. 

I pretty much expected that I'd learn more about feathers and possibly seeds that evening, which of course would've been wonderful, but just like the aforementioned Feathers, the author's discussion ranged across topics and lit on many subjects I hold dear: writing, kids, everyday wonders, and the instinctive affinity for the natural world that every child is born with and that can blossom or wither as the child grows.

I could natter on for ages about any of these topics but I'll stick with one of the anecdotes Hanson shared, a little story in which a child takes you down a peg or two without intending to do so and leaves you realizing that even if you think you're fairly humble, you're still capable of fluffing up your feathers and strutting a bit.

In the author's story, he was at a local shop in their very small town with his young son, where they ran into a little girl from their preschool. In the shop's window was a poster with the author's photo on it, announcing the date of an upcoming presentation. The little girl gawped at the author, looked at the poster, looked back at the author, then back at the poster, clearly linking the two and seemingly speechless. "Is that you?" she finally asked. Yes, came the reply. 

How could one not feel a bit chuffed at this bit of recognition? And then came the flattening reaction: the little girl studied the author, and then the photo, and finally asked, "Do you wear the same sweater every day?" 

(Note to self: borrow a sweater when the day comes that I actually get an author photo taken. And return it to the owner immediately.)

My dad had a similar experience once upon a time. He was an aeronautical engineer with many interests and loved nothing more than a wide-ranging conversation. One summer day, he was at a company picnic, and a little boy fell into chatting with him. Talk turned to jets and airplane design. Dad warmed to his topic as the boy stared at him, entranced. How wonderful to have such an appreciative audience! The boy was practically slack-jawed with fascination.

Then, without warning, the boy sped off and ran to his own father. He pointed back at my dad. "Papa! Papa!" he cried. "Look! Look! That man is all covered with little dots!"

It is quite true that auburn-haired Dad was liberally speckled with reddish freckles, which were on glorious display in short sleeves on that summer day. "Well," said Dad at this point, "that put me in my place."

Carol Burnett knew this feeling well; on her show back in the 1970s, she told a story about sitting on her young daughter's bed, talking to her earnestly--longer than she'd intended, as the child's rapt face and unblinking gaze encouraged her to continue. Satisfied, Burnett smiled lovingly at her daughter, waiting for a reaction. She didn't expect it to be the statement, "Wow. You sure have a lot of teeth."

I don't recall a time when anybody young or old hung on my every word, but there was a day when I gave a little presentation about writing books to a small group of kids in my daughter's elementary school.

Most of them were inattentive, but one boy was riveted. I turned the pages of one of my published books and warbled on about the writing of books for his benefit. When I asked if anyone had any questions, his hand shot up. That's when I learned the real source of his fascination: "How did you write all those words so perfectly in the book?" 

By which of course he didn't mean my deft word selection, but actually I would be very happy to see that as a review on Amazon. Hope is, after all, the thing with feathers.*

*A statement that I can no longer make without thinking of Woody Allen's reaction: “How wrong Emily Dickinson was! Hope is not 'the thing with feathers.' The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.”

The Race Is to the Swifts

In February and March, people visit San Juan Capistrano in hope of seeing the return of cliff swallows to their nests beneath the eaves of old mission buildings. March is also when folks await the return of buzzards (turkey vultures) to Hinckley, Ohio.

And every summer night, hundreds of people gather to watch more than a million Mexican free-tailed bats pour out from under a bridge in Austin, Texas.

But if you've missed these annual animal aggregations, never fear. Because now is when Vaux's swifts are streaming south for the winter, pausing to rest and feed in the vicinity of Monroe, Washington--and when people flock to an old chimney to watch the little birds plunge into it at night.

Vaux's swifts, often described as "flying cigars," are North America's smallest swifts at barely 4.5 inches in length. They spend spring and summer in western North America, primarily in coastal states and Mexico, ranging as far north as southern Alaska . Then they skip out on us to spend winter in warm, sunny central America. Clever birds.

"Wait a sec," says you. "What was that bit about the chimney?"

Yes, it's true, Santa isn't the only organism that plummets down chimneys on a predictable schedule. Vaux's swifts nest in cavities, in hollow trees, and chimneys. During migration, they cram into trees and chimneys by the hundreds and thousands in order to keep warm--and safe from predators--at night.

Photo from Washington Dept. of Wildlife

They cling to vertical surfaces with sharp-clawed toes. Their short legs and feet are completely unsuitable for walking on the ground and not much use for perching, either.

When they're not stuck upright as if held in place by Velcro, they're flying. Vaux's swifts do nearly everything on the wing--courting, mating, feeding by snapping up insects in midair, and drinking by swooping over water and scooping up a beakful. They even gather nesting material while in flight.

In Monroe, the birds swarm into an old, unused chimney that's part of the Frank Wagner Elementary School. The chimney is 31 feet tall with an opening that measures four square feet. As many as 21,000 swifts funnel into it in a matter of minutes. Once inside, each bird jostles to find a holdfast. They settle into place, overlapping like shingles on a roof.

We visited the swifts in September 2014, arriving early to enjoy a feast of spaghetti and apple crisp. (A swift eats about 20,000 insects in a day, so we didn't save any for the birds.) Kids pitched beanbag swifts into a cardboard chimney. People wandered about wearing headbands adorned with paper swifts bobbing on pipe-cleaner posts. An Audubon table lined with stuffed remains of various bird species attracted a small crowd.

Looking at the fragile form of the Vaux's swift, you couldn't help but marvel at its diminutive size and realize just how much of a live bird consists of flurry, fluff, and motion.

Early-birds fluttered near the chimney as evening advanced. The sky darkened, and the swifts' numbers grew. They looked like bats as they flickered through the air.

Darker and darker grew the sky, faster and faster whirled the birds. And then, as if at a signal, they began dropping into the chimney. Each bird dove at the opening, braking its fast forward motion to plummet in tail-first.

So many birds! It was as if the chimney were a vacuum drawing them in from the sky. They twirled in like a reverse cloud of smoke. The tornado spun for several minutes before diminishing, bit by bit, until the storm was down to just a few stragglers.

And then, after a few beats, one last bird zipped across the sky and ducked in just in time, accompanied by onlookers' laughter and applause.

John James Audubon doesn't appear to have ever painted the Vaux's swift, but he did encounter its eastern cousin, the chimney swift, and study its natural history. He witnessed the birds' flowing into a communal roost at dusk and described it :

"When about to descend into a hollow tree or a chimney, its flight, always rapid, is suddenly interrupted as if by magic, for down it goes in an instant, whirling in a peculiar manner, and whirring with its wings, so as to produce a sound in the chimney like the rumbling of very distant thunder."

Ornithologist William Leon Dawson (1873–1928), who called the Vaux's swift a humble "sky-scooter," notes that "at favorite seasons the birds cross and recross each other's paths in lawless mazes and fill the air with their strident creakings, while here and there couples and even trios sail about in great stiff curves with wings held aloft."

Vaux's swifts are a cause for celebration at a number of chimneys along their migratory flight path. You can cheer them on in Monroe this year on Saturday, September 12 (find out more on the Swift Night Out website here). The website also streams images of the birds inside the chimney via the Swiftcam (shown below).

Hush! A Thrush

Some birds are more often heard than seen.

The Swainson's thrush is a member of this shy chorus. Cryptically clad in buff and white, with a spattering of spots to break up its form, it slips quietly through trees and shrubs, keeping out of sight.

But when the male Swainson's lifts his voice in song, it's enough to make you feel as if you've been transported to some Arcadian idyll. The song is an ethereal upward spiral, sung not only at dawn but also throughout the evening, often until well after sunset. A haunting, ringing quality seems to make it hang shimmering in the air until the next trill rises. (You can listen to it here.)

Before this year, I'd only seen a Swainson's thrush once, and that was just because he was kicking up a storm rustling through leaves in a neighbor's yard uphill from my Seattle one in an area where a fence had fallen down. He gave me one startled look and vanished.

This summer, I have the privilege of watching a female Swainson's incubate her eggs in a nest perched on a conifer branch just a few yards from my office window in Cottage Lake.

She sits so patiently on  her tightly woven nest; on many days it seems she only moves to snuggle herself in more deeply. I often feel like bringing out a few magazines for her, and a little cup of coffee. With the recent scorching weather, though, I've observed her sitting next to the nest, letting the air keep the eggs warm. She prods the eggs with her beak now and then, testing their temperature and turning them over.

The male, however, is all over the place. He often flutters into the maple right next to the window to peer in at me. Or to give a thumping to the male robin who rashly lands on a branch in his domain. Sometimes he swoops through the spray of the hose when I'm watering the raspberry patch out front. Sometimes he perches on the shepherd's hook in the garden near the nest, looking like an expectant father pacing a waiting room in a 1940s movie.

The Swainson's thrush is such a lovely bird, it's a shame that it's got such an unimaginative name--the fate, alas, of so many birds. No offense, Swainson, but seriously? You already have a warbler and a hawk named after you. (Reptiles and fish totally luck out when it comes to names. More on that some other time.)

Regional names for this flutist of the woods aren't much of an improvement. According to the Audubon Encyclopedia of North American Birds, its nicknames include Alma's thrush (who's Alma?), olive-backed thrush (ho-hum), russet-backed thrush (yawn), and swamp robin (better, but rather limiting).

More interesting are the varied ways in which bird books render the thrush's skein of song.

photo from Wikipedia

"Song spirals upward, like whip-poor-will-a-will-e-zee-zee-zee, going up high and fine at end..." explains the Audubon Encyclopedia of North American Birds.

"Po po tu tu tu tureel tureel tiree tree tree," warble the thrushes in the Sibley guide, but only if they're in the Pacific; interior west and taiga birds tend to whistle "po rer reer reeer re-e-e-e-e-e" instead.

Naturalist William Leon Dawson, in Birds of California, describes this thrush as "a flitting shade and a haunting voice," and admits to difficulty in recreating the song in syllables, but shares other naturalists' versions:

weeloo weelo weeloeeewit-wit

t'villia-t'villiaholsey

govendy govindy goveendy

Well, wit-wit and weeloo and a govindy, too. Some authors, though, dispense with interpreting the song and go with the "everybody's a critic" approach:

"Those who have heard the olive-backed thrush singing an even-song to its brooding mate compare it with the veery's, but it has a break in it and is less simple and pleasing than the latter's." Neltje Blanchan, Bird Neighbors, 1922

"Its song, while perhaps not as beautiful as that of the Hermit Thrush, is better known to most bird-watchers..." Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds, Eastern Region

"The throaty, gurgling song lacks the richness of the wood thrush's and the purity of the hermit's but is pleasantly musical." Richard Pough, Audubon Guides

Fortunately, Swainson's thrushes cannot read.

By Don Faulkner via Wikimedia Commons

They also make a wonderful call that sounds like a drop of water, often rendered whoit or quoit.

[We interrupt this twittering about thrush song for some breaking news. It appears the eggs may have hatched, as I thought I saw a tiny head and gaping beak protrude from the nest's edge before Mama Thrush stood over it. She has her wings spread out to shade the nest, as it's currently in full sunlight on a day shaping up to be a hot one.]

I have my fingers crossed for our resident thrushes. Their nest is built precariously close to the tip of a branch, rather than tucked closely by the trunk, and I fear that the day will come that a jay or crow takes note of it and dives in for a meal.

I know, I know, that's nature for you. I don't blame the jays and crows; I just hope it doesn't happen. The thrushes have been so single-minded  in raising their brood, parental intensity condensed to a single point in their black ink-drop eyes. I'd like to see their little ones fledge.

In fall, Swainson's thrushes leave the northwest and head south. Some migrate as far as Argentina. They fly at night, calling to each other, and if you listen in a quiet place, you can hear their notes twinkling down from the sky.

Plum-Blossom Snowfall, Then Spring

While friends and relatives back east were being pummeled by snow, we were enduring a deluge of plum-blossom petals drifting to the ground. And that was before Spring officially arrived last weekend. It was supposed to pour both days, but Saturday proved to be bright and warm, and so we were able to get out in the garden and start prepping it for the growing season.

Barrels filled with soil in the sunny side yard.

A robin has staked out our front yard as his territory and sings from atop a blue spruce.

An Anna's hummingbird continues to rule the back yard and spends a lot of time and energy chasing an interloper away from the feeder and sitting on a branch chirping his indignation.

Meanwhile, the female hummingbird--whom the male chased from the feeder most of the winter--has forgiven her suitor his loutish ways and has a nest secreted away somewhere in the garden. He has gallantly decided to let her sip from the feeder.

Here she is enjoying some time away from tending to her eggs, looking rather like a tired mom nursing a latte in a Starbucks while someone else minds her children at home for a few minutes.

At night we can hear the spring peepers singing, a barred owl hooting, and coyotes yipping and howling. The morning brings a dawn chorus of robins, wrens, and sparrows with the flicker providing the drum section. I've always liked early-morning sunlight, especially on days when I don't actually have to be up early and can linger to savor it with a cup of coffee.

A Crescendo of Crows

As evening falls, the crows arrive.

First just two or three. Then clusters of half a dozen or more. Calling, cawing, the crows wing their way over our house, a black arrow of birds pointing to the west.

The crows look purposeful, and they are. They are heading home from a day spent gleaning in fields, parks, and city streets to roost for the night at the UW Bothell campus, along with  more than 10,000 others of their kind.

My husband and I headed there, too, one recent evening to watch for their arrival. The sky was that wash of pink and blue peculiar to midwinter dusk, with purple shades of night seeping in around the edges.

And then the pink and blue became speckled with bits of black. From all directions, the crows came, from Seattle and Sultan, from Snohomish and Skykomish. Their cawing grew from a few raucous cries to a seething, swirling wall of sound.

Crows perched on the roof and in the trees. Late arrivals gathered on the grass before looking for spaces in the crowd. Clusters of crows would startle and fling themselves into the air, making the constant crow-clatter rise and fall, swoop and turn.

The crows aren't here to feed. Nor are they hatching plans to conquer the human race. They're simply seeking safety in numbers.

By nightfall, they'll all be tucked into the willow trees and other vegetation growing thickly in the wetlands on campus. It's a slumber party inspired by a mutual desire to not get picked off by a hungry great horned owl.

These highly social and smart birds have a lot to say before settling down for the night. Who knows what they're sharing as they caw, cackle, and squawk?

By the time we left, the crows had vacated the rooftops. A few stragglers flew in, making straight for the trees; it was easy to imagine they were stealing glances over their shoulders, convinced that an owl was just a few flaps behind them.

At sunrise, the crows will awaken, stretch, and fly off for another day of scavenging, socializing, preening, and playing. Many will head for familiar places while some may be inspired to tag after other birds and find new feeding grounds.

By late spring, the crows will disperse throughout the region, busy with mating, nesting, and raising young. They'll stay in their home territories throughout the summer. In fall, all the crows--youngsters on up to crows that have been around for 30 or 40 years--will resume trekking to the campus to roost in the trees.

The Quicker Flicker Picker

The holiday lights have been put away. The Christmas cookies are long gone. We enter the dank slog through January and February's winter weather, a season that's always felt very long and dreary to me, made more so by sad memories of bad things that have happened to loved ones during this time. Spring, growth, and renewal seem very remote.

But not if you're a bird. The male Anna's hummingbird who ferociously guards the nectar feeder in our yard is already alternating his pugnacious displays with athletic courtship dives, swooping and buzzing loudly in front of his lady love. Bufflehead ducks in ponds along the Snoqualmie Trail are courting, too, the males rapidly bobbing their heads to impress the females.

photo courtesy Wiki Commons

And I heard a varied thrush trill the other day--just one short trill that broke off abruptly, as if the bird had surprised itself and was now standing quietly, bashfully putting a wing over its beak and looking around in mock alarm, wondering who spoke out of turn.

It seems kind of early, though, for woodpeckers to be drumming. Yet on January 12 a local birder reported hearing a flicker rat-a-tat-tat on her chimney flue in Seattle.

Flickers are big, polka-dotted woodpeckers found throughout North America and into parts of Central America. Properly speaking, the species is called the Northern Flicker.

Flickers found in the eastern part of the species' range flash bright yellow wing and tail linings and are known as yellow-shafted flickers; flickers of the West are rosy instead and are called red-shafted flickers. They were once thought to be separate species.

Like other woodpeckers, flickers drum to court each other and to defend their territory. They usually drum on trees, but with the diverse drum kit that humans provide, flickers have expanded their repertoire--like any enterprising musicians would. So they also drum on metal chimney flues, gutters, and other house bits and pieces. One midwestern flicker routinely used an abandoned tractor as its post. Locally, I know of a flicker who uses, to great effect, a metal streetlight as his bandstand.

We'll never know whose home had the honor of being the first to be drilled and drummed by a flicker, but the habit goes back a long way. The author Frances Staver Twining, in her 1931 book Bird-Watching in the West, describes the flicker's springtime behavior thus:

The flickers are busy signalling from the ridge-pole over our sleeping heads at five o'clock in the morning. Later on in the day I am very apt to come across a pair of these energetic birds on the ground in the middle of a path. They bow to each other like partners in a quadrille, execute a few awkward steps, and converse in tones that vary from a soft coo, kuk, tut, flicker-r-r to a resounding wake-up, wake-up, wake-up! This is a flicker's courtship and his spring song.

Flicker on suet feeder, Seattle, outside our previous house

I haven't heard any drumming* or cooing so far this season, though one flicker did let out a joyous wick-wick-wick-wick, a call described by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology as "a loud, rolling rattle with a piercing tone that rises and falls in volume several times....You’ll hear it in the spring and early summer, while pairs are forming and birds are establishing their territories."

Like the varied thrush who said "Whoops! Pardon me" after letting out a trill, this particular flicker clammed up and I haven't heard him since.

Flickers are boisterous birds, however, so they'll definitely be shouting soon enough as well as drumming. The "rolling rattle" has spawned a wealth of regional common names, such as wake-up, wick-up, yucker, harry-wicket, yarrup, and yawker bird. Another call note, a piercing klee-yer, has added a few shorter names, such as clape. The drumming likewise has inspired red-hammer, yellow-hammer, and a slew of shouted epithets I will not render here.

Male flicker keeping an eye on me at Magnuson Park. Flickers spend
lots of time on the ground probing for and eating ants.

The name "flicker" itself may be a human rendition of its rattling call, though sources also suggest that perhaps the bird's habit of flicking its tail or its bill is the source of its name.

I can't say I've noticed flickers flicking any more than other birds (and certainly not as much as a wren or sparrow). I wonder if perhaps the name was inspired by the way a flicker's dazzling red or yellow colors are revealed, like flickers of flame, when it spreads its wings and tail.

I never saw flickers when I lived back east; I've only seen these birds since moving west 25 years ago, and every single one of them was a red-shafted flicker with feathers shading from pink to crimson.

At least, until a rowdy flicker with screaming-yellow wings and tail crash-landed on the suet feeder this past weekend.

What a bird! The undersides of his wings and tail would have done a canary proud. He was a glorious lemony explosion in the middle of a dank, foggy, gray midwinter morning.

The distraction created by those beautiful feathers is what made me into the "quicker flicker picker" of the title: I did what the most newby of new birders would do, which is rush to identification before checking sources carefully. I went around crowing that we'd seen a yellow-shafted flicker.

Not so fast, cautioned wiser, calmer birders. On a birding website, they pointed out that "my" bird had a red moustache, a feature of the male red-shafted flicker; a yellow-shafted male would have a black moustache. This flicker also had facial and crest feathers that were more gray and less brown, also typical of red-shafted. However, it also had a bit of a red chevron on the back of its neck--a mark that exists in the yellow-shafted and not the red.

So what was it? A red-shafted flicker with yellow shafts? A yellow-shafted flicker with a red moustache? None of the above. It appears to be either an intergrade flicker--a flicker who's a cross between a yellow and a red--or one that's got such an intergrade in its ancestry.

An intergrade's different from a hybrid. A hybrid is the product of two completely different species--a mule, for example, is the hybrid offspring of a horse and a donkey. An intergrade is the product of two different subspecies. Red-shafted and yellow-shafted flickers are both varieties of Northern Flicker, hence their kiddos are intergrades.

Whatever his parentage, this splendid flicker's appearance nudged me to see what John James Audubon wrote about them. He did not have anything to say about being awakened by flicker reveille at an ungodly hour, and he seemed to be  genuinely fond of this species. Below is his impression of the birds (leaving out the later bit where he and an associate plunder a nest).

Do try to ponder the merriment of flickers yourself when their springtime joy bubbles over into drumming on your roof at 4:30 a.m.!

"It is generally agreeable to be in the company of individuals who are naturally animated and pleasant. For this reason, nothing can be more gratifying than the society of Woodpeckers in the forests. To prove this to you, kind reader, I shall give you a full account of the habits of the Golden-winged Woodpecker....No sooner has spring called them to the pleasant duty of making love, as it is called, than their voice, which, by the way, is not at all disagreeable to the ear of man, is heard from the tops of high decayed trees, proclaiming with delight the opening of the welcome season. 

Their note at this period is merriment itself, as it imitates a prolonged and jovial laugh, heard at a considerable distance. Several males pursue a female, reach her, and, to prove the force and truth of their love, bow their heads, spread their tail, and move sidewise, backwards and forwards, performing such antics, as might induce any one witnessing them, if not of a most morose temper, to join his laugh to theirs. 

Even in confinement, the Golden-winged Woodpecker never suffers its naturally lively spirit to droop. It feeds well, and by way of amusement, will continue to destroy as much furniture in a day as can well be mended by a different kind of workman in two. Therefore, kind reader, do not any longer believe that Woodpeckers are such stupid, forlorn, dejected and unprovided for beings as they have hitherto been represented. In fact, I know not one of the species found in our extensive woods, that does not exhibit quite as much mirth and gaiety as the present bird."

*Untrue as of 3:30 p.m. on January 13, when I heard a flicker ardently drumming on a cottonwood tree across the street.