FRIENDS
OF LATODAMI ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION CENTER
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New Book Describes a Year at
Latodami
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Special Bonus The following are the journal entries from Randy for May, 2005. Previous entries from March and April are still on line. Latodami At They aren’t alone, and now I wish I’d reviewed some of the migrants’ songs. I still recognize those of the northern orioles and hooded warblers, but one raspy, robin-like melody seems new to me. I’d guess it’s one of the tanagers, but without a call note I can’t tell. I’d grump at myself for procrastinating, but the woods are just too lovely for that. Dawn was half an hour ago and now its golden light is glowing in the tops of newly green trees. The melodies trickling down from the tongues of morn may carry me—or my heart, at least—to heights unknown. Three deer discover me, and are not pleased. They leave, huffing and complaining. I just grin. A veery calls from up the hill. I hold my breath and lean uphill to hear his song. No luck. He’s not singing yet. But I also realize that the deer only pretended to leave. Up where the veery calls, there’s a bush with two large brown ears. Every now and then, it shakes. Long lines of crows are curling into the pines. They have
a meeting with an owl. The proceedings
remind me of a session of Now, many long loud minutes later, the meeting has evidently ended. The crows have left. I’m climbing the hill to the meadow and there, glowing brown in the early morning sunshine, is the owl—of the great horned variety. It scratches its ear, quite unperturbed. A crow flies over, caws loudly, but keeps going. It seems to have said what it had to say. At the meadow’s edge, wrens, song sparrows, and a towhee sing. A brown beetle, reminiscent of a firefly, scales the rough heights of the cherry tree I’m leaning on. I see it first at shoulder level, lose sight of it at twelve feet or so. Its climb is unhurried, but without pause and straight up, and to what so serious business? And why doesn’t it simply fly? Actually, I can guess why a brown bug chooses to climb a brown tree: its ancestors climbed. Others of its kind that chose to fly met a flycatcher—and had no progeny. At the hedgerow, much of the multiflora rose is brown, brittle, and dead. Several patches of it have been cleared and worked. In the middle of each little circle stands a two-foot sapling, marked by a yellow ribbon. While disease sweeps through the alien rose, Meg is replacing it with native bushes—in this case, two species of dogwood, planted by a Boy Scout as part of his work toward the rank of Eagle. Meg bought them with royalties from Wildness in a Small Place. I feel that I’ve paid back a little of what the meadow has given me. So has the Boy Scout. The swallows have taken the house from the bluebirds. However, bluebirds are now in another house twenty-five yards away. Perhaps they just moved over. And with that, the housing disputes seem done. Either a swallow or a bluebird sits on every house in sight. I don’t see the constant circling, chasing, and fluttering any more. Now, it’s on with the business of raising the young. Tent caterpillars are nesting, too. They’re swarming all over a new tent in the drooping branches of the cherry tree I lean on weekly. I’m surprised that they’re outside the tent. They seem so vulnerable to the host of birds that visit this tree regularly. Meg says that this is normal for tent caterpillars. They go inside at night. Web worms, in the late summer, build tents large enough to encapsulate the leaves they eat. They do stay inside. The birds are all around. A wren warbles from his perch on the tangle of dying brambles. A female blackbird scolds above me. As the female swallow stuffs grass stems into the nest box hole, the male twitters from his perch just above my head. He doesn’t seem to notice the caterpillars. Not his style, it seems. An oriole arrives like a tongue of flame from the woods’ edge. I’m breathless. He just looks around. “Of course I’m magnificent. Why the surprise?” Fortunately, he needs only compete with other orioles in magnificence. There are others who might challenge him. Among the small green leaves and catkins of spring, with blue sky behind, a bright yellow warbler appears. And looks around, magnificently. The female swallow flies from the hedge toward her new nest with a large fluffy white feather. It must be quite a prize. From seemingly nowhere, two more swallows intercept her. They want it, too. She dives, wheels, and eludes them for a moment. Her mate leaps from the nest box, meets her and her pursuers at full speed at the apex of their arcs and, for a moment, swallows are whirling so quickly above the meadow grass that my eyes can’t follow them. After split seconds that seem like minutes, she emerges from the melee, feather clutched tightly in her bill, races for the hole, and stuffs the feather in. I’m left with several questions. Who donated the feather, and under what circumstances. I’ve heard that wrens will pull hairs from the tails of sleeping coons. And how do the swallows tell each other apart? Even perched, they all look alike to me. How did he know his mate in that swirl of feathers? I can’t imagine, but he did. He returns to his perch on the roof; she goes inside to arrange things. In the hedgerow, the yellow warblers are building, too. As the male looks on from the top of the tree, the female is drawing a long silk thread from another caterpillar tent. The thread is longer than she is. She tugs at the silken mass, flutters back, then underneath, till she has the length she wants. With silk dangling behind, she flies low along the hedge, then arcs quickly upward into an autumn olive, I think. Soon, she’s back.
Each trip leaves the tent more raggedy. I
hope to see what she’s built. I read
that yellow warblers nest only a few feet up and that they tolerate
observation well. There’s a kingbird on the mullein! I don’t know whether it will nest here or if it’s passing through. A cabbage white butterfly wobbles by, the kingbird swoops down on it—but the white bug zigs as the black bird zags. The kingbird zooms across the meadow, still hungry. In statistical mechanics class years ago I was both bewildered and amused by a memorable problem: how long, on average, will it take a drunken sailor to get from the bar to the boat, given that his path is perfectly random. The butterflies have solved it. Indeed, they live by it. Apparently, the housing wars aren’t over yet. The wren that was warbling from the hedge has just flown to the swallows’ box. It perches, looks about, and seems ready to look in the hole—when three swallows converge on it. The wren flees back to the hedge. One male swallow peers into the hole. Satisfied, he perches there for a while. The swallows squabble over housing space and feathers, but wrens must be a common enemy. One day at Bayer I found punctured bluebird eggs scattered below a nest box I had been monitoring. House sparrows will raid bluebird nests, but this was far from sparrow territory. A house wren warbled from atop the adjacent nest box. I had assumed that the swallows had chased the bluebirds from this box. Perhaps it was the wrens, or maybe serendipity. Their new box, farther from the hedgerow, may be safer. I’ve been watching the birds pass through one particular branch of an elm. The elm is very much in seed. In the last few minutes, it has attracted a white-crowned sparrow, a goldfinch, a song sparrow, a Baltimore oriole, a yellow-rumped warbler, and an Acadian flycatcher—well, an Empidonax, anyway. Elm seeds must be a staple. Bernd Heinrich
reports that, although the elm bark beetle has virtually eliminated the large
American elms, the species seems still to be thriving as smaller trees. Evidently, the disease has eliminated those
elms that mature later, leaving a population that reproduces before the
fungus can kill them. That’s good news
for the birds, I think. It’s time to go home—long past time, actually. But on the way down the hill, here’s a yellow and black warbler with white beneath his tail, hunting through the bushes. He’s accommodating. He passes through three times while I take notes. (I’d forgotten my field guide. He was a magnolia warbler.) Now it’s really time to go. Latodami Sunlight is in the treetops over Grom Run. The morning is cool, clear, and quiet as I arrive. A cardinal sings, and a titmouse. A veery calls his harsh “veer.” And now, distantly, the one I’ve most come to hear: a wood thrush flutes upstream. He’s answered by another, right above me in the top of a tree at the top of the hill, singing in the sunlight. Still another sings downstream. This isn’t just occasional tooting. This is a symphony! My sunlit thrush is singing a phrase every three seconds. His neighbors echo each one, less loudly but not less beautifully. I think the sunshine is crystallizing in the treetops to tinkle down around me. It falls upon a sea of bright green barberry, thrice-cut ferns, trees newly leafed and hawthorn blossoming. A titmouse passes through. A nuthatch mutters as it scouts the butternut tree. A hooded warbler adds, to the thrushes’ flutes, his piccolo. He sings from lower in the canopy—from perches in the bushes, mostly—and moves from site to site more often than the thrushes. He moves quickly, too, with the warblers’ natural nimbleness. In yellow and black, he adds ballet to the symphony. The warbler passes. Other birds appear, then too move on. The sunlight slips silently down the trees, so I suppose time must be passing. I simply stand, entranced, as the thrushes sing. But now I’m in the sunlight. The meadow must be, too. So I turn uphill to break—or maybe stretch—the spell. Halfway to the meadow, along a brushy ravine, there are new songs: a cardinal’s, a thrasher’s, a wren’s, and one faint trill like a chipping sparrow’s, but not quite. A female oriole is hauling on a grapevine strand. She works hard, pulling from all angles. Upside down must seem quite normal to her. The thread comes loose and she’s off with it. An odd call comes from the bushes. It reminds me of a squeaky wheel, but too low in frequency for a black and white warbler. A thrush-sized bird with a yellow bill and an eye-ring peeks out, but I can’t see most of it. It disappears. Quick movement high above leads me to a hummingbird. The oriole is back, escorted by her mate this time. While she works in the grapevines, he supervises, then, gleaming in the sunlight, chases a competitor away. I think she’s weaving her nest in a large willow that overlooks the meadow. There’s more movement in the bushes. This time, a pair of hermit thrushes emerges. They disappear, then reappear, flicking their wings nervously, as I watch. I think I know their nest site, too—and I consider that a confidence not to make light of. The hummingbird is at my level now, probing at the dead branches of an apple tree. I can’t imagine what it’s doing. I thought hummingbirds only ate nectar. Meg informs me that it’s probably either eating spiders or finding spider silk for its nest—or maybe both. To the insect world, spiders are formidable; to the avian world, they’re lunch. I suspect, then, that there will be a hummingbird nest nearby, too. This is a very busy little area. As I leave, a vireo of some sort, possibly red-eyed, sings. A light wind on the meadow pushes waves northward on a green sea. Robins and a flicker are probing its floor. A rabbit races into the hedge. Tree swallows perch on most of the nest boxes. I thought, at first, that the bluebirds’ had been abandoned. Then the male flew to it, peeked in, and left quickly for an autumn olive. At least one of the perching swallows wasn’t a male: her mate flew up behind and, fluttering, mounted her four or five times. Mating in the bird world, or at least in the tree swallow world, seems to take a lot of energy but very little time. And, if I interpreted the body language rightly, it’s over when she says it’s over. Two male orioles are chasing across the middle of the meadow. That’s a little surprising, since I usually see them chase each other through the trees. Another surprising chase just occurred: a phoebe chased a bluebird from a mullein spire. The bluebird—the female—had been hunting from various spires as she went to and from the nest box. I’d guess that she moved into the phoebe’s sphere inadvertently, for the chase was brief and not intense. Above me, the “Acadian” flycatcher hunts in his own looping fashion. I added the parentheses after the following conversation. Two men, one near my age and the other much younger, were strolling along the other side of the meadow, occasionally looking at nest boxes through their binoculars. They chatted as they walked, so in my ignorance I assumed that they weren’t seeing much. We met along the hedge, and there my education began. They were Joe and Tony Panza and yes, Joe is quite able to chat and see birds simultaneously. Tony was quiet, but I’ll bet he can, too. I pointed out the active bluebird nest, then described the birds I’d seen. Joe doubted that an Acadian flycatcher would hunt in the center of the meadow—it’s a woodland species. He guessed it was a willow flycatcher. They look identical but have a different call. As he talked, he noticed it in the tree beside us, listened for its call, and identified it as the willow species. He guessed that the bird I couldn’t identify along the ravine was a white-eyed vireo. Two life birds in a ten-minute chat! He really does know birds. He was one of Joe Grom’s students. Joe Grom must have been very special. |
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