For the Birds

By Mark W. Danielson

My wife and I love looking at the birds explore our yard.  We are fortunate to see bluebirds, cardinals, humming birds, hawks, jays, roadrunners, scissor-tailed flycatcher, blackbirds, vultures, and many more.  Recent experience has shown a great disparity among birdbrains. 

Let’s start with hummingbirds.  One would think these adorable tykes would have short range at the rate they flap their wings, but they actually migrate to Central America by flying across the Gulf of Mexico.  Impressive as it is, they are as short on brain power as they are in height.  Days after a friend told me about getting trapped in his hangar because their only way out is “up”, we had one get “trapped” in our own hangar.  Bear in mind, the large garage door that let it in remained open.  After trying to attract it to bright colors, flowers, and trying to coax it with a large net, the dingaling kept struggling to find its way out through the roof.  I finally raised the hangar door hoping the setting sun would attract it.  Thankfully, it did.  Unfortunately, as I write this, there is another dingaling in the hangar doing the same thing.  Again, I opened the hangar door and hope it’s gone by the time I close it.

Now let’s talk about a larger bird.  The northern mockingbird.  Three times the size of the hummingbird, but has the same pea sized brain.  I make this claim because one managed to get trapped in our small covered entry.  Bear in mind there are open windows on two sides as well as the open main entry available for it to fly out at any time.  But no, this dingaling kept trying to fly through the roof, as it were.  Fortunately, this area is smaller so I was able to chase it around with the pole net until it wore down a bit and dropped altitude.  Finally, it flew out the door. 

Then there are the cardinals who I will describe as birds of a higher power.  The reason they are featured as Angry Birds is they have attitude.  You see, the pair in the above photo have been checking out our house for a while and seem to like it very much.  They approved the courtyard and the front yard, so it was no surprise when they decided to explore the front entry.  But make no mistake, these two were there by choice.  Prime real estate for nesting.  Easy entry/exit.  Dry and protected.  What’s not to like?  So when my wife went into the entry and disturbed them, they looked down from the hanging lamp and scowled.  Yes, scowled.  Thankfully, the interruption proved enough where they left the same way they came.  No raising the roof.  No desperate struggles.  Just a fly away with looks of disgust.  Yes, we love our cardinals.

Perhaps this is why they hold such a special place in the Catholic Church.  Birds of universal appeal and wisdom.  It seems fitting to feature them the day following Easter.       

And yes, the hangar hummingbird did leave before the sun set.  (You're welcome.)

Mystery bird

by Carola Dunn

We had an amazing afternoon's birdwatching in my son's California garden. It's not huge about 1/3 acre, but it's a bit of a jungle. He's had a bees' nest under a shed for years. The bees are very busy pollinators, helping to produce wonderful harvests of avocados every year. Right now the avocado trees are smothered in blossom and his loquat tree is weighed down with fruit.

There's a dead palm tree that hasn't been cut down because a)something more urgent always turns up and b)a woodpecker has been busy trying to make a big enough hole for a nest. We went outside armed with binoculars and a bird book to try to work out what kind of woodpecker it is. It didn't take long to decide it's a Nuttall's. Now we're hoping it will succeed in nesting and bring up a family.

While we were watching the woodpecker we saw a pair of house finches, a common bird at my feeders in Oregon. A hummingbird zipped past. A phoebe, a small black and white flycatcher, perched on an overhead cable and darted out to catch flying insects, returning to its perch each time with its cry that sounds to some people like "Phoebe, phoebe," (more like Fifi, if you ask me).

Way high in the blue sky sailed two hawks, one pale, one dark, neither of which we managed to identify, though one came quite close before being driven off by crows. A mockingbird sang its beautiful, ever-varying song, until chased away by a rival.

Then we noticed a bird none of us had ever seen before. Several more of the same came to perch in a couple of palm trees. They were about the same size as the mockingbirds and had pale yellow undersides, darker backs. As we pored over the bird book, focused and refocused the binoculars, we realized that they were behaving like the phoebe, only instead of catching almost invisible bugs the intrepid creatures were picking off bees. The bees started to get angry and clouds of them buzzed up, not too close to us luckily. The birds were in a feeding frenzy. We still couldn't figure out what they were. It was a good half hour later that I flipped through the book one last time and happened to spot a photo that matched: the Western Kingbird.

What with one bird and another, they kept us amused half the afternoon.

Birds appear quite often in my books. In my Cornish mystery series, herring gulls are frequent visitors, as they're ubiquitous in Cornwall.  They're as much a part of the scenery as cliffs, moors, the ocean, and the wildflowers, adding to the sense of place. And then there are the buzzards, always on the lookout for dead bodies...

http://caroladunn.weebly.com/cornish-mysteries.html

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(photos not taken by me--I'm hopeless at bird photography)