Not a junco

Here's a riddle:  When is a junco not a junco?  Answer:  Why, when it's a yellow-rumped warbler, of course.   But damned if I wouldn't have sworn up and down that this was a junco when I was watching it.  It was feeding on the ground like a junco, and to the naked eye at about 30 feet, it looked exactly like a junco --dark above and light below.  And besides, there were other juncos around at the time.  But you know what they say about the camera -- it adds 30 pounds, and turns juncos into yellow-rumped warblers.

I later found out from the paper that this fall yellow-rumped warblers had been seen by watchers in enormous numbers -- flocks of over a thousand.  Strange, that.  I guess they can spare one for Somerville.

Sphyrapicus varius

If there was ever an animal that needed a publicist, it would be the yellow-bellied sapsucker, whose name is basically a string of insults.  That said, the name is apt in a descriptive sense -- though the females, of which this is one, aren't quite so yellow-bellied, and in Somerville at least, neither males nor females are doing much sap-sucking.  Here they're only coming or going, and as such, I've only ever seen them in March or October.

A similar thing can be said of the Eastern phoebe.  They do well around people generally, but I guess Somerville is just a bit too much for them.  We only catch the transients, and rarely at that.

More of the same

I think that's a pine warbler, looking a bit like Quasimodo here.  If it is a pine warbler, that's number 64 on my Somerville species list.

Here's one I'm a bit more certain about:  a black-throated blue warbler, sadly decapitated by my lens.  It was eating grapes.

I've started logging the birds I see on eBird, since Somerville is underrepresented there, not so surprisingly. Or at least I'm logging the kinds of birds I don't see every day -- these two, for example.

Overground Railroad

That's an ovenbird right there.  It was here today, and likely will be somewhat south of here by tomorrow.  I can never quite remember when the warblers migrate in the fall, because I never see many of them.  The ovenbird at least does us a favor by not changing into some drab and unrecognizable plumage.  Thanks, ovenbird.

Adios, chickadees

How, you'll be asking yourself, did I enter into possession of this perfectly square chickadee nest?  Well, it's like this.  I noticed Saturday evening that the parent chickadees were no longer visiting the nest.  Of course I feared the worst.  But then, as I thought about it, it seemed more likely that I had miscalculated when the birds were born, and that they had simply fledged and moved on -- as turned out to be the case when I opened up the birdhouse this afternoon.

The nest was clean and empty, except for one unhatched egg and a few droppings.  As you can see, it's mostly made of moss and vegetable fibers on the top.  Underneath was a soft pillow made up mostly, it looked to me, of dryer lint and cat hair. It's all about local sourcing.

And then there were the mites.  After I finished handling this stuff, I noticed my hands were covered with minute, almost microscopic mites.  I hope I washed them all off.

One short life

In a previous post, I had been wondering how the catbirds had made out with their nesting.  I hadn't seen any juveniles at all, which made me wonder.  Then today I came home and found one -- dead, in the middle of my patio.  It wasn't obvious why it had died, or how it had been killed.  Normally I'd blame the neighbor's cat, but the bird didn't look like it had been mauled in any way.  So it's a bit of a mystery.

It's sad, of course, but mortality is high among juvenile birds.  And if this one successfully fledged, there might well be others.  They're probably pretty retiring, though.

In happier news, the chickadees in the birdhouse seem to be doing well.  The parents are frantically busy, as the parents of all newborn birds must be. No caterpillar in my yard is safe for the next few weeks at least.

Nesting chickadees

We've had a birdhouse up for years now.  One of the kids made it at some point, and with a few modifications, it's been up ever since.  But this is the first year that it's actually been used by anything.  In the past, I've seen chickadees check it out, but it didn't seem like it was to their liking.  This year, though, we've finally got a pair nesting there.  The eggs must have just hatched, because yesterday I saw one of the parents carting off what could only have been a bit of eggshell.

All the other local birds seemed to have fledged their young by now.  The juvenile cardinals and robins have been more or less on their own for weeks now.  It seemed like a particularly successful year for the cardinals.  As to the catbirds, I can't be sure.  I saw the two of them collecting nesting material at one point, but never could pinpoint the nest.  I still see the adults around, but as to any offspring, I couldn't say.