The predators among us

Here's a new one on me:  a blue jay eating a house sparrow, and with some relish.  If this sparrow was a fledgling, it was pretty well grown.  I didn't see how this started, but my impression is the sparrow was predated elsewhere -- or found dead, I suppose -- and brought into this tree.  The jay ate half of it before inadvertently dropping it, at which point I went to look at it.  But when I retreated, the jay came back to collect the rest of the carcass, and flew off to eat it elsewhere.  That reads as a pretty substantial meal to me.

But now I'm fearing that the chickadee nestlings currently being fed in their box are going to have a rough go of it.

 

Open House

 

I've been a landlord for a long time, and I'm very familiar with the drill every time I show an open unit:  will the prospective tenants take it, or not?  Same goes for the birdhouses I put up.  Carolina wrens have been around my yard for a few weeks, and they've visited this birdhouse inside and out, but... they've yet to make up their minds, I think.

I've had two of these birdhouses up since the previous winter, and they've never been occupied.  They're sized for house wrens, but I don't know of anybody in Somerville who has a house wren.  I've seen exactly one in all my years here, migrating through, by all appearances.  Carolina wren has become much more of a city bird in recent years.  I hear them with some frequency, particularly in Cambridge.  And because they're here year round, they can get a jump on nesting. and grab the best nesting spots before the house wrens come through.

Unless, of course, they lose out to the chickadees...

But actually, I have an older nesting box, made out of a section of tree trunk, that I think the chickadees prefer.  So we'll just have to see, and probably will see, soon.  The cardinals at least are very busy collecting sticks.

 

Warbler wrapup, 2023

 

In the past, I've fretted about my year's warbler numbers going up and down, but I think I've finally realized that one observer, in one small yard in Somerville, is just way too small a lens.  That said, my numbers were decent this year -- 26 individuals, across nine species.  And I was even away for a critical window, from the 6th to the 9th of May (I was in Cape May, New Jersey, where, ironically enough, I saw almost no warblers, despite some diligent looking).

Magnolia was the winner this year, with six individuals, across a range of days.  Common yellowthroat was just behind, with five, then four black-and-whites, and four ovenbirds.  Those patterns have been pretty typical over the years.  But unusually this year, I had three new species for Somerville:  Canada, Tennessee, and bay-breasted.  Unfortunately, I only got pictures of the Tennessee, and they were of a quality I would describe as sub-masterpiece:

These sightings were all from my yard, since I scarcely ventured out into Somerville to look for warblers elsewhere.  And beyond warblers, there wasn't much -- more hummingbirds than usual, a few flycatchers, and that was that.  The last flycatcher showed up on June 8th, which seemed unusually late.  Somebody forgot to make themselves a calendar alert, I guess.

Neither Moscow nor mallard

 

Weird stuff fetches up by the Mystic.  I've seen, over the years, a chicken, a greylag goose,  and now today, the latest in feral waterfowl, a Muscovy duck.  This is not a bird that's particularly on my radar, and so I would know nothing about it if it weren't for Wikipedia.  So, for the record, this creature is a duck native to the Americas south of the Rio Grande, known to scientists as Cairina moschata, and known in the barnyard as Mucovy duck, or Barbary duck -- because, of course, it has nothing to do with either Moscow or the Barbary Coast.  It has long been domesticated, and like all domesticated fowl, comes in a wide variety of formats.

Now, you can say it's not a Massachusetts species, and still less a Somerville species, but I don't care -- it's going on my list.

The Ovenbird

 

Ovenbirds constitute a distinct season in my yard -- about ten days after the first week of May.  There's a part of my yard that's irresistibly attractive to them, a shady lane (of blacktop, this being Somerville), with a cedar fence on one side and a thick shrubbery on the other.  I doubt there's another person in Somerville who boasts a yard so magnetic to ovenbirds.  It's a small distinction, but I'm pleased with it, out of affection for the ovenbird.

Ovenbird was not, by the way, the only monotypic warbler in my yard today. Shame on you if you can't think of the other one.

Warbler wrapup, Spring 2020

I made a discovery this spring: the more time I spend in my yard, the more warblers I see.

In years past, I've worried about declining warbler numbers, at least as they manifest locally.  I've blamed house sparrows, and while it's true that sparrows compete with warblers for food, and on occasion harass them, I've come to doubt that there's a tight linkage between the number of sparrows and the number of warblers that pass through.  There are a ton of other factors that affect how many warblers I see, starting with level of effort, of course, but including such things as weather, overall population numbers, and even local vegetation patterns (for example, this last year I lost my apple tree, which was a bit of a bird magnet).

Just taking what I saw in and from my yard, I counted the following:

Black and white, 10
Black-throated blue, 2
Cape May, 2
Magnolia, 2
Ovenbird, 6
Northern parula, 1
American redstart, 3
Wilson's, 1
Yellow, 3
Common yellowthroat, 9
Yellow-rumped, 1

There are a few others I was unable to identify, or only heard singing, and some of these birds may have been continuing birds that got counted twice, but in general, I feel like this was a pretty representative year:  11 species, across five genera.  Ovenbird was the curtain-raiser, on May 3, and American redstart brought the season to a close on June 1 -- rather later than usual.

I also spent some time at the Mystic and Alewife Brook, and saw some species there that I didn't see in my yard:  chestnut-sided, prairie, and Blackburnian.

All taken in all, I saw the species I expected to see, with a few exceptions:  blackpoll, palm, and pine.  And I even added a new one for my Somerville list, in Blackburnian warbler.

Black-throated blue times two

There's a great deal about warbler migration that's a mystery to me.  But I had a piece of luck today that helped me answer at least one question that's been bothering me:  namely, do individual warblers hang around my yard for more than one day?  I'd always suspected that the answer was sometimes yes.

It happens that on Monday of this week, I saw a black-throated blue warbler in the yard.  And on Tuesday.  And on Wednesday.  So were they they same individual?

By luck, I got photos on both Tuesday and Wednesday of the bird in the same posture at about the same location.

Here's Tuesday:

And here's Wednesday:

Now, looking at pictures of this species on Google, I see that the white wing patch is a bit individual: in some birds, it looks kind of like Iowa, where in others it's a bit more South Carolina, and so forth.

So here's a closeup of the wing patches from the pictures above:

I make it as the same bird. No?

Meanwhile, in other news, a pair of mourning doves has been nesting outside my back door, and they have been on the nest for what seems like forever.