Posted on by Julia B. Hebner

Is it the Singer or the Song?

I’d had minor surgery, and there I was, resting again, this time on a worn wicker chair in the shade of our ever-expanding fig tree.

I sat there, leaning back, with my bare feet propped on another chair. I watched sparrows cut the air, back and forth over the yard and in and out of birdhouses half-hidden by the porcelain vine.* Robins stalked through spiky grass and plunged their beaks in the ground to spear wriggling prey. Sparrows squabbled in the elderberry bush. My lethargy made a sharp contrast with the drive and purpose all around me.

Then I heard it. Right overhead. A lovely double note, like two pebbles dropped in a pond, one behind the other.

I looked up, into the branches shading me. The musical plop-plop came again, but leaves hid the source.

Then a cowbird and two tiny birds dropped onto a closer branch. The sun backlit the trio, turning the smaller birds into silhouettes. The three moved from limb to limb, always together. Suddenly, one of the little birds hopped right onto the back of the much bigger cowbird and began gently poking and pecking through its feathers.

I realized these small birds were the deceived parents of a changeling—a cowbird— that hatched in their nest.

I can admire the handsome outfit of the cowbird—a clean brown head and a compact black body—but I can’t like the bird. Cowbirds lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. Their hatchlings toss the rightful baby birds out of the nest to their deaths and then take the place of their victims. Irrationally, I feel this is wrong and cowbirds are bad.

But these small bird parents above me are innocent and blameless. Who are they, these birds with such a pretty call?

I pull myself upright and go inside. But I am unable identify the tiny birds with either my phone or an actual book, so I give up. I go back outside in hopes that the birds are still there and I can use the Merlin app to identify them by their song.

I’m in luck! The plop-plop sounds again.

Oh, no! It’s not the sweet little birds who make that liquid call. Merlin ID’s the singer as the cowbird—the killer cowbird calling his ‘parents’ to wait on him!

Ugh!

And it was such a pretty sound!

(*Yes, we are aware it’s invasive. We hope to take it out this fall.)

Posted on by Julia B. Hebner · 1 Comment

A Lovely Evening?

Yesterday evening two friends and their dog came by and sat with us two and our dog on the patio. We waved to neighbors walking with their dogs, pushing strollers, riding bikes. Everyone out enjoying the warm weather.

As we sat and talked, twilight drifted in and a trio of bats flitted overhead. The warm weather had called them out, too. I worried that these bats might not find enough insects up there to eat to replenish the energy they were flapping away hunting for them. After all, this is only the second week of March and a cold snap is predicted for tomorrow.

Of course, we will go back inside the house and close the windows. We’ll put on socks and sweaters and twist the thermostat. We’ve almost normalized these spurts of premature spring, these extended summers with stretches of killer heat, these long autumns and short winters with a bitter cold week or two thrown in.

I doubt these changes are that easy for bats and birds. The traveling birds seem to arrive earlier every year. Mornings here are already loud with the song. Yesterday I watched the local avian residents quarrel over bird houses and gather nesting materials. But if the insects already hatched in the heat of the last few days, will they survive through the next week of cold weather to be food for the bats and the baby birds soon to start cheeping in the nests?

How can insects, flowers, plants, birds and bats remain in sync when the weather isn’t?