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

For the Birds

Sparrows defeat me.

Most birds here are easy to tell apart. A Blue Jay is obviously not a Cardinal and a Crow is not a Turkey Vulture. Woodpeckers can be confusing—a red headed woodpecker might be a Yellow-bellied Sap Sucker and the smaller Downy Woodpecker might be a Hairy Woodpecker except for the shorter bill. A wren is a wren but is it a Carolina Wren or a Northern House Wren? A quick look in a bird book and I can name that bird.

Except the sparrows.

Recently crystalline white snow covered the ground. Under the bird feeders, it was cross-hatched and scratched by a flock of birds. They were unusually easy to distinguish, their markings and colors plain against a white drop cloth and bathed in the soft light of grey skies.

This is my chance, I thought, to finally learn which sparrow is which.

I focused on a fat sparrow, pecking at seed scattered on the snow. His bold black and white striped crown set him apart from the other birds scrabbling alongside of him. .

But not in the bird book. And not on the bird app on my phone. He didn’t look exactly like any of these fifteen sparrows in the book or on the app. He was clearly not the House Sparrow with all that white on the throat or a White-throated Sparrow because I didn’t see a yellow patch above his eye. He somewhat resembled the Chipping Sparrow but the Chipping Sparrow had a rust colored crown. When the app threw out a reference to regional differences, I knew I was defeated.

I will never put in the effort necessary to distinguish sparrows. In spite of the more than fifty birds I can identify between sips of coffee and without moving from the porch swing, it is clear that I myself remain the Common Dilettante.

Sparrows called my bluff.