birds, Mother Nature's gifts

[Nancy]

I just got back from taking my little dog for a walk in the gloaming of the evening. It is one of the most peaceful and beautiful times of day, except for daybreak which I rarely get out in.

This is the time when the song birds sing their evening songs. It's really extraordinary to hear them. Usually there is one song master, I call him. I think it is a cardinal male, and he sings various melodic songs for about 45 minutes. Sometimes, another distant bird will repeat the songs. I am guessing that he is calling all birds back to their nests, that the time is upon them for rest and sleep.

We are all so busy with our lives, but if you can take just a couple of minutes and stick your head out of the door or window in the gloaming and listen to the song birds, you will be refreshed.

On the other end of the spectrum, in the summer, there is what I call a "rooster" bird. This one gets up at about 4:30 AM and starts to sing, not too much at this time of day, but enough to signal the other birds that is is time to get up. About 4:30 AM is when the black of night is just giving way to a tiny touch of light.

Then at about 6 AM or 6:30 AM all of the birds start calling to each other. One starts the song, and you can hear, in the distance, another bird repeats the song, and it echoes like that for quite a distance, each bird answering the other's call. All of the birds get into the act in the early morning, all kinds of calls and songs, each species answering their own kind and it is sometimes quite loud. The morning serenade goes on for about an hour or two and gradually, the birds scatter to search for food.

I just think birds are one of Nature's greatest gifts, and we often don't take the time to appreciate them or listen to them.

 

[Dale]

Nancy - I totally agree with you and you express yourself so eloquently - thank you for posting this.
I love birds/animals/nature and I appreciate birds' actions and calls any time I am outside, especially since my surgery last year. Sometimes I think they know more than we do.
I see you live in upstate NY. Have you been to the bird centre in Corning (I forget what it's called). We were there last summer and it is such a great facility! I wish we had one around here!

Thanks again -- spring is WONDERFUL!
Dale

 

[Bina]

We have the same pair of robins come back and nest in our front evergreen tree every year. Yes, they wake up early and sing early, and then again in the hour of dusk the singing resumes.
Today was sunny and about 70 in the sun, so i put my deck chair about 8 feet from the bird feeders and quietly did my Sudoku puzzle while the Juncos and Purple finches feasted beside me. The fluttering, peeping, and singing is nature's music and I feel rejuvenated.
(you won't catch me in a shopping mall).

 

[terryj]

Nancy, Sunday hubby and I were busy all day, me working in the house and him in the yard. Sunday evening around 7 we went and sat out on the pool deck with our glass of wine and saw and heard the most amazing red bird. I think he was doing just what you said, calling the other birds back to the nest for the night. We live in the country and it was so quiet that eveytime he stopped singing we could hear other birds off in the distance answering him. The last time he sang and there was no answering call we saw him fly off. Of course we also had our neighbors mixed up rooster crowing that night.

 

[Nancy]

Sue-

It sounds like your red bird is a cardinal, like the one here. They have a beautiful set of songs to sing early morning and evening.

We have a lot of Canada geese around here and they usually fly in a V formation, one taking the lead and then dropping back to allow another to take the lead from time to time. The entire time they are flying, they are communicating with each other, back and forth. Even when there are only a couple of them, they honk to each other. Sometimes, when they are in migrating mode in the late Fall, they fly very high up and you can hear the faint sound of honking as they go by.

If only we could uncover the mysteries of animal's speech. I think we would be amazed that what is just noise to us is a highly sophisticated language.

My dog often barks out the back door to her friend next door. And her friend answers. Each bark is different and the patterns of each are different. I am sure they understand what the other is saying. My dog also sometimes barks when she hears a dog in the distance. And she will stop barking to allow the other dog to finish barking and then will do her own answer bark.

It's fascinating.

 

[Ross]

Oh I don't know. While I agree with you, I have something worthy of a cartoon going on here at home. Lyn is doing battle with "Some" kind of birds. They are busy building a nest in a place where they should not be. Lyns taken the nest parts out 4 days in a row now, put mothballs up there, and yesterday, they threw the mothball sack out and had a small apartment built by the time Lyn got home and saw it. This is becoming really comical with her and the birds.

 

[Marguerite53]

Thanks for the lovely post, Nancy! It is so important for us to open our senses to the creatures around us! And I do love birds!!

Ross, your story cracks me up. Lyn and my husband are on the same wave length. We have a robin who is terrorizing us! He wakes us up at 6am knocking on our deck window!! The first time we heard it was later on a morning, and since the upper deck is a balcony (no stairs to it and 3 stories up) my husband and I looked at each other and thought who the *&%!! is on our balcony knocking on our window!!!! Apparently a robin will see his reflection and approach it, posture and -- seeing that it is a bird posturing back at him, will attack. Cute, but he also leaves a huge mound of bird sh** and marks all over the whole window (which my husband gets to clean up since he's the outside guy). The advice we found was to cover the window with paper (done) and get a mylar balloon to hang close by. Now, you would think that advice was because the shiny balloon would be scary. No. This website said... "One technique that sometimes works is to paper over the area where the robin has been actually hitting, and then hang shiny helium balloons nearby. Most birds are frightened of helium balloons, probably because they act so different from things birds encounter in nature: they seem to fall up!" Okay, now really -- what did he do -- survey the birds?? Hey, are you scared of this because it falls UP? The store clerk who sold me the balloon and I laughed ourselves silly over this!!

And I do love songbirds. We have tiny red finches fly through each spring. They made a nest for the first time just below the balcony mentioned in the last story. That male finch just sits in the sun on the railing and sings his head off. It's beautiful!!!

I'm watching for "my" blue heron to return. He is my favorite. Seems like he's been gone forever. I miss him!!

Wish we had Cardinals out here. Maybe some variation, but not the gorgeous ones back east.

Thanks, Nancy! Happy bird watching!

Marguerite

 

[Ross]

Lyn put an old license plate up there and they threw it out too!

I told her to forget it and type up a lease agreement for them to sign.

 

[Bina]

Oh, we now have a Grackle terrorizing the robin nesting in the front yard. Today I sat out with the bird feeder again and made sure that those nasty Grackles stayed away. A group of male Goldfinches were putting on quite the song and dance performance to impress the ladies.

 

[Nancy]

I live near a National Guard airport, and believe it or not, that airport is home to quite a large flock of wild turkeys. It's hard to imagine that turkeys can fly, but they can, just not too high and not too far. They sometimes fly low across one of the highways around the airport, and it's a pretty scary thing when they are flying right in front of your car. On occasion, they get lost and take a little stroll through my backyard, having cut through the ravine across the street and heading back to their home at the airpport.

During mating season, you can sometimes see the large Toms with their tail feathers all spread out. They look so handsome.

When visiting my daughter in Florida, I saw a sign that said. "Peacock Crossing", and asked my daughter about that. Apparently peacocks are highly protected where she is and they have the right of way crossing the roads. She told me that they had stopped one of the sports games because it was mating season and they had wandered out onto the field and were strutting about with their tails fanned out. And she said they were mean when approached. And I always thought it was so strange to see flocks of buzzards on rooftops in Florida. Those are pretty big birds and they must make quite a mess on the rooftop.

 

[Nancy]

Here's a funny story about our local hospital. The hospital built a new parking garage. It was prefect for roosting pigeons and they were everywhere, because it was a warm place in cold weather. They especially loved the lighted sign over one of the doorways, and would plop on many of the patients going into the Medical arts building attached to the hospital. The hospital tried everything, experts, pest control people, you name it. They never did get rid of the pigeons. But they did install a plastic owl over that doorway and that seemed to cut down on the birds roosting in that particular spot. But the pigeon problem made some headlines for a while in the local newspaper because no one knew what to do about them. And they are still everywhere else in the garage, sometimes on top of cars.

Another story about a small local lake that had a popular public beach on one side. Canada geese have decided to take up residence on the lake, and they took over the beach making a terrible mess out of it and polluting the sand and water. The Town had many meetings about what to do with the geese. There were huge numbers of them. Of course, many of their plans were shot down by animal lovers. So they tried scare tactics, some people had border collies who chased the geese away, and finally, I think, some of the animal lovers decided that they would humanely patrol the lake and shore and scare away the geese. That was a couple of years ago, I guess they are still doing that patrol duty.

Birds are pretty stubborn.

 

[Ross]

Birds are pretty stubborn.

According to Lyn, this is the understatement of the year!

I asked her before she left for work this morning if she wanted me to go get some Red Dot Gun Powder for when she gets home. She can place an IED in there.

 

[hensylee]

I am in a new place this spring; some of the birds are new to me. This morning I heard a hoot owl soon after daylight. There has been a couple of big birds flying about in the early morning and late evening. Wonder if this could be owls?