We were playing cribbage this afternoon and Sena spotted a blue bird perched on top of our crab apple tree in the back yard. I rushed to get the camera and got a quick video about 7 seconds long before it flew off. I pulled a few images of the back of the bird; it never turned around. We’re both pretty sure it’s a male indigo bunting, which Sena probably spotted about a week or so ago.
Click each image and then click the little “i” icon, which will open up to instructions on how to enlarge the image.
According to my field manual, it’s actually a gray bird without actual blue pigment in the feathers. They look blue because of how they refract light, similar to blue jays. I have personally not seen an indigo bunting in over 20 years.
And I won the cribbage game, which is pretty rare because Sena will not be defeated! How much excitement in one day can I stand?
Sena took video this morning of a pair of goldfinches having breakfast in our backyard garden. They were all about getting the seeds out of the thistle or knapweed, whatever that is out there. The female is harder to see, naturally, because of its muted coloration to make it less visible. The male is loudly dressed as usual.
We have this lone wild turkey who hangs out in Sena’s backyard garden. I’m going to refer to it using male pronouns because I think it’s a jake, which I think is proper lingo for young male turkeys.
We saw 4 or 5 turkeys last year traipsing through the yard. I think the winter was hard on the small flock and this guy is the only one who survived.
I’m going to call him Jake for now until somebody corrects me about the gender and thinks of a cooler name. The hens usually have bluish-gray heads and are smaller. Jake’s head has a lot of red in it. He also has a couple of spurs on his legs and I think hens usually don’t. I used this website for general guidance.
You can’t say “never” or always” about the characteristics of male and female turkeys. I see web references that say hens can have beards, which are those hairy things stuck to their chests.
One thing that confuses me is the guidance about the tips of the breast feathers, which says they’re always black on males and brown on females. Almost everything about Jake says he’s male except for the feather tips you see in the video while he’s preening. They look brown.
Jake has a horn on the front of his head, which will eventually become the snood, which is a wormy-looking kind of appendage that dangles off the front of the heads of male turkeys.
Males usually strut, but I think Jake doesn’t because he’s alone and doesn’t have a reason to strut, which is to compete for dominance with other males. There are no other males.
It’s a little unusual for turkeys to be loners. I don’t know if there’s a clear explanation for why some turkeys are loners. I think it’s fairly common for hens in the breeding and nesting season to be solitary.
We saw a big flock of turkeys last year in the back yard of a previous neighbor. They evidently all hopped over their fence and then acted like they couldn’t figure out how to jump back out. I made a YouTube video of it because it was comical.
I don’t know how Jake will find another flock to join.
This morning, we noticed the demonic robin flapping around our downstairs window well again. The window film doesn’t work, probably because it’s essentially clear and has a sort of light scattering pattern on it. So, Sena ordered a new film which is basic black. We’re hoping it eliminates refection, which we think is still the main explanation for the bird’s behavior.
I think this is a female because of the color of its head. Typically, a male robin’s head will be virtually black but a female’s head is mostly gray. That’s according to my favorite handbook on Iowa birds by Stan Tekiela, Birds of Iowa Field Guide, 2nd edition updated in 2023.
male robinfemale robin
I’m just remembering that it’s not entirely true that we’ve never had a problem with birds who had a poor sense of boundaries around houses we’ve lived in previously. In fact, one house we lived in was home to sparrows. We tried to scare them away with rubber snakes, but they didn’t work. I guess part of the trouble was they never moved unless we moved them around. And last year, a pair of house finches built a nest in the fake Christmas tree on the front porch of one of the previous houses we lived in. There were eggs in it when I found it. I set up a video camera to record their comings and goings. The eggs never hatched.
rubber snakehouse finch in fake Christmas tree
And that reminds me; we lived in a house many years ago in which a pair of mourning doves built a nest on one of our outdoor stereo speakers!
But before then, I can’t remember that we ever had birds’ trespass on the many properties we’ve previously lived in. It’s a common story. Bird encroachment can happen to you at any time in your lives.
There are many choices for how to cope with the issue, many of which you can find in the blog post with several years of comments, “How we stopped a robin’s pecking at window glass” I mentioned yesterday. Some suggested shooting the birds, although there is a law against it. Anyway, I’m pretty sure that, poor shot that I am, I’d put more holes through the windows than in any bird. Netting seems to be effective for some people, but for others only to the extent that they wrap themselves up in it because they’re fit to be tied from frustration.
While we’re waiting for the new window film to get here, I’m now wondering what’s going to happen to something else Sena bought the other day: patio tomatoes. We didn’t know you could grow tomatoes in a pot on your patio. Years ago, a garden center salesperson scoffed at the idea.
The pertinent concern is whether birds, like the Ms. Demonic Robin, will poke holes in the tomatoes. We have two varieties, the cherries and the slicers. One cherry tomato is already visible. Come to think of it, a lot of critters will eat tomatoes, and many of them trot, hop, crawl, or stomp across our back yard in and out of the woods.
The other plant Sena got was a Maltese Cross (Lychnis chalcedonica) flower. Because of the shape of its flowers, it’s named after the Maltese cross. It’s supposedly resistant to deer and rabbits. It can attract hummingbirds and butterflies. I think robins won’t eat it.
ADDENDUM: I almost forgot another interesting time a robin did something ridiculous at another house we used to live. You can read about the hoorah’s nest a robin built on our deck in the post “Who’s a Hoorah’s Nest?
Now we’ve got a female robin who is pecking our window well window and even tearing up the screen.
She can turn her head almost completely backward so I know she’s the window-hating, demonic robin from hell. She never pecks the window panes below the level of the well, which makes me believe this is still a problem with seeing her own reflection as another marauding bird.
I call her demonic because I caught pictures of her sitting on a wooden lath staring back at me with her head turned at pretty much 180-degree angle, glaring at me—like something out of the movie The Exorcist.
She’s been at it for over a week now with no end in sight. She’ll stay up most of the night flapping against the glass. Sena got the idea of trying some window film which has a pattern on it. Maybe that’ll break up the light. We taped it up just to see if it works.
It’s not like there’s a whole flock of birds attacking the house or the block or the town, like the movie “The Birds.” It’s not the Alfred Hitchcock thing, which he got from a story by Daphne du Maurier, also titled “The Birds.” I’ve never read it. I’m aware of one scientific explanation for birds attaching en masse, which was about the time thousands of seabirds attacked the coastline near Monterey, California because they ate neurotoxin infested phytoplankton.
It’s just one obsessed bird, and maybe she’s the only one snacking on poisoned phytoplankton. I can find plenty of advice on the web about how to stop this crazed bird-brain preoccupation. Take a look at the blog “Hinessight: How things look through an Oregonian’s eyes” and read the very long post “How we stopped a robin’s pecking at window glass.”
Read it for entertainment. And maybe you’ll find something workable to prevent devil-driven robins who spend a lot of time twirling their heads watching reruns of “The Exorcist” on their tiny screen TVs and get their kicks from pecking at your window. There are 13 years’ worth of comments, so get comfortable.
I finally got pictures of gray catbirds this morning! They’re swooping around our back porch, like a lot of other birds have been doing lately. See my video from yesterday about the sassy robin!
The last time I got photos of them was about a year and a half ago. As Mr. Charles Muntz said in the movie Up: “I’ve spent a lifetime tracking it. Sometimes years go by between sightings. I’ve tried to smoke it out of that deathly labyrinth where it lives. You can’t go in after it.”
gray catbird gray catbird with chestnut color under tailgray catbird fanning tail
OK, so maybe I’m exaggerating a little. On the other hand, catbirds are more often heard than seen. Many times, all you hear is a mewing noise reminiscent of a cat, but raspy and mixed with a lot of other noises it mimics from other birds (which might be one reason why the literature says it’s related to the mockingbird). And while it doesn’t live in “deathly” labyrinths, the catbird can be almost invisible in thick shrubs where it builds its nest.
The catbirds have a rusty color under their tails, which can be hard for amateurs like me to get a snapshot of. But you can find a lot of excellent videos out there, like the one below:
Tonight, a female robin attacked our windows. My guess is that it’s attacking its own reflection. A lot of backyard birds are out, nesting, stealing our herbs, pooping on our deck. Sena saw a Baltimore oriole and we both saw a female goldfinch trying to do the same thing as the robin—bite the screen.
We’ll see what happens over the next couple of weeks.
I put 2.5 miles on the step counter today walking on the Clear Creek Trail, so my feet are complaining a bit more.
Sena didn’t come with me on the walk today because of some gardening she had to do. She deals with foot issues and has been trying shoe inserts lately. Trimming them is an inexact science, but she got it right. The thing was, her feet hurt even worse with the inserts.
That’s because they were upside down. There are raised gel contours around the bottom for extra support, which have to face downwards in the shoe. They were a lot more comfortable for her once they were in right side up.
I didn’t get any shoe inserts because my new shoes fit pretty well. I walked a little further than usual, moving east on the part of the trail which has a fair number of ups and downs. It feels more like a nature walk (which is on the Make It OK Calendar for May Mental Health Awareness Month).
The trail is paved, but the trees and other vegetation are thick and tend to crowd around both sides. The trees sometime bend in archways across the path.
It was tempting to park my butt on the bench, but just sitting might have invited more flying bugs to buzz around my ears—despite applying enough OFF to defend me and a few other people.
We’ve walked this trail many times, but I saw something a little unusual today. There’s a big old dead tree that looks like a tuning fork.
I set a goal to reach a familiar place that’s high enough and cleared of foliage to see the creek from high above. That’s where I saw the 3 ducksateers: mallards in a line swimming up and down the stream in a sort of aimless way, yet determined to make good time.
After I returned to the trailhead, I heard the camera-shy gray catbird I always hear in a tall shrub right next to the trail. I sat in a bench close by with my camera out. It made the typical catbird noises, which sounds like a collection of whistles, creaks, and meows. But it hid in the leaves and when it burst onto the paved trail, it moved too quickly for me to get a shot.
I think the catbird hides in the trees right next to other birds, like robins, just to misdirect you. And that fooled me today–again. I thought I got a video clip of the catbird—but it turned out to be a robin, hamming it up for the camera like robins always do.
So, I included an old picture of a real catbird I took about a year and half ago.
shoe inserts wrong side upshoe inserts right side upthe archway treethe beckoning benchthe tuning fork treethe 3 ducksateersthe catbird photo taken a year and a half ago
Today I trekked down to Clear Creek and again saw the geese pair. As always, I heard them before I saw them. I swear I can hear them honking from a mile off.
They almost seemed like they were dancing together. They were the waltzing geese.
So, I’m not strictly following the Make It OK Calendar per day for May Mental Health Awareness Month, at least according to the Iowa Healthiest State Initiative. Sometimes the goals on the calendar may not feel natural on a particular day or the opportunity might not appear.
Today, I’m a few days late on the Smile at a Stranger prompt and I figure better late than never. I was out for a walk to Clear Creek, testing out my other pair of new shoes (they’re black which is the only difference).
I didn’t encounter anyone on the way there, but I did see the geese pair I saw yesterday. I think this is the same pair I’ve seen over the years and they always return to about the same area by the creek where I suspect they nest. They honked raucously as they always do as they flew in from the north before landing on the water. The female walks up the shore a few steps and just stands there while the male floats in the creek close by, protectively. I never get to see exactly where the female enters the tall grass to start building a nest. I wonder if it’s because they both sense some nosy person like me is watching them.
Anyway, on my way back I smiled and greeted 3 people who were strangers to me. One was an old guy like me, out for a walk. We smiled and said hi to each other.
The other two were special. There was a kid on a tricycle, coming in hot down the hill straight for me. There was a big guy I figured was his dad bringing up the rear behind him, murmuring words of warning about the obvious risk of so much hi octane tricycle speed down a hill.
The kid was hurtling down so fast that I thought “Am I going to have to catch him?” It reminds me of an old song written and sung by Bill Withers in 1971, “Grandma’s Hands.” The relevant lyrics:
“Used to issue out a warning She’d say, Billy don’t you run so fast Might fall on a piece of glass Might be snakes there in that grass…”
Then the kid put out both feet and made a long sliding stop just a few yards short of me—and grinned wide.
I grinned back and called out, “Hey, rocket man!” He waved and said “Hi!” And so did his dad, who smiled wide. I said “How you doin’?” and he replied “fine! How are you?” I said “I’m good” or something like that.
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