bird watching – Page 8 – Go Retire Psychiatrist

Spring, A Time for Optimism

This is the season for optimism and milestones: graduating medical students and residents, new faculty from the graduating resident class—including the milestone of getting the suspicious looking postcard notice in the mail reminding me that I’ll soon be eligible for open enrollment in Medicare.

No kidding, I got my first ever Medicare Open Enrollment postcard notice although, of course, it was not from any government agency as the Medicare Open Enrollment Inquiry Card indicated. This notice was obviously a lure from an anonymous marketer soliciting for one or more insurance companies, “SD Reply Center” in Rockwall, Texas.

Don’t get sucked in by this hustle. This has been going on for years. I found an on line news story from 2012 written by Bob LaMendola, with the Sun Sentinel in South Florida.

This is widely viewed as a scam, and the company targets seniors (yes, I am one of those). If you send back the card with all of your personal data on it which they request, outfits like SD Reply Center (SD stands for Senior Direct) will sell it to insurers who may knock on your door. Insurers themselves are forbidden by federal and state laws from sending these postcards or otherwise soliciting seniors unless we request them. While it’s not against the law for companies like SD Reply Center to solicit seniors, consumer advocates advise us not to mail our personal information to the sender of an anonymous postcard. While it may not be harmful, seniors are then in the difficult position of fending off eager insurance salespersons.

I will be shredding my postcard. But I will remain aware of Medicare open enrollment and pursue less worrisome avenues for more information about my coverage options. You have to keep your eyes peeled for trouble.

Speaking of trouble, our birds are in a lot of it. Right after the house finches lost their nestlings, the cardinals lost their only chick, probably to the same predatory crow that took the house finch babies. The cardinal and house finch parents are now gone.

However, while the robins might have abandoned the under-the-deck nest (not clear, my wife says she saw one flying under our deck), they may have settled into our front yard crabapple tree. It’s thick with flowers right now and provides excellent cover for the brand new nest the floor of which still needs work (just like the nest under our deck needed for a while).

Spring is a time of optimism. Hope springs eternal in the human breast—and in the robin redbreast.

Front porch
Back porch
Needs a floor

Saga of the Nestlings

Recall that the house finch nestlings were taken by a marauding crow yesterday. The house finch parents were frantic and devastated for about an hour. Although the crow flew by a second time, it didn’t return. The reason why was clear today. The nest is still in the tree but it’s obviously a wreck. We think it has been abandoned.

I checked on the cardinal nest and could find only one baby. He’s large and the younger, smaller brother is nowhere in sight.

The robins have not laid any eggs in the nest under our deck and it’s likely they’ve abandoned it.

Survival of the fittest seems to be the lesson here. Instinct is the driver, but it was hard not to think of the house finch parents, (especially the female) as grieving the loss of all their chicks.

The cardinal parents seem very annoyed when I pop around with my camera. Why not? Life is hard enough, with bad weather, crappy nest-building materials, unsafe locations, and predatory crows.

Annoyed up in a tree
Annoyed on the nest
Annoyed period

By the way, we saw a yellow warbler for the first time. I mistook it for a goldfinch at first. But then I saw the streaking on its belly and checked my field guide. Goldfinches have black wings and a black forehead patch. Yellow warbler males have orange streaks on their bellies. This one was probably picking bugs off the topmost tree leaves. It’s a male and making the most of its time on earth.

Marauding Crow Snatches Nestlings

I was sitting at my desk by the front window where we often watch the house finches come and go from their nest. It was just a couple of days ago that 3 baby house finches were squirming about in the nest.

There are 3 house finch nestlings ( or I guess I should say there were)

I kept hearing a strange noise outside the window. It sounded like a large sheet blowing and flapping in the wind. I glanced a couple of times and didn’t see anything. About the 3^rd time I heard it, I caught sight of a huge crow (maybe a raven?) flapping its wings, which was the sound I evidently heard.

I grabbed my camera and tried to open the blinds but I was too late to get a snapshot of the giant crow pounding the juniper tree with its wings, jabbing its beak into the tree and then thundering off with a mouthful of nestlings. I’m pretty sure it got all of them.

I was stunned. A couple of minutes later, the house finch mama was flitting in a panic around the tree and in the nest, apparently searching for the newborns. It was a frantic scene which went on for over half an hour at least. She flew off and flew back repeatedly to what I assumed was an empty nest. There might have been an egg left because the crow returned to fly over the tree. But it didn’t stop.

I now believe that’s what happened to the missing cardinal egg and cardinal baby. My wife says she has seen a large crow swooping around our property. I wonder if that’s what spooked the robins who have probably abandoned the nest under our deck.

I took a quick look around the web and found that crows will eat eggs and nestlings, but it’s said to be an uncommon occurrence. It definitely happened in front of me and in the blink of an eye.

I don’t know what the house finches will do now. Will they try again? I doubt it will be in the same tree. Many of the branches are bent, exposing the nest where the thief broke in.

I’ll keep you posted.

The Bird Saga

The bird saga continues and it has been a little rocky. The cardinals are having an up and down course with their young. They lost a chick. One egg was laid a bit late and so the two chicks remaining are vastly different in size.

The house finches are hatching. So far there were two hatchlings we could see. Out of the five eggs it was hard to tell what happened to the other three. I could see only two; one of them was the brown egg.

My wife took a shine to one of the house finch nestlings. She calls it her “little alien.” Funny, I always thought I was her little alien. Both of the babies look like they have Mohawk haircuts.

My wife says it’s her little alien.
I thought I was her little alien.

The robins probably have abandoned their carefully built nest under our deck. It has been a few days now since the nest was completed and no eggs are in it.

Now we’re starting to see Baltimore Orioles flitting around our garden. There were three of them (all males) and I could barely get snapshots of two. I doubt we’ll see nests. They build pretty high up in the trees.

front
back
one dude

Cardinal Hatchlings So Soon?

Big day on the psychiatry consult service. So, this is a short post today because I’m pooped. I logged 2.8 miles and 35 floors on the step counter and here’s a picture to prove it.

Step counter log today. I’m feeling it tonight.

The other bit of news is that the cardinal hatchlings are here—at least two of them anyway. One egg is still unhatched. The house finches are still in their eggs. And there are no eggs in the robin’s nest yet.

We were a little surprised. We weren’t expecting them to hatch for about another week.

What’s Up with the Birds?

Since my last post about our birds, we’ve had some new developments. The robins actually have a pretty fine nest now under our deck. I managed to get a blurry snapshot of mama robin actually sitting in the nest. I’ve also caught sight of a portly male cavorting with her on our porch rail. Early this morning the nest was empty.

Broody robin?
Empty nest…so far.

There’s an odd, brownish egg amongst the house finch clutch. I’m not sure what that means, if anything. Maybe it’s the same as brown or white chicken eggs. E.B. White wrote an essay entitled “Riposte,” (in White, E. B. (1999). Essays of E.B. White. New York, HarperPerennial), which treated the difference in some detail. The general idea was that brown eggs are more “natural” than white ones because they are suggestive of the country. However, the last paragraph of the essay mentions a farmer who planned to promote green eggs and who knew of a hen who could lay them.

That reminds me. Later today, I noticed some pretty large green eggs, not just in the robin’s nest, but in a few other places too. Robins don’t lay eggs as big as my head and they generally are not green; they’re robin’s egg blue as the saying goes. As for who laid them, I think I spotted the culprit out in the garden.

What the…?
The culprit!

There are still just 3 cardinal eggs. Mama cardinal lets me get pretty close to the nest these days before she thunders off. She tries to hide behind leaf and junk. And papa is stand-offish as usual.

Hiding
Shy

My wife is pretty busy in the garden and pointed out that I don’t have any shots of the pansies. They’re a sure sign of spring, along with the daffodils and tulips—and cavorting birds leading to many eggs.

OK, Maybe Robins Can Build Nests Anywhere

I’ve been making fun of birds who build funny-looking and impractical nests. Maybe I’ve been wrong about the robins, though. My wife alerted me by phone that the robin I joked about in my YouTube video, “Nest Building for Bird Brains,” had actually cobbled together a convincing nest underneath our deck.

I couldn’t believe it. I think the only explanation is alien influence. Their heads are egg-shaped and that’s about the only proof you need.

Egg as big as my dang head!
Definitely an egghead alien…

I figure the aliens get into our dimension via spacecraft through a wormhole, which would appeal to a bird, especially a robin. They love worms! They would just as soon gobble up a worm as poop on your Hostas. Then the alien probes the robin (they got this thing about cloaca probing), inserting an egg as big as my head for crying out loud. This naturally leads to a change in the robin’s central nervous system, leading it to become insane in the bird brain (so to speak) and rendering it incapable of doing the normal thing like building a nest in a tree, so they end up slapping it under a deck, in your lawn mower, on top of your god-forsaken egghead, good gahd amighty!

However, you can hardly call it quibbling when I point out there’s no bottom in the nest—yet. On the other hand, if I were a betting man, I would have bet against it getting built at all.

You can still see the floor board! Ya gonna lay eggs on that?

Our guess is that, at this rate, the floor will be down in no time and eggs will likely be laid soon after that.

We now have three bird nests to keep track of for the next couple of weeks—cardinal, house finch, and now the robin. At this rate, we’ll be lucky to keep up.

Bird Brains Building Nests

I just can’t figure how some birds ever get the nest-building job done. It’s mind-boggling how clueless some of them are. And it’s no wonder—they’re all bird brains trying to figure out something that they obviously don’t have much more than bare instinct to go on.

Robins are some of the worst nest builders around. About 4 years ago, they tried to build a nest in between our deck rail and the house. It was the most hilarious Hoorah’s nest we ever saw!

This year they’re trying once again to build a nest underneath our deck. Don’t they get it? That’s what trees are for.

We’ve got a bird’s eye view of the egg-laying prowess of a house finch and a cardinal, in the front yard and the back yard respectively. We don’t understand how the cardinal lost one of her eggs. She just laid a replacement.

Funny thing about cardinals and house finches. We see the male house finch feeding his mate all the time. The papa cardinal is a rare visitor to the nest; I sometimes wonder if mama has trouble with laying enough eggs because she’s underfed.

And the eggs of the house finches are not what we expected. They’re creamy white, not pale blue. Guide books are not always right, I guess.

We’ll keep checking on the robin’s nest building progress. I’m skeptical, but I’ve been wrong about a lot of things.

Bird Brains Building Nests

Let’s Get Ready to Rumble!

Let’s get ready to rumble! It’s an egg laying contest. The competition is underway and let’s face it—the house finch has the title tails down.

As of last Friday, the house finch had 5 white eggs in the nest, which is a typical clutch. The cardinal is probably going to end up with only two, after losing one egg somehow. Usually, the number is between 3-4.

House Finch clutch
Cardinal clutch

None of the house finch eggs are the expected pale blue color—all creamy white.

But how many will actually hatch? And more importantly, how many will fledge? Also, it looks like the chipping sparrow will have some commentary about the matter because it continues to hang out and make a lot of noise.

We’ll probably know the hatching result in another 12 days or so. Fledging numbers will take another couple of weeks. We can see the action in the house finch nest from our front window. We can peek into the cardinal’s nest from our back window. The competition is keen.

Drab streaks are in.
My hair sticks up more.

Anything can happen. Last year, I think a cat might have made off with at least one of the baby robins who hatched from a nest in the same tree the cardinals are in this year. We don’t know for sure if either of the two chicks actually fledged. I’ll keep you posted.

Bird Garden Update

I have some bird garden updates. As of a few days ago, we noticed a 4^th egg was added to the front yard nest. I say that because there is a mysterious triad of birds now associated with the loosely woven and frankly untidy property.

I caught a fair snapshot of a house finch male and female which might explain the nest, although I’m still puzzled for a couple of reasons.

House finch male and female (female in the back and camera shy).

The eggs are white although I’ve read that house finch eggs are usually bluish. The other curiosity is the single chipping sparrow that hangs around and chirps up a storm whenever I get too close to the nest.

Chipping sparrow raising a ruckus (sounding an alarm?)

I can’t find another nest in any of the other front yard garden trees. What’s the motivation for the chipping sparrow? All three get really fussy whenever I’m out there messing around.

I can see the tree from inside our house through the window. I can’t get a clear picture of the bird sitting on the nest because there’s not enough light through the foliage. But every time it moves it’s head, I can see its beak, which looks sort of thick but it’s in the shadows—I don’t think that’s the sparrow.

Both male and female house finch have thick beaks. The male is pictured here; the female is brown with a heavily streaked belly.

As for the back-yard garden, there’s still only two cardinal eggs left in the nest. Mama won’t let me get too close when she’s sitting on them. She gives me that look, “Don’t you eye ball me.”