Early this morning, we saw the Red-tailed hawks trade places in the nest. This gives the mate a chance to grab a bite to eat while the other incubates the eggs we hope are in there.
Little birds tend to chase the hawks away from their territories. Even though the hawks are 3 times bigger than the little ones, they meekly oblige by moving away.
Today is Earth Day and Sena is out in the garden working. She’s doing it not just because it’s Earth Day. She’s doing it because she cares a lot about the garden and not just that. She’s often way out in the outlot beyond our back yard.
We got a message in our mailbox from Forever Green in Coralville. Of course, it’s an ad about a sale to buy stuff at their store on Earth Day through Arbor Day (April 22-25). The great part of their message is:
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.
Sena cares a whole awful lot. Happy Earth Day!
How about them Hawks! I’m not talking about the Iowa Hawkeye football team. Today, I got another video of the Red-tailed hawk pair in their nest that might make you seasick. It’s windy. Sena tried to get a video but often gives me the camera.
According the internet they mate around March or April and lay 2-4 eggs which hatch in 4-5 weeks.
They poke around in the nest as if maybe they’re turning eggs (we think). Tree leaves are starting to bud out so visibility will unfortunately diminish.
This is a follow up video of the Red-tailed hawks nesting in the outlet beyond our back yard. This time it seems to be fixing up the nest. We can’t tell whether they have eggs in it or not. It was pretty windy today, so the view is even more challenging.
We saw some kind of raptor today in our back yard and I couldn’t tell for sure if it was a Red-tail hawk or not. I got the video with an old Canon point-and-shoot through a window at 7:45 in the morning and she sky was overcast. It had a dark spot below its eye, mostly white breast feathers. The back feathers looked mostly brownish. It didn’t look like it had been banded.
It looked like its left foot might have been injured. It looked almost black. It held its left leg up most of the time while perched in a tree, but lowered it so it could scratch its face with the right foot. It’s blurry but you can see its left foot starting at the about 44:15 mark in the video.
I checked a couple of websites with photos of common Iowa raptors, but this bird doesn’t seem to closely resemble any of them.
A couple of days ago, last year’s pesky female robin came back to peck at one of the basement windows. It’s a window well and she looks like she might be bringing next materials to it. She’s also beating at the window with her wings, as though she sees her reflection—despite the window film Sena applied to it.
I’m pretty sure this is the same robin who twisted her head around backward, Exorcist style, to stare balefully at me last spring.
She does this during the day. They sleep at night, thank goodness. But at the crack of dawn, she’s out quixotically pecking and flapping at the windows like they’re windmills.
We’re also on the lookout for the house finch pair. They seem to be scouting the covered back porch fan as a likely spot for a nest.
This morning, I got a snapshot of a male house finch sitting on the back porch fence post. He’s a proud looking fellow. I saw the female a minute earlier but could not catch a picture of her.
It’s spring; they’re probably a mating pair and we saw them last year. So, there will soon be eggs somewhere out in the woods past our back yard. There will probably be chicks soon.
Maybe the chicks will survive. I remember during the month of May in 2019, I was keeping watch on a nest of house finches just outside of my office window. I would go out every day to a skinny little juniper tree, part the branches, and snap pictures of the eggs and later, the squirming hatchlings.
One day, I heard a noise like the flapping of big sheets outside my window. When I finally looked out, I saw the biggest crow I’d ever seen, just taking off with all of the nestlings clenched in its beak.
The mother house finch arrived minutes later and searched frantically for her chicks for over half an hour.
It wasn’t until then that I learned I was at fault for exposing the hiding place of the nest in the tree. I went there daily and spread the branches, probably while the crow watched me from high above in the sky.
I thought I learned my lesson, but I didn’t. In May of 2024, a mating pair of house finches built a nest in our artificial Christmas tree right on our front porch, a step away from the front door. The ruddy male would feed the female, who had laid 4 eggs.
I set up a critter cam on a tripod and filmed them for days. Every time I hustled out there to get the camera to download the videos, I scared the birds off. We watched for 17 days. The typical time to hatching is about 14 days. I finally tossed the whole thing out in the back yard.
There are a red tail hawks, turkey vultures, and crows all over the sky. I hope the house finches know better than to build a nest in any of the big pots on our porch. I know better than to draw attention to them now.
Sena got a video of a large flock of birds flying around in the outlot beyond our backyard. We thought they were all starlings, but I couldn’t focus enough on individual birds to tell for sure if there were other species mixed in with them. I couldn’t even confidently identify a starling although I’m pretty sure that’s what many of them were.
I think it’s not unusual for other small nondescript blackbirds to mingle with starlings. While we can’t make a case for the smallish flock being a murmuration, there was an impressive number of them. Trying to identify specific species by repeated attempts to focus and magnify using video editing software mostly led to my murmuring under my breath—mainly curses.
Starlings are often called pests and web sources say they are among several species of birds that spread disease. The Iowa State University Extension calls them “nuisance birds.”
My usual resource, Birds of Iowa Field Guide (2023 edition) by Stan Tekiela is a little more generous in the description of the European Starling, calling it a songbird which can mimic the songs of up to 20 species and can even imitate the sound of the human voice. Other web resources compare them to mockingbirds. Large flocks of starlings commonly mix with other blackbirds in the fall. Starlings were introduced to New York City in 1890-91 from Europe.
See if you can pick out the starlings in our video and other birds. I got mostly eyestrain from the effort.
We visited the Terry Trueblood Trail and relaxed. The temperature was in the 60s, just a little on the breezy side. Everything seemed to move slower, except for the lady bugs which tried to keep warm by landing on us everywhere they could. I thought they would get into my rolled up blue jean cuffs, but amazingly they did not.
There was a small, brave patch of asters hanging on for dear life, literally. We both loved the red tree and you can tell which one it is in the video. I should know what kind of tree it is, but for now I guess just seeing it was good enough.
The cedar waxwings were flitting around maniacally and sometimes that means they’re getting smashed on fermented berries. But I didn’t see that there was enough on the branches for a party.
A pelican lazily swam across the lake in a way that suggested that it’s OK to just relax. What’s the hurry?
We might have seen one of the last northern shovelers (a dabbling duck) still hanging around. It’s like it was saying, “There’s still plenty of time.”
Whether that’s true or not, slowing down doesn’t hurt at all.
Today, as usual, we had to interrupt our cribbage game so Sena could capture video of all the birds in our backyard, the fall colors, and whatnot.
She caught some shots of Northern Flickers, which she has not seen before although I can remember catching them on camera years ago. They’re really strikingly colored birds and you can easily distinguish female from male birds.
The males have a black mark next to their bills which is called a mustache, which the females don’t have. They don’t migrate and you can see them all year round.
Sena was slinging the camera around and hurrying from window to window to get the best shots. She accidentally caught me on camera. I threw a still shot of it in the video just for laughs.
We saw a bird we didn’t recognize at first mostly because it was small and preening with its back to us. It had a red breast, so it was probably a young robin. Our luck, it’ll try to attack our windows next spring, although Sena put up some window film which may prevent that—we hope.
The fall colors are relaxing. The squirrel reminded me of Dug the dog in the Disney Pixar movie Up. I would have stuck a picture of Dug in the video but it’s copyrighted.
By the way, I won the cribbage game today. It happens.
Music Credit for YouTube video:
Carefree Melody by Twin Musicom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Source: http://www.twinmusicom.org/song/302/carefree-melody
Artist: http://www.twinmusicom.org
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