Orioles and Rosebreasts, In Detail

This frigid spring weather really smokes out the birds. I've been very thankful that I overbought on peanuts and seed a few months back. I remember thinking, "Now how am I going to use 50 pounds of  peanut halves?" Well.

But when orioles come in, I have to get creative. Turns out a grapefruit half will serve just as well as a navel orange or Clementine.

This is an interesting plumage. It's an adult female Baltimore oriole, and she's fairly old, as evidenced by the increasing black coming in on her face and back. Some might think this is a young male, but the secret to sexing Baltimore orioles is in the tail. No matter how much black an old female Baltimore has on her head and back; no matter how bright her orange breast, she will always show an olive-brown, not black tail. So don't be fooled by male-like coloration. If the tail is olive-brown and dull orange, it's a female.

Male Baltimores have black deck feathers on their tail. The deck feathers are the two that sit atop all the rest, forming the center stripe of the tail.

I got this smart fellow to try Zick Dough by loading an exhausted Clementine half with it. He took a shine to it right away.

When a bird does something novel, other birds watch it. This female rose-breasted grosbeak wondered about the Clementine the young male oriole was feeding from.

I've had good luck with peanuts and rose-breasts. Everybody seems to like peanuts. Though this is the only rose-breast this year who's gone for them.

He liked them so much he got into some good spats with the resident redbellies over access. Red is a battle flag for birds. He's intimidating her with that fancy shirtfront.

She is, however, better armed in the poking department, having a vicious stabber rather than a pincer.  

Rebelly: I WIN.

Rosebreast: I wait.

They love my Bird Spa, with its bubbling water. Rose-breasts are avid bathers. Seeing one on it always stops my heart, in a good way. 

This little female grosbeak was watching the oriole eating fruit. So. Is that good to eat? Should I bump you off and try it?

Look at the oriole's response! Ha ha!! He is evil!

His evil eye sufficed to drive the grosbeak away. Look at her beautiful yellow wingpits! If this were a young male, they'd be pink. And carmine-rose on an older male.

Here's a young male rosebreast, taking off from our sycamore,  from early autumn. Isn't that underwing gorgeous? So that's how you sex a bird in all-brown plumage. In rosebreasts, yellow= girl, pink= boy!

 I raised a baby grosbeak one summer years ago--Jeffy. He was one of my favorite clients EVER. So gentle and sweet and easy to be with. When I released him, he hung around eating from little cups of mixed vegetables and mealworms around my yard. At the time he left, he still had yellow wing linings. Though there was no way to be sure, I had a strong feeling he was a male. 

I didn't see Jeffy for several weeks. Then one September day, he came out of nowhere and circled over me, calling, as I worked in the garden. I was SO excited to see him. And I saw his pink wingpits, and knew I'd been right about his sex all along. That was such a great moment, one of the gifts of sticking with rehab and being there for the magic moment when a bird returns to say hi and show me his wingpits. This is my watercolor of that moment (as described in The Bluebird Effect). 

The older a male rosebreast gets, the more immaculate his coloration. Young males will show an admixture of brown in their black parts, especially on wings and head, and lots of speckling on the breast and flanks. Look at this amazing male, probably in his second spring (though as always I'm happy to be corrected!He's got fully black feathers in his wings, so maybe he's in his third spring?)  Wing linings are pale pink, and he has a very small pink cravat. Lots of streaking on the underparts, as well, and brown mottling on head and back. Taken May 2, 2016 here. Click on the photo to embiggen it and see the details I'm talking about.

This is interesting. I've been digging around trying to find out how long it takes a male rose-breast to attain full adult plumage. Found this in Birds of North America (now known as Birds of the World!): 

"Some males may not acquire complete Definitive Alternate (what we plebes know as breeding) plumage until their third year or later. Smith (Smith 1966a) cites a single male that was banded as a yearling in 1961 and did not acquire a completely bright-pink bib until 1965. "

Whoa! Like a bald eagle, taking four years to get that cravat? WHO KNEW? Probably not the case for all individuals, but still. Who knew?

This is the best shot I've ever gotten showing molt in a second spring male rose-breasted grosbeak. Look at the retained juvenile plumage in wings and tail! It shows as dull brown. He's got the remnants of the broad white crown stripes he wore as a juvenile.  All his ebony finery is still on its way in. And the deck feathers on his tail are newly grown, and black. Taken May 3, 2016, in Whipple, OH.

 This one has just a few black specks on his breast. But look at the extent of the carmine on this boy! Runs all the way down his midline, goes almost from shoulder to shoulder across his breast. From what I've observed, I suspect the rose cravat gets more extensive as he ages, as well. I'm fascinated by the progression of molt in birds, especially as it is used to age them. 

It has been such a delight having grosbeaks around this spring. They are one of the great gifts of early May. I know they're helping keep me content on the gray rainy cold days when I'm not grubbing in the garden or ranging through the forest. 

Another reminder, my last. Tomorrow, May 9, I will be participating in the Virtual World Series of Birding, with an all-star team of 22. Proceeds from our pledges will go to monarch butterfly research. The money is needed more than ever, with the recent slaying of two of Michoacan's most ardent monarch conservationists by drug cartel fiends on the butterflies' mass wintering grounds. My esteemed friend Mark Garland has put together the team. I'm included for geographic diversity, since most of us are from the East Coast. I got 61 species on my place alone on my dry run May 7, so you can do the math if you wish to pledge. At 10 cents per bird, that would be $6.10. :) Who knows how many species we can rack up, with people like Louise Zemaitis and Michael O'Brien birding their yard in Cape May? Scott Weidensaul will be checking in, with highs in the 30's and blowing snow in northern New Hampshire. Seth Benz's forecast on the Maine coast isn't much balmier. Nowhere but Texas, where Angel and Mariel Abreu will clock in,  is the weather going to be salubrious, but we're all going out and seeing all the birds we can. I'm hoping for peeks of sun, but it won't even reach 50 degrees here tomorrow. 

 I'll be birding around my admittedly largeish "yard" and along my bluebird trail, as I feed hungry babies in the box and leave little crocks full of live mealworms on the box roofs. Just got back from my second run today. All are warm and well-fed. One more run before nightfall. 

 If so moved, you can pledge for monarch conservation here: 

https://www.worldseriesofbirding.org/teampage.asp?fundid=1485

Thank you so much!

What to Feed Orioles...and What NOT to Feed

This is an unusual sight: a Baltimore oriole eating sunflower chips with a cardinal. Another unusual sight: the same oriole, eating peanuts!

But then, this is an unusual spring. April was terrible: cold and wet. I had high hopes for May, but it was 38 at wakeup this morning, May 6, in southeast Ohio, and the birds are hurting. I lay awake all night figuring out ways to help them. I've got to go on another Zickpotition to feed baby bluebirds in their boxes today. My third such trip this nesting cycle. I hate that I have to do that, but it's that or clean the dead little ones out of my boxes, and that I really don't want to do. 

When it's cold and wet, bluebirds and other insectivores have a terrible time finding enough food for their young. So I help. If you haven't seen the video yet, click here: http://tinyurl.com/zicklife

These orioles are migrants, and they normally make their living like this. Here, he's spreading apart a dead leaf wad with his opened bill, looking for caterpillars or spiders. 

But in this craptastic weather, the orioles are forced to mooch. 

I had literally two tiny Clementines in the house when they blew in. 

 Do you like my oriole orange feeder? It was a gift from my sweet dear friend Kim Beard, last October. It happens to have a prong on it that works for impaling a small orange. :) 

The wee clementines were disappearing fast. So as I lay awake all night, it occurred to me that the orioles might accept grapefruit. And they did, though they shake their heads at the sourness. This is a young male, who still has some olive-brown immature plumage around his eyes.

The first thing I did when I got up this morning was make a double batch of Zick Dough. Here's the recipe: 

Zick Dough Improved

1 cup peanut butter

1 cup lard (can be bought in large tubs at Walmart)

Melt the fats together in microwave until liquid. 

Combine dry ingredients: 

2 cups chick starter (make sure it's unmedicated; available at feed store)

1 cup cornmeal

1 cup flour

Add melted fats and stir until crumbly. Does not need refrigeration. Serve in hanging plexi dome feeder so it stays dry. Serve in winter, or during unseasonably cold spells in spring and summer. It is too rich for a steady diet and can possibly cause issues with gout, but it's great for pulling birds through hard times. So feed sparingly, and only when needed.

Here's a hanging plexi dome feeder I got at White's Mill in Athens OH. Has a screen bottom so water won't collect, and an adjustable dome so you can keep starlings out by lowering it so only cute little natives like this female downy woodpecker can wiggle in. Such an awesome little feeder! 

While I was lying awake this morning, I got this idea that I might entice the orioles to take higher-quality fare than orange pulp by using a little birdy psychology. So as soon as the batch had set, I stuffed an exhausted Clementine skin with fresh warm ZickDough.

The older male oriole came down, tasted it, and approved. I was squealing with joy from inside my studio blind. 

 Along came the young male. Whatcha got there? (This is how birds learn: by observing each other). And old boy says, "Nothing you'd want! Mine!"

When an older female dropped in, she was attracted to the Clementine, but didn't consider ZickDough fit for consumption. You can see her spreading her mandibles, trying to get down past the dough to the fruit pulp. Oh well. Two out of three ain't bad. 

Between the ZickDough and the grapefruit, I've got them covered until I can get some big navel oranges today. I also ordered 3,000 mealworms from thenaturesway.com , my favorite supplier of mealworms. Tell Tim Vocke that Zick sent you!

(I don't normally feed mealworms to the birds in my yard. But in a spring like this one, they can make the difference between life and death for nestlings).

You will notice that I am NOT feeding grape jelly to these birds. I do not consider straight grape jelly a fit food for any wild bird. It is practically pure refined sugar, full of artificial color, and not a fit food for any bird.  I hope that if you are feeding grape jelly to orioles you will stop and consider my warning. I've been rehabilitating and experimenting with feeding wild birds since 1982, and I would never, ever feed straight processed grape jelly to one of my clients. If I did, I'd expect to see it keel over from liver damage in short order.

You will see a lot of people recommending feeding jelly to orioles. This is classic anthropocentric behavior. I enjoy it, so I do it. I don't even think about whether it's good for the birds. It brings them in, they like it, and that's enough for me. Well, just because a bird will eat something doesn't mean they SHOULD eat it.

No, there aren't any studies as yet to prove me right, but you can ask any avian dietitian if they'd feed jelly to orioles. You'd get an "absolutely NOT!" And neither are there targeted studies to back up the assertion that Red Dye #40, as found in artificial hummingbird "food," is harmful, and I think there's now solid agreement on that score (except from the manufacturers who continue to make money on it).

For more information on that, see my blogpost, Red Alert for Hummingbirds.

And, at the risk of making this post a real linkfarm, I wanted to let you know that I'll be raising money for monarch butterfly research this Saturday, May 9! Mark Garland, my dear friend from Cape May, NJ, has asked me to bird around my home and contribute my sightings to his Virtual World Series of Birding team, The Monarchists. We have an AMAZING team of 15 people. They are: 

Lu Ann Daniels, Ron Rollet, Elle McGee, Bert Hixon, Michael O-Brien, Louise Zemaitis, Meg Hedeen, Mark Garland, Dick Walton, Erik Bruhnke, Drew Lanham, me, Seth Benz, Geoff Heeter, and Scott Weidensaul. 

Talk about good company! If you'd like to contribute to our knowledge and research on monarch butterfly migration, you can donate a per-bird amount (any amount is fine! A penny! Whatever!) at this link: 

https://www.worldseriesofbirding.org/teampage.asp?fundid=1485

Thank you, as always, for reading and enjoying this wonderful spring with me.

Waiting for Piper

Bird photography requires great patience and a quiet, still center. You must be willing to wait for the moment when the bird you're after finally shows up and does the thing you're trying so hard to photograph. You set yourself up and make sure you're in the right place at the right time and then you hope.

I do a ton of bird photography; I spend part of every day doing it. That's because my studio window is set up to look out on one bodacious planted bird paradise of a yard. I'm bragging because I done made it myself. Everything that's there we planted, and the birds thank us by coming in close.

But waiting for Piper isn't like tapping away at your keyboard and staring to your left, then grabbing your camera as I'm doing right now. (I've taken dozens of photos of hummingbirds and yellow-throated, prairie, pine and Blackburnian warblers while trying to get this post written). It was a much more purposeful thing, because I had to wake up at 4:45, clear the blear from my eyes and be ready to rock.

Sometimes Piper would show up when there was enough light to catch him, and sometimes he wouldn't.

But other birds showed up.

Male cardinal, born this summer. He's getting his all-red bill and breast. 

Another one, peering up at me from the bell post. I love these scruffily endearing babies.

I did not expect a female Baltimore oriole to drop in while I was fruitlessly waiting for Piper to come back. But I was very grateful that she chose to check out the landscape roses growing by the water garden. The light was very low, but luscious.

There were more--tufted titmice and Carolina chickadees; a scruffy-looking common yellowthroat. But my favorite of the bonus birds I saw while waiting for Piper was this one: a Baltimore oriole fledgling. Oh, thank you for choosing poke as your perch. Your colors are divine. Positively tropical!

Just look at your little blue feet, you cute thing. Ahh, I love freshly minted birds.

I realized that I could just hang out the bedroom window all morning, Piper or no Piper. But oh, when he did appear...

In the Shade Coffee Plantation

Coffee in bloom. Do you ever think of the flower that precedes the bean, with its light, citrusy fragrance?

That day with the long-tailed manakins at Tarrales was magic. As I sat and watched for the manakins, a tropical pewee came down and sat quietly not far from my right shoulder.
Waiting for manakins, I saw everything else--a Swainson's thrush, eating the same lauraceous fruit that the manakins were enjoying. A Baltimore oriole, perched on an inga tree above the shade coffee plantation where the manakins were foraging. It was a flash back to my painting of the same subject for the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center. Full circle! Trying to get a photograph of the oriole reminded me why there will always be a place for artists who can paint an idealized scene. Would you know that the oriole in my photo was inhabiting a shade coffee plantation? The fact is, all this bird activity was taking place within an active agricultural field of shade-grown coffee. Shade growing leaves the overstory largely intact, if thinned, and replaces the understory with coffee shrubs. It's not virgin forest by any means, but it's highly valuable habitat for Neotropical migrants and tropical resident birds.
The entire time I sat quietly watching for manakins, a gray hawk screamed at me from across a valley.
It was clear to me that this vociferous bird had a nest nearby, because its mate would periodically come to join it and add its protests.
Gray hawks (Buteo nitidus) sound a lot like gulls, or red-shouldered hawks. This species is a rare prize near Nogales, Arizona, on the Mexican border, but they're very common around Tarrales.
Looking across the valley, I could see the most gorgeous golden trees in full bloom. Could anything send a clearer message to a honeycreeper to come sample some nectar?
Walking down from the manakin feeding area at last, I found a tree that had fallen across the path. The richness of canopy life hit me when I realized that the trunk was covered with creeping orchids. Oh, oh, oh. Of course, they were spicily fragrant, their tiny pink flowers no larger than my thumbnail. Charmed, I'm sure. Twitching, in fact.
Like the vast majority of things I found in Guatemala, I had no idea what they were. I knew they were orchids, and that was about it. Sigh. Another thing to figure out. Being mostly on the tree's underbelly, I hoped they would get enough moisture to survive, or perhaps be transferred to a more suitable spot before the tree rotted away. One could collect many such doomed plants if one were so inclined. Every tree that comes down holds treasures untold from the upper reaches of the forest. I could go pretty wild, having a garden in Guatemala.

As I rounded a turn in the dark trail, I spotted my life white-eared ground-sparrow (Melozone leucotis). What a bird! Buried in shadow, there was no way I could get a photograph of it. I stood, letting the feeling wash over me, of seeing something I'd never seen before. I looked down at the ground--I usually stare at the ground when I'm not looking for a bird--and there in the leaf litter lay the molted tail feather of a blue-crowned motmot. Well, would you look at that.
Magic, that's all it was, the whole day, and as tough as the trip turned out to be, I was glad I'd come here. I dream of spending a week or so just doodling around Los Tarrales, seeing what it has to show me.

Department of Shameless Promotion

Note to New Yorkers: I'll be speaking at The Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Sapsucker Woods in Ithaca on Monday evening, April 7--and opening the Letters from Eden art show at the same time. The show of 60-plus watercolors and drawings will hang at the Lab until July 7. Having never seen the new building, I'm really excited to be loaning some art to decorate it for three months! Many thanks to Jerry Regan and the Ned Smith Center for Nature and Art for helping me put the show together, creating the fabulous labels, curating and transporting the show, and kicking off its national tour! For more details, see the Lab of Ornithology's web site.

Shade Coffee Birds

On the moderate-elevation slopes and terraces of Los Tarrales, coffee grows in the shade of a largely intact forest. Trees of many different species provide the shade, and birds move between the canopy and the coffee shrubs unimpeded and apparently undisturbed. It's a beautiful conjunction of agriculture and useful habitat, foreign to those of us who associate agriculture with endless monocultures of corn, wheat, or soybeans, which are almost useless to native wildlife. This is a much happier land-use marriage.

I loved seeing birds that would soon be in my own yard, engaged in tropical doings. Here, a Baltimore oriole gorges on the strange fruits of a cecropia plant. They don't look juicy or tasty, but orioles and honeycreepers, euphonias and jays love to take bits of the strange, wormlike fruits.One of the things that strikes me hard in Guatemala is the difference in scale between temperate and tropical leaves. This oriole is dwarfed, lost but for his coal-bright orange.


Swainson's thrushes were everywhere in this disturbed, mid-elevation habitat. They looked strange to me against the odd forms of leguminous pods, but they felt perfectly at home.
A female ruby-throated hummingbird fed at the flowers of a tree-sized composite plant, perhaps a Senecio. Its perfume made me swoon.
Hurry home and see us, Mrs. Hummingbird. On second thought, wait a bit. The weather's still iffy. Wherever we went, black-and-white warblers combed the tree trunks, huge and small, for insectile delicacies. I'll see you in April, my dear, as you scour the oak limbs for sleeping spiders back home.
One of my favorite pictures of the trip is this little yellow-bellied flycatcher in the understory of a fishtail palm plantation at Los Tarrales, impatiens glowing in the background. I'll be listening for his plaintive chu-wee? in my backyard in May.
Enough on those Neotropical migrants, Ms. Zickefoose. Move on to the tropical residents. Start with me, the barred antshrike.
You are a fine birdie indeed, even though you and your mate skulk in the shadows. We'll talk about tropical residents next. Ah, sun, ah, exotica.