Baby Bluebirds, Chickadee Eggs, Trashy Tree Swallows

Still checking bluebird boxes on May 6. It was a big day, enough to make three posts out of it! And I love bringing you along. This stuff is just so cool, I have to share.

The Three Graces leaf out. I have been photographing them every time I pass. It's awesome to see the changes. 

Hendershot has four nice four-day-old bluebirds. I fool them into gaping by giving a little whistle. Easier to count them when they pop their heads up, as you shall see...

Driveway Mid has four two-day-old bluebirds. The hen seems to have removed a fifth, infertile egg. 

I have her down as having laid five, but poking down into the pile o' meat reveals nothing. Yes, they're hard to count. You kind of have to figure out what you're seeing each time you look into a box. You can't count heads, because you can't always see them. In this case, the chick at 6 o'clock in the lineup has its head under the chick at 9 o'clock, and the 12 o'clock chick has its wing over on the 1 o'clock chick and its head way over to 4 o'clock, and the 1 o'clock chick has its head tucked down. This makes me chuckle. But trust me, there are four chicks here in this sweet Celtic knot.

Here are some six-day-old bluebirds from my Old Studio box in our yard. They're smaller than the Warren #4 babies, though they're the same age. It's all about food. They're fine--the Warren babes are just abnormally fat and well-fed, being only three in number. You should see babies in a box where only one or two of the clutch hatches. Monsters!

There are some fun surprises in today's box check. Meadow Slot on our farm has E-Nor-Mous ten-day old bluebirds, five of them! Man, she got started early! Counting back, these hatched April 26, so she started incubating her clutch on April 12, meaning she started laying April 9. Whoo-ee. And I'm not feeding bluebirds this spring, either, so that tells me that Bill's mowing the meadow three times last season has improved the feeding grounds for our bluebirds. Or maybe she's just hot to trot. She'll have these fledged and be thinking about starting another nest while most are still feeding young in the box. The minimum turn around time for bluebirds from fledging a batch to starting the next clutch of eggs is about two weeks.

That's not very long. This amazing ebb and flow, and all the change and surprise in my bird boxes is is why I get so frustrated when I'm traveling and don't get around to check them at least once a week. All this wonderful stuff happens and I'm missing it. After running boxes since 1982, I still hate to miss a single little thing.

Surprises abound today. I had something start a moss and bark fiber nest in the meadow PVC box, and I thought it juuust might be a white-breasted nuthatch, since we keep seeing nuthatches perched out in the open on the snags we put up in the meadow. I was literally holding my breath. And then one day I came and found the nest all torn up, and tree swallows holding the territory. I was really disappointed, because nuthatch is my Holy Grail of baby birds I want to paint. I haven't had a nuthatch in a bluebird box since about 1984, in Connecticut, and it was on an old box that my landlord had nailed to a tree (bad, bad thing). And the babies were taken by a coon just before they fledged. Part of me has never gotten over that. And this is why you never, ever nail a nest box to a tree. 

So I was waiting with bated breath to see what would happen to this torn-up mossy nest--to see who built it. And it looked like the swallows had queered everything. 

Not so. 

For today, May 6, a Carolina chickadee bursts out of the box as I come up to it, and I find six precious little Carolina chickadee eggs in there! I can only guess that she had them hidden under the moss and they escaped the tree swallow's depredation. And she has prevailed! The tree swallows have moved to a wooden box nearby. Hooray!

It's a great year for chickadees on our place. Here's another nest in the garden box--an uncharacteristically late laying. This moss nest appeared overnight, and I think she's still laying as of May 6. We now have four active CACH nests with eggs, and another in the Oilwell box built, with no eggs. Not sure what's going on there. This is what makes checking such fun! This is the latest CACH egg laying I've ever had. Something must have happened to their first attempt. I find that chickadees are one-brood wonders, and they seem not to attempt nesting if it gets too late. It's one brood or nothing for them, at least in southern Ohio.

I am absolutely knocked over by the perfume coming in the windows from my heirloom lilacs. This is Aunt Lolly the Younger, who is heir apparent to the throne, as Aunt Lolly the Elder is slowly croaking in her shaded north exposure. I have to lop off one enormous trunk after another.  Hooray for The Younger! But I'm not counting The Elder out, no way. These are tough, tough plants. They really should be called tree lilacs--the biggest darn lilac I've ever seen.

 Up close. Swoon!

Bill for scale. Look at the size of those clusters! I planted this one about six years ago. It's headed for the top of the deck. I deliberately planted it where I could stand on the raised deck and someday swoosh my face in the blossoms. It will get that tall. I think I've found The Perfect Spot for it, don't you?

 Speaking of tall, I had to move Hibiscus "The Path" to the front porch. She was bumping her head on the ceiling of the greenhouse, and it's too hot in there now for anything but peppers and tomatoes. They love heat. My fuchsias, hibiscus and jasmines, not so much. Out they go!

One last surprise in the Meadow Wood box. Here's what tree swallows do when they can't find any nice white feathers for their nests. When they can't find any feathers at all. They use beech leaves, tinfoil, and cellophane. Awww. Poor little things. On a whim, I tore some feather-like strips from my bluebird notebook and let them fly on the breeze. The tree swallow who built this nest watched intently, its flat little head pivoting, as they fluttered by him. I'm betting they end up in his nest. Don't worry. I'm going out to buy them some goose feathers this afternoon.

Thus ends the box check. But it's never over, not until August. So there will be more babies to come!

Spring's Busting Out

It's been a week and I haven't posted. Nobody's filed suit. Spring's like that. Everything happens at once and it's all just too beautiful for me to take in. But I try, I try.

 The heirloom lilac, a lilac of truly titanic proportions, bursts into bloom alongside our 42' tall birding tower. She's going for 20', and Phoebe predicts we will one day pick blossoms by leaning over from the towertop.

A quiet little shot that turned out to be one of my favorites. I think it's the beautiful laundry floating behind, and that first petal falling that I love. This tulip came in an Easter arrangement from our church altar, and it just gets bigger and more beautiful every year. How often does that happen with tulips? Usually the chipmunks eat them or they just dwindle away. This one's a survivor.

There is a barn on the corner of our road that bursts into bloom each spring.

Wisteria, the thug of thugs in the plant world, has one week where it's worth tolerating, and oh, what a week it was.

I shot this barn in every light regime. There are many more photos, but these are just a few.

In the yard, the forsythia gives up its gold, shining all over my girl.

 

And then I caught her with messy hair and no mascara, the way I love her best.

She also shines on the field, jumping much farther than I would think any daughter of mine could, but then she got long stems from her daddy.

Another phoebe made the mistake of flying into the living room while prospecting for a home. He never came back. Oh, please, come back. We had to catch you to get you out, as you were panicking in the high clerestories.

No. I will nest somewhere without giant naked primates who hold me too close to their big mouths.

More springy things in my next post. I'm sorry they're not better organized. Neither is springtime, and neither am I these days.  

Zick on NPR-Raspberries

photo by Connie Toops

While sitting in a theater (gasp!) watching a much-touted movie about birding, I got a call from my editor at NPR. She was working on a piece I'd submitted to All Things Considered in July about growing raspberries, massaging it a bit so it wouldn't sound out of place in October, and she had a few questions. Mainly, "Can you harvest raspberries in October?" Having eaten a small, glorious handful just a few days prior, I gave an enthusiastic yes!

My dear friend and colleage, natural history writer and photographer Connie Toops, has a penchant for bringing me wonderful plants each year when she comes to speak and guide at the New River Birding and Nature Festival in Fayetteville, WV. She comes up out of the mountains of North Carolina with pots of fabulosity. And last spring she brought me four golden raspberry plants. I kept them in the pots until they were busting out, then set about digging them a soft fluffy garden bed in June. On one of the hottest days of the year. I worked out there, turning the soil, getting all the Virginia creeper and trumpetvine out of it, making a huge mound of manuery soil for their home, edging it with plastic so nobody could get in and they couldn't get out. Got myself a good case of heat exhaustion and had to leave a dinner party that night, practically incoherent, with a pounding head. But oh, were those plants ever worth it. We've had tantalizing hints of the bounty to come in three flushes, one, yes, in October. Never have I tasted a more delicious raspberry. They somehow pack a ridiculously intense raspberry flavor into each tiny bursting globule, belying their pallid color. Absolutely amazing. A gift of the finest kind.

So here's the piece. Give it a listen, and if you like it, hit Recommend, share it on Facebook, Twitter, or whatevah, and leave a comment if you please. Click HERE to listen and read.

Connie's got one of my heirloom lilacs growing down in North Carolina. File under: Sharing. Or What I Love About Gardening.