Miracle on the Patio

8 o'clock on March 6, 2021, a beautiful  Saturday morning. I'm making breakfast when I look out and see a goldfinch huddled on the doormat. Which says "WELCOME." Well, that's interesting. Not used to having them come to the front door!  I don't even have to lift the binoculars to know this bird has Mycoplasma. Well, I'll deal with that one later. Right now, I'm trying to fit in a little breakfast, in between disinfecting feeders and catching birds and cleaning cages.

With a heavy sigh, I put my little bowl of homemade muesli and berries together, drown it in almond milk, and take it and my sweet boy Curtis Loew down to the --squeeee!--new PATIO! I finally got sick of having to mow in this Godforsaken corner, sick of the mud around the door, and especially tired of having to dig out my hillbilly French drain every time it rained hard and long. Yep, I'd be out there in each downpour, trencher in hand, digging out the little rut from the door to the lower slope of the backyard. I'd clear away the dirt and the trench would leap with water. Otherwise, that water would come straight in under the basement door. It got old. 

So the patio's purpose was manyfold, and it finally went in this January, courtesy Thomson's Landscaping in Marietta, Ohio. Yes, it's a water control system, but it's also absolutely delicious to have a little paved court where I can bask in the spring sun. Curtis has a big old foam pad to lie on. You should see him wag when I suggest we take breakfast on the patio! If I had a tail it'd be wagging, too! I can't wait to plant some nice flowers in the terraced beds--the salvias I overwintered in the basement should do nicely. Then it'll be a hummingbird observatory! Woot!!

Curtis and I were basking, taking a rare moment to relax, when straight down from the sky came a little female goldfinch. It looked just like the one who had been sitting on the front porch earlier. It was clear from the way she flew, her body straight up and down, her wingbeats tentative, her tail spread to brake, that she couldn't see much at all. Poor wee thing!  But look how Curtis watches it, without dashing after it. That, my friends, is PROGRESS with a mountain cur! I didn't have to say a word. He just knew he shouldn't go after this bird. 

A lot of cool stuff happens to me, stuck way back out here in the wilderness. But this was one of the coolest things, and I'm so glad I thought to get video of her approaching me and Curtis. I had to wonder why that little bird, who was feeling so vulnerable and bad, came to my front porch--and then made her way down to the patio where I was sitting. Could she possibly have been trying to get help? Trying to find the lady who had been filling the feeders? Who had picked up so many sick goldfinches and taken them inside? Stranger things have happened. We must never underestimate what birds know, and never assume we understand why they do what they do. 

A bunch of people on my social media feed have asked for a video of me capturing a goldfinch. Well, catching a free-flying wild bird with your bare hands, compromised or not, is NOT something you can really do one-handed while making a video. If I was ever going to be able to pull that off, it was now. I had a blinded finch in a wide-open space. I decided to give it a go. Watch the Gentle Cobra in action!

                

I was shocked at how emaciated and weak this poor wee bird was once I got her in my hand. She was by far the sickest of the now NINE birds I've captured and am treating. Um, make that twelve. So sick that she wouldn't eat, even after her big first dose of Tylan water. So she stayed in the intensive care bin for two days, and I force-fed her nestling formula with a syringe. I was elated when she finally began to self-feed again! Once she was eating on her own and could see, I could put her in the community hospital cage. Except that one was full. 

               

So I let her sleep in the ICU while I prepped another, larger cage that I put in Liam's room. Seeing her put her head under her back feathers gave a pang to my heart.

I went to the crowded foyer cage, which now had six goldfinches binging off its sides, and caught two birds to be her cagemates. Here's a male who was really sick, but he's seeing now and looks so much better! I can tell it's a male because his black cap is coming in. Females don't have a black cap.

And here's a little female who looks really bright! Oh, if you could have seen these birds when they came in just a few days earlier!

The new cage, waiting for more patients. Patio Finch went in here, with a nice window looking out onto where she was caught.

I've taken down all of my tube feeders. I'm keeping only a peanut feeder up so I can, I hope, catch the last few sick goldfinches from this flock. Once I've got them, the peanut feeder will come down. I just cannot continue to feed with this epidemic raging. I don't want my feeding station to be an infection point for innocent birds. 

And so I ask you, if you're seeing sick finches--house or gold--with swollen, closed eyes, please harden your heart and take your feeders down. Allow the birds to disperse. Don't invite them into a place that's teeming with Mycoplasma. They're better off foraging naturally, dispersed and socially distanced. Soak your feeders in a joint compound bucket with detergent and bleach (one part bleach to 10 parts water, or a good healthy glug for a full bucket). Let them soak for 15 min, and soak all parts--flip them over if they're too long to submerge completely. Rinse them and put them away for a few weeks, or--as I do now--  for the spring and summer. You might need to bust them back out for that March or April snowstorm, or that cruel May freeze, and you'll be glad you disinfected them if you do. 

Thank you.

A Helping Hand for House Finches

It started on the fifth of April,  with a typical rainy morning, when I looked out my bedroom window and saw this little fella with a big Fu Manchu of nesting material. I skibbled down the hall in my jams, did a two-wheel corner into the studio, grabbed the big camera, and thank God he was still a settin' there when I got back. 

First, you gotta love a guy who helps around the house. Second, my affection for house finches has grown over the years, as I've watched them decline pretty drastically from their mid 1980's explosion in New England, then all up and down the Eastern Seaboard.  They were frankly a huge pain, mobbing feeders by the score and tweeting incessantly. Loudly and incessantly.

Nature finds its balance, though. I've watched as they have been taken out by inbreeding depression, which means they have little resistance to disease. All eastern house finches descend from a release event at a NYC pet shop in 1939.
They were imported from California and sold as "Hollywood Linnets." Imagine. This is what the Migratory Bird Treaty Act disallowed! Let's hear it for that!  Being inbred and with little genetic diversity,  they've succumbed to Mycoplasma gallinae, a disease of domestic chickens that also strikes at least 30 other native songbirds to date. I'm so happy now when I see healthy house finches and I really do wish them the best. After all, they are native to North America--just not east of the Mississippi. Their song is among my favorites--so clear and vibrant, a tumbling cascade of beautiful notes.

I figured they were building, and it wasn't hard to figure out where. House finches like dense conifers close to houses. Duh?

And speaking of duh...Do you see their neatly woven nest?

With its precious cargo of four eggs of palest blue, ink-dotted with black?

Daddy's whiskers for a lining and a mourning dove tail feather for good measure. Ah, it's all too sweet--and too damned visible. Any blue jay worth its salt--and there are at least six around the yard this year hooray!!--is going to key in on that nest immediately, if not sooner. If I can find it so easily, what about a sharp-eyed jay or crow?

So I cut a thick branch off the bottom of the same spruce and stuffed it into the boughs over the nest, making a little awning to hide it from predatory eyes. 

Better. (Compare to first photo). 

You have to approach it from the side to see it. Jays flying over won't see it nearly so easily. At least that's the hope. 

And speaking of hope...they hatched April 21.

And here they are on Day 2, April 22. The weird yellow thing is the transparent crop of a baby which has its head down in the nest lining to the right. That's actually regurgitated seed fed to it by its parents, and it's completely normal for an infant house finch to look like that. I know it's hard to tell what you're looking at, but the lower chick has a downy head to the right and two sweet little arcs of downy wings on either side.

House finches were the most challenging of baby birds to paint for my book, Baby Birds: An Artist Looks Into the Nest because they have so darn much long grayish white down that their anatomy was totally obscured! But oh are they dear. Crossing my fingers for this nest, hoping the cold spring keeps the ratsnakes in their burrows, hoping the chipmunks won't brave the prickly spruce--just hoping for everything. Know the feeling?

Avian CSI and My Unique Theories

Yesterday was another crests-up day, all day long. The sharp-shinned hawk made an appearance in late morning, but I knew he'd been hangin' around, because there was nothing happening at the feeders, despite the steadily falling snow.

My photos of the sharpie are all terrible, but it's because he's old and wise and he knows to sit well out of camera range. He's no dummy, and he's a good hunter. I've heard a sudden bird squeal from his favorite part of the north border, and on the day I'm chronicling here (November 21), I saw him make a kill.

The jays were merrily feeding, crests straight up, when he came in from the southwest like a blue bullet, looping up just enough to clear the house, then diving on the feeders. He did a barrel roll which bottomed out right in the middle of the jay flock, and came out with something in his fist. My heart was in my throat but I instantly ascertained that his prey was much too small and brown to be a jay. Besides. He's not after jays. He'd have a terrible time subduing one. He doesn't want a fight. He wants food.

I watched him as he took it into the north border and made a mental note to wait a few hours, then go into the woods to try to find the kill site. I wanted to give him plenty of time to consume the bird. Photographers and birders take note: The last thing you want to do is chase and disturb a hawk that's just caught a bird. You could make him drop it, and that would be a very bad thing to do. It would be a waste of a good meal for a bird who needs it badly. Leave him alone. The only look you'll get is him leaving the bird behind.

Sharp-shins are declining precipitously in the U.S., even as Cooper's hawk populations are burgeoning. Why would that be? Aren't there enough feeder birds to go around? The simplest, most surprising explanation would be that Coops have taken to eating their smaller cousins. Terrible thought, but it appears to be true.  I hate it when nature works like that, but it is what it is. It's called habitat partitioning. And it will force the sharpie to live in places where Cooper's hawks aren't. Feeders, thanks to their unnatural concentration of songbirds, bring the two together. As I think about it, most precipitous declines can be traced to an anthropogenic cause. 

As I pontificate on why there are so few sharp-shinned hawks around, realizing that I'm sewing this mostly out of whole cloth, I'm seeing John Cleese as paleontologist Anne Elk, introducing her groundbreaking new theory about the brontosaurus, stridently stating, "This is my theory. It is mine, and I came up with it. It is an original theory, and it is my theory." 

Many thanks for giving delightful flesh to my hazy memory to thenerdist.com

So I was not about to disturb this accomplished little sharpie at his meal. I waited about four hours, then I went out.

It didn't take long to find the shadow of his lunch. The curious will want to click on and embiggen all these photos.

 

Let's have a closer look at that. 

There were only two scraps of anything resembling bone.

 

Mandible, neatly cleaned. Scoop-shaped, conical. So it was a finch. 

Pinkish-red rump feathers. Dull brown flight feathers. It was a male finch. Purple or house? We have both, and their colors have evolved to be nearly indistinguishable here in the East. When they first arrived, house finches were an easily-separated tomato red, to the purple finch's raspberry wine. You could tell people to distinguish them that way, and I did. No more. They're almost the same color now. There might be some adaptive value to cooler reds in the East. Less need to radiate heat? This is my theory, and it is mine. No one else has come up with it, because the theory is unique, and it is mine. Channeling Anne Elk again. Brain on overdrive today.

The answer to the victim's identity is here, in this photo below. Anyone know why?

 

It was a male house finch, because those three buffy undertail coverts to the lower left have brown streaks on them. There are no brown streaks anywhere on a male purple finch. Case closed. Except for cool leftover bits of info.

 Here are the sharpie's droppings. There are almost always droppings at a kill site. 

 

 You can tell they're hawk droppings because they squirt out in a line. Owls drop a puddle, straight down.

 All this took place just inside the woods. That's our garage there, and the yard.

Sharpie knows where the good food is. 

 

I was a little rattled by the close call. What if he'd grabbed a jay? Telling myself he won't. And when I came out of the woods I found big clumps of rabbit fur.  Aww, no. Please no. I can't lose Half-ear Smalley! He's only five months old!

It didn't look good for Smalley. But I searched and found no blood. Just clumps of torn fur. So maybe he survived whatever had happened to him.

Nov. 21, 2018

I didn't see him for a few days. I figured a coyote had nabbed him.

And then on the morning of Nov. 24, he showed up again. 

 

Whewwwww. It is ever thus with rabbits, eminently edible, dear little creatures that they are. They're always looking over their shoulders, and I am too, on their behalf.

I've since found more such fur clumps, with no blood or bone or sign of major struggle, and I have to conclude that the rabbits are fighting these days. Over what, I don't know. Maybe corn.

Please, Nature Gods, don't take Half-ear Smalley. I need warm furry things around to watch, feed and love, even if I can't touch them.

Zick Goes To Sedona!

Every once in awhile...no, every day I am reminded that I may be the luckiest person alive. 

I have two healthy kids who are sweet and considerate and smart. I live in a beautiful place that I love fiercely. Everything on me works, and nothing hurts. I can see, walk and run. 

Everything I love most is free. 

And I get to work up talks about the things I love, and go to cool places and meet awesome people and give those talks. 

When I've discharged my duties the best that I can, I allow myself to hike around looking at landscapes and wildlife.

That's not a blue jay.

That's a western scrub jay!

That's not an Eastern cottontail.

That's a desert cottontail! Lookit those giant ears! The better to radiate heat with, my dear.

Zick goes to Sedona, Arizona!! Aieee!! And this was my first Sedona sunset. I will never be the same.

 About a year ago, Ross and Beth Kingsley Hawkins of the International Hummingbird Society asked me to give a couple of talks at the Fourth Annual Sedona Hummingbird Festival, July 31-August 2, 2015. It took me about ten minutes to scrabble around my calendar and say HELL YEAH!!

I had always wanted to see the famed red rocks of Sedona.  And a hummingbird festival, there?? 

I had NO idea what I was in for. It was so much more wonderful than I could have imagined.

The blistering heat of Phoenix's low desert slowly fell away as I drove two hours north.

"Monsoon season" had arrived, and with it a bit of rain and a lot of spectacular clouds. Pardon these through the windscreen shots. Couldn't help myself. 

The mountains rose up before me, and with it my adrenaline. I was SO ready to see this area.

Highway 17's OMG moment, when you climb, then behold the Verde Valley for the first time. I actually got a little vertigo and slowed way down. Heights. Beautiful heights. 

When I got to my destination, the Summit Resort in Sedona, the monsoon skies just blew me away.

I rooted around on Yelp because I was hungry, got the drift of area restaurants (some great, some not so great, and all expensive) and hied me to the Safeway, where for $50 (less than the price of a typical dinner out) I bought a week's worth of the kind of stuff I like to eat. With a fridge and a microwave in my fabbo room, I was in business! I didn't want to waste any of my precious time waiting for a waitron to bring me a menu or forget to bring my check. I wanted to stuff my gob and get back out in the red rock desert. So that's what I did.

Then I hurried back out into the beauty that surrounded me. 

I'd been up for about 20 hours, having left home at 2:40 AM, but seeing a humble house finch against the backdrop where it evolved and so richly belongs knocked me flat.

You see this sky? This sky's in love with you...

House Finches Can Be Annoying

Eastern bluebirds are water freaks. They will bathe in almost any weather, like their cousins the robins. I love how they look in late fall, with their fresh plumage showing a glaucous, frosty sheen.

We are not the only ones who find bluebirds beautiful. They have a hard time bathing alone. It seems all a bluebird has to do is plop into the water to find himself surrounded by sycophants and admirers of every stripe and wingbar. These, winter-plumaged American goldfinches, and a house finch.

I have been watching bluebirds since 1981, and I can tell you that house finches are unnaturally attracted to them. If a bluebird is around, a house finch will follow it and try to copy what it's doing.

I have no explanation for this behavior, other than that they just seem to like bluebirds. I had a captive house finch in the studio for nine years. He had a mirror he loved to look into. Then I cut out and plasticized a photo of a bluebird, and that finch slept next to it, pecked it gently until it wore to white.

This little male house finch is trying to be subtle, but he's creepin' on the bathing beauty.

He makes his move, front and center. Hi. Having a bath?

Yes, Mr. Observant, I am bathing, and I'd thank you to give me a little elbow room here. You house finches have not had an original thought in your lives.

What? What? I'm just watching you. I'm not hurting anything. Why so cross?

You are annoying. Please leave.

(finch takes the not-so-subtle hint)

grumble

Phew. Creeper! Back to my bath.