Chicken Soup for the ADD Birdwatcher's Soul

My "work" day started at 9:54 with a white-eyed vireo and a couple of brown thrashers. Now it's 2:11 pm July 30, 2012, and a juvenile male American redstart is headed in for a real bath. A perfect spotlight of sun lights his way.

This is very nice.

I am getting very wet and floating around like a little orange leaf.

Vireo. Why? This is a very large bath and you don't need to crowd in.

You're right. Sorry about that. I'm red-eyed with embarrassment. Your spray was so alluring...

2:26. Our resident female eastern bluebird, feeding three five-day-old young in a box in the front yard, stops in for a well-deserved drink. Her plumage is so worn she's barely blue any more.  But come October she'll be vibrant and glossy again, these brown summer weeds replaced with fall cerulean frost.

3:10. Piper the indigo bunting stops in for yet another bath.

3:11. A monarch comes to nectar at the butterfly weed which is reblooming below the studio window. A tiny beautiful bee flies by.

3:11:39: a ruby-throated hummingbird slams into the monarch and knocks it into the air. Hummingbirds can be so rude!

3:41. A juvenile scarlet tanager drops in for a drink and bath.

It actually goes up to the bubbler and drinks out of it just like a child at a playground. Score another favorite photo!

I'd taken 360 photos in 2 hours 20 minutes on one July day. I probably missed half the action when I was looking down trying to work. On days like this, I'm thankful that I can be here, seeing things like this right from my drawing board. My only regret is that there's no one here to share it with.  But people who can sit at a window all day and stare out of it are hard to come by. People who will  do that are even harder to find. So I roll it in my hands for a few hours and make a little mud pie of words and photos, just to try to show you how cool it all is, and how the show just goes on and on and never stops at all. It's not just here. It's everywhere. Birds are migrating, right now. All you have to do is look.

And putting out a freshly scrubbed bubbly birdbath on a hot summer day doesn't hurt either.

The Ten-Ring Bird Circus Continues

We left our heroine just before 1 PM on July 30, 2012. She was nearly limp with excitement at the incessant bird circus going on outside her studio window. But it was not close to over.  At 1:09, the juvenile hooded warbler decided to try bathing in the Spa.

The bubbler is attractive but very, very scary to a small warbler at the same time. The hooded made about a dozen passes at landing before she screwed up her courage to do it.

It helped to have a friendly tufted titmouse enjoying himself right there in front of her. If he can do it...

The Warbler has Landed. But she's too shy even to drink. Knock-kneed with fright she is.

At 1:38, the juvenile orchard oriole returns. It still hasn't bathed, but it's watching a male northern cardinal with great interest. What a beautiful sleek bird. Reminds me of my Ora Lee, who lived in my studio for 17 years.

Turns out that the oriole's watching the cardinal because it wants to drink and bathe in the spray from its bath!

It drops down beneath the bath and laps drops off the Creeping Charlie leaves with its long, feathery tongue. Then it wallers around in the wet leaves a bit. That'll count for the Spa bird list. It landed and drank from the bath. #70 it is!!

At 1:43, the juvenile hooded warbler finally works up the courage to bathe!

And glory be, she preens it out in the birch right where the worm-eating warbler was earlier.

 She makes sure every feather is just so before she leaves at 1:44.

1:46. A young male American redstart comes to check out the thistle feeder, as a redstart has several times each day for the last week. I don't know if it's the same redstart, but the curious young birds figure that if the goldfinches are eating from the feeder, there might be something there for them, too.

Such a gorgeous plumage, this young male born this spring. See the peachy orange breast patches? That would be yellow if this were a female. And it's a bird hatched this year, showing no black speckling in the head or back as it would if it were a 2011 model. Can you see the flattened, flycatcherlike bill and rictal bristles at its corners? It catches flies and other insects right out of the air. Hence the flycatcher bill.

1:53. A common yellowthroat, again a juvenile, shows up and skitters through the saucer of water I keep for those birds that prefer still, shallow water to the deeper, more challenging Spa.

It preens and preens, rearranging its mussed feathers right under my nose.

1:53. I get one of my favorite shots of the day from our little male redstart. Just beautiful, like an avian butterfly he is. 

  1:59. That gorgeous orchard oriole bombs back through. Who knows. It could be an entirely different individual. I'd believe anything today. All these birds in less than an hour. At this point I've given up trying to get anything done on my article.

Man, I love late summer. Spring is fun and pretty and exciting, but fall birding is THE BOMB. Get out there, people!! Or, if you've got a good window, stay in!!

More Staring Out the Window

At 12:10 the white-eyed vireo returns and

 moves to the arbor vitae, where he's spied something edible.

He gives the dead part of the shrub a hard look

and launches himself.

He nabs a small black caterpillar or beetle larva.

and strikes a final lovely pose at 12:12:01.

12:14. I check the brown thrashers to find them throwing big chunks of matted lawn clippings around, thrashing the asparagus and rhubarb bed.

I like the way brown thrasher and mockingbird siblings pal around long after they've fledged. They remind me of Phoebe and Liam, going everywhere as a unit all summer long.

The bolder, older one flies to the Bird Spa and takes a quick drink at 12:17.

The Spa is crowded. At 12:18, a Carolina chickadee attempts to bathe with two tufted titmice. It doesn't work out for the chickadee, but it does catch some nice spray.

At 12:20, a nondescript sparrow gets me briefly intrigued. I hope for a moment it's a Lincoln's, but that face, pallid as it is, looks all too familiar: juvenile song sparrow. Still, I'm glad to see it, because ours raised a brood of three in some ornamental grass over our septic system and were gone before the June rains were over. After singing every day all the late winter and spring, the birds simply quit the place. And not only that: all the song sparrows on our road did the same thing. I'm only just now seeing migrants coming through on post-breeding dispersal. If anyone knows where my SE Ohio song sparrows go after they raise their first clutch, please enlighten me!

This newly minted song sparrow is is sunbathing too. Everybody's doin' it.

  I'm just gathering myself from identifying the sparrow when a juvenile orchard oriole drops in to the perch by the Spa. If it lands on the bath, it will be species #70 to drink or bathe there. C'mon!! Do it!!

Practically every bird I've seen today is a juvenile. Only fitting that a Juvenal's duskywing should show up at 12:21 and get itself photographed. It's been 2 hours and 20 minutes since I picked up the camera, and I haven't put it down for more than five minutes. And I'm not done yet!

The madness continues on Sunday. Actually, it hasn't let up yet. For those of you interested in ageing and sexing birds by their feathers, scroll down and see the corrections in my last post (I Get Nothing Done...) Turns out that both of those hooded warblers were this year's babies--even the fully hooded male. Whew! You learn something every day. I hope Bob Mulvihill will keep looking and correcting--that's how we learn.

 My computer is gagging on all the photos, and I'm having the time of my life with this late summer migration. Good news is I've managed to beat my South Africa articles mostly into submission. And gathered a whole bunch of cool new images of fall migrants in the process.

photo by Sara Stratton. Yes, I'm working. The antler hanging over my lamp, a gift from my farmer/hunter/neighborbuddy Jeff, is for back scratching. The Buddha is for luck and prosperity. Come ON, Buddha. Kick it into gear. We have the luck thing going...