End of Summer Birds

Summer is winding down. The first cool nights are here. The bird population in our yard is changing. I haven't seen any Robins for some time doing their running, stopping and listening for worms in the ground. It's oddly silent except for the raucous cries of the Blue Jays and Crows. I still hear an occasional Gray Catbird, though, giving its cat-like calls from deep inside a shrub. 

This one is was sitting out in the open and was about to launch into flight.

A couple of weeks ago three or four Chestnut-sided Warblers were moving around in the thicket close to our driveway with one of the them looking like a male. I went  to get my camera, but then only found this one bird, probably a first year youngster. 

When walking along a trail pishing will usually draw out one or two Common Yellowthroats 

Dragon flies and butterflies abound. Avian migration in the fall is kind of protracted and all you can do is be on the lookout. In my next post I'll talk about Nighthawk migration.

Happy Birding!

Watching Northern Gannets is fun, except when it's not

(Warning: disturbing images)

The high point of my visit to my birth place in Germany in 2009 was a trip from Hamburg down the Elbe River to the diminutive island of Helgoland in the North Sea, 29 miles off the coast. The side facing the sea is a 200 feet high rock cliff, home to thousands of sea birds, mostly Northern Gannets, Common Murres and Black-legged Kittiwakes. It was a gorgeous day, bright sun, blue skies. I had only a few hours to photograph the birds, no way of avoiding the mid-day sun with its harsh lights and shadows. But losing myself  in the moment, I was happy and kept firing away at the awe-inspiring assembly of nesting Northern Gannets.

Parental care: placing a feather

Macabre Discovery

Closely examining the photos after I got home, I discovered the tragic consequences of the Gannets' method of nest construction. The rocks were covered with tons of man-made indestructible trash: plastic lines and pieces of nets that the Gannets had dragged up for nest material in place of their customary sticks and seaweeds, and that ended up trapping many of them, leading to their slow and agonizing deaths.

The living and the dead:  a recently dead adult bird in the left upper corner and the skeletal remains of one near center right among apparently oblivious  adults and chicks

Is this adult going to be able to free itself from the sling around its neck?

These juveniles didn't make it

Fortunately this  appears to be the only known Northern Gannet colony in the North Atlantic suffering such  calamity. The North Sea is a shallow shelf sea ideal for shrimping with drag nets over its bottom. Nets are lost or torn apart and remain floating in the water or washed up on the beach. Gannets are known to resort to beachcombing for their nest material. Or perhaps they grab it when the nets are  pulled in for mending. 

Scottish trawler

Trawl nets on Belgian boat

Part of a trawl head on top of the rock. How on earth did it get up there?

Until then I had been content to archive my photos on my website; but now I had to write about it, hoping to bring this debacle to the public's attention. That's how I started my blog.

Eastern Phoebes building a nest

Several weeks ago an Eastern Phoebe pair decided to build  a nest in a corner space above the main entrance to our house. Wrong spot.  When I discovered the beginnings of a cup- shaped mud and moss construction, I scraped it off, but they kept returning with more mud and moss to the same site until we wedged a piece of foam rubber into the space sealing it off. 


There are lots of nooks and crannies around our house, shed, and workshop and I hoped they would find a more suitable spot - which they did, at least in their opinion, right above the back entrance to our porch. One or the other bird kept fluttering up at the upper portion of the porch door. Puzzled I watched it for a while. When I finally walked around I discovered a bead of mud plastered along the trim above the porch door. It didn't make much sense to me at first, but after a while they concentrated their efforts on a midpoint and started cementing together a nest. I think both the male and the female participated but can't be sure. 

They were messy, dropping mud and moss on the steps below. We decided to let them be and I locked the back door which we weren't using much anyway.


Gradually they turned the mess into a neat cup-shaped nest.  Then for a long time nothing. It was too high and too deep for a nesting bird to be visible over the rim. For a time I thought they had abandoned the nest until, a couple of weeks later, I started hearing the typical chorus of begging nestlings. 

The parents used a clothes line fastened to the edge of the porch as a perch when approaching the nest.  They were easy to distinguish from each other because one of  them looked flat-topped having lost feathers on its head.

The nestlings started to be visible over the rim and grew and grew...

I was going to get some better photos, but the very next day the three chicks had fledged and departed our yard. 

There are young ones all around. Throughout the day I am hearing, in the trees above or the adjacent hay fields, the nasal begging calls of young crows. Small fast moving juveniles keep chirping and twittering in the thickets along the edge of our lot.  A couple of days ago a Mockingbird, giving off sharp warning calls, was dive-bombing my dog as he trotted along a wall of shrubs and trees behind our supermarket.  The bird swooped down repeatedly, but my dog was totally oblivious to these mock attacks.  Another adult was sitting on a strand of wires above. There must have been a nest nearby. 

There isn't  much else going on but I am reading that shore bird migration is starting soon. Happy birding!