Ciblek Mania

This spring, for the first time ever, a male rose-breasted grosbeak has been visiting the sunflower seed feeder outside the kitchen window. We get them annually on the feeders outside the studio windows, which are farther from the house. And their tennis-shoe-on-the-gym-floor eeek! is a common sound on spring mornings here at Indigo Hill. But this dude was so close that I was able to take this image with my Canon G12 standing at the kitchen window.

I wish we were lucky enough to have the rosies around all summer, but they are merely passing through en route to more northerly woodland. At least while they're here we know they will be well fed and watered.

The second we open the back door to start the morning feeding frenzy, the doughheads make a big show of flying away. But they only go far enough to be in a good position to swoop in first to the fresh handfuls of dough on the deck rail and in the hanging dough feeder.

Here are a few of the most avid doughheads.

This is a video Zick and I made showing how we (as crazy people) make our suet dough for bird feeding. It also features cameos by Chet Baker, Boston terrier and by Liam Thompson, creeper. Much of the video footage was shot by Phoebe Linnea Thompson.

I hope you like this short how-to video. It felt like we were shooting some weird cooking show for bird watchers.

It was a combination of factors that got me rolling on this outside project on a recent Saturday. Bad weather was headed our way. The bird feeders needed to be restocked with food. And we were all rotting our brains with too much TV and computer time.

Phoebe and Julie elected to go for a run, so I grabbed Liam and we launched the annual ritual that is the building of the brush pile.

Our sycamore tree on the edge of the yard to the west of the house lost several large branches in a late-summer wind storm. We pulled these brown-leafed monsters out of the tree and broke them up into manageable pieces.

First thing is to build a skeleton to support the brush pile. I used a cinder block to help hold one of the larger "bones" of the skeleton in place. Then it's just a matter of building a messy tepee of sticks, branches, and boughs.

Liam is really good at hauling the brush pile materials.

We laid most of the branches on the northwest-facing side of the brush pile. This will offer more protection from the elements for birds using the brush pile (our weather does most of its attacking from that quarter). And the open side faces the house, so our views of the brush pile denizens will be more clear and open.

After the holidays, we'll add our tree and wreath to the brush pile, giving it a bit of green to liven the scene.

Liam was proud of what we made. And so was I. We went inside to fix some hot chocolate and by the time we walked back into the studio to look out at our handy work, there were the usual suspects using the feeder. More importantly, there was a newly arrived fox sparrow kick-scratching through the seeds and leaves beneath the brush pile. Now that's what I call instant gratification!

Then, taking a celebratory swig from my mug, I burned my tongue on the too-hot hot chocolate.

Can I just say that we miss you Boys of Summer? It's just not the same around here without you, as the days get shorter and the air gets cooler.

Have a nice winter, but don't forget to come back home, OK?

My newest book was several years in the making. Now, it's finally here (and I believe it's also in both "bricks" and "clicks" bookstores everywhere). The title is Identifying and Feeding Birds, and it's just published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

As poet, guitar god, and nature lover Jerry Garcia once sang: "What a long, strange trip it's been." So true, so true. And yes, we've forgiven Jerry for pronouncing nuthatch as "nut-thatch" in the Grateful Dead song "Eyes of the World."

Back to the book: It's my attempt at delivering, in a fun-loving way, all the necessary info for attracting, feeding, and identifying backyard birds in North America. It's based upon my nearly 40 years of feeding birds—every minute of which I've enjoyed (even while making truly stupid mistakes). I'm hoping the reader can learn from my experience and leapfrog straight to doing bird feeding right with maximum enjoyment.

But you, my fellow book-reading consumers will decide if this particular book succeeds in its goal.

Identifying and Feeding Birds is the first book in a multi-title series I'm working on for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The second book, Hummingbirds and Butterflies, co-written with Connie Toops is currently in the publisher's Easy-Bake Oven and should be out in spring 2011.

As an aside, it's NEVER a good idea to put a Stretch Armstrong through your little sister's Easy-Bake Oven. See, this is the kind of beneficial advice you can get from me.

If you feed birds and want to do it better, or if you're just thinking about starting, here's a list of reasons to buy my new book:

1. People a lot smarter than I am think the book is pretty good.
2. Feeding birds is good for you. Ask your doctor.
3. My sister made me confess to the Stretch Armstrong/Easy-Bake Oven crime.
4. I debunk all the bird-feeding myths that have puzzled you for decades.
5. In the book I share my family's heirloom suet-dough recipe, which is lard-based.
6. You'll learn obscure facts, like the one about Jerry Garcia's nut-thatch mispronunciation.
7. It costs just $14.95, which is less than you'll spend in a single Starbucks visit.
8. I'm proud that it's part of the legendary Peterson Field Guide Series.
9. It contains revealing "Behind the Music" profiles of 125+ backyard bird species.
10. While you're at it, why not buy two?

Thank you for lending me your eyeballs over the past several years here at Bill of the Birds. I always endeavor to make your time here well spent (or to trick you into feeling that way). However, there may be occasional subliminal messages that slip through my fingers. These messages will encourage you to read more blog posts, to watch more birds, to go to birding festivals, to have more fun as a birder and human, and to buy my books. Sorry, but I cannot help myself.

When the weather gets tough, it's fascinating to see how birds will change their behavior to adapt. Conventional wisdom says that juncos are ground-feeding birds that prefer to scratch through whatever is covering the ground for their food. Or they may mount a weed stalk to get at the seed heads near the top. Normally at feeding stations, they are on the ground below the feeders, scratching for mixed seeds such as millet, cracked corn, or sunflower bits.

With our recent snows and ongoing low temperatures, the bird feeders are a blur of activity. When I looked out the other day, I did a double take. There was a junco, perched on a vertical log feeder, pecking at bits of suet dough we had packed into the drilled holes. The suet log, hanging nearly six feet off the ground, is normally visited by woodpeckers, nuthatches, chickadees and titmice, starlings, and Carolina wrens. Seeing the junco using it, despite the lack of strong clinging feet, was a new one.

We'd seen the juncos at the hopper feeders (top image) picking out sunflower bits. And we knew the juncos loved the suet dough we put out on the deck railing, so I guess his should not come as a huge surprise. After all, the birds don't read the books describing their behavior. They're just trying to survive until tomorrow.

Our new feeding station on the deck railing outside the kitchen table window has been a busy, busy place these past two weeks. The weather has taken a decided turn for winter. The naturally occurring food supply—fruits, berries, seeds, late insects—has been diminished, so our seed, nut, and suet-eating friends are coming to our feeders in greater volume.

Tufted titmice, I've noticed, are hit-and-run eaters. Normally they drop in, hop onto a feeder, grab a seed or peanut, then fly off to a handy perch to consume it. One titmouse seems to want more from his foraging visits. He tries to take more than a single bit of food. Does he perhaps have some blue jay or American crow in his ancestry? Those well-known gluttons will gobble up several food items, filling up their throats before adding one or two more pieces, held firmly in the bill. These corvid family members will cache food—hiding it for later consumption, but that's not as well known as a behavior in titmice. However, it turns out that they DO cache food, too.

This particular titmouse was intent on getting another peanut into his bill, perhaps for caching. But every time he'd pry one loose, it would fall before he could grab it. The piece he had in the back of his bill prevented him from getting a secure grip on a second nut. Notice I am assuming this was a "he" even though TUTIs are not sexually dimorphic. This just seemed like typical behavior for a male.

As he tried, other birds would land on the peanut feeder and he would try to chase them off. Most fled, but not the male red-bellied woodpecker. He parked himself on the feeder and stayed put. I watched as the peanut dust flew and the level of nuts in the feeder dropped noticeably.

I sat there wondering if the birds ever think of each other like we humans do. Do the other titmice give each other knowing looks and mutter things like "There's Todd that greedy hog. Just look at him stuffing his face! That dude needs to learn some manners! It's like he was raised by jays or something!"

It's been a great fall for yellow-bellied sapsucker sightings around the farm. Some years we get one or two sappies that stick around through the fall. This year, given the number of migrant sapsuckers we've seen, I'm hoping we'll have a handful of wintering birds. I'm not sure our trees are happy about this, though they have nothing, really, to worry about.

On several occasions I've seen three individual YBSAs at once, swooping from tree to tree in that unique sapsucker way. Nearly all of the birds we've seen have been youngsters (birds born last spring/summer) and we can tell this by their splotchy, ill-defined plumage. On Saturday morning of Thanksgiving weekend a beautiful adult male yellow-bellied sapsucker showed up. I had stepped out onto the back deck to check the temperature and heard a light tapping coming from the nearby weeping willow tree. When the male peeked around from the trunk, the morning sun caught his red crown and throat (adult females have a white throat) and I bolted back inside the house for my camera.



In my experience, yellow-bellied sapsuckers are very quiet birds. They seem to lack the red-bellied woodpecker's zest for life, the downy and hairy's constant activity, and the flicker's flashy flight style. Sapsuckers can be easily overlooked, which is why it's so helpful to know the audible clues to their presence.


The tapping noise they make when excavating sap wells sounds like someone absent-mindedly tapping a pencil on a desk: tap-tap-tap —pause—tap-tap —pause—tap-tap-tap-tap. It is irregular in its rhythm and soft enough to go unnoticed.

Sapsuckers do vocalize quite regularly, making a soft, wheezy, descending meearr that sounds somewhat catlike. Our birds have been mewing a lot—perhaps scolding each other, trying to figure out whose territory this is going to be for the winter.

We've watched the sapsuckers make their rounds, visiting their sap wells like trappers checking their trap lines. On Saturday I noticed three other woodpecker species visiting the newly drilled sap wells in the willow: a downy, a hairy, and a red-bellied woodpecker. The male sapsucker actually tried to drive off the hairy, when it was caught poaching a drink at a ring of wells.

A few neat factoids about sapsuckers:

• They drill lines of small holes in trees, causing the tree to emit some sap to protect itself. The sapsuckers then revisit these wells on a regular basis to consume the sap and any insects attracted to it. The holes are visible scars in the tree bark, permanent evidence that a sapsucker was here at least once!
  
• It is thought that sapsuckers do not do much harm to healthy trees. In fact some ornithologists believe that sapsuckers prefer to drill holes in trees that are already under stress because they produce sap that is higher in certain nutrients. Still many sapsuckers are persecuted, especially by orchard owners.
• Sapsuckers don't actually "suck" sap—they lap it up with their tongues, which have short feather-like projections on the end. Sapsucker tongues function more like a brush than a straw.
  
• Dozens of other birds and many animals and insects will visit sapsucker wells to drink the slightly sweet sap.
• In spring, early arriving hummingbirds rely on sapsucker wells when plant nectar and insects are unavailable.
• Sapsuckers are avid migrants, with some birds reaching Central America and the islands in the Caribbean.

I've also seen our sapsuckers perch nearby our feeding stations, which are always stocked with sunflower seed, peanuts, suet, and suet dough. I'm hoping they will "tap into" this additional source of food so we can enjoy them all winter long.

Here's a very informative page about the yellow-bellied sapsucker.

The new feeders I set up two weeks ago, outside the west kitchen window, are getting lots of traffic now. All the usual suspects are in the chow line rotation, which greatly enhances the daytime view from the seats at one end of the kitchen table.

I used a tripod clamp to attach my Canon 30D with the 300mm lens to the table, so I can sit there working or eating or reading the newspaper (remember those?) and be ready to snap off some frames if there's a good opportunity.

I STILL need to spend some quality time learning how to take good bird images. But here's what I grabbed from the new feeders one afternoon earlier this week.
A male red-bellied woodpecker, lured in by the peanuts. He's still not too sure about that large gun-like object I'm pointing at him.

Nice to be able to see the actual red belly on a red-bellied woodpecker.

The American goldfinches are losing their summer colors, fading to their winter tones of drab yellow-green.

A new tube feeder filled with new seed got the GOFI's attention.

The northern cardinals had a phenomenal breeding season—there are dark-billed youngsters everywhere. Even the adults (female above, male below) are looking a bit different as they molt out their summer feathers for a new set of winter duds.


There are some additional enhancements I need to do to the feeding station to make it a bit better for bird photography. I need to add a couple of perches for our mutual convenience. And I may try to add another feeder or two. With our weather set to take a turn for winter, I'd better get cracking!

Here's wishing everyone a birdy weekend.

That's our birding tower in the photo above. And that's me taking a newly assembled feeder tree over to the side yard to augment our feeding station. Well-stocked bird feeders can be a huge asset on a Big Sit (oh, that does not sound very good, let me re-phrase). Well-stocked feeders can make your Big Sit more attractive (better?) to birds.

I give up!

The point I'm making is that I spend a lot of time scattering seed and placing feeders and water features with the specific intent of luring an additional species or two into view so we can count them on The Big Sit (which is this coming Sunday, October 11, 2009).

Last Saturday I got a wild hair and decided to devote the entire day to work around the farm. This was a welcome break from my normal work (at Bird Watcher's Digest) which, though fun, seems never ending. Think about it: You finish the November/December issue and it's time to start working on the January/February issue. I am in my 21st year of BWD issue cycles (and I still enjoy it!).

Back to my Big Sit preparation (H). I started by assembling the aforementioned feeder tree and adding some new feeders to it. These are the feeders that can be seen from the giant studio windows where Julie works.

Then I decided to add an additional feeding station cluster on the deck outside the big kitchen window, a vantage point from which all of us can watch the activity. I found a few new, unused feeders in the garage left from a bird store shopping frenzy last September, at Nature Niche in Berkeley Springs, WV. These went up on a set of feeder hooks I cobbled together from spare parts.

I still wasn't satisfied. Then I remembered the gray birch tree trunk that broke off a few weeks ago. It would make a perfect snag. So I set about preparing the trunk and digging a hole deep enough to support the snag's weight.


Once the snag was in place, carefully adjusted so no bird poop would drop directly into the bird bath, I went inside for a frosty cold refreshment, and to appreciate the results of my work. It's nice to do a job, see the progress and completion, and know that that's it! It's done!

The new feeders outside the kitchen window. The first brave feathered soul to visit them was a female American goldfinch. Since then we've had cardinals, titmice, Carolina chickadees, white-breasted nuthatch, and downy woodpecker as visitors. I suspect this station will be very popular as the season progresses. And I expect these new augmentations to net us at least one additional species for the Big Sit—maybe a pine siskin or a purple finch!

But I'd settle for any new, unexpected species, like this blue-crowned motmot! That would be sweet!

This morning when I took Phoebe out to the bus, dawn was barely breaking and there was a heavy dew on the ground. By the time I took out Liam to his bus, just after 8 am, the dew was still there, and it was joined by a heavy, filmy mist, which obscured the sun. As we walked to the garage, the silhouette of a bird sitting on the power line caught my eye.

"Is that a tree swallow?" I asked myself. Liam overheard me and said "Walll, you know what preddy-mush all the birds are Daddy, so, yep, it prolly is!" He was right! It WAS a tree swallow.

Now THAT'S a good sign of spring's arrival.

Bus duties completed, I tossed a handful of dried eggshell bits up onto the dark-shingles of the garage roof. The tree and barn swallows eat these eggshell bits all spring and summer. I know it's early, but it felt good to start yet another spring ritual: The Feeding of the Eggshells.

Also in full song this morning: eastern meadowlarks, eastern bluebirds, house finches, a red-shouldered hawk, and all the usual suspects (cardinals, chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, woodpeckers, song sparrow, wild turkey) joined by some het-up dark-eyed juncos who are getting a head start on their spring concertos.

Here's a heads-up for your ears. I'm going to be a guest on the Martha Stewart radio show "Living Today" today at 2:30pm. This show is available for subscribers to Sirius/XM satellite radio, on channel 112. I realize that not everyone subscribes to Sirius/XM but you can sign up for a free three-day Internet trial subscription on their website.

I've been on the MSL show several times before, usually being interviewed via the telephone. But last May I was in New York City for a variety of events and I was invited into the Sirius Radio studios for an interview, which was pretty cool. Today's spot will be a phoner from Whipple. We'll be talking about bird feeding and the approaching spring migration.

I'm hoping the wind quiets down a bit—it's howling this morning as I write this—loudly enough to be heard over the phone!

For the past 20 years of my birding life I've tried to start each new year off with a good bird, an exciting field trip, or at least SOME sort of birding activity. This, unfortunately, often comes into conflict with the revelry of New Year's Eve, especially in years when I am playing music for someone's party. Arriving home in the wee hours of New Year's Day, crashing hard, then waking up well after the sun's appearance has usually meant that the new year starts off with a cup of coffee at 11 am, accompanied by a bleary cardinal or two at the feeders.

I always note my first bird of the year. Last year it was an American goldfinch. I'll tell the tale of this year's first bird in a future post.

The subject of today's post is the first stop on the birding trip Julie and I took on New Year's Day with our pal Shila. We called all the members of The Whipple Bird Club to organize an impromptu field trip for January 1. The fact that it was already nearly noon on January 1 was of no concern.


Shila could make it. Steve could not. Our destination was The Wilds, a recovering strip mine about 40 minutes north of Indigo Hill. The soil there is too poor to support trees, so it remains grassland and thus attracts birds that prefer vast open spaces: northern harriers, rough-legged hawks, short-eared owls, horned larks are just some of the winter species regularly found at The Wilds.

Before we could head north, we had to head south into town to drop of kids at my folks' house and to pick up Shila. En route to Shila's abode my cell phone rang. It was Steve.

"Billy! I've got a bird here that's different. Can you help me ID it?"

Now I know enough about Steve's birding skills to realize that he would not be fooled by a female red-winged blackbird, a leucistic house sparrow, or a winter-plumaged starling.

"I think it's something good."

We high-tailed it to Steve's and this is what we saw at his thistle feeders:






Steve had found a common redpoll among the 30 or so pine siskins at his feeders. We waited for about 40 minutes before the redpoll showed up and when it did, Steve's the one who spotted it for us. This was a great bird to see so early in a new birding year!

From the reports I've heard this is a big pine siskin year and a big white-winged crossbill year here in Ohio. We've had siskins at the Indigo Hill feeders for a month, but no other special northern finches have visited us (evening grosbeaks, crossbills, redpolls). However Steve's bird gives us all reason to check through the feeder flocks.

I first saw common redpolls at the Thompson family feeders in Marietta, Ohio in the winter of 1978—the very same year we started Bird Watcher's Digest. They came in with some evening grosbeaks and siskins and stayed for more than a month. They all came back the following year, too—both '78 and '79 were fierce winters. Little did I know it would be 14 more years before I'd see redpolls in Ohio again. We've had two visits—both short and more than a decade ago—from common redpolls at Indigo Hill. The last one we saw here was in 1994.

So this lone female common redpoll is a special bird, seen with great birding pals, on the very first day of a new year. Here's hoping 2009 turns out to be a special, memorable birding year for all of us!

First thing this morning, while I was talking on the telephone with a hick buddy from West Virginny, the death rocket came blasting past the studio window.

This was a big female sharp-shinned hawk and she swooped up into feet-forward position to grab a male northern cardinal. Her piercing talons must have killed the redbird instantly because he hung limp as she pumped her wings and propelled the two of them into the sumac thicket. Entering the thicket at full speed, she turned just so, and did not disturb a single snowflake from the branches as she passed.

The entire event took less than three seconds. The sharpie was in blurry, fluid motion the entire time. Many of the birds at the feeders next to the birch tree were so surprised that they did not have time to react. And in the aftermath, no one dared visit the feeders for half an hour, despite the ice and snow covering everything.

Nature red in tooth and claw...

An adult female yellow-bellied sapsucker showed up at the peanut feeder today. Zick had noticed that the peanut consumption was way up and the peanuts in the feeder were way down, and wondered why—even going so far as to wonder specifically about a sapsucker.

I think she may have even conjured this bird. It's been years since we've had a sapsucker at the feeders regularly. I'm hoping this gal stays for a spell. We've got lots of peanuts on hand—she can eat all she wants.

Happy Friday everyone.