Ciblek Mania

There's a new episode available of my podcast "This Birding Life."

This episode (#36!) is a new type, I'm calling "Ear Candy" because it's audio-only. This is my attempt at creating shorter (but I hope no less interesting) episodes in between the longer episodes that come in both audio and enhanced audio (with images) formats. The longer episodes (I'm working on one about birding in Israel right now) take me a much longer time to create, which often means there are long lags between episodes. Which is why I'm hoping that Science can perfect cloning soon.


This episode "Sounds of Spring at Indigo Hill" is built with audio field recordings I did with my iPhone. And there's a bit of narration tossed in between. I hope you like it.

I'd also like to thank Carl Zeiss Sports Optics for their sponsorship support of "This Birding Life" and Podcast Central.

I am working from the farm for the next 10 days or so, trying to get some writing done on the next book project. It's a bleak, raw day here—every single thing seems to be some shade of gray, drab olive, or brown. The utterly bare branches of the deciduous trees, devoid of swelling buds, beseech the sky to let the sun come out to play. Even the normally cheery carmine red of the northern cardinals seems subdued. 'Round these parts we call this book-writin' weather. May as well, it's too muddy and bone-chilling to be outside.

There are a couple of subtle signs of spring among the feathers. And for this I am truly thankful.

• The male American goldfinches are showing just a few small spots of bright yellow spring finery.
• Stick your head outside and you'll hear spring singing already! Cardinal, white-breasted nuthatch, tufted titmouse, Carolina chickadee, American robin, Carolina wren, and song sparrow are all in spring tune-up mode.
• The red-tailed hawks at the end of our driveway are perching a bit closer together each day. One day soon they'll be close enough to touch each other, and we all know what happens next boomchickywahwahchickywahwah.
• And finally, now, when I see a Carolina wren, I nearly always see TWO Carolina wrens. A small wisp of moss on the bird feeder tells me they are already nest building in the copper bucket under the front door eave.

I admire our birds for how they carry on living despite the fact that the weather is bleak and cold. I'd admire them even more if one of them would get in here and help me finish this book chapter.

OK the bleariness of the Ohio winter has settled in upon us and signs of spring, well, there are none! Sigh.

There's one specific sign that I look for each spring—one that lets me know that the ambient daytime temperatures are warm enough for there to be airborne insects. The air above our southeastern Ohio woods is peppered with gnats...

It's the return of the blue-gray gnatcatchers! They return in spring sometime in early April, usually around the 5th. Once they're back, they are with us until early October, giving away their presence with their high-pitched wheezing calls.

What's facing us now here in Ohio is about six months of gray skies and icky weather. Funny that a bird as gray as our winter skies can be such a harbinger of the joys and colors and music of spring.

I. Can't. Wait!

Oh how I wish our wonderpup, Chet Baker, Boston terrier, could be trained to find morel mushrooms using his highly sensitive nose. That would make him truly useful in ways that transcend his utility as a companion animal and terror to the bunnehs.

I LOVE all of spring's wondrous bounty: the returning songbirds, the hillsides bursting with blossoms, the greening of the landscape, the warmer weather, the almost vastly improved Pittsburgh Pirates...but right up there in my top five or so spring things is the ephemeral appearance of edible fungi.

We'll be eating morels most nights this week thanks to the wet spring and warming temps of recent sunny days. It's good to be alive.

Photo by Julie "Don't Say Anything Mean About Chet Baker" Zickefoose.

I found further proof, thanks to today's balmy weather, that writing about birds is much easier when you can write with the windows open, bird song floating in on the gentle breeze. Spring!

However there is this caveat: Spring in mid-March (at least here in southeastern Ohio) is a teasing vixen. She'll let you glimpse her rapturous beauty and catch a whiff of her sweet perfume, but reach out for her expectantly and she'll slap your face with three days of sleet and snow.


She'll make you watch while she coats the daffodils in frost and forces the timberdoodles to forage in roadside ditches. She'll bruise your heart with her apparent cold-hearted cruelty, but that's just spring's natural way of making you truly thankful when she arrives for real.

And on that day, each year, I drop to the ground and roll around in the new green grass, trying my best to hug the entire Earth.

Dear Readers:

My sincere apologies for the sparse and irregular posts of late. After my first Guyana post last Monday I had the very best of intentions last week about sharing some more from that trip but then life revved up into krazy-train mode. I blinked and it's another Monday!

I will try to do better this week. I hope you'll stick with me (I do appreciate your patience).

In other news the blue-gray gnatcatchers got in this morning on the farm. I heard my first brown thrasher of the spring on Sunday, and the eastern meadowlarks were battling it out over the meadow this morning. We watched them from the tower where we'd run hoping to identify three mystery ducks that flew over the hills to the west of us. No joy on the ducks, but the woods showed us its flimsy spring garments—the tree buds and blossoms exhibiting the most wishful thinking possible. We'll see if leaping into spring so soon is warranted or even advisable. I fear winter may yet have a face slap or two in its arsenal.

On of the birds whose arrival I note each year as a solid sign of spring is the blue-gray gnatcatcher. Male gnatties come back well before the leaves are out on most trees—and just after the male red-winged blackbirds have started conk-a-reeing in the cattails. How the gnatsters find anything to eat I'll never know, but they must.

I often hear this species before I see it. It has a high-pitched, sibilant call that sounds more like an angry mosquito than a territorial bird. Hearing the gnatcatcher's call I scan the treetops, hoping for a sign of movement—these are very active birds. But the gnatsnatcher's gray-on-gray plumage is a perfect match to the still-leaden winter skies, and I often miss seeing this tiny bug-eater of the treetops.

Gnatcatchers ARE very susceptible to spishing, however. And, as you can see from this series of photos, their curiosity sometimes brings them quite close to the spisher. Try it for yourself.

I'm glad that the gnatties come back early. Even though they don't add much color to the woods as some later-arriving migrants do, they add sound and activity and life, where everything else seems dormant, still slumbering under winter's sedation.

These images were taken on Easter Sunday at Camp Tupper, a park in Marietta, Ohio. The hill in this last image is ceremonial mound called the Quadranaou, built by the Hopewell Indians sometime between 100 B.C and 900 A.D. Growing up in Marietta, we kids in the neighborhood surrounding Camp Tupper called it the turtle mound because it was vaguely turtle shaped. It got the name Camp Tupper during the Civil War when Union soldiers used this park and Sacra Via nearby as camping and parade grounds.

Every April, the spring beauties carpet Camp Tupper—a reminder that spring is here and soon the trees will be full of migrant birds and the air full of their songs.

It's been spring, officially, for two weeks, but it's not really spring for us bird watchers until the good spring migrants start showing up. Don't get me wrong. I LOVE the hardy early arrivers: pine warblers, tree swallows, chipping sparrows, brown thrashers. But it seems so much more wonderful when the wood thrushes, chestnut-sided warblers, great crested flycatchers, and Baltimore orioles show up.

So I guess I am trying my level best to hurry the seasons along. Despite the advice of all the New Age gurus that we must "live in the moment and not "wish our lives away." When it comes to anticipating the special birds of spring, I'm totally ready to forget today if tomorrow brings a dawn chorus of new arrivals.

Some other spring signs:

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.