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Author Archive | Dan Greaney

Go Listen to the Cattails!

By on March 25, 2023 in BirdWords

Marsh Wren Singing

The cattails are chattering, chittering, burbling, trilling, and buzzing! The noises of spring, evidence of things not seen, are pouring forth! And now is the best time to actually see the maestros of the marsh!

Responsible for most of the cattail chatter you’ll likely hear are marsh wrens. They are quintessential and versatile singers, storming the reeds with song from their little walnut-sized bodies. Some have stayed around all winter, quietly tucked into the tules. Now the longer and warmer days draw them out from their hideaways, both down in the ditches and down south.

Males are busy building many nests throughout their marshy turf, and scolding away invaders–other male marsh wrens, too-forward blackbirds, poking egrets, and passing people. The nests are about a yard above water, big hollow softballs of reeds with a small entrance hole, all tied to surrounding vegetation. When a female arrives, with song and fluttering he will give her a guided tour of his six or ten or twenty nests. If she sees him as energetic enough to keep local predators away and help feed the fledglings, and if his territory is biologically rich enough to provide abundant insects and snails, she will line one of his nests with soft vegetation and feathers, and there incubate a handful of eggs.

A second and even a third female will receive the same treatment from the male, and the new females will make similar instinctive calculations.

All the parents seek to protect resources for their children, and will pierce the eggs or nestlings of competitors–usually blackbirds or other wrens. The birds are conducting their own sub-humane warfare, each parent liable to the same treatment it tries to deliver.

Eggs hatch after two weeks of incubation. Both parents feed the blind and naked babies, who in another two weeks turn bugs into a nest full of young birds as big as their parents.

Eventually the young will grow their adult feathers–buffy browns, a white-ish eyebrow, and decorative black and white-lined plumes on their back. Good luck seeing them! Now, while they’re out courting, is the time!

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Still Aliens?

By on March 3, 2023 in BirdWords

Starlings may offer us a mirror as much as a window, but let’s look through the window at this versatile, widespread, up-and-down species.

Starlings are ubiquitous in North America, living from Alaska to Florida and from Labrador to Baja California.  They typically follow human development, preferring lands cleared for agriculture, golf courses, or parking lots.  In winter they gather in vast herds which can descend on open fields and scour them like locusts, their quick-scuttling movements prodding some to call them “winged vermin.”  But then they leap into the air where, as a flock and perhaps with other blackbirds, they dance in beautiful murmurations, the wheeling starbursts of motion that 1990’s screen-savers sought to emulate and that have been filmed and set to classical music.

Starlings are one of our blackbirds, not taxonomically but functionally.  They’re the chunky ones with stubby tails and, in flight, wings that extend like isosceles triangles.  They walk quickly, their heads bobbing like chickens’.  The new feathers they grow each fall are tipped white gold, creating a winter plumage that can surprise viewers who have close-up or binocular looks.  Over the winter months their bright spots wear away, leaving spring birds with an iridescent black coat shining behind a bill that turns a sunny yellow.

Males woo females by establishing a nest site.  They are aggressive, and will harass other birds–flycatchers, bluebirds, ducks, etc.– from a woodpecker hole to claim it for their own.  They will stuff the cavity with plant and animal debris, from pine needles to trash, and form a hollow inside.  Sufficiently impressed, the female will make her finishing touches and lay a handful of eggs.  The parents will share incubation duties for twelve days, and then feed the young in the nest until they fledge three weeks later.

European Starling Feeding Nestling

Starlings are social and socially adept, if not always friendly.  Vocally they are first-rate mimics of other birds. In murmurations they coordinate their synchronized flights by attending to and following the birds right near them.  They have been reported playing–taking turns sliding down a metal roof with morning frost. When they have disputes, over, say, territory, starlings are plain-spoken.  A bird wanting to enforce its turf will simply encroach on another’s space until, sidling down the wire or branch, the second bird runs out of space and flutters away. Not much nuance in problem-solving for these birds.

The starlings in America are not native, but European.  They were introduced into New York’s Central Park in the 1890’s by Shakespeare fans who wanted to import all the birds the bard mentioned.  In the hundred-thirty years since, they have followed the development of European-cum-Americans across the continent.  The birds have not had time to genetically diversify, and their rapid expansion is now in reverse.  As it is with many songbirds, there are about half as many starlings in North America as there were when we celebrated our first Earth Day.

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Shovelers Don’t Shovel

By on January 31, 2023 in Birds, BirdWords

Northern Shoveler Pair

Who would have thought it? Shovelers have been around much longer than shovels! The oldest known shovels, rough tools made of wood and sometimes a shoulder blade, are less than 4000 years old, whippersnappers like the folks who made them. Shovelers, on the other hand, are ducks, which, allowing for some evolution, date back to sixty-five million years ago, about the time dinosaurs proper were going extinct.

Of course, for purposes of our understanding and communication, we are the ones giving out names, and shoveler bills are broad, reminding us of our digging tools, and thus the name we use for them.

Northern Shoveler Drake

But shoveler bills are not for digging. Their broad bills, like those of many dabbling ducks, are edged with comb-like ridges. No, ducks don’t have teeth. Crowns and root canals are not required. Rather their bills are bony cores covered in keratin sheathes–think fingernail material. The keratin edge is scalloped into ridges that catch small aquatic crustaceans and seeds as the ducks squeeze water through, just as on a larger scale whales net krill in their baleen. Shoveler bills are for filter-feeding, not digging.

In their long history of acquiring food, shovelers have learned a further trick: the benefit of cooperation. As they  squeeze water through their bills they often paddle in a tight circle with a friend, or twenty or more friends. Apparently this action creates a tornado-current that pulls up foodstuff from deeper in the water, making the foraging more profitable for everyone involved. One can only imagine how they learned that stratagem.

It seems to have worked. Our species, the northern shoveler, prospers at mid-northern latitudes around the globe, mainly from western North America through Siberia to Scandinavia. Each summer a mated pair settles on a quiet pond or wetland. As with other ducks, the female raises the young on her own. She forms a scrape in the reeds or fields nearby, and there lays about ten eggs, which she incubates for over three weeks. When the young hatch, she quickly leads them to the water, where they feed and grow under her watchful eye, until they fledge after about seven weeks more.

Now that winter and water have returned to the North State, so have the northern shovelers. You can spot them, in small groups or by the hundreds, on quiet waters–the males with rusty red flanks and tuxedo-white breasts, the females in dappled browns. Her bill is orange, his black. The bills of  both are noticeably large–but they remain bills, not shovels.

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An Avian Santa Claus

By on January 3, 2023 in BirdWords

Pileated Woodpecker Female

Santa Claus isn’t the only one in a pointy red cap who flies around in winter handing out presents. Pileated woodpeckers do, too. As a matter of fact, they fly year round, delivering gifts through large swaths of North American forests, mostly south of the reindeer.

Pileated woodpeckers thrive among big trees. They prosper in west coast conifers and arc across Canada into deciduous forests throughout the eastern US. Among the big trees, they build and deliver their gifts as only these largest woodpeckers in North America can.

Their gifts are staples of life–food and shelter. Their tools for delivering them are those of carpentry, or maybe jack-hammering–tools of woodpeckers generally, but writ large in these crow-sized birds.

First they need a firm foundation for their hammering. The three toes forward and one back that most birds have would be comparatively unstable. Woodpeckers instead have on each foot two toes forward and two back. This allows a solid grip at the variety of angles at which woodpeckers work.

Further, woodpeckers have stiff tails that function with their feet to create a sturdy tripod from which to work.

Well anchored, woodpeckers still need a stout, strong bill to pound and pry. These birds regularly punch wood at about fifteen miles per hour. With what are probably the continent’s most heavy-duty natural chisels, pileated woodpeckers excavate gaping holes in dead trees. However, the abrupt deceleration of smacking their heads into solid wood creates impacts up to fifteen times what humans can sustain–impacts that would shut down the NFL with concussion injuries. All their concussive pounding requires some protection for these bird brains. Fortunately, they have it.

Human hyoid bones, which anchor our tongues, are firmly based at the top of our throats. Woodpecker hyoid bones are anchored at the base of their upper bill and flex in two bands over and around the brain before curving up under it to root the tongue. This limber anatomy creates extra elastic length for the tongue, allowing woodpeckers to probe deeply after insects in their excavations. It also lets the hyoid bone act as a sort of seat belt around the brain, tightening against destructive sloshing inside the skull.

The hyoid can’t reduce the pounding to zero, however, and woodpeckers have another brain-protecting design. Their brains are oriented more vertically than ours. That spreads out the force of frontal impact over a larger area of the brain, effectively dissipating the blow of each whomp on wood.

With these tools for effective and sustainable wood-carving, the woodpeckers can make their gifts–presents not wrapped up with a bow but offering vitals to their forest neighborhoods.

The large, often rectangular feeding holes that pileated woodpeckers create expose their prime food, carpenter ants, to not just themselves but to wrens and other birds, too, a feast any time of year.

And their nesting cavities? The excavations of smaller woodpeckers often end up as homes for smaller birds–swallows, titmice, nuthatches, chickadees, bluebirds, etc. But pileated woodpecker cavities are super-sized, and can provide homes for bigger forest and woodland residents: numerous ducks–mergansers, buffleheads, and wood ducks; owls of various kinds; other woodpeckers that are upsizing; and many mammals, including squirrels, flying squirrels, different bat species, pine martens, and raccoons.

The efforts of pileated woodpeckers are a boon to the forests. Each year mated pairs select one of their many holes and there raise their brood of three to five young, ensuring that this avian Santa Claus keeps giving.

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Cinnamon Teal – spice on the water

By on November 23, 2022 in BirdWords

Seasonal colors, check! Pumpkin spices, check! Plentiful food and gathering with family? Check and check! Cinnamon teals are birds of the season! Turkeys notwithstanding.

Their color is brilliant autumn rust, a very red cinnamon.

The spice, of course, is in their name.

Feasting? That’s what the season is for: they dine and rest in preparation for raising young next spring.

And gathering with family? Cinnamon teals often feed together in tight groups, but they are not so numerous that they cover lakes the way some ducks and geese do. Fortunately, they seem to have an inclusive attitude, and readily paddle among other ducks on the ponds– adding spice to the mix, one might say.

Cinnamon Teal Drake

Cinnamon Teal Drake

Teals are small dabbling ducks. The dabblers are ducks who feed not by diving but by skimming aquatic plants and insects from the surface or tipping tail-up to stretch below water to gather snails from the bottom of their shallow ponds. Cinnamon teal, with relatively large bills perfect for filtering surface water, often skim the top of a pond near the cattails and tules that ring it.

Along those tules a male may establish a favored resting spot, perhaps in the morning sun. There his fiery eye and brilliant rust-colored head and lower body can shine. If he stretches a wing he shows a green patch at the hind end of his upper wing, the teal color that defines this group. Forward of that color patch, known as a speculum, he shows an even larger strip of powdery blue feathers. But he does not always shine so brightly.

Ducks are heavy birds, and their aerodynamics require them to fly fast or not at all. That requires all their feathers to be in good form. Most birds molt, or replace their feathers, piecemeal, but ducks doing so would be flight-compromised for a long time. Instead they lose all their large feathers at once, becoming completely flightless for a much shorter period. Male ducks typically enter this phase after their young have hatched. They lose their bright colors and their flight feathers. Brown camouflage feathers grow in, and they retire from public life for a couple months. By mid to late fall they will grow colorful new feathers, including flight feathers

Cinnamon Teal Female

The timing works well. The females have raised their ducklings, and the young have fledged and flown. She is ready to start looking for a mate for next year just as he is freshly dressed to impress. She will study the males as they preen and strut for her attention, and make her selection. The pair will bond over the winter.

The female runs nesting. She builds her nest in dead pond-side vegetation, often under overhanging reeds that require her to tunnel into the den. There she will incubate 4-16 eggs, sometimes including eggs donated by a female from another species. When the young hatch in about three weeks she will guide them for a couple months, until they take wing to spread their own spice.

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