The Change to Summer Birds

I keep the bird feeders filled with sunflower seeds and cracked corn year round.  Although the diet never changes, the species of birds visiting the feeder vary from season to season.  The last few weeks has seen the arrival of what I think of as the summer visitors.  Many of these, like this Blue Grosbeak, would be difficult to view if they didn’t regularly visit the feeder.

Even though they are permanent residents in this area, I rarely see Brown-headed Cowbirds in the winter.  During the summer, I routinely see them at the feeder.  They are also to be found stationed atop the tallest trees around the property, watching to spot nest locations in which to lay their eggs.

A gathering place for birds that don’t typically visit the feeder is the vegetable garden.  Brown Thrashers patrol back and forth along the vegetable rows, plucking larvae from the plants and pulling grubs or cutworms from the soil.

Chipping Sparrows search the garden for both seeds and insects.  This guy kept chasing and eating some type of insect moving quickly across the planting beds.  He captured several in just a couple of minutes, but I never got a look at what he was hunting.

Field Sparrows have found the mulch of cut grass in the garden to be ideal nest material.  They are frequently seen leaving with mouths full of the fine grass stems and leaves.  The top of the fence is  a favorite perch.

Bluebird pairs seem to find an abundance of suitable insects inside the garden boundaries.  The female sits on one post …

… and the male usually sits on the next post over.  When an insect is spotted, they will fly down to pick it up and then return to the post.

With all of those garden insects to feed on, it’s no surprise that the Bluebird couple claimed the bird box nearest the garden.

The female has just begun incubating this clutch of five eggs, so I probably won’t be seeing much of her for the next couple of weeks.  After that, she’ll be busy ridding the garden of insect pests in order to feed her growing family.

With their aerial displays and propensity to chatter, Tree Swallows are usually the most noticeable of the summer birds at Blue Jay Barrens.  These birds were uncommon here 25 years ago.  When I first installed bird boxes, they were all occupied by Bluebirds of Chickadees.  Now, 80 percent of the box inhabitants are Tree Swallows.  The shallow pool of water at the site of my new toad pool construction has been getting a lot of attention from the swallows.

The area that has been stripped of vegetation seems to be a preferred site for the collection of nest material.

The final phase of Tree Swallow nest building is the addition of feathers around the rim of the nest.  The birds almost always use feathers from domesticated chickens or ducks.  The battling Wild Turkey males leave an almost daily offering of feathers in my yard, but the Tree Swallows don’t find them of interest.  Maybe they just have a preference for white feathers.

No Tree Swallow eggs have yet been laid, but I imagine that will change soon.  By the time the last of hatchlings leave the nest in late summer, the resident population of Tree Swallows will be about four times what it is now.

World's Longest Bluebird

It’s wonderful having a digital camera handy to capture visual evidence of unusual sightings.  Without a clear photograph, no one would believe that I saw the World’s Longest Bluebird.  The Bluebird’s head is clearly visible at the top of the stump and there’s no mistaking the authenticity of the Bluebird wing tips and tail showing below.  I believe that this specimen tops the typical seven inch individual by at least a foot.  This was a remarkable creature to view.  I’m only sorry that I couldn’t get a picture of it in flight.

Bluebirds have been abundant this year.  I believe the resident birds have been joined by some returning from farther south.  Until today, none of them seemed to be unusually elongated.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a body of this length required a secondary posterior nerve cluster or brain to control its rear half.  Unfortunately, the position of the tree trunk makes it necessary to speculate on the proportions and positioning of body parts on what must obviously be a long, serpentine avian body. 

Further observation of this unusual specimen proved devastating to my long bird theory.  When the Bluebird finally took to the air, the two halves went in different directions.  Even though current evidence suggests that my earlier photo was in fact showing parts of two different birds, I’m not yet ready to abandon the idea that there may be a super long Bluebird at Blue Jay Barrens.  It’s entirely possible that there were two normal Bluebirds hidden from my sight and that these two birds flew just as my long bird slithered away down the tree trunk.  I’ll be keeping watch for stretched Bluebirds from now on.

A pair of normally proportioned Bluebirds has taken up residence in the hole that was earlier excavated by the Red-belliedWoodpecker.  It’ll be fun to have these birds nesting so close to the house.  I just wish I could turn the tree around a bit, so the nest hole would be visible from the window.

Eating Cedar Berries

As far as I can tell, Eastern Red Cedar fruit production was about average this year. It’s hard to estimate because most of the fruit is in the upper half of the tree. Only a small percentage of trees have any fruits low enough on the tree for easy viewing.

Big cedars can produce quite a load of fruit. This tree could easily produce a crop of fruit with seed enough to cover Blue Jay Barrens. Cedar fruit supports large flocks of birds through the winter and dropped seed produces an army of cedar seedlings trying to infiltrate the prairies.

Here’s an example of why I don’t post many bird pictures. On this day, Bluebirds were feeding on the fruit. They would come out to the branch tips to gather some fruit and then disappear back into the greenery to find a branch stout enough to sit on. You could hear them moving about inside the tree, but you never knew where they would come into view.

When I got too close, the bluebirds took refuge in a nearby Tuliptree. Remnants of the old flowers combined with Bluebirds and blue skies make this appear to be a spring scene. I can almost imagine the fragrance of the early spring blossoms.

The birds must have felt secure at the top of the tree. While I wandered around looking for a suitable angel for photos, they conducted some personal grooming. Eventually they moved on to some cedars farther down the ridge. I wandered off in a different direction and left them to their meal.

Bird House Tenants

All of the bird boxes are occupied for round one of the Bluebird/Tree Swallow nesting season. After checking all of the boxes, I found that instead of only one pair of nesting Bluebirds as I mentioned yesterday, there were actually two boxes that contained Bluebird nests. I my error came about by assuming that seeing a pair of Tree Swallows sitting atop the box meant that they were the owners. I don’t know what the Bluebirds were up to that they would let Tree Swallows have such easy access to their nest site.

There was really a lot of material used to create this nest. It’s possible that the base was started by another pair of birds and the Bluebirds stole the box and built their own nest on top. I’ll dissect the nest when I clean out the box to see if this was the case.

Four eggs so far. I would expect one more before brooding begins. It looks like the boxes are doing a good job of staying dry, despite the downpours that seem to occur every couple of days.

No eggs yet in the Tree Swallow nest, but it’s already looking dirty. I think the birds found some of the feathers that were cleaned out of the box last year and used them again. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that happen before. I know that Tree Swallows can really mess up a nest, but they should at least start with clean building materials.

Planting Bluebird Seeds

If you guessed high fiber breakfast cereal, you’re wrong. This is what I cleaned out of a nest box that was being used as a winter roost by several Bluebirds. I had four boxes that were heavily used by wintering Bluebirds this year. Are you wondering why I saved a bowl full of the mess?

Bluebirds wintering in Ohio, subsist primarily on berries. The flesh of the berries is digested by the birds, but the seeds pass on through. This causes the roost boxes to accumulate a collection of seeds along with the organic fertilizer. This journey through the bird benefits the seed. The seed coat is weakened by the digestive juices and leaves the seed in perfect condition to absorb moisture and germinate.

Here’s a sample of some of the seeds in the mix. I can recognize Eastern Red Cedar and some type of grape, but I have no ID on most of them. We had a lot of shrubs this year that carried fruit long into the winter, so there are many possible candidates.

I decided to plant the nest box cleanings and see what germinated. I always keep a few pots full of compost handy for just such an undertaking. There are probably a lot of other seeds that are already in the pot, but all tree or shrub seedlings should come from the Bluebirds.

The planting area was made available courtesy of a squirrel that didn’t want me to raise a blueberry bush in the end pot. I had seven pots, each with a different type of blueberry that I was starting. Every day, the squirrel dug a hole in the center of the end pot and pushed the blueberry bush onto the ground. I replanted the bush each time. I tried moving the pot to the other end of the bunch and the squirrel followed. I finally found the bush chewed into little pieces. Hopefully, the squirrel won’t have any objections to a shrub collection growing here.

Bluebird Boxes

I’ve noticed the Bluebirds beginning to pair off and stake out their preferred nesting box, so I went out yesterday evening to check for nesting material. This is the oldest active box I have. It may look a little bit shabby, but last year it successfully fledged two nests of Bluebirds and one of Tree Swallows. No sign that nest building has begun for this year.

This ant hill sprang up four years ago, just a couple of months after I put up this box. I haven’t seen any ants attempt to climb up to the nest. The black plastic tubing may be a deterrent. I buried the bottom of the tubing to discourage anything from climbing up through the inside of the pipe.

This box was made by the local FFA class. Several Bluebirds have roosted here through the winter. They’ve made a bit of a mess around the entrance hole.

They’ve also made a mess inside. Bluebirds exist primarily on fruit through the winter, so their droppings are usually full of seeds. I cleaned a bunch of poop and seeds out of this box about two weeks ago, so all of this has accumulated since then. Insects should soon make up the bulk of the Bluebird diet.

The seeds I cleaned out before represented a wide variety of fruits. This batch is entirely from Eastern Red Cedar. Cedar fruits are generally plentiful through the year, unless one of the giant Starling flocks moves in and decides to stay for a while. Starlings love to gorge on the fruit and scatter the seeds all over the prairies.