Late season nesting

What: Last week I spotted a female robin (Turdus migratorius) bouncing around in the slippery elm (Ulmus rubra) at the corner of my house. It was so neat to watch because the bird almost had an architectural eye when looking at the tree. I imagined it looking at angles of branches, sturdiness of limbs, relative hiddenness of the entryway access to food and water. She investigated for quite awhile, bouncing every so often to a new vantage point to reassess the quality of her new domicile. I had followed her to the spot because I heard a male robin singing and I hadn't heard one in a while. When I went to investigate I saw the female in my driveway picking up nesting material and then dropping it (female robins alone build the nest and incubate the eggs). It was like she was doing a full inspection of the territory for quality of supplies and location. This week I checked in again on her progress and she is now sitting on some eggs (not sure how many yet, will report back later).

Robins nest made mostly of mud with
twigs, grass, and bark strips (Ruby Mtns, Nevada)

Ecological notes: Last year a pair nested on the light outside our neighbor's door, the year prior they nested on the floodlight on my garage and fledged three young. I was bummed this year when we didn't have any nesting robins for most of the spring. What a treat though to have this pair, and so late in the year too. Most birds are done nesting by now and have started flocking together in larger groups (Monday I spotted about 50 geese honking and flying towards the lake).

Robins can have two to three clutches in a year, so I'm assuming that this is the second or third for this female this year. In general male robins are a darker gray, with a darker patch of slate on top of their heads, females tend to be browner. Lots of sources I read just parrot other sources, so I don't know how reliable they are. Apparently males have more robust streaks on their throats than females, but I don't know how reliable this is since it's a relative comparison. I'm in out of town right now (the photos are a couple days old), but when I get back I'm excited to look closer at their throats. Since the females are the only ones that sit on the eggs, that should be a pretty easy thing to study. The one sitting on the  Males are definitely the only ones that sing though.

Where: My backyard

Other notes: Robins are one of three types of birds we have that use mud to build their nests, phoebes and swallows being the other two in Vermont. I've watched a robin dip a stick in mud and carry it to the nesting site. You can see in the above photo that the nest also incorporates twigs, grass, and strips of plastic. Phoebe and barn swallows are pictured below:

Phoebe nest made primarily of moss, (Shelburne Farms)

Barn swallow nest made mostly of mud and grass (Bread and Butter Farm)

Mourning doves

What: We've got a pair of mourning doves (Zenaida macroura) that started to build a nest in a boxelder (Acer negundo) at the end of our street. I watched the male bring supplies to the female all morning. It was a hot and listless day and the female was yawny waiting for the male to return with sticks (for more on how to identify male vs. female, check out: The Secret Life of the Mourning Dove by Michele Patenaude; in short males are larger, have rosier chests, and have more irridescent heads).

As is evident in the video, it appeared as though the male was testing the strength of each twig/pine needle to be added to the nest by banging it against the ground. Flimsy ones were discarded, sturdier ones brought back. It was fun to watch him pick through the bounty of needles and twigs in search of the perfect ones. I was in and out all morning, but I'm pretty sure the male worked on this for about 6 or 7 hours before my sister and I left the house. By the following afternoon it was abandoned for whatever reason.

A finished mourning dove nest is kind of a disaster so it was hard to tell that it had even been abandoned. I found one a few years ago with Ian Worley and I asked if it was old because it looked like it was in awful shape. He said that was par for the course and the active nests I've seen since then look almost like the birds don't really care at all for craftsmanship or aesthetics. But I guess if you're building a nest in a scraggly tree like a boxelder you build a scraggly looking nest to blend in.

Ecological notes: The nest went unfinished and I think they selected a nearby site over the next couple of days after the video. Last Sunday, Brian was outside and watched the doves attacking a red squirrel. I went out and the red squirrel was coming down a white pine with feathers clinging awkwardly to its mouth. At least one of the mourning doves, and I can't really think of a more docile bird, were going crazy. So the video is from July 1st, 7 days before "the attack". I suspect that they rebuilt and soon after laid eggs. I don't know that the eggs had hatched yet, but my guess is that the doves defended their nest from the red squirrel and the red squirrel might have bit back, but not been actively hunting the doves.

Where: Burlington, VT in my backyard.

Other notes: The red squirrels have been extra bellicose the past couple weeks. It's amazing, I hadn't really seen any of them in my back yard for about two months - just an occasional sighting. But now that the fruits on our black walnut (Juglans cinerea) are swelling, they've been fighting off the gray squirrels like that's the last food source on earth. They start wailing at dawn and don't really stop. What's interesting is that the gray squirrels, though they are certainly submissive, have been equally vocal.

Also, there was a robber fly in my backyard today. I couldn't tell what kind it was nor could I tell what it was eating, but it was fun to watch it devour its meal in fits and starts.

European larch and a Crow's Nest

What: I've been watching the tamaracks (these are European Larch, Larix decidua) from a distance emerge into spring with this odd yellowish color. These little spur shoots have stacks of rings indicating previous year's growth.

Ecological notes: I climbed the tree to take a photo of the storm clouds dropping rain to the east over the Green Mountains. This patch of 3 larches are part of a larger plantation of trees adjacent to Centennial Field. As such they've got great lower limbs for climbing. I boosted myself up an all too healthy buckthorn and took these photos about 40' up one of the larches. The wind wasn't even that strong today but still made me uneasy - life in the sun ain't that easy (see video for a poor attempt to capture what caused my uneasiness). After about 20 minutes the two crows that I'd seen yesterday with nesting materials flew over and made a ruckus. With my arms hugging the bole like a frightened koala I twisted my head to watch them dip acrobatically down into the valley below. As the crows disappeared I spotted an old nest!! Or a new nest?!

Larch branches seem to break quite readily. In fact the whole tree has this appearance of someone who barely made it out of bed. Snapped branches litter the lower limbs, latent buds burst from every fissure on the bark, the bark turns a dead scraggly gray and flakes readily, and the new growth is a sickly grayish white. Yet it maintains it's own elegance (though certainly, at least to me, this peaks in the fall when it, unique among conifers, drops its needles. And so the crows' shabby little nest blended in perfectly with the dishelved backdrop. But again my mind wandered to the wind. On the edge the trees were like sails, and would be worse once the leaves fully emerged. Crows obviously don't get motion sickness. But imagine the nestlings - in a nest that barely has sides to it - perched up there in a good wind storm.

Where: Most of the larch in the Champlain Valley are plantation European varieties, these being no exception. There's one other European larch that I know of in Centennial Woods and it's a bit bigger than these - though I don't know exactly how old they are.

Other notes: I've found my desire to want to know challenged by my want to experience. While driving home tonight, the sunset was beautiful, and I thought of stopping at Overlook Park and snapping a photo, but didn't. I couldn't imagine trying to explain away the pink fire swallowing the horizon with the physics of light scattering.

And I started this blog in part to confront much of the misinformation about natural history (or at least plagiarism) rampant on the internet. One source quotes an esoteric piece of information from another source and then another source quotes the second, changes the text a bit, drops the citation, posts it and this gets reposted and changed to suit the new author's needs. Pretty quickly the initial attribution is dropped and nobody really knows the original source. Take the etymology of Tamarack (and alias for Larch, more properly applied to L. laricina, our native larch). Tamarack is supposedly a bastardized version of hackmatack, the Abenaki word for "wood good for snowshoes." In this case the original source is Charlotte Erichsen-Brown's 1979 book Medicinal and Other Uses of North American Plants, and even she doesn't cite her source (I don't have access to Gordon Day's Abenaki Dictionary so I can't verify this).

So now everyone can run around and say, Oh yeah, larch is great for making snow shoes without having actually tried. Hopefully most of what you'll read here is less recapitulation of other people's speculation and more (mis)information that at least comes from first-hand experience.