Is there a bright yellow bird with black wings in your vegetable garden poking among the salad greens? Or perhaps a drab female or juvenile bird (shown below)?
Whoosh! Fast moving birds circle, swoop, rise and fall as they eat flying insects. Swallows and swifts move so fast that it’s hard to identify them in flight. With one swift and six swallow species in our area(*) the first step is to decide: “Is that a Swallow or a Swift?“
This stop-action photo by Patrick bx (@bronxfxdc) makes it easy to see the differences described by audubon.org below.
Color: If the bird has any color, it’s a swallow. Chimney swifts are dark brown all over (see top image). Many swallows are colorful or iridescent. Most have white bellies.
Flight style: Chimney swifts flap their stiff wings so fast that they look like they flip on their body axis. Swallows bend their wings as they flap in “swallow-like” flight.
Perched? If the bird is perched or standing on the ground it’s a swallow. Chimney swifts cannot stand on the ground and cannot perch at all except to cling upright inside a chimney.
(photos from Patrick bx (@bronxfxdc) embedded tweet & the Crossley ID Guide to Eastern Birds via Wikimedia Commons; click on the captions to see the originals)
Mid to late summer is a good time to be a bird in Pennsylvania. Fruit is ripe, seeds are plentiful, insect food is everywhere and for raptors there are plenty of naive young animals to capture. With so much natural food available and with songbirds’ preference for insects in summer, birds are not dependent on backyard feeders in July.
You can safely bring in your bird feeders now. In fact, if you cannot clean your feeders every week, they are unsafe for birds. Highly pathogenic avian flu has ebbed this summer but there is apprehension that it will return during fall migration. And it’s not the only disease that kills birds.
Yesterday I encountered three dead or dying birds in my neighborhood within half a mile of each other: a house finch that fell over unless it propped itself on open wings, a dead fledgling robin standing in the street (below), and a fluffed house sparrow that could not walk.
Frozen in place: dead American robin fledgling standing in the street, 12 July 2022 (photo by Kate St. John)
I have no idea what was killing them. It could have been a different reason for each species. I do know that if it was contagious, finches and sparrows would have spread it at bird feeders.
Male song sparrows sing to claim territory and avoid fighting with rivals. Each male has a unique song that creates an audio boundary marker that other males are expected to honor. When a rival intrudes, the owner escalates with aggressive signals before he attacks. If you know what to look for, you can tell when a song sparrow is angry.
The owners reacted to the stuffed singing intruder as if he was real and escalated as follows:
When the intruder first arrived, the owner matched the intruder’s song. If this didn’t drive off the intruder …
The owner repeatedly flew and landed near the intruder, wing-waving and singing softly. “Wing waving” is vibrating one wing at a time. Soft song is more aggressive than shouting.
When none of this worked the owner attacked the intruder.
This video from the Univ of Washington shows the second step — wing waving and soft song — with narration by one of the researchers. Notice one wing raised and waved at 0:27. Wing raising is a happy greeting between male and female cardinals. Not so with song sparrows!
The stuffed intruder would not leave, even when the owner sang softly, so the owner attacked. Yow!
Barn swallow feeding young, 24 June 2018 (photo by Anthony Bruno)
3 June 2022
In early June in Pennsylvania, barn swallows have eggs or young still in the nest. By the end of the month their young will fledge and we’ll see them feeding.
Wood thrushes (Hylocichla mustelina) are back in Schenley Park after their winter sojourn in Central America.
Yesterday this one used his beautiful voice to claim a nesting territory near the Bartlett tufa bridge. Click here or on the screenshot below to hear him sing.
Of all the birds he wins “Best In Song.”
(photo from Wikimedia Commons, video by Kate St. John)
In your backyard, in a local park, or at hotspots on Lake Erie’s southern shore, this is the week to see beautiful warblers on migration in eastern North America. They fly overnight and fuel up during the day, flitting among new leaves on the hunt for insects. Here are just a few of the gems to look for, in photos by Steve Gosser.
May at last! For the next three weeks gorgeous birds will arrive on the south wind, some to nest, others to pause on their northward journey. With colors more vibrant than April’s wildflowers they suddenly appear among new green leaves. Red, yellow, blue, black and white, Christopher T’s photos show them at their best.
Male scarlet tanagers (Piranga olivacea) are not scarlet when they spend the winter in South America — instead they are green — but by the time they’re back home in the eastern U.S. they are the brightest red.
Kentucky warblers (Geothlypis formosa) highlight brilliant yellow with a black cap and mask. We are lucky to have this uncommon bird nesting in Pennsylvania. I-80 approximates the northern edge of their range.
Seed-eating birds use only their beaks to extract their food from shells and husks. Have you noticed how they do it?
At the feeder you may see them pick up a whole nut, crack the shell with their strong beaks and let the shell fall, then work on the seed inside their mouths with tongue and beak. They do the same with grassy seeds though we rarely see it.
Evening grosbeak and American goldfinch at the feeder, Nov 2012 (photo by Marcy Cunkelman)
This slow motion video of a field sparrow (Spizella pusilla) shows how he separates the “wheat” from the chaff. It’s a lot of mouth work for tiny seeds.
During the winter common grackles (Quiscalus quiscula) are mostly absent from Pennsylvania but in early March they head north to nest. Their return began this week with a trickle of solo birds on Tues 1 March which grew to small flocks of 5-7 on Thursday. Very soon large flocks will pass through on their way to Canada, taking over feeders and backyards as they did at Marcy Cunkelman’s in this 2005 photo.
Common grackles take over the yard, spring 2005 (photo by Marcy Cunkelman)
Even if you don’t see them you will hear the grackles announce themselves. Look to the treetops to see the males puff and “skrinnk!”
This week’s scouts are the early birds. More grackles are definitely on the way. Look at the difference in eBird reports between December-February and March-May!
eBird: Common grackle sightings, Dec-Feb past 10 years
eBird: Common grackle sightings, Mar-May past 10 years
Use eBird and your sightings will be added to the maps.
(photos from Marcy Cunkelman and Wikimedia Commons; distribution maps from eBird retrieved on 3 March 2022; click on the captions to see the originals)
