I’m a great fan of both kingbirds and kingfishers. The former flies over the ponds and bays I watch and nabs insects. It often rests on a perch at eye level with me, well, slightly higher, after all, it is a king.
But on May 26 I did get a photo of it lower to the pond.
Those who gave birds their scientific names did not mince matters, crowning the kingbird with the name Tyrannus tyrannus. Worse than a king, or better from its point of view, this bird is a tyrant.
So I watched it fly off its perch and catch insects, always failing to get an adequate video of it, but in the short clip below you can get a sense of its hauteur. The call you hear in the video is not made by the kingbird who is rather quiet as kings go.
That sideways glance strikes me as a kingly gesture and I often see the kingbird pose like that. Here is a photo I took in June as I was in a kayak and a kingbird reigned along a section of South Bay.
Back to the May video: as you can see, I was sitting in a perfect spot to get more and perhaps more dramatic video but my camcorder wasn’t ready when the king was deposed. A bird known in Latin as Quiscalus quiscula, further humbled with the everyday name of “common grackle”
flew almost on top of the kingbird and drove it from its perch and any perch in the near vicinity. The kingbird departed silently. The common grackle, well, it grackled, from a high perch looking not so common.
And the common grackle was not finished. A kingfisher was also working the pond. Just as the kingbird rules the insects, the kingfisher holds sway over fish. I didn’t get a photo of the kingfisher working the pond that day but the over the years I have. Here is my best photo which I took on September 1, 2011:
Here is a video I took at a small pond at our land in 2002, that era of just adequate camcorders and editing software, that captures the noisy flight of the bird and its aggressive demeanor.
I am sure I have a video of a kingfisher diving into the Lost Swamp Pond but I haven’t found it yet. One was diving into the pond on May 26 but just too far away to get a good video.
Then I saw the kingfisher fly off a tall tree angling lower over the pond. At the same time the common grackle that had bullied the kingbird flew at the kingfisher forcing it to dive unceremoniously into the pond. Really the kingfisher seemed to bounce of the water, or pivot, because it made a rapid retreat from the lording common grackle. It all happened too quickly to take a video of that.
Why did the grackle go to all that trouble?
Like the kingbird, the grackle feasts on the insects spawned by and attracted to the pond. But grackles generally pick them off logs or off they perch on logs and sticks floating or leaning low over the water and pick the bugs they can reach off the water.
They also fly into trees a pick the bugs off the leaves. They don’t flutter up and pick insects out of the air.
The grackle doesn’t dive in the water so it should have no bone to pick with a kingfisher. There were other grackles around the pond. I saw them perched high on a dead tree. The same one kingfishers use but on lower branches.
I’ve never noticed birds competing for perches and there were plenty of dead trees in and around the pond and dead tree branches and pointed remnants of trunks around the pond.
So maybe the grackle was showing off for the other grackles making it a tough day for kings in the Lost Swamp Pond.
In late May 2011 I noticed a beaver cutting the willow saplings in a pond not larger than a typical backyard swimming pool and its surrounding patio.
Ten days later I saw the beaver, and it saw me.
I got into the habit of going down in the late afternoon and watching the beaver cut willows.
I had seen beavers in that small pond before, once there were two beavers there in the spring. The pond typically dries up in July but as late as June 21 I saw the beaver dragging a long willow sapling over to its burrow.
Then sometime in late June it moved down to a much larger pond down a wooded hill, leaving plenty of willows behind and those that it cut would soon grow back. On July 1 I saw it eating pond weed in its new, larger, and deep pond.
It also ate the roots of some of the many water lilies in the pond.
We had water lilies blooming there for years but not as many as in the summer of 2011. On July 12, I could tell by the muddy water that the beaver had eaten many water lilies, but there were plenty thriving in the pond.
Beavers had lived in the pond over the years, sometimes two at a time, though none had successfully bred, but I had never seen one of them eating the lily roots or lilies. All the beavers who came to the pond moved up from White Swamp, a huge wetland a quarter mile downstream, where there are acres of water lilies.
For years I thought beavers came up to the pond on our land to get at more saplings and trees, but not this new beaver. Mostly it just ate the water lilies.
As the close up photos and videos I got suggest that beaver and I became pretty tight, especially when I sat in a lawn chair I always kept next to the dam. From that angle I got my Facebook photo.
This month, May 2013, a year and a half later, I got a photo of the beaver yawning.
The good times were gone; so were the water lilies.
In the spring of 2012 another beaver moved into the pond and it didn’t gorge on lily roots. It cut some maple saplings and honeysuckle. I was away much of the winter but by report knew the beavers stayed in the pond. When the snow melted I found ironwoods, ash trees, and nannyberries that had been cut by the beavers for winter chow. There was a long log near one of their burrows that had been completely stripped.
But my beaver friend had seemed to have no talent for cutting any but the smallest stalk, let alone a tree. At the end of March enough of the ice on the pond melted so that I could once again see my old friend. Before the grass grows, beavers usually cut trees. The beavers that I watch in the East Trail Pond on Wellesley Island were not at all shy about doing that.
On March 30 I saw something I never saw before. The beaver dug into its dam where it found a root that evidently had been pushed up with mud to make the dam higher in the fall.
Then the beaver disappeared for 6 weeks. I had one worry. Trapping season had not ended and some kid had traps along the creek down to White Swamp.
I think I happened by on the morning when the beaver returned. It swam sprightly and I noticed that it again dived in the shallows of the pond where I often saw it find lily roots. It climbed on shore, did some grooming
and then waded into the fresh green grass, I assumed for a meal. Seeing that it made itself at home again, the next week I walked around the pond every day to see what it might be eating. I saw a few nibbled honeysuckle branches and even a few scent mounds, but no stripped logs that proved to me that the beaver had a square meal.
Then came that yawning day. It was very disconcerting to me. I saw the beaver hunched on the shore near a bank lodge, under a thick wall of honeysuckles. But it wasn’t grooming like the jolly beaver I saw in 2011. It was on a tilt, looked like it could hardly hold itself up.
Then two chatty girls walked down the road near us, a rare occurrence. The beaver dove into the water, came up without anything to eat, nosed the nearby honeysuckle leaves hanging over the pond, but evidently had no taste for that and then climbed back up on shore. I left it just as I had found a half hour before, moping.
I came back after my dinner saw the beaver swimming toward me. I think it had just moved off the shore where I saw it in the afternoon because its fur seemed dry which means it was having a bad hair moment. It came swimming toward and paused just below me, and then turned and swam back to where it had been.
But it didn't climb back up on shore. It began trying to collect the pollen on the surface of the pond, an easy but meager meal I have seen beavers resort to in the spring.
I got the impression that the beaver was begging. Once every summer we cut some aspen saplings when they begin to shade our garden, and if there is a beaver in the pond nearby we offer the saplings to them. Over the years some beavers have almost eaten them out of our hands,
But this beaver was usually shy of eating even what supposedly is a beaver's favorite bark. I hurried up to the garden, broke of some leafy aspen saplings and hurried down to the beaver. It seemed to perk up, but didn't swim right over.
I left it and the next morning was pleased to see the aspen taken away. I brought down some more, but it floated untouched for many days. As I write this now, July 5, I've seen no signs of the beaver that liked me and liked our pond, but liked lily roots down in the huge swamp more. Though they spread by roots, water lilies can grow by seeds. The famous beavers in the book Lily Pond ate all the lilies there and had to move away, but the lilies began growing again it two years. So maybe it is au revoir and not goodbye.
I once got a photo of gray tree frog that lived up to that name: gray frog on a tree.
But I usually see them on leaves quite green.
I began to think they were actually Gray’s tree frogs, named for Asa Gray, the great 19th century botanist. Perhaps the little frogs kept sticking to him when he reached out to pick the fruits of his research.
Idle thought except I wish that those who named frogs were not, like the botanists, so prone to name the frogs for their color. Clearly, in the spring at least, frogs prefer to be heard and not seen, and if all frogs were named for their song then at least we would all have a head start when we get down to discussing what frogs sound like. Of course there is the spring peeper, and maybe you could give the frog namers come credit for the western chorus frog, which I have heard often but never seen, but I don’t exactly know what a “western chorus” is.
Instead of gray tree frog, how about trill tree frog. Here are their first choruses on our land this spring. Starting to pick up as the peepers wind down:
By May 18 that had the stage all to themselves, which in the video below appears completely black until I had the wit to raise the camcorder up to the moon.
This year as I listened to spring peepers, I fancied that each was trying to avoid catching the same beat "Peepers and Snowfleas". I think gray tree frogs try to pick up on a neighboring trill which makes for a lag which in turn gives rise to short waves of sound.
I was going to try to get to the bottom of that when we were hit with a cold spell and none of the frogs sang. When they started singing again, it seemed a question of the frogs getting back in shape. When some of my trill tree frogs got going, they were joined by a lone peeper. The tree frogs almost sound conversational and the peeper like a child trying to attract attention, of another peeper.
The tree frogs keep trilling into the summer but not in great bunches so I'll have to wait until next summer to better figure out their techniques and style.
Back to naming frogs for their singing. Actually the toads in our area, I believe they are called American toads, sing the best chorus in terms of human music making. If we had to do Beethoven's 9th Symphony, his "Choral Symphony", and we had to use an animal chorus, I would use toads in the spring. Hear what I mean:
There were a few leopard frogs there too adding some bass. Leslie and I make a pilgrimage to a bay off Quarry Point of Picton Island every May to hear the toads. Sweet music and conveniently sung in the middle of the day so we usually make a lunch of it. So I give you the "Beethoven toad."
I add plants only so I can begin my essay on spring flowers with a photo of a bullfrog.
Now that organism is planted. Bullfrogs crawled out of South Bay at the end of April and, still bronzed from the bay bottom mud where they wintered, they warm up and slowly hop up to the ponds. When stunned and sun starved like that, you can admire bullfrogs just like you do the spring flowers. And like the stunned frog, spring flowers are close to the ground. I pride myself on not picking them thinking they are too beautiful and delicate to be picked (perhaps losing my frog analogy here)
And they are too low to the ground -- like a frog. Of course the spring beauties pictured above come out in April as do trout lilies and hepatica. But this cold April all the flowers seemed tardy. In 2010 the trilliums were out in bunches by the 19th.
This was the state of the trilliums this year on April 25.
At that time the trout lily was grounded beauty of the moment.
Trillium was out the first week of May
And some blooms were fading to pink in the third week of May.
So I think we had a short season for trilliums. I usually get obsessive about special clumps in hidden grottos that try to throw huge white blossoms at you. Look at what I could stand and admire on April 29, 2010:
As individually beautiful as trillium are, they are most striking en masse and best seen just as it gets dark almost bleaching the usually somber hills.
But this year, I must confess, their marching over hill and dale was not quite as dramatic. Take a look at this charge of white in 2007.
But this relative mild year for flowers had some surprises for me. One of the games I play in May is try to frame photos with as many different blooms as possible, and for doing that, this May was the best ever.
Now that's an underwhelming photo unless you have gazed on flowers like this for 19 years and never seen a red trillium and a white trillium flanking a sessile bellwort. Ironically, several days of dry weather made combinations blooms more striking. For example the first violets had trillium for neighbors.
Seeing the blue violets immediately prompts me to search for some blue hepatica before that early flower completely disappears.
I caught those beauties on May 5. Strange how easy it is to adjust to the fading of such delicate blooms. One April I fancied I could sit and see the first hepatica bloom (white) unfurl. It might be more to the point to sit and watch the last hepatica bloom fade soaking in its delicate beauty. But by that time I am anxious to see the yellow and white violets. The latter were out by the 19th.
At the end of May, my conceit about not picking spring flowers because I can't bend down that low ends. The bushes begin blooming, principally clusters of white flowers. Not far from the white violets, I saw a blooming elderberry bush.
Usually at this time of year Leslie does all the planting, but to make it harder to see the animals in the Deep Pond from the road, I searched for small white pines that I could transplant. I first made the stupid assumption that pines up on rocky knolls would be easiest to transplant not knowing how pine roots can get a strangle hold on rocks, but my snooping around one wooded knoll did afford me a view of this delicate bush's blooms, which I have yet to identify.
I found plenty of small pines easy to dig out in our very wet central valley. It crossed my mind that I should do some serious botanizing. One year I did find a small orchid on our land. But I checked my files and found that I had found that in September during an early hunt for blue gentian. All to say, in spring let the flowers come to you, and the seeds. Maples seemed, as they always do, out of control in their seed making.
Since we spent so many days on our land soaking in the bird songs and frog choruses, I didn't make my usual tour of Wellesley Island to see how many flowers that I see on our land can also be seen there. However on one boat trip we saw one of the glories of the island that are not so well presented on our land, the shad bush blossoms.
Now that's an underwhelming photo unless you have gazed on flowers like this for 19 years and never seen a red trillium and a white trillium flanking a sessile bellwort. Ironically, several days of dry weather made combinations blooms more striking. For example the first violets had trillium for neighbors.
In the winter I can lie in bed and imagine the chorus of frogs, that globe of pulsing sound, but not the songs of birds. I can imagine the bright colors of the rose breasted grosbeak, but not the lilting reiterations of its song
I can imagine the darting red of the scarlet tanager, but not the slurring syncopating song
and the oriole, all orange in my mind's eye, but the fluting song is mute in my winter ear.
Even though I practice Mozart, Chopin and Bach on the piano one hour every day, I can't grasp bird songs in the darkness of winter. Their notes have to be wrapped in spring leaves. I can't alienate the song from the concert hall. Blame the wood thrush.
The thrush song blows my ears and mind. If I drink too much wine in the evening, I think the trees are singing. I took the photos of the other birds in May. I took the photo of the wood thrush in October, as it fattened up for its long trip to Central America. I never see the wood thrush in May even though it sings every evening and every dawn and on many days, especially the cloudy ones. I never see it in May because it's wrapped in leaves when it sings. I see wood thrushes on the ground in late April. The leaves aren't out enough for it to sing.
I shouldn't be using the impersonal pronoun "it." The male birds do almost all the singing in the spring. Bird songs claim territory and invite sex. In the spring that's what birds are all about. In March and April plenty of birds make that sex and aggression apparent, especially what I call the power pole birds. The red wing blackbirds' kereeing and flash of red epaulets are one of the excitements of the spring. The male comes weeks early and energizes any dead stalk in the marsh into a power pole.
Then the ospreys come and extend that metaphor to the extreme. After they hover in the air above the river, screeching and pairing up, they build their nests on power poles along the river and a half mile inland. It seems the more wide open the pole the better. Here is one of this year's nests in Thousand Island Park.
Can't see an osprey? Just you wait. They are all over the place, especially on poles.
Nothing is more he and she than the birds. I assume that the birds that arrive in May exhibit the same passions and aggression as the ospreys, and blackbirds not to mention the geese who sometimes fight all night on the river until they settle into pairs. But the song birds are wrapped in leaves. It is just harder to see, and thus: THE LEAVES OF MAY BLUR BOUNDARIES THAT ENGENDER SONGS. That's what I wrote down in the middle of the month. Small birds that can't be seen must be heard. And the melody of the songs of some small birds seems to move constantly through the trees.
With humans the whole carnal-val began when the fig leaves dropped. Not so with the song birds. I know they are there in the trees, the he and she birds, but in the spring as the songs hop and fly throughout the leaves, it's IT to me, entrancing, but ironically forgotten in the winter. Look at that wood thrush's breast. Some kind of musical notation!
Around our little house in the woods, a typical evening in early May begins with wood thrushes singing, then some tree frogs start up, snipe ululate, Spring peepers and gray tree frogs resume their chorus, a whip-poor-will methodically beats time at all points of the compass. That's It. The video clip below is underwhelming, no wall of sound, no dancing in the swamp, but it's all I need. I am at one with... IT.
I wish I was exaggerating. After all I grew up with a sitcom in one ear and a pop song in the other. My ears only slowly lost the beat of modern American life. In the 1970's and 80's my wife and I annually visited my parents in Thousand Island Park for 2 or 3 weeks in the spring. After dinner they would repair to the TV and we would cross the golf course across the street and go up into the woods to a ridge overlooking acres of trees. I never thought of taking a photo of that valley in the spring. Here's what it looks like in the fall.
We would listen to the thrushes, on the edge of a boulder seat as the eery songs of the hermit thrushes began to top those of the wood thrushes and veerys. On our walks home in the dark we would hear the whip-poor-will singing at each stop on its way to the insect rich trees overlooking the golf course. We often heard two whip-poor-wills. We decided it would be nice to spend every spring night listening to thrushes and whip-poor-wills.
Before he died my father gave me the house and in 1994 we moved permanently to the island. Then the demands of keeping a child entertained seemed to peak just when the birds were singing. Walking to the ridge after dinner was not one of his favorite things to do. (A few weeks ago we at least went up to the ridge over looking the golf course to count the bats coming out of the woods and hear the whip-poor-will. We got a rare glimpse of the fluttering flight of the whip-poor-will, very brief in the dark video below.)
Of course once we moved to the island and our son was in school, the first week in May was devoted to hiking in the woods and, forget about the wood thrush, we began hearing rose breasted grosbeaks. How to distinguish its song from yellow warblers and robins? It dances several fluting notes longer. One afternoon I was able to get some video showing a grosbeak singing. Another grosbeak was singing in the distance which is probably what made the grosbeak near me so insistent.
A towhee was nearby and as insistent as the grosbeak.
However, one melodious problem of listening to bird songs at our house on Wellesley Island is that robins are everywhere. Only the orioles could top their notes. So to hear the sounds of other, rarer birds, and to get some relief during the tourist season on the river, we bought 52 acres of land, mostly wooded, 4 miles south of the river. In 2006 we found a spot surrounded by ironwoods under huge red oaks and didn’t have to cut down any trees to make room for our 28 x 16 foot one room house.
On May 18, 2006, as we were digging post holes, we heard a rose breasted grosbeak singing high in the towering oak, a good omen. But living with the birds doesn't guarantee seeing them, only hearing them. And this May we had our annual see the grosbeak challenge as he hopped from branch to branch in the tall red oak. I saw one hop; the rest was lost in song.
Of course, birds had been making themselves known around our house in the woods before May. The chickadee and song sparrow, both winter here, and give you a taste for sweet songs from small birds (I refer to the former's "feee-beeeee" song.)
There are two springs, March 21 and when the leaves in the trees make the birds sing. As we learned spending evenings in the woods on the island, the wood thrush song is the nonpareil. Living in the woods, we soon discovered that the thrushes sing in the day, especially in early May. When we first spent May nights at our land in 2007, we still had to hike a bit into the woods to hear their song, but since we don't cut much vegetation on our land, as opposed to all our neighbors, each year they seem to be more comfortable moving closer to our house. Since we have owned the land, the woods have been undisturbed for 15 years which probably hasn't happened since about 1830.
While other birds do give the impression that they are singing to claim territory and attract a mate, wood thrushes sound like they are making wishes and if they keep repeating them with clever variations and sing them with a coy sweetness then they will all come true. As for territorial claims, their good natured song seems to preclude any disputes.
My wife Leslie generally likes to stay in our house after dinner and listen to the wood thrush there. I'll catch his song at the first light of dawn. So I sit by a pond 200 yards away waiting for muskrats and listen to a wood thrush in the trees behind me, which despite repeated attempts I never saw. For most of May he kept up the same pace of song as at the beginning of the video clip below, but by May 28, well, let's hope his wishes had come true and he had happily mellowed.
The most intriguing thing to me about thrush song is that the thrush seems to throw the sounds several feet across the tree. I suppose that arises from the sharp variation from clear tones to a buzz. My camcorder can't pick up that motion. The thrushes and other birds also sing at dawn and we lay in bed three hours every May morning half sleeping and half listening to thrushes. One morning I swear I heard the clear tones of the thrush on one side of the house and the concluding buzz on the other. Then I went back to sleep. I was wide awake in the evening when I was sure I heard the thrush song start on one side of the dirt road and end in a tree on the other side. Of course, I can't see the thrush and can't see if it just flew across the road.
In the same area of scrubby woods, I saw an oriole, and twice saw a scarlet tanager. The tanager sings like it has some doubt that it has to sing at all. Which makes sense, just see how striking it looks.
Scarlet tanagers like deep woods and that we are seeing more around our house is another testament to how the woods have grown. A closer study of bird territories is an enjoyment for another May but we might be making some sense of it. Our land forms a triangle with woods extending beyond the hypotenuse and the other two sides with our woods facing open fields. The grosbeaks seem to gravitate toward the bushes closer to the fields. I think we have four nesting pairs. Vireos are spread throughout the woods. The wood thrushes tend toward the high or well leaved trees near fields. For five years the first tanagers we saw were deep in the woods. But now they have moved out to include our house and ponds in their territory.
Last May a tanager was almost too easy to spot since it perched on the tallest pine overlooking a field and sang.
This May the tanagers had a nest where our land meets a strip of woods heading down to a huge wetland. The nest was over a dirt road. The male tanager seemed confused as he policed what must have seemed like very low ground. He was down in catbird and towhee country. One morning I saw him in the trees not singing but seeming to listen to the phoebes and redstarts sing.
In 2012 leaves came out a few weeks earlier than this year. The 2012 tanager was showing his colors after successful nesting, I hope.
By moving into the woods we found that we escaped what we consider one of the major drawbacks of bird watching. What is the point of traveling all over the world for a fleeting glimpse of a rare bird when you can live with the birds. True, keeping tabs of the grosbeaks, tanagers and thrushes was not easy, but at our land we discovered the vireo, a small bird that is everywhere in the woods, even back on the island, but if you don't live a few feet from its nest, they are easy to miss.
Their song is pleasant, melodic snatch, not quite long enough to grab your attention every time a vireo sings, but to compensate for its brevity the song is repeated throughout the day beginning in May and, if all goes well, into July. Then when it stops singing, you might get a good look at one.
I got that photo in late August when it was fattening up for migrating to points south. I do see it in May, but it keeps jumping from branch to branch nabbing bugs and singing after every bite. I could take long videos of its singing as I try to follow it with my camcorder, but meanwhile Leslie is rattling pans or doing other chores. Hard for close neighbors to get that degree of separation that makes for definitive sound tracks.
Late in the month, in another part of the woods, I saw a song sparrow perch on a log of an empty beaver lodge to spruce its wings after a bath. All the while a vireo up in a nearby tree sang as it picked off bugs to eat.
Song sparrows have a brilliant burst of song, and can ring out through a swamp in March when snow is on the ground and bring me to warm attention. But in May song sparrows seem to sing a modest song and don't even try to keep up with the likes of the vireo.
One small bird that is all over our land in May challenges my assumption that the making and taking in a bird song is a shared joy. Scientists who analyzed bird song with sophisticated equipment can show how much of the song our ears of incapable of hearing. And it is possible that our brains shape what we can hear into a more accessible and hence more pleasant experience. Birds might here more stress and strain as they react to every note and inflection. We might miss the half of it. Some smaller birds remind me that all song is not mellowed by the fresh green leaves. One evening I sat by our small Salamander Pond and a redstart seemed to demonstrate to me that, dammit, it wants to be seen and heard.
Let me close with my favorite. Eventually the wood thrush wants to be seen. By late June when it is time to impress young wood thrushes with their melodic fate, the adults plant themselves out on a dead limb and give their most virtuoso performances. The bird in the video below keeps looking to the right which is where I would hear the final notes of its song. Like I said, the thrush warps my brain. The video ends focused back on the leaves still hopping with songs. A veery was buzzing in there and so was the tale end of the thrush song.
