Birds Returning From Tropics On The Decline

It was in the golden afternoon that he came. A summer tanager, bright even in the subdued April light.

We have been expecting him, though he doesn't nest at our place anymore. He came to the feeder that is set with cones of peanut butter, halves of oranges, apples and grapefruit. He ate, then bathed in the pool, hopped onto the rocks and fluffed his feathers. He then flew to a giant sweet gum tree in the wooded lot without a single chip or chirp, much less song. We believe he had just winged in from his winter vacation.

For some years he nested in our yard in a water oak. But then one year he came, full of joy and singing only to find his summer housing and eateries had been replaced with people houses and bricked walks, lawns and gardens and paved streets. It's enough to make a tanager cry, and I think he did, for he left us and hasn't been back to nest since.

We have more to concern us though than whether he nests in our yard. Scientific reports show that tanagers, flycathers, orioles and vireos are drastically decreasing in numbers each year when they return to the States from their winter stays in the tropics. Why? Because their winter habitat -- Latin American forests -- are being destroyed at almost 100 acres a minute. These forests serve as the only home for more than half of the world's species of plants and animals, including birds.

When migrating birds arrive in the States each spring and find their nesting habitat destroyed, they go looking for other suitable sites just as our tanager has done for the past few years.

Both male and female are beautiful birds, though of different colors. He wears a solid red suit. The wings and tail are usually tinged with a grayish or brownish color, edged in red. The 7 1/2 inch male stays a rosy red all year. Females have a yellow-orange underpants with a light yellow-green back.

First year males look much like the female. Young males by their first spring are not fully red, but are a strange mixture of red and green patches. They mate in this color. Once on a birding walk along the edges of the Savannah River, we saw such a male tending young in the nest.

Of the 350 species of tanagers in the tropics, only five think it worthwhile to visit the States. Two species, the scarlet and summer, nest in the eastern United States.

The summer tanager is the only breeding tanager in our area. The scarlet migrates through the spring and fall and, of course, has the jet black wings and tail, a mark that easily distinguishes him from the summer.

To distinguish the summer tanager from the cardinal, a year-round resident, and often called the winter redbird, the summer is a smaller, more slender bird with protruding black eyes. And he has no crest. The tanager's bill is longer and more slender than the cardinal's red conical-shaped one.

We still have real estate in our yard for sale. We'll sell it for a song and a little grass and rootlet hangout.

May Is An Outdoors Month

Get ready for May! It is the time for getting out into the marshes and ponds and lake shores. These bodies of water are the most fascinating of the outdoors.

The root-stained, weed-grown, algae-brown waters of the marsh, the cattail-fringed pond, and the lush green necklace of willows and sedges around a blue lake harbor fascinating creatures.

There's just something about a body of water that lures man to it. Is it the timeless sound of the lake waves lapping against a stony shore, or the plant tangled shallows of a pond filled with creatures from insects to alligators, or fresh water ponds formed behind barren dunes on ocean beaches?

May! -- the time of wild strawberries, wild sweet william, wild ginger and wild geraniums, often called cranesbill because of the queer shape of its seed capsules. In the marsh skunk cabbages emerge, beautiful to view from a distance. Its foul odor belies its beauty.

Around swamps and ponds marsh marigolds glitter in the warm sun. The common dandelion is everywhere, its golden flowers enhancing weedy fields and roadsides.

This is the season when indigo buntings sing from lofty, leafless treetops, when meadowlarks sing along fence rows, when orchard orioles are spotted with long green grass lengths for the nest hanging at the tip end of a branch of water oak, and the yellow-breasted chat who you know is around by his grunts, screeches and snorting noises.

Bobolinks, from the pampas of Argentina on their way to northern nesting grounds, sweep over the ripening grain fields with tinkling melodies in their throats.

May is the time to see the striking scarlet tanager, with jet black wings and tail, on his way to more northern nesting grounds. Red-wing black birds throw camouflage aside and blaze crimson epaulets from every bending cattail stalk. Wafting over the gray water is their liquid song, "o-ka-leee, o-ka-leeee." The protective-colored dowdy female is busy nest building.

Look around. There's a common yellow-throat hiding in dense vegetation. You can hear him, "witchity, witchity, witchity," but you don't see him. Lisping among the pines and oaks hung with Spanish moss is a parula. These colorful tiny warblers love swamps, ponds and lake shores where they nest in a swinging swag of Spanish moss. The hooded warbler's haunts are swampy environments . . . low, heavily shaded woods with thick undergrowth. Damp woods around lakes and ponds are favored by this handsome yellow and black feathered beauty.

A great blue heron stalking along the shore of lapping lake water, or standing motionless in the brown water of a pond among reed grass and spatter-dock, is one of the most spectacular visitors of the water habitats.

May! Don't miss the show that's quickly pulling the curtain for the next scene -- summer.

Birds Can Teach Us A Lesson or Two

Yellowed with age, this tale of the cardinals was found in my grandmother's clippings file.

Characteristics of birds, as we have said before, change little, if any, over the eons of time. Consequently, this scenario could happen outside your window today just as it did at the feeding tray of this couple some 85 to 90 years ago. Birds don't change!

Following is an enchanting account by the observers of the "way of birds:"

"My husband and I were delighted and amused at breakfast recently by an episode outside our dining room window, so amazingly human as to make an almost unbelievable bird story.

"Having fed sunflower seeds all winter to a rose-taupe Mrs. Cardinal and a scarlet Mr. Cardinal from a feeding tray outside our window, we are this summer feeding in addition little Jenny and Jane and Jim Cardinal. (There seem to be two small females and one rose-spotted young male.)

"As soon as these three were able to leave the nest, the parent birds brought them to the tray, and shelling sunflower seeds, put the kernels into the wide open mouths of the little ones. This feeding was accompanied by constant trembling of little wings and strange crying on the part of the babies, which sounded to us like the insistent ringing of little silver bells.

"Soon we noticed that the young birds came alone to feed. They were very helpless at first, and seeing their inability to crack the husks, we fed them shelled seeds at one meal. Deciding, however, that this was an unsound pedagogical principle, we straightway abandoned it and in little more than a day's time all three youngsters could not only feed themselves ably, but could drive away the sparrows that plagued them as well.

"However, (and this is where my story really begins), one morning while Jenny was having her breakfast, Mother Cardinal flew to the tray to break her fast also. Before our astonished eyes and ear, the young scamp, who until that moment had been feeding herself with perfect ease, at once dropped the seed from her mouth and began the infantile fluttering of her wings, accompanied by her babyhood cry -- which she could still muster and which still sounded to us exactly like the ringing of the little silver bell.

"The mother gave no heed to this display -- whereupon Jenny took a seed in her bill and shifted it about with the unjustable pretense of being unable to shell it.

"This method of appeal she alternated with the whimperings and teasings I have just described, until Mrs. Cardinal -- exasperated as nay mother would be -- said to her in effect, 'Oh, stop the nonsense child!' and slapping Jenny with her bill, flew away.

"Thereupon (and to this I set my sign and seal) the little feathered child at once resumed her feeding in a sensible and very grownup manner."

Oh, but what we humans could learn if we would but observe nature!

Warblers Fill The Air With Song

April is the month of migrant warblers, for it is in this month that the preponderance of these beautiful birds pass through our lawns, forests and parks, northward bound.

Few warblers spend their winters with us. One is the lovely yellow and olive-green pine warbler, a year-round citizen of the South's forests and lawns. He has put on a new bright suit for spring and has already left our yards to build his nest high in a tall pine.

On some sunny morning, we might awaken to find our trees and shrubs alive with colorful creatures that have appeared from somewhere in the night.

This flashy one with yellow, black-flecked breast and bars of white across tail and wings . . . a magnolia. From Yucatan the night before he set out straight across the Gulf, flying ever northward. Today he is resting and feeding along North Augusta's Greenway. Tonight perhaps he will push on. No doubt thoughts of mating and nesting in his old neighborhood have triggered his hurrying on.

Within a week he'll be building his nest in the same spruce thicket in Maine or Quebec where last year he and his mate raised their brood of four. Some members of the family will return to the same area next breeding season.

From his West Indies winter home, this chestnut-cheeked warbler in his spring migration flight passed through the Bahamas and Florida, steadily pushing through Georgia and South Carolina. Some of the flock drop down to feed and rest for the night along streams and wood edges in our area.

A sighting one never forgets is seeing the Cape May warbler feeding from the blossom, the color of his cheek patch, of the tulip poplar. The pointed fir and spruce forests of Nova Scotia beckon this beautiful warbler home for the summer. Here he will build a nest for the six or seven creamy white eggs, richly blotched with shades of brown. These tiny eggs will produce youngsters that in the fall will repeat the age-old migration journey on the same sky roads that their ancestors have followed for eons past.

This flame breasted blackburnian, of fire-throat, as he is often called, is in from the jungles of Peru or Ecuador where he spends the winter. Now during these lengthening, warming, sunny days he is hurrying to the pine grove of southern Quebec where he nested last spring. He and his mate will hand their nest far out on a lofty swaying branch in a jack pine.

Migrating through our area from his winter home in South America, the blackpoll warbler breeds mainly in Canada but has extended his nesting range into the mountains of New York, Vermont and New Hampshire. This white and black warbler can easily be mistaken for a chickadee, though the migrant is a good inch or more larger than his look-alike.

He wears a solid black cap and has a solid, somewhat triangular white cheek patch. His solid white breast is streaked on the sides with black. His back is black and gray striped.

The blackpoll is a late migrant and perhaps has not been through our area yet. Look for him!

Birds Known By Their Eggs

This spring, think eggs!

Nesting time has rolled around again. Not only will the shape, size, material used and in what situation the nest is placed (a thorny vine, low shrub, in a hedge, in a tall tree, or on a shelf) tell you who the owner is, but the eggs will sometimes clinch the identification.

A bird's egg is one of nature's masterpieces. From the tiny eggs of the hummingbird to the large eggs of the Canada goose, there are remarkable differences.

The range of colors, shapes and markings on bird's eggs are incredible. Many blend perfectly with their surroundings.

For instance, the killdeer's light buff with bold blackish-brown or black blotched eggs blend so well with the surroundings that it takes a sharp-eyed person to find them. This bird builds no nest but deposits the eggs in a slight depression of debris or pebbles. Around a home, a good chance to hide the treasure is a gravelly driveway.

Many of us have cardinals nesting in our yards. If you are not sure the nest you have found is that of a cardinal, being able to identify the eggs will help in its identification. The ground color of the greenish-white, heavily speckled and spotted with different shades of brown will tell you the nest is that of a cardinal. The clutch is usually four eggs.

The mockingbird is another common yard bird. Although material used in its nest is decidedly different than the cardinal's, the eggs are much alike in color and size, and might be hard for one to determine the owner. The bluish or greenish ground color is heavily marked with various shades of brown. To be sure which eggs you are seeing, the difference in the nests would be your best clue. Seeing the owner at home would be indisputable.

There's a great variety in bird's eggs . . . in number, size and color. Yard birds such as robins, cardinals, towhees and brown thrashers produce a clutch of four eggs usually, but sometimes there might be a large set of five or six. The Carolina wren's usual clutch is six slightly buffy colored, reddish-brown spotted eggs in a dome-shaped nest.

Brown thrashers nest at least twice in a season, with robins, cardinals and towhees nesting commonly three times. In the South, the nesting season is longer than in northern states. We had a towhee in our yard once whose young fledged in mid-September.

Cavity nesting birds usually lay pure white eggs. Owls, some hole-nesting, others in open nests, lay pure white round eggs. All woodpecker's eggs are white.

A flicker's nest was found in a felled tree and I examined the eggs. Although the shell was white, the eggs had a pink glow. The shell was translucent and the yolk showing through it caused a lovely pinkish blush.

The eggshell of most song birds is spotted with shades of light to dark brown. Many species of birds have eggs spotted with purple and lilac along with brown and black. Eggshells vary from white, glossy white, buff, to different shades of light blue to blue greens and various shades of green.

No one clue may be enough to ensure accurate identification. It is by the combination of several pieces of evidence that you will succeed in your search to "know your eggs".