One Wild Bird at a Time

by Bernd Heinrich

  Twenty minutes later I saw a phoebe swoop into the cellar space under the new cabin, where the phoebe nest had failed the previous spring. In the next three days he sang almost all day, and on the evening of April 21 he again flew far over the pines to the east, where the female visitor had flown. The next morning I heard him in the woods in that direction. He came briefly back to the cabin, sang several times, and aggressively chased a pine siskin, a tree swallow, and a black-capped chickadee. His chasing of these birds that he could not have mistaken for phoebes and that could not have been his rivals might have been caused by deep frustration.

  On May 10, 2013, after an absence of more than two weeks, I arrived back at the cabin in the afternoon, eager to hear the phoebe. Would he finally have a mate? It was soon clear that he did not. There was no new nest in any of the spots where one could have been. A phoebe still sang all day long as before. In the evenings he flew to the tiptops of the tallest trees around the cabin and from there made sallies over the forest, calling and performing his aerial display. In the mornings he flew under the cabin roof to the same potential nest sites, as though showing them now to an imaginary mate. He even visited the site of the failed nest in the cabin cellar.

  He seemed as enthusiastic as ever, but neither mate nor rivals arrived. And so he persisted every day through May. By then a local pair already had half-grown young and phoebes in Vermont were into their second nesting. Still, every morning the lone male started to sing before daylight, at around 4:30 a.m., and continued without a break for about an hour. Then he always made his rounds of the nest sites as though showing them off, but no other phoebe was ever there to see them.

  In the first week of June he was checking out new sites, as if the ones he had been examining might have been inadequate. For a test I put up a small board under a shed roof that could have been an excellent nest site. He quickly found it, perched on it, and fluttered and chittered again as though talking to a phantom female. But everything remained as before. On June 16, a warm day when I had left the cabin door open, he flew in and seemed to be searching inside; phoebes often build their nests in sheds and barns. But he didn’t stay.

  Finally, at the beginning of June, he appeared to give up; there was no more singing. But then on June 24 he inexplicably let loose with excited song in late evening, at 8:45 p.m., when it was just getting dark. He had not sung once for a week, and now he sang without a break for sixteen minutes, alternating the phee-bee and cheer-vreet calls as he had when he first arrived in the spring, and did not stop until it was too dark for me to read my watch dial without a light. It was his last serenade.

  The next morning I heard several single calls, then no more calls at all. He stayed around for a while longer but, being silent, was not always easy to find or recognize. His tail-wags were now faint and infrequent.

  On July 3, I saw him seemingly slumped down in the sun, perched on a pine stump in front of my window. Sometimes I also saw him perched briefly on the dead branches of the black locust tree in the clearing, all the way into September. Being still here, I expected him to come back the next spring to give it another try, after spending the winter in perhaps Georgia.

  The first phoebe the following spring, 2014, arrived at the cabin on April 7. It was silent, so I could not keep track of it, but in any case it did not stay nearby. On two more occasions I saw it or others that made no fuss except an occasional soft cheep. They were near the cabin but paid no detailed attention to it or to potential nest sites. I suspected they were vagrants traveling through to other destinations. But finally, on April 22, came a phoebe that showed entirely different behavior.

  I heard him in mid-morning, after a night of warm rain and temperatures around 8°C. He was singing loudly, giving the typical phee-bee and cheer-vreet calls at the rapid pace of one per second. He perched at the tiptop of a sugar maple, near the ledge under the cabin roof where the nest had formerly been (it had fallen off over the winter). He repeatedly flew down and spent minutes fluttering and perching on that precise spot, then resumed singing from the tops of the tallest trees at the cabin. He had no apparent preference among sugar and red maple, pine, oak, and chestnut; it was height that he sought. He most often faced away from the clearing when he sang. At 9:45 a.m. he flew west over the forest and sang at about a hundred meters’ distance. He returned at 10:04, sang briefly, and then left again. Having chosen a nest site, he was now trying to lure a mate to it. But would one come?

  I saw only one phoebe off and on near the cabin for the next several days, but by May 1 a pair was present. By May 7 the two had started a nest. They mated on the 14th and finished a clutch of four eggs on the 26th, and in the afternoon of June 28 all the young fledged.

  The next year, 2015, the first phoebes arrived on April 16, and a pair was present from the beginning. Both male and female inspected nest sites from that first day, appearing to be undecided as they flew from one to another, always the same ones day after day. But finally on May 1 they started building, at the same site where the nest had been in previous years. The fourth egg of their clutch was laid on May 13.

  The behavior of the two pairs differed sharply from that of the lone bird without a mate: with only the one bird present, there was singing from the tops of the trees throughout the spring and summer. With the paired birds I heard none of this singing from the treetops and few loud vocalizations at all after nesting began.

  I had not expected to be able to observe how a phoebe would behave when it lost a mate, or how it would act to secure a new one. Seeing this process from up close and watching it unfold did not bring me much understanding but did bring empathy. The eventual success of the nesting pairs retrieved the joy I had felt living with similar flycatchers in my childhood.

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  Evening Grosbeaks

  THE EVENING GROSBEAK IS ODDLY NAMED. IT IS NO MORE associated with evening than morning, noon, or night, and its bright white and yellow colors suggest light and sunshine. It does have a thick beak, as do many finches, weaverbirds, cardinals, and tanagers.

  Like most finches, evening grosbeaks gather into flocks in the fall and winter. I own a fond memory of a flock of them on a fall day over fifty years ago. The leaves were down, and the birds were feeding on the seeds hanging from a white ash tree. With their bright colors, compact body shapes, thick bills, and gregarious habits, they seemed more like parrots than finches. The picture of them in the ash tree stuck in my mind. That may have been my first encounter with them. But evening grosbeaks are now common winter visitors to feeders supplied with sunflower seeds. In one of my still-favorite bird-identification books (Audubon Bird Guide, 1946), the author speculates that winter is a critical period for the grosbeaks because of low food supplies, and that “if enough winter bird-feeding stations are established to free the evening grosbeak from dependence on natural foods its populations might increase greatly in years to come.”

  Sixty-eight years have passed since Pough’s hopeful pronouncement, and there are probably as many or more bird-feeding stations as in his time, but I doubt that the number of these birds has increased much. Like pine grosbeaks, redpolls, pine siskins, red crossbills, and white-winged crossbills, they may be in great abundance one year and then absent for many years. They are, like other seed-eating finches, wanderers that largely depend on the vagaries of wild seed crops. Whenever I hear their metallic ringing calls I take notice—as I did in the spring of 2011.

  During the winter of 2010–2011, I did not hear or see evening grosbeaks in my western Maine woods. I was not surprised, since it was one of the rare years when there were, to my knowledge, no trees offering seeds in the fall and winter. The sugar maple had not flowered that spring, and there were no seeds of pine, hemlock, larch, red spruce, white spruce, or balsam fir. Nor did I see any ash, striped maple, or mountain maple seeds, or any birch seed of the three common species (yellow, gray, and white). In short, there was an unusual paucity of tree seeds. Even the red-breasted nuthatches t
hat have in my memory “always” been there were absent that winter. Might they or any other seed eaters return to nest in the spring?

  Near the end of the first week of May 2011, the trees were still leafless. But the red maples, which flower every spring, were nearly finished blooming. Pale yellow patches of the mass-flowering sugar maples, which do not flower every year, dotted the hillsides against the gray-brown of leafless deciduous trees and the dark green conifers. I was cheered to hear, for the first time since the previous year, the calls of a red-breasted nuthatch. The summer birds were flooding in, and the songs of ovenbirds, Nashville warblers, yellowthroat warblers, purple finches, black-throated green warblers, and solitary vireos sounded all around. Yellow-bellied sapsuckers, northern flickers, and pileated, downy, and hairy woodpeckers were drumming here and there. Four tree swallows circled high over the clearing at dawn, and two of them stayed and carried the first dry grass into a bird box. But then on May 7, to my surprise, three evening grosbeaks landed on the sugar maples by my cabin.

  At dawn four days later, on May 11, temperatures dropped to near 40°F under an overcast sky. It was not a great day to see birds, but still, as I opened the cabin door I again heard the distinctive bell-like calls of evening grosbeaks, and there, right in front of me, a flock of seventeen was perched on a young quaking aspen tree on the other side of my clearing. The adult males are clad in bright white, yellow, and brown plumage, with females and immature males in muted grayish yellow. But even more startling to me was the color of the birds’ bills. I looked again to be sure. Yes, they were pistachio green, unlike the ivory of the evening grosbeaks that I had seen before or those in the latest bird guide I had received as a gift. The green shone prettily against the males’ luminescent yellow feathers.

  I was captivated by the sight, and noticed that these grosbeaks seemed to be picking at leaves—I had the impression that they were perhaps eating them, but I doubted my own eyes. Grosbeaks are seed eaters. Their thick bills evolved to be able to crack cherry pits. After I watched them in astonishment for some minutes, they all left, as if at a signal, in their rapid parrotlike flight. I climbed up and picked a twig from where they had been, to see if I could tell whether they had really been leaf grazing. The twig seemed sparsely leafed out, but then I counted sixty still-attached fresh leaf petioles without their leaf blades, which must indeed have been snipped off. The pistachio-colored bills had not been a hallucination either. As I later learned, evening grosbeaks are one of the few if not the only songbirds that change beak color in the nesting season, as some birds change into nuptial garb by molting their old feathers and growing new.

  Evening grosbeaks are at home and nest in the boreal zone of fir and spruce. I did not see the flock of seventeen again. Perhaps they traveled to Canada and northern Maine, where there are endless spruce-fir woods, and where I had seen them nest in June in the early 1960s, when as a student I was working in the Allagash in a lumbering camp.

  Ten days later, on May 21, some evening grosbeaks were still around: a flock of seven flew over. At this time the beech leaves had fully unfurled, the maples were almost leafed out, and blue violets had erupted on the forest floor along with white and purple trilliums. I saw the head of an incubating broad-winged hawk as she peered down over the nest edge. The leaf-gleaning birds such as red-eyed vireos and scarlet tanagers were back, and the phoebe had started to lay eggs.

  In another week, while I was watching nesting tree swallows, I was again distracted by the loud ringing calls of an evening grosbeak. I judged the sound came from the hardwood forest nearby, and I heard it again from the same direction several hours later. Odd, I thought, because if there is one thing these birds do consistently it is to move around a lot. I had not heard any for days.

  When I went to check I found a male grosbeak perched in the top of a huge pine tree among the maples, ash, and poplars. A female appeared and landed briefly on a branch next to him. They exchanged soft whispered calls. When she flew off he followed closely behind her. I sat quietly in the woods where they seemed to have vanished, and soon again heard their soft, almost whispering calls—and then saw the pair less than five meters above me. Their sweet-talking indicated that they were a mated pair, and given the season, they should and could be nesting. They next flew into a dense young red spruce growing among the hardwoods, and from there she flew to the same big pine where I had earlier seen the male, and he followed right behind her. Again he made the loud metallic clanging calls. She returned to a spot near me, and together they flew back to the same red spruce. When she picked at a dry dead twig, I ran back to the pine to await them, and as expected they revisited it. I saw her fly to their just-begun nest at the tip of a pine branch some thirty meters above the ground.

  In contrast to the previous year, the pine tree was laden with young cones. Already the balsam firs, red and white spruces, white ash, and sugar maples were also fruited. It promised to be an excellent seed year.

  Much was new. I saw grosbeaks eat leaves, change beak color, build a nest, and act as a couple. I was used to seeing the grosbeaks in flocks almost every winter, but unlike the other finches, they wear the same-colored feather garb year-round. Might the green color of their bills at this time be attributable to their food? Might it signal that they were ready to nest? Or is it related to sexual selection? But if so, then only one sex should have the specific bill coloration. Contrasts pique interest, in bird and man.

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  Audience to a Woodcock

  THE AMERICAN WOODCOCK IS A UNIQUE CLOWNISH-LOOKING bird classified with the sandpipers and shorebirds in the family Scolpacidae—but it’s a shorebird that has nothing to do with shores. It walks on stubby legs, has a bill a third of its body length, and has eyes placed toward the back of its head. At dusk on a cool evening in April, the male flies over the trees into a clearing and, on fluttering wings, settles onto the damp matted grass and leaves where the snow has recently melted. He makes a series of strange-sounding soft hiccups, and then moves forward in short jerky motions interspersed with loud buzzy peents. As it gets dark he rockets up into the air like a giant hummingbird, his wings making a whistling sound. At first he flies up at an angle of about thirty degrees, rising ever higher over the forest. After reaching an altitude of a hundred meters or so, he starts to circle and rises so high that he is merely a speck in the sky, then even the speck disappears. You hear him only faintly, if there are no competing sounds, or not at all. But then you begin to detect a rapid series of high-pitched chirps as he starts to plummet in spirals and zigzags. Near treetop level he breaks his descent with a loud fluttering of wings, and he lands at almost the exact spot from which he took off about a minute earlier.

  Long before I knew a thing about woodcocks I had seen and heard their sky dance. As a boy I once stayed all night in a field near our farm in Maine after hearing a woodcock there in the evening. At dawn, after snow had covered my sleeping bag, I heard it again. The bird’s music was to me far more engaging than what played on the radio. When about half a century later I made a clearing in the woods next to my Maine cabin, the one avian musician I had in mind was the woodcock. Every year I look forward to his spring ritual, and I have not missed the April premiere for decades.

  Since the woodcock is a popular game bird, its habits and habitat have been and still are of great interest. This bird is perhaps one of the most-studied in North America. We now know that, any spring in a given spot, the sky dance is likely to be performed by the same individual as in previous years. But there is also a good chance that he has been replaced. Ownership of a launching plot is fought for, and territorial success depends on a male’s dominance over other males, who are under pressure to perform, as during a courtship period a female may visit up to three different males in a single evening. Since males probably abandon any display area where no females visit them, their display areas are apt to be near habitat suitable for rearing young.

  The woodcock has been experiencing a
downward plunge in population for thirty years because of forest regrowth. Oddly, although this bird lives on the ground under a cover of thick woodland trees, for the species to reproduce the male requires a sizeable clearing as a launch pad for his aerial mating dance. (I do my part. I have laboriously used a chainsaw, an axe, and brush cutters to hold back the constantly incoming tide of forest to maintain a cleared space in my woods.) And the woodcock also faces other challenges. Evolution of the males’ conspicuous display has been fueled by competition to attract receptive females—but the display that attracts females can also lure predators.

  Food may be a problem as well. Woodcocks feed on earthworms and reach their food by probing with their long bill, which has a hook on its tip for holding a worm. (Judging from the numerous poke holes left on a patch of mud where a woodcock has foraged, it seems likely that the bird pokes into the mud at random, and one wonders how it manages to find any worm at all.) Woodcocks likely gamble their lives every spring by arriving from the south when the ground is apt to be frozen hard or blanketed in deep snow, conditions that prevent them from reaching the earthworms they feed on.

  In 2011 I saw my first woodcock near the usual time and usual conditions, on March 26. Temperatures had been near −12°C for a few days, but were rising as I was driving to my Maine cabin from Vermont. At 6:30 p.m., when the light was fading, I spotted a woodcock along the roadside. It was not moving. I turned my pickup around and drove back, hoping to pick up the bird if it was roadkill. But by the time I got back it had walked across the road and up a snowbank, and I saw it fly off in typical whistling flight. The ground was frozen solid. At the cabin all was still under deep snow, although some steep south-facing slopes had bare spots. It was not until almost a month later, on April 21, when there had been significant snowmelt in my clearing, that I saw a sign. I saw the white woodcock droppings (sometimes referred to as paint spots) at a damp depression from meltwater at the lower edge of my clearing. A woodcock had come. And at 7:55 that evening, I heard his peents and saw him launch into his sky dance. He had made it home again! I was elated to once again partake of his presence.