Spring has sprung!

Photo courtesy of Don DesJardin

Spring is here and now it finally feels like it! With the lingering wintery weather and crazy social conditions, it has hardly felt like it. But today it is 75 degrees and my resident Mockingbird is singing his little heart out. For now, I can forget about being cooped up at home, because my yard birds are so busy! I have been enjoying sitting outside listening to this Mockingbird’s mimicry. His song is easy to pick out because he doesn’t use any original phrases, every element of his song is taken from things he has heard in his surroundings, and he repeats these in phrases of 3, constantly changing and rotating between sounds.  It is fun to identify what he is mimicking, and then to use these clues to try to decipher the places he has been and who he has been hanging out with. He has been singing a lot of different Ruby-crowned Kinglet song phrases, plenty of California Scrub-Jay screams, and lately he has been adding phrases that I can only interpret as car alarms! I watch him as he sings from atop the ornamental Trees-of-Heaven in my backyard. But the story doesn’t end with a raucous male Mockingbird serenading my neighborhood. A second silent bird seems to be following him around.  Based on their behavior I assume this to be a female and potential suitor for my resident copy-cat. As I sit here, I hear another Northern Mockingbird begin to sing a few blocks to my west, I wonder if this silent bird I have been watching is in fact female, and if she has chosen her mate yet.

This time of year most birds are thinking about their biological reason for existence: reproduction.  If you watch and listen to the birds in your yard you can easily pick up on these cues.  You may have noticed the early mornings are a bit noisier lately, this is because male songbirds are advertising and attempting to attract mates.  They use their song to defend the territory from other males, and they also sing to attract females. If you are able to watch them for a while, you may be lucky enough to observe other behaviors associated with breeding.  

If you see a bird carrying something in its bill, pay attention to where it goes and what it does with its load. It could be carrying material with which to construct its nest. During this season of courtship males may bring their prospective mate an attractive food item to demonstrate their prowess. For example, male flycatchers will often bring their mates big showy insects like butterflies and dragonflies, presumably to impress or to demonstrate their hunting capability.  Later in the season, they will be bringing food to feed hungry females stuck on the nest incubating eggs. After this, the eggs will become nestlings that will need to be fed constantly. Being a bird parent is a busy business, and involves a lot of food-carrying!

It is now a few hours later, and while I am strolling around the block, I see a Northern Mockingbird hop into a dense hedgerow with a mouth full of dried grass stems. To the field-trained eye, this behavior is clearly associated with nest-building. This particular hedgerow is about 100 yards from my house, so I wonder if this bird is one of the pair I have been watching in my Tree-of-Heaven. Now that I have discovered the location of a nest, I can pay attention to various clues to tell me if the Mockingbirds in my yard are the same ones using my neighbor’s hedgerow. I will start to cue in on which direction the birds come and go from, I will listen for how close other Mockingbirds are, and if I am lucky I will be able to follow one from my yard to my neighbor’s. By paying attention to these little things, I am able to interpret so much about the birds that share the neighborhood with me.

You can do the same thing in your yard, if you notice a particular bird hangs around a lot, stay put and watch it for a while.  Maybe you will get the chance to see it carry some fruit from your ornamental shrub to its mate that is waiting just around the corner.  Maybe it has even decided your yard has enough resources to sustain its brood this year. By paying attention to the subtle things they are doing, you can learn a lot about them and their world. At the end of the season you may even be lucky enough to see them toting a brood of clumsy, fuzzy, fledglings around the yard!

- Ned