Just spent a fascinating half hour discovering something about chickadees. I have three bird baths set up around my yard - varying in depth, size, floor shape, location height, degree of cover, amount of direct sun, etc. But I never saw any of my numerous chickadees and their numerous young-of-the-year use them - or even show interest in the showers from the sprinklers like the robins. They only drank from them - but never so much as a toe dipping or tail splash. I made a number of assumptions around the observation but today opened my eyes to a different possibility. I was setting up an automatic timer to help me water during this dry spell and incidentally watered a big patch of large leafed bamboo in the process (not a wise thing to encourage any type of bamboo with a taste of water). As I went in to fix up a nice pot of Gyrokuro green tea (yum!) I noticed motion in the bamboo. I finally saw a single chickadee not really flying about or feeding among the leaves - rather it seemed to be clumsily rubbing itself on the leaf faces and vibrating its feathers, rapidly moving to the next leaf or standing on an adjacent stem and using it as a perch to rub its body on the leaf faces. I noticed that it was only going to the leaves that still had water clinging to them and actually going after the water on the leaf surfaces. I watched in amazement and I concluded that it was taking a sponge bath of sorts - because after it rubbed the water onto itself its body motion was similar to how the larger birds move when they are bird bath bathing but much quicker and shorter in between the frenzied moving from leaf to leaf. I have many, many leaves on my bamboo stand and as I watched that little critter must have hit every one of them. Talk about cute.
My Baltimore orioles have reappeared and the adults are focusing on my meal worms and completely ignoring the grape jelly. When I first put the worms out, the orioles came and took them away to what I assumed were their young. Now they mash them flat and gobble them down. Their young are amusing me all about the yard now in the uncoordinated explorations, but the adults are eating all the worms I can put out. It appears also that the adults are significantly smaller than the young I am seeing. Maybe its just the difference in coloring and the fact that I never see them together - but it seems to be. And don't worry about the grape jelly fermenting, the House Finches are eating it along with the robins and catbirds. Another bit of fascination was an interaction between the two young-of-the-year, feisty Brown Thrashers and a young-of-the-year Gray Squirrel - both now nearly fully grown. In a slender, bare trunked, tall tree I watched what for all the world looked like a game of tag between the two thrashers and a squirrel. The birds would perch various limbs and branches and the squirrel would chase after them and what appeared to actually touch them. The reacting thrasher would jerkily take off only to land on another close by branch as the other thrasher would go after the squirrel. The bird would contact the squirrel and the squirrel would either leap to another branch or drop down the trunk and then take off after the aggressive thrasher - only to have the other thrasher move in. I watched this behavior for some 20 minutes with all three creatures apparently not striving for anything except the interaction with the others. My anthropomorphic eyes thought they saw them playing as no animals were injured in the making of my observation. I have also had the joy of monitoring a Chipping Sparrow nest from three blue mottled eggs to the cutest little chicks I could imagine. The catbirds, thrashers, robins, Mourning Doves, and others are all busy on the second and third brooding and the antics of hatchlings continue to amuse - but, my, the bird populations are growing in my little corner of the world. I did manage to rid myself of being the party headquarters for grackle hoard. I simply stopped filling their favorite feeders for about a week and a half. Yes I did miss the other birdies but when I finally did fill the feeders back up the other birdies came back in full force with nary a grackle for a couple of days. Then when one does show up I put my hose on "jet" and chase them away with the water. I've only had to do that a couple of times. I guess birds might just communicate somehow even if it is just by not hanging out in my yard. Well I am off to set up some experimental snares for my burgeoning stealth rabbit population. Nothing else seems to be working. I have already live trapped some 27 "what I believe to be" 13-Lined Ground Squirrels now and some 17 gray squirrels along with my eradication program on the pesky vole. Did you know that according to the DNR web site, the 13-Lined Ground Squirrel is the "gopher" the UofM uses for their symbol? I am just full of it today. Darn, now I have carpenter ants in my green house trusses. Another beautiful day in the neighborhood - would you be my, could you be my, would you be my neighbor. Thomas Maiello Spring Lake Park
