Evening Grosbeaks are still visiting my yard every day (including today), but the flock is now absent more often than it's present, and there seem to be fewer birds now. Yesterday and this morning there were at least four birds--two males and two females--and there may be a few more than that, but that's the most I saw at any one time all weekend. Now that the young aren't begging, the birds can be present and feeding in my feeders and the trees without any calling at all, so it's hard to get an accurate count. And they're spending more time in the box elder trees (especially the one right against the house) than they are in my feeders even when I know they're present.
Saturday I watched a young (hatch-year) female take a siesta in late morning where a large limb jutted out of the trunk in the back box elder. She fluffed her body feathers; part of the time she seemed to sleep with her head facing forward, and part of the time she tucked her beak in under her back feathers. She stayed there for an hour. Her feathers were fluffed and she was the only grosbeak present--I'd also seen her at dawn in my window feeder with her feathers all fluffed, so I was concerned that she might be ill, but I watched when she woke from her nap and she flew strongly to the upstairs window feeder, then over to the bird bath, and then up to the trees, and her flight was strong and direct, and she was holding her feathers normally. I think it was also she who chased two males out of the window feeder later. The grosbeaks are enough of a curiosity that they made the Sunday Duluth News-Tribune, which seems sad--when we moved to Duluth in 1981, they were a backyard constant, abundant in fall, winter, and early spring, and present in at least small numbers all summer. No one is certain about their numbers before the 60s, so we don't know if we were just enjoying the crest of a long population cycle and now we've been in the trough, or whether the decline (noted throughout the eastern half of the continent according to Project FeederWatch data) is a real and potentially dangerous one. When these grosbeaks arrived in early August (I first noticed them on August 4, but we'd had sort of a family health emergency and I'd not been paying that much attention to my feeders since mid-July), I was seeing at least two pairs of adults (maybe three or four) feeding fledglings. The young birds were flying strongly, so we have no way of knowing where the birds nested, but it seems genuinely hopeful that there must have been some breeding this year not too far away. I've put about 80 photos of these birds on flickr--they're all in this set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lauraerickson/sets/72157627266314931/ You can see birds at different stages of molt, and both HY and AHY male and female plumages. Under my name on each photo page, you can see the date that photo was taken. Unfortunately, I didn't get any good photos of adults feeding young. That's the fun thing about photographing birds--there are always more photos to take! -- Laura Erickson Duluth, MN For the love, understanding, and protection of birds There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of birds. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature--the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter. —Rachel Carson Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail. ---- Join or Leave mou-net: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
