When the Swallows Return to.."fill in the blank"

I consider it a banner day, a day with an extra shot of joy, when I see my first swallow of the season cutting through the air with that graceful swoop and dive they are all so adept at. With my New England roots, I don’t expect this recipe for happiness to arrive until April or May, but I am not in New England any more. So imagine my surprise when on Feb 18th I was treated to the arrival of the first Purple Martins at the nature center I am now volunteering at. Yippee, Martins, the largest of all swallows!

This was followed the next day by a sudden appearance of a large flock of swallows
(hmm guessing, Rough Winged swallows but it was too gray a day to be sure) swooping in and out of a bridge overpass. In TX then, it is already swallow time.

The Martins arrived on cue, just as we were showing a group of 4th graders the gourds that hang in a circle, a kind of Condo for the martins when they return. Just as we were explaining how they would be coming up soon from Brazil, (now that Carnival is over,) in zoomed a pair, circling around us and then popping into the gourd to see what had changed over the year. Amazing! We could never have staged such a thing! The kids loved it!

Now on the Cape I wasn’t near anyone with a Martin house, so mostly my joy came from watching the Tree swallows, lying on my back floating in the pond while they swooped in for some tasty bugs. However I have been reading up on Martins and are they ever fascinating. First of all, now wild is this? All the Martins east of the Rockies, which is clearly a good chunk of real estate, will only nest in man-made Martin houses. You have probably seen one, maybe you even have on. A small condo of houses, sometimes built as one unit, apartment like, or by providing separate housing by hanging several gourds in a circle.


Back in the day, maybe hundreds, possibly even a thousand years ago, they nested in old woodpecker holes but for reasons we can only guess at, the Indians began providing gourds for them to nest in. Now a lot of people are under the impression that Martins eat a lot of mosquitoes like the other swallows and therefore it would have been easier than spraying some prehistoric Off around. But the truth is they fly really high when seeking their food and mosquitoes lay low, so never the twain shall meet. Damselflies, dragonflies and a zillion other insects are on their menu, but not mosquitoes.

Stokes has a book devoted solely to raising Martins and he theorizes that because a colony of Martins aren’t shy about mobbing larger birds of prey or vultures, that the Indians may have appreciated their help in keeping scavengers away from their drying hides and meats. Whatever the reason, the habit continued with the settlers and with bird enthusiasts today, so why knock a good thing? The official term is “behavioral pattern shifting” when a species switches to a whole new way of doing business. I just find that amazing. West of the Rockies, where I take it no ancestral people were tending to their housing needs, they still nest in old woodpecker holes like a normal bird!

The ones we saw that day, may linger, or continue north. They have often been mistakenly referred to as scouts but that would imply that they were checking out the route and going back to say they have made reservations, come on down. Not the case. These are the adult birds that are heading back to be the first to get the prime real estate. The subadults come straggling along anywhere from 2-8 weeks later. Now, here is something else interesting, last years young will NOT return to their birth sight, but will look for someplace new. Neither will the ones in their second year, they are staking out greener pastures too. However, by the third year, they head back to their native site and will stay true to that for the rest of their years. Interesting yes? The thought is that this will keep the group from inbreeding and make for a healthier flock. And because all those 1st and 2nd year Martins are looking to relocate, you, the kind person putting up a Martin home, if you situate it correctly will probably get some takers. There are entire books on the subject of exactly how to position such a house and what it means to be a Martin landlord if you are interested.

Depending upon where you are geographically then, you may be anticipating the arrival of your swallows soon, or perhaps you have a few months to go. The Capistrano swallows, which are Cliff Swallows have a whole festival fashioned around their return. They arrive at the mission of San Juan on the feast day of St Joseph March 19th and leave on Oct 23rd the Feast of San Juan. Good Catholic birds it would seem! Again, nature never ceases to amaze.

There is more that could be said about Martin behavior, a fascinating subject too, but we all have our limits to how much we want to hear on a particular subject and I imagine you have reached yours. Till later then… enjoy that world around you that is new every morning.

Time to "Spring Forward"

No, it is not time to put our clocks ahead an hour, but mentally, this Yankee living in Texas had better set her clock ahead by two months. Clearly, Feb is the beginning of spring in Hill Country. In my yard I have two little sticks of forsythia that have bloomed at the beginning of Lent rather than at Easter. Plus I have been treated to some lively chase scenes between the Carolina chickadees, which usually signals the territorialism of the breeding season has begun. Even the Bluebonnets, that the area is famous for, have come up enough that now I know where not to mow. February but is sure feels like April. Probably the best thing to do is to just toss out the calendar and take each day as it comes. Today, Feb 23 its 80, summer in my Cape Cod mind, but tomorrow it will be a high of 60, clearly fall! So lets just forget any idea of four seasons for the next few years.

I know I have mentioned this before, but the Chickadees here, although they look almost the same as my Black Capped chickadees from home, are Carolina chickadees.
And the telltale difference is in their sound. The Black Capped Chickadee gives a two call note when claiming a bit of the woods for his own, “fee-bee”, whereas the Carolina goes for a lengthy oratorio of 4 notes, “fee-bee, fee bay”. Not a huge difference, but enough to make you look twice and realize you may not know what you are looking at. However, both species, when excited or agitated about another pair coming too close get the same excited hysteria in their call and often the chase begins, one pair routing out the other interlopers.

Reading about Carolina chickadees I read that they probably parted from the Black Capped some 250,000 yrs ago. They, like the Black capped, love insects when they can get them, but switch to seed eating at your feeder and elsewhere in the winter. On the Cape mine came to the feeder pretty much year round except when they were nesting and raising the young, then if you are going to be catching insects for the kinder, why not have a few yourself? Happily for the gardener they eat aphids as part of their diet so welcome them in.

The Carolina chickadee caches its food, which can make you feel less guilty about those days you don’t fill the feeder as early as you should. An article said they tended to do this at mid-day and then eat it later in the day, or in the next few days. I vaguely remember an article that was mostly dealing with the elasticity of brains that pointed out that the chickadees brain grows by ¼ the size when it is caching food. Maybe we should put down the crossword puzzles and start squirreling food around your house and see if our acumen improves!

Other signs of it really being emotionally April rather than Feb is the return of Purple Martins to a gourd complex they have at a Nature center I am volunteering at. We had a group of third graders the other day and just the way it often seemed at Greenbriar, the students arrive and it’s time to, “Cue the nature”. With this group of third graders we had just started talking about migrants when in swooped two early arriving Martins, checked out the houses as if on cue and then took off again. But to go into Purple Martins now would task your attention span so, shall we save it for another day? I think we shall. Who knows perhaps by then it will be a different “season” too.

Not Knowing Who to Expect

The trick of changing geographical locations so completely, is that I am pretty much in the dark as far as who to expect, bird wise, to show up at the feeder, or in the bushes, on any given day. After living on the Cape for more than a decade, I could anticipate the arrival of the “first” of this or that species. Noting when the Juncos would first arrive in winter and when they would, almost overnight, decide to leave. A friend has told me that Red-wing blackbirds are in the marshes already, our first sign of spring in that latitude.

But here in TX, I am clueless. I have had robins and cedar wax wings in my neighborhood, and I assumed perhaps they wintered here. But then I was at a nature center where they were calling us out of a meeting just to see the amazing group of 20 or so robins in a nearby tree. So my ho-hum response to the robins in my neighborhood should have been one of more enthusiasm for maybe they only pass through this area on their way to wormier pastures. And of course, I would never want to be a show off and say we had a roost of 8,000 robins on the Cape one winter. It would have been bad form.

I tried checking out a book I got on Western Birds, only to show another deficiency in my knowledge base. Raise your hand if you think of Texas as being in the West. I thought it WAS the West. Not according to the Peterson Field Guide Series. Yes, a small corner of TX is included, but otherwise I guess I would find the who’s who of Texas birds in a southern book. In the small corner of Texas the book does cover, it says Cedar Waxwings are occasionally present in winter. Again, it seems I should have lept about more enthusiastically when I saw them.

On Feb 6th a hummingbird came buzzing by my head. Wow, was it an early scout, or do some over-winter here? It has gotten pretty chilly so they would have to be pretty hardy to survive. I was under the impression that there may be zillions of hummingbirds here, and in the summer maybe there will be. However, it seems, from what I can glean from this book, that there may only be two types. The Black-chinned hummingbird and the Ruby Throated Hummingbird that is said to arrive around March. Googling Black Chinned ones, I see that they arrive before the Ruby Throated. Perhaps then, this was an early scout, or a hardy one that waited out winter. Either way, I did know to get excited about that and wondered if it was time to stir up some sugar water.

And this morning, the first flock of ducks I’ve seen, flew overhead. They had longish necks and in my uber enthusiastic way I jumped to the exciting conclusion that they might be Whistling ducks. Black Bellied Whistling ducks are said to be in this part of TX but the book didn’t say when they were here. In the gray light of morning, and the huge gap in my knowledge here, I of course couldn’t know.

Herein lies the rub. When I was on the Cape, I wrote this blog to share with you what I knew about what I was seeing there. However, here in Texas it seems I will more often be writing about what I don’t know. And who knows, perhaps there is a reader out there who knows all about Texas birds and other flora and fauna here and would like to chime in. Or take over. In the meantime though, with your patience, I will just plod along, sharing what I am learning and what I have yet to learn. Occasionally, there might be something useful, such as , if you want a bird book on TX don’t buy the one on Western Birds! Till later then…

The Insatiable Appetite of White-winged Doves

I will get to the doves in a minute, but may I just say that the dog and I have just returned from an afternoon walk, the dog in full pant mode and myself glowing with perspiration, (that seems the most polite way to put it), and it is ONLY Feb 1st! How will we ever survive the summer??

But I am not here to sing you the refraining chorus that plays in my head 24/7, “You will never survive this summer!” but rather, to share a few facts that are new to me, but common knowledge to anyone living with White-wing Doves in their neighborhood. First and foremost, they are bottomless pits!

How quaint that when we first moved in, I was afraid, due to the obscene number of cats that lived here, that I would never have any birds come to the feeder. How naïve, for now birds, particularly white winged doves are coming in droves and if I were to feed them as often as they empty the feeder, I would soon be in foreclosure.
Several sparrows help them in this pursuit, but because there are also cardinals and juncos, goldfinch and golden fronted woodpeckers, I hate to have them arrive to find the cupboard is bare, so out I go with another bucket of seed.


It turns out the White-wing Dove used to be mostly a tropical bird, which momentarily can make it seem exotic, but like so many other species it has pushed north and is perhaps headed to a bird feeder near you as we speak. They are gregarious grain eaters and love to arrive en masse. And although they prefer to forage on the ground, several of them seem willing to hang on to the feeders, perch on top of the feeders, consequently knocking a lot of seed on the ground where they can eat it in their preferred manner.

Possibly, they may provide some entertainment when the nesting season comes, for at least some of them are likely to nest in the junipers. The nest is not an elaborate affair, mostly sticks, but I read that the male is very particular about which stick he offers his lady, so watching them chose and discard sticks may provide some amusement.
They also are known for their broken wing act when predators are around, so again, something to watch for. And, if its really too hot to do anything else, I can look deeply into their eyes to see if they are adults or young doves. The adult’s eyes are crimson with a blue ring, while the young have brown eyes, hold the ring. Which now that I am looking at them as I write this, most of them seem to be brown eyes. Hmmm, guess I will have to search out crimson eyed ones. Finally, if I can attempt to train my ears to hear the difference in their calls, their usual “who cooks for you” (which where I come from is attributed to Barred owls), can also be a drawn out “hooooh ahhh” if a predator is nearby. With the remaining feral cats still abroad, one would think they might do some “hoohahhhhing” at some point. Mostly I am curious is if sounds anything like the Army Ranger “HooAh!”. Probably not.

See the silly things you fill your time with, when you are not sure what to fill your time with. I will be thrilled to be going to an open house at a nature center 20 miles from here on Feb 8th. They are looking for volunteers for their education program and I can’t wait to put up my hand. It should provide a great way to learn about the Texas flora and fauna and be a great escape from the daily confronting of my non-domestic talents. So stay tuned to see if this little transplanted buckeroo can find a new direction.