Courtship Season for Cardinals

Snow may still be on the ground, but LOVE is in the air.  Cardinals are so ubiquitous at our feeders that it is a great bird to practice your bird behavior watching skills on.

Over the winter, perhaps you had several pairs coming to your supply of seed, and if you were watching, you might have noticed the male is slightly aggressive to the female.  Nothing of a domestic violence order of course, simply that the female usually gives way to the male.   You may have been lucky enough in winter to see several pairs at the feeder at once.  For many territorial birds that need to defend their territory is only present in the breeding season whereas winter time is a time to gather in flocks.

As early as mid Feb you might have noticed a difference.  They were beginning to travel in pairs, and, as love can often “break up that old gang of mine”, so does the increase of hormones begin to change this gregarious flock into one prone to border skirmishes.  For some time now, in Texas, I have been watching chase scenes of male cardinals after males, and females after females. 

And isn’t that interesting, as the pairs mate for life, mostly anyways, they seem to have divvied up the “defending hearth and home” responsibilities with each of them chasing off members of their own sex.  “You go get him Harry!”  “She’s all yours Harriet”.  Watch for it, two red males careening through the trees and in other cases, two females chasing and “chipping” wildly.

 It is that loud and excited chip that should get your attention.  When you hear it something is up.  It may be defense of territory, but it also may mean danger. Look for cats, or the smaller hawks like Coopers and Sharp Shinned that prey on smaller birds.  Soft continuous chips are the pair keeping track of each other.  They do this pretty continually and in the book, “What the Robin Knows” by Jon Young, he tells a heroic story of a cardinal that noticed his mate had stopped chipping, only to see she was frozen in fear and in the path of a hunting hawk.  He said the male swooped right into the path of the hawk, surprising it to where neither did the hawk get the female but the male got away also.  Shew; an impressive display of mate loyalty!

Just a couple more things you might see in this season of love:

-Male cardinals feeding the female.  Totally a tender moment as he picks out a choice seed and offers it to his mate.  And bless him, he doesn’t drop this behavior once the honeymoon is over, but will often feed her in a similar manner as she is incubating the eggs.

-Aggressive hormones are elevated now, and as much as the male will chase off a territorial intruder, both males and females will fight relentlessly at that pertinent cardinal looking back at them from your window, or your car mirrors.  No matter how much they batter the glass, this guy isn’t going away!  Do them a favor and cover your rear view mirrors with plastic bags, or put paper up in the offending window.  When the hormones drain away, so will the window battering.  Although, can you believe it, there is a record of a female battering a window every day for 6 months!!  Think she was on hormone supplements?

-“The redder the better”.  Studies have shown the redder males, get the girls, or girl in this case.  Remember, they are monogamous.  And the redder males get the better territory, which often comes before getting the girls, and therefore the redder males have more offspring.

-Listen for “counter singing”.  As a pair is establishing a territory they may be at opposite ends of it and singing back and forth, one copying the phrase of the other note for note.  Songbirds, by the way, learn their songs so sometimes you hear regional differences.  I haven’t noted a Texas accent to their “cheer, cheer” but maybe I haven’t listened hard enough!

All right, clearly there is too much information to share on this familiar bird, and no doubt, you have other things to do today.  God bless the Internet and the Cornell site in particular.  Should you be interested in more information you can always Google it yourself.  Or perhaps I have already given you more information than you wanted!

Either way, now that you know what to look for, you will be amazed at the various dramas being played out in your own backyard.   Happy Spring everyone, the world is full of wonders to watch for! 

The Grass is Always Greener In the Other Person’s State

This is for my winter weary friends in the Northeast who by now, must be tired of white and could use a green “chlorophyll fix”.   This is NOT intended as bragging; my “grass” may be green now, for in Texas, it starts to green up by February, BUT give it 3-4 months and it will be brown as toast. Plus, it isn’t really grass.  Much of the yard is clover, which normally would be a good thing; it never grows too high, it fixes nitrogen in the soil etc.  The only hitch, and I think I have mentioned it before, is that it is BURR clover and eventually all the sweet little yellow flowers will turn to burrs that will be all over my dog, and consequently, all over the rug.  So this early shot of green comes at a price.

While you were all getting buried in snow, we were getting, what I think, was more rain than usual.  Ah, the wildflowers will be fantastic this year!  At least that is what I thought but just today, talking to someone about it, they said, “No, the rains need to come in the fall not spring.” Supposedly then, these rains were too late, so I better stop inviting everyone down to see the “river of color” the pastures can be.  It just shows that after 3 years, I still don’t know how to “read” Texas.  If I look at entries from our first spring here, I see the yard was awash with wild flowers in March. This March there are a few dandelions and a couple wind flowers; not exactly “awash”.

However, what we are awash in is mushrooms.  Not the wide variety and color array I would look forward to on the Cape, but still, my walk around the neighborhood with the dog had me stopping every few feet to look at what seemed to be a type of Earth star. Correct identification of mushrooms is tricky business and I have just spent the last 20 minutes scrolling through pictures of earthstars and false earthstars.

 None of them looked exactly like the kind I saw. I continued to look and now,  if I had to make my best guest I would say I was looking at, are you ready, Scleroderma polyrhizum.  Its common name is “Star Earthball” or “Dead Man’s Hand”. The latter paints a lovely picture doesn’t it?

 The written description comes pretty close: lover of poor soil (check), coming up through road edges (check), and splitting open to reveal black spores (also check).  It is supposedly found in many places including North America, and as broad as that is, I will also say, check.  They seem to love the roads gravelly edge, and they were doing that Super Mushroom trick of coming up right through the road. 

I feel I must add this “road” is not a well sealed professional road but our neighborhood facsimile of a road; tar gravel and vaguely flattened out.  I was pretty surprised when they put it in that the plan was for the intense heat of a Texas summer to melt it all together and our tires would act like the rollers to press it flat!  Great.  We all had gravel-studded tires, gravel-studded driveways and gravel-studded shoes for some time.  But it looks like this fungus loved it!

After so much rain, the bare spots in the back yard are covered with a black jelly fungus.  Its Latin name is too ridiculously long to spell. The cool thing about THIS fungus is that when it is dry, as it often is here, it is black and crusty.  However, when it rains, it returns to the rubbery texture that gives it it’s common name of “jelly fungus.” Cool.

This certainly has been like me, to start with green grass and end with black fungus!  I have always said my personality is akin to the White Rabbit in “Alice in Wonderland”, often rushing, often late.  My other tendency is to take you dear readers down “rabbit trails” as my mind pings from one topic to another! Best to stop now before another “trail” beckons.

Meanwhile, my March wish for you is that your snow may be melting and your grass greening before the month is over.  8 days to spring and counting!

Life in the Subnivian Zone, reprinted from 2/11

Authors note:  I wrote this piece on life under the snow a few years ago when we were having a wild winter on the Cape.  Now in 2015 history seems to be repeating itself and then some.  I thought, then, maybe it would be appropriate to print this again and let you know about the party going on down there!  Pat 3/5/15 where, even in TX if feels like it is in the teens today! 



With all the groaning so many of us are doing about this endless winter, it seems a good idea to point out a few creatures that are doing the dance of joy. Bring on the snow! May it last until May! For some, life in the Subnivian zone is sublime!

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And what is the Subnivian zone? It’s simply the area between the ground and the top of the snow-an area of “free-for-all” for the likes of voles, mice, and shrews. Just think of the protection they gain within the tunnels they dig there. The temperature stays fairly constant, as it might in an igloo. The wind doesn’t bother them but most of all, the Hawk and the Owl and all others who place them on the “Friday Night Special” menu, can’t see them.

I am sure I have shared with you before how, as the snow begins to melt here, you can clearly see the tunnels that wind back and forth over the fields. Today I came across one shaped like a large valentine. Obviously no one has equipped these critters with a GPS or a Surveying kit to plot the straight line. Theirs is a meandering path that takes them to where grass may still be found, or whatever food source they are after. Under the cover of snow, mice and their like can feel free to chew away on the bark of young trees. If you come upon a tree in spring that is mysteriously missing its bark at the bottom, you can be pretty sure that is what happened.

The tunnels do provide some security, more than just having to “run for your life” all the time, but the prey weren’t left without a few tricks of their own. Owls and fox, coyote and weasels all have excellent hearing and they can hear the party going on down there. Perhaps you have seen pictures of a fox or a coyote leaping in the air to pounce on the ground, with the hope of trapping the vole in the collapsed tunnel.

Bernd Heinrich in his book “Winter World” says that, owls, upon hearing the sound, dive-bomb down with their feet curled and can punch a hole in even the crustiest snow. Then, grabbing with their talons, they usually find the, not-so-safe-after-all, vole. But before you take pity on the poor vole, let me remind you that it can have up to 18 litters a year, with 5 young in a litter and those, are able to reproduce in a months time!Eh Gad! Be thankful the occasional fox or coyote can still rout them out.

Another pro-snow animal is the Ruffed Grouse.
Of course, its preference is for soft snow that has recently fallen and has some depth. To stay warm through the night, and stay out of the storm by day, they blast head first into the snow and disappear in a puff of flakes. They then tunnel a little way under and set up a nice, well-insulated igloo for themselves where they are warm and out of harms way The only trick here is that snow may melt and then ice over in cooling temperatures making it a lot harder to ”poof” your way out again. Also, one must assume they only try this with soft snow or they would be in line with many of our NFL players with some serious concussions.


Now, does any of that make you feel better? Not every living thing is groaning about the forecast. And when the snow in your area finally does begin to melt, you too can go look for “Where the Wild Things Were”. Possibly even finding out your yard wasn’t quite as tame as you may have thought it was.