White-faced ibis feed in shallow water at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in Utah. Photo by Barb Gorges.
Published July 7, 2013, in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, “Birder learns to look more closely.”
2014 Update: We’ve had the opportunity to enjoy birding Seattle and Wenatchee, Wash., again, since.
By Barb Gorges
Maybe it’s because I’ve been spending more time outside, or maybe I’m becoming a better observer, but I’ve seen more bird nests and young birds this breeding season than years past.
It helps to know how different birds nest so you can recognize them. Knowing that belted kingfishers nest in burrows in stream banks helped me make sense of watching one disappear into rocky dirt, especially when another came to take its place. Surprisingly, the cliff with the nest burrow was 100 feet above, and a hundred yards from, our local stream.
For nearly half of June, Mark and I were on the road, to and from our younger son’s graduation (Master’s, mechanical engineering, from that other UW, the one in Seattle) and we checked out local birds whenever time allowed.
Our first stop was the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service unit on the edge of the Great Salt Lake outside Brigham City, Utah. The 10-mile, one-way loop drive takes visitors along acres of shallow water that in mid-June has hundreds of wading birds and their nests, including white-faced ibis, black-necked stilts and American avocets. I was lucky enough to see one fuzzy avocet chick close up. Their nests are just vegetated high spots above the human-managed water level.
When we arrived at the beginning of the loop, we saw an open-sided shelter and thought it might be a shady place in the treeless landscape to eat our supper sandwiches—except cliff swallows had daubed half a hundred nests in the roof rafters. Old nests and droppings littered the benches below. Each gourd-shaped nest was built from probably a few hundred swallow-sized mouthfuls of mud from the nearby canal. We watched from inside the car while the cloud of swallows swooped after the cloud of horse flies. Later, down the road, when strong wind came up, we found young cliff swallows clinging to the gravel road surface for dear life.
A Wood Duck mother and ducklings keep us company as we cross a boardwalk at the Washington Park Arboretum in Seattle. Photo by Barb Gorges.
In Seattle, at the north end of the Washington Park Arboretum, there is a board walk out over the edge of Lake Washington. We were enchanted by wood ducks, mom and seven ducklings, feeding around the lily pads.
It was clear the family was attracted to us, following us as we traveled the walk, but not in the begging-for-handouts way. After taking many pictures of them, we finally looked up to see the bald eagles and osprey overhead. Oh. We were being used as human shields. That’s OK.
Bushtits are common little brown birds in Seattle, but not common for us Wyomingites, so we stopped to get a better look at one, trying to follow it through the thick vegetation. It kept disappearing. Then we realized it was disappearing with its mouth full and reappearing with it empty. Sure enough, we soon spied the nest, a pendulous ball of plant material tucked in among the leaves. I learned later that spider web holds it together.
Bullock’s orioles also have elongated, but woven, hanging nests. One we saw was made mainly of fishing line. Discarded fishing line is dangerous for many kinds of wildlife, including the birds using that nest–they could get toes stuck in it and become trapped.
In Wenatchee, Wash., mitigation for a hydroelectric dam on the Columbia River has resulted in lovely parks and a natural area. Mark and I enjoyed the number of bird species from a variety of habitats: river, wetlands, grasslands and huge cottonwoods. I was thinking about how intelligent the land managers were to leave dead trees standing and what a nice hole that was in that big dead tree, and there it was, a motionless young American kestrel eyeing us—proof that dead trees are productive.
Also in Wenatchee, in Ohme Gardens, a manmade coniferous forest on a dry bluff overlooking the city, we observed an Oregon junco feeding a fledgling on the ground. But wait, the fledgling was decidedly larger than the junco. It was a cowbird, hatched from an egg left by its own parents in the junco’s nest for the junco to raise, something we’ve read about but never seen before.
Now, in July, the first flush of nesting is over here in Cheyenne, but the goldfinches are just beginning—they wait for the thistles to go to seed. Some birds, like robins, will attempt a second brood. If you missed the early days of the mallard ducklings and Canada goose goslings at Lions Park at the end of June, it will get harder and harder to tell them from adults. Just watch for that gawky teenage look.
Cheyenne Bird Banter 