Naturally

I was brought up right, but I had left home without a jacket.

It was a beautiful March day. Spring had sprung. March can leave humans befuddled, but birds become twitterpated. The most exuberant songsters in the yard were the cardinals, house finches and Eurasian collared-doves. The squirrels still wished their coats had pockets. Killdeer yelled their names.

Then the band showed up. A couple of trees in the yard became blackbirds. A flock of red-winged blackbirds is commonly called a cloud or a conspiracy. They are a boisterous bunch, for sure. Their merriment is restorative. They depend on photoperiods (increasing day length) to trigger their hormonal shifts for spring migration, but they use temperature to determine the precise timing of their return. Red-winged blackbirds are polyglots able to understand the vocalizations of other birds. When researchers played a warning call used by yellow warblers to signal the presence of a parasitic brown-headed cowbird, the redwings reacted and went on full alert. Red-winged blackbirds visit bird feeders offering sunflower seeds and cracked corn.

A friend called to tell me his lawn robins had returned and brought spring with them. He recognizes two kinds of American robins—winter robins and lawn robins. A winter robin isn’t his harbinger of spring. He said, “I’m not all tore up about spring being here.”

I watched sandhill cranes and a pair of trumpeter swans fly over. Species like cranes, geese, ducks and swans fly with their necks outstretched. Herons and egrets fly with their necks pulled back in an "S" curve. Trumpeter swans were extirpated from Iowa and Minnesota by unregulated hunting for feathers and meat, combined with wetland habitat loss. The last native breeding pair in Iowa nested in 1883, and they disappeared from Minnesota around 1885. Successful restoration programs that began in the 1960s-1990s, restored the population. Kudos to the clever work of many people.

One of my favorite children’s novels is “The Trumpet of the Swan” by E.B. White about Louis. I am a huge fan of E.B. White, and he penned a wonderful story of a trumpeter swan born without a voice, who overcame his disability to win the love of a swan named Serena. A treasured book from my boyhood was “Charlotte's Web,” a classic children's novel about the friendship between a pig named Wilbur and a barn spider named Charlotte, who saved Wilbur from slaughter by writing messages in her web.

March’s generous moisture will create temporary vernal ponds that will make frogs happy. Frogs are happy with the water and with the ability to eat what bugs them.

Q&A

“Do both members of a pair of great horned owls and bald eagles incubate the eggs?” The female great horned owl begins brooding immediately after laying the first egg. The clutch size ranges from one to four eggs, rarely five, with two being the most common. Only the female has a brood or incubation patch, which is a featherless area on her abdomen designed to keep the eggs warm. The eggs are incubated for 30-37 days. The male delivers prey to the female. Hatching is asynchronous, often two days apart. Bald eagles begin incubation after the first egg is laid. Both sexes have brood patches, although the female's patch is more well-developed than that of the male. The incubation period is generally 35 days, with the female doing the majority of the incubating. Hatching is usually asynchronous, with 1 to 4 days between eggs hatching.

“How many birds are named after a city?” There is no Minneapolis magpie or Des Moines duck, but there is the Nashville warbler, Cape May warbler and Philadelphia vireo. These birds were named by early naturalists who typically first identified or documented the species in those areas. “Whoa, wait up just a second, birdbrain. What about the Baltimore oriole?” I hear you. A fair point. Baltimore is a city and an oriole is a bird, but both the bird and the city were named for Lord Baltimore. The bird’s orange-and-black plumage matched the colors of the heraldic crest of Cecil Calvert, known as Baron Baltimore or Lord Baltimore, who founded Maryland. The major league baseball team, the Baltimore Orioles, was named after the bird, which is also the state bird of Maryland.

“How do squirrels find buried acorns?” A squirrel has a rocking spatial memory, a keen sense of smell, and a treasure map.

Thanks for stopping by

“You can sometimes count every orange on a tree but never all the trees in a single orange.”—A.K. Ramanujan.

“We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.”—Penelope Lively.

Do good.

This bushytail is taking a walk on the dark side. Black squirrels aren’t a separate species, but are a melanistic color variant of the eastern gray squirrel. The dark fur is caused by a genetic mutation (melanism) that offers a thermal advantage, giving the squirrel a leg up on surviving cold winters. A black squirrel will be coming to a tree near you. Photo by Al Batt.