More Wrens!

Scrounging the last photos that I grabbed on a flash drive Before the Breakdown, I have a final Carolina wren post for you. The photo transfer went well, until I threw what I thought was an empty library in the trash and had to re-import it all. What's that they say about learning by your mistakes? I forget.

Phoebe had a great time documenting the departure of the five wren babies from our hanging basket nest, while I was otherwise occupied on WOSU's "Front Line" daytime talk show.

After withholding food for most of the morning, one parent came in with an enormous food item. I'm still not sure what it is--perhaps a moth pupa, perhaps the abdomen of a dog day cicada. It's huge.

I've seen this behavior in bluebirds, too...on fledging day, the parents stop feeding their young, and then sit just outside the nest with something really big and juicy-looking. My interpretation is that they're pushing the nestlings to the limit of hunger, then offering something huge...but telling them they'll have to pop out of the nest in order to get it.

This almost-fledgling isn't buying it.


I'd rather not eat something the size of my head, thanks, Mom. Maybe Mikey who eats stinkbugs will take it from you. Ix-nay on the upa-pay.


Told you Mikey would eat it.

It wasn't long before this nestling became a fledgling, buzzing unsteadily to the shelter of a juniper beside the house.



From there, it clambered to the trellis, where it teetered and panted in the unaccustomed sunshine.

The wren nest was exploding. I know that birds must be able to count, because they have to keep track of five babies in all different places at once. They use their location calls to home in on them, for sure, but they must also be able to count.

Because there was one in the birches


and another clambering up the trunk of another birch


showing its unfeathered flanks and underwings, and two more already behind the compost pile, all of them yeeking and squirking and fluttering and falling. These things are only 12 days old. That they fly at all is a minor miracle.

Over the next couple of hours, all five babies made their slow, stuttery way to the thick sumacs and brambles behind our compost pile. I'm always tempted to help, and sometimes I do, when babies get separated from their parents. Last year I used an iPod to call Carolina wren parents back to get a chick, apparently forgotten in the nest. It worked like a charm. You can read about and listen to the story here.

No need for such intervention this year. The fledging went off smoothly. There was one person who was very relieved to see the babies go, and that was Chet Baker. He got his front porch back. Sunpuppies need their sunning spots.

Fledging Day for the Wrens

When you start seeing pale feathery necks and throats, you know those babies are getting big.


Carolina wrens do not stay in the nest very long. They develop at an incredible rate, being capable of flying at only 12 days after hatching! Please pause to think about that. On Day 1, it's a squirming pink blob of protoplasm the size of your thumbnail. On Day 12, it's almost fully feathered and capable of flight. FLIGHT! What were you capable of on Day 12? Sucking, sleeping, crying and pooping, that's what.

Even I could walk on Day 12, Mether.


When you've been around baby birds a lot, you just KNOW when they're going to fledge, almost as well as their parents do. Carolina wrens give a special squirking call when they get to fledging age. These birds got real jiggy around 10:30 AM on June 23, then settled down for the rest of the day. I knew, knew, knew that 10:30 AM June 24 would be the witching hour, the day they left. And wouldn't you know it, I had an interview scheduled on WOSU Columbus for 10-11 AM on June 24. I had to be up in the tower room, blabbing on the phone about me and my book, Letters from Eden. Can I get an ARRRGH? I mean, these birds were fledging as I was speaking and there was nothing I could do about it. Well, there was something I could do about it. I could give my camera to Phoebe, and SHE could capture the moment I'd been waiting a month to see...

First baby on the rim. Mom below. Photo by Phoebe Linnea Thompson.

Not only that, but my camera battery crapped out on Phoebe as this was happening. She couldn't find my spare, so without bothering me (because my kids know when Mom's doing an interview, nobody can interrupt), she grabbed Bill's camera, put my telephoto lens on it, and resumed shooting. Fledging was not going to wait for me, she knew that. Now that, my friends, is a useful twelve-year-old girl.



She is very useful as a pillow, I know that, Mether.

If you'd like to listen to the interview with WOSU's wonderful Charlene Brown (and hear how jiggy I was, knowing the wrens were fledging right downstairs!!), listen here.

Life Around the Wren Nest

Dead Laptop Update: Apple has it as of this morning, and has ordered the part(s). Zick Update: Coping fine with Old Slow iMac and her ancient browsers. Keeps me off Facebook, and that's a good thing. I'm painting up a storm. Amazing what else you can get done when pages take minutes to load.

You may have gathered by now that I was rather single-minded about documenting wren family life. I loved it. It was exactly what my Science Chimpy brain loves to do, especially after two weeks of frenetic travel. Just to settle down and watch some birds--the same birds--doing what they do is my idea of heaven.

Watching any nest is really interesting, but there was so much else going on around this one that, while the parents were away foraging and the babies were sleeping, I took a few snapshots of other creatures on my front porch.

A silver-spotted skipper probes Geranium "Maverick Pink." I keep wanting to call it "Renegade Pink." I have a distinct aversion to the word "maverick."



A great spangled fritillary works on the Lobelia "Laguna Blue" in the wren basket.

A male ruby-throated hummingbird takes the morning sun on the wren basket bail.


And another feeds from a Little Beginner in the foreground. They like to catch the drips all around the cap.

Just so you can see where the nest was in relation to the front door, and to give you another mini-Chet Baker fix, here it is. It's the topmost, leftmost basket, the one with all the blue lobelia and pink gerania.

In case you're wondering, I don't pose Chet. He walks into whatever picture I'm trying to frame, and that's the truth. He walks in and looks right at the camera and tells me when he's ready for his closeup. How is this, Mether? I will stand by this pedestal and smile. I, Chet Baker, will transform your picture of plants from boring to charming.

Stinkbugs for Breakfast

I've mentioned some of the prey items taken by Carolina wrens. One thing I noticed in the time I spent observing the family: The wrens seemed to bring the same species of insect all day long, then switch to another species the next day. It was really interesting. For instance, there were two Daddy Longlegs Days in a row, and then they switched to camel crickets, and brought those almost exclusively for an entire day. And then...they switched to green stinkbugs. I couldn't believe my eyes. They knocked all the legs off them, just as they did the daddy longlegs (but didn't bother to do with the camel crickets). Even legless, there was no mistaking the peculiar oblong, beveled, emerald green bodies of the stinkbugs. Imagine!!

I run into a stinkbug on a raspberry or mulberry and even tasting where it was sitting makes me gag. Imagine having your mom ram one down your throat. OK, now imagine having her and Dad offer them to you all day long.


This baby wouldn't swallow another stinkbug. He was fed up with them. So Mom had to remove the bug and offer it to someone else.

He just kept his mouth open and refused to swallow it, so she plucked it back out and gave it to the baby to his left.

Now you would think, as bad as they smell and taste, that stinkbugs would be much too noxious and maybe even poisonous to Carolina wrens. Apparently not, but there is always the picky baby to contend with. These birds taught me so much!

I've spent part of today soaking the Bird Spa dish in a strong bleach solution, then scrubbing it a million times with Comet, trying to remove the oxidation and algae stains that permeate its rough surface. The stains look better, but aren't gone. And as soon as I put away the hose, giving it the last rinse and fill, the birds started coming: families of seven tufted titmice at a time, pairs of cardinals, goldfinches, chickadees, red-winged blackbirds, mourning doves. It's a party out there, and well worth the considerable effort to keep it as clean as possible. Speaking of effort: It's a horrible feather mite year; most of my cardinals are bald, and I get a load of mites on my arms every time I visit my bluebird boxes. I've been changing nests and scrubbing boxes, trying to stem the infestations. Today I power-washed the feeders for good measure. I figure the least I can do is keep their bath and feeders clean. Every now and then an errant mite, left over from my constant dealings with birds and their trappings, runs along my eyebrow or my neck, and it sends me into a frenzy of itching. It's not the first time I've been glad I'm not a bird. Imagine carrying thousands of 'em in your feathers all the time.

And having your mom serve stinkbugs for breakfast AGAIN.

Wren Daily LIfe

Sick Computer Update: The nice Fed-ex man came and picked up my computer with its Black Curtain of Doom and its melted cord to ship them off to Apple, and let them become Apple's problem. The Apple Care Protection Plan should be mandatory. Three years of free service. Well, not exactly free, because the plan is expensive, but not as expensive as a new logic board and video card. Get the Plan. If you put your laptop through what I do, you're going to need it. The nice man gave Bacon four bikkits. Dog etiquette has not progressed as far as child etiquette. He didn't ask if it was OK to load Baker up with carbs; he just did it. Four big Milk Bones is pretty much a day's ration for a 24-lb. doggeh. I was so happy to see that laptop drive away I didn't chide him.

Input: daddy longlegs. Output: copious fecal sacs. I love the awkward leg position Mr. Wren assumes in order to dive in and get a fecal sac as it's being produced.


Away with it!


Songbirds remove the neat, membrane enclosed fecal sacs and fly a good distance from the nest before dropping them. Grackles like to drop them over water, and since grackles generally nest near water, that usually means a pond or stream. When there's no pond or stream, grackles will cheerfully fill up your bird bath with them. Instinct is a funny thing.

My bluebirds like to put their babies' fecal sacs on our phone wire, or on our heron weathervane, or to line them up neatly on the railing at the top of our tower. Oh, thank you.

As the wren nestlings got bigger, so did the food items the parents brought. There are very few insects that can evoke a physical shudder from me, but they are: daddy longlegs, cockroaches, and camel crickets. I think that's because all three of those tend to be in basements, and when I was a kid I have memories of cold, clammy camel crickets leaping everywhere and occasionally bouncing off my bare legs as I walked through our basement in Virginia. Ecch.

I don't know where they were getting them, but the wrens brought in camel crickets by the dozen.


There were a couple of reliable perches each wren would fetch up on while pausing to see that the coast was clear near the nest. Usually, it was the bail of a hanging basket.


Which offered nice color opportunities. This is a little variegated ivy geranium that might be called Sugar Baby Red. Teeny tiny leaves edged in cream, dark salmon flowers, and I've had it for years and years, ever since I pinched a cutting off a huge hanging basket at a garden center because I didn't want to spend $30 for one somebody else had had the fun of growing. Plant propagation and cutting theft: It's one of my only vices.

The Wren Eggs Hatch

I've mentioned before how nervous this (perhaps first-time) mama Carolina wren was. She was off her eggs as much as she was on them in the days we were home. Luckily for her, she got to do the bulk of her incubation and early brooding of the young while we were safely away in North Dakota and Montana. She had two full weeks to finish incubating and hatch out the five young. I was so excited when we came home, to peek in the nest and see what had happened to those five speckled eggs while we were gone.

Oh, sweetness!

There followed many hundreds of photos of the humdrum daily activity of a family of Carolina wrens. None of them are fantastic, being taken with a hand-held 300 mm. telephoto from the dim inside of my kitchen, with hard, contrasting light and the nest in deep shadow.

There are other extenuating factors, the main one being that I'm STILL waiting for Apple to deliver the shipping box for my sick laptop. It's supposed to arrive July 6, and I'll pack it up and give it right back to my friendly Fed-ex deliveryman, who usually has not one but three bikkits in his pocky for Chet Baker. Last time he came here he had run out so I had to slip him a few to give to Chet, because Chet Baker don't take no for an answer where deliveryman bikkits are concerned.



What does all this have to do with wren photo quality? Well, it's taken me all day to transfer my photos from the external hard drive to the Old Slow Desk iMac. That's because each photo icon in the bunch takes around 30 seconds to appear on the screen, and I had 600 of them. Once the icon finally appears, I click it, and opening it in Preview on this computer takes oh, another 20 seconds, and then there's editing, which I completely lost patience with, because you don't want to know how long it takes to edit a photo on Old Faithful. So most of these images have been spared the kind of post-production caressing that I'm so used to doing for this blog. Life is too short.

All of which is to say, !@#!#@$#@$%#$^!! I hate it when my laptop dies. Preliminary word from the technicians I've spoken with is that it needs a new video card and probably a logic board, too. If you buy a Mac: Buy the Apple Care Protection Plan. I did. It runs out in mid-September, 2009. And I am real, real glad I'm not buying a new video card and logic board for my laptop. It's bad enough to be without it for a couple of weeks. That makes two Apple Care logic boards I've gotten--one for Old Slow iMac, and now one for the laptop. You don't want to be paying for those.

I thoroughly enjoyed cranking open the window and shooting wrens, though, and they didn't mind one bit having every aspect of their family life documented. I could get a decent enough shot of the incoming parent to identify the food items they brought. This was the only de-haired forest tent caterpillar I saw them bring, so I was really happy to document that.

By far the most frequently brought prey item (and you're going to have to steel yourself here) were daddy longlegs, with the longlegs taken off.
All together now: BLEEEECCCCHHH!

So much for the urban legend about the baby who popped one in his mouth and died. These babies were practically raised on the little brown oblong protein packets that are daddy longleg bodies.


I would love to have dropped everything and quantified the prey these birds were bringing, done nothing but watched them all day dawn to dusk and figured out exactly what they were eating, but that wasn't in the cards. I had my own kids to provision and care for.

The Bacon helped greatly with my project by lying for hours at a time on the front stoop, baking his liver and lights.
This was a help to me because the wrens would pause just long enough to chew him out--pip! pip! --before going to the nest. It gave me time to grab a snapshot of the insect in their bill before they gave it to their young.

Baker was happy to be of service.


He's the hardworking doggeh.

The First Egg

Little teakettles, that's what they are, little avian teakettles, with their decurved spout bills and their cocked handle tails. Carolina wrens bring a garden alive.

It took the wren pair only four days to finish their nest. Granted, it wasn't a very impressive nest as Carolina wren nests go. It was barely there. Sometimes that happens when the female bird is ready to lay her eggs NOW. I suspect that might have been the case here. The nest was no sooner constructed than the first egg appeared, small and speckled and very dear.


I rolled it out a bit farther to see, then rolled it back into the nest cup.


Because the nest was so well tucked under my gerania, I never got a shot of the whole thing. This is it. Once the babies fledged I realized it was really barely there, not much to photograph at all.

This pair was unusual in my experience--extremely quiet, very spooky. Previous pairs that have nested at our door have been bold and noisy, especially as the nestlings got older and near fledging time. The adults gave voice to a constant Purrrll! Purrrll! note at the slightest hint of a threat.

This pair, by contrast, was nearly silent: no cheery duets, no scolding. Not only were they silent, they were spooky as all getout, and the female bolted off the nest whenever we mounted the front porch stairs or touched the door handle to come in or out. She'd leave in the middle of the night if I so much as let Chet Baker out for a widdle. She was so spooky I began to wonder if her eggs would ever hatch; she'd leave them cold for much of the day even after incubation had started.

But the wren was in luck: We left for North Dakota and Montana soon after incubation of her five eggs began. She had two weeks of nearly undisturbed peace to sit and warm her eggs, then brood her hatchlings. When we returned, her babies were four days old. By then, the pair's bond to them was so strong that the disturbance we caused barely interrupted the flow of their nest visits.


I couldn't wait to get home on June 3 to see what had happened in the little nest over the last two weeks. Five pairs of yellow beak flanges greeted me; a tentative finger in the nest contacted warm downy flesh. Hooray! They'd made it through without Mama Bird's watchful eye. Let the photography begin!

Carolina Wren Nest

Blessings abound in June. There could be no more delighted host to a family of Carolina wrens in a hanging basket than the Science Chimp. First, let me dispel the notion that, should birds take up nesting in a hanging basket full of flowers, you have to creep around and stop watering the basket. If you stop watering it, the plants will die, and nobody wants that to happen, especially the birds who built the nest in their shelter in the first place. The Lord doesn't stop watering the forest floor just because a towhee is nesting there. He depends on the towhee to build a nest that repels water and drains quickly. So you water a little more gently, with a watering can, but you water it. Durn straight I water it; those are some nice plants in there and I grew them meself.

Neither do you have to creep around or stop using your front door. The wrens chose to nest there precisely because they wanted to be around human activity, because noisy everpresent humans are likely to be intolerant of the snakes and raccoons that might otherwise eat their eggs and young. If that sounds like a stretch for a bird's thought processes, well, you'll just have to believe me that it isn't. Following the wren's lead, I moved everything away from their basket that could possibly give a leg up to a coon or a six-foot black rat snake-pots and pedestals and trellises and the like. You have to stand back and think like a five-foot snake. And when you think like a snake, you realize there are very few truly safe nesting places for birds.

I first noticed the wren's work when I was watering the basket of geraniums and lobelias, when I noticed some pieces of arbor vitae and grass laid in a kind of fairy driveway across the surface of the soil. I thought what I always do when I find a Carolina wren nest. Now who put those there?



And then I break into a huge grin, because there's only one person who would put those there and that's a Carolina wren. These wrens are sneaky little things, and they can make a whole nest before you even wake up that it's going on. They're fast, too. Once they've picked a place they like, they don't mess around.


They haul great billfulls of moss and cocoa fiber, grasses and rootlets and skeletonized leaves and before you know it they have a little domed affair which may or may not have a fabulous porch that spills out and over the container. This was a very restrained pair, and they omitted the portico and went with a modest walkway of arbor vitae. This pair also skimped on the dome. Most Carolina wren nests are thickly roofed, with a hole in the side, but this pair relied on the geranium leaves for shelter, and it worked very well.

I delighted in standing at the sink, catching them at their nest building. I'd crank the window wide open, no screen, and shoot away from the darkness of my kitchen blind. Only one hummingbird came into the kitchen the whole couple of weeks I was at it and I caught her in my hand and sent her right back outside. Not so fast, Buzzy Marie.


If you've been reading this blog for awhile you know that I have a lot of favorite birds and you can't really take me too seriously because I love birds so much that the way it works out is that the one I'm studying or caring for at the moment is my favorite. Carolina wrens just happen to be a Real Favorite bird right up there with chipping sparrows, eastern phoebes, ruby-throated hummingbirds and eastern bluebirds. So ignore for a moment my tendency to sing the praises of brown thrashers and yellow-breasted chats and blue-gray gnatcatchers and red-bellied woodpeckers and believe me when I say that Carolina wrens are one of my top Favorite Birds. Srsly.


For what is not to love about a bird who helps herself to the moss on your bonsai trees and stuffs great wads of it into your hanging basket to make the most picturesque little domed nest; who sings a cheery duet with its mate that sounds like it's yelling JULIE JULIE JULIE; who never lets so much as a drip from a fecal sac touch your front porch; who brings a steady stream of more or less noxious insects to feed its adorable young right in front of your nose?


So in these next few installments, I invite you to elevate the Carolina wren to one of your Capitalized Favorite Birds, or if you don't want to do that, already having Favorite Birds of your own, then please just indulge me. Be kind. Gush about the birdies. Because Lord knows I have suffered for my art. See previous post.