Titmouse Tufts

If there is a bird with a passion for fur, it is the tufted titmouse. Titmice are notorious in certain very small circles for their penchant for pulling fur or hair off animals. Bird Watcher's Digest once published a story from a man who was lying in a hammock trying to get a nap, and this titmouse kept flying down and yanking his hair out. They'll pull hair out of the tail of a sleeping dog. One of the best things I ever saw was a tufted titmouse on a country road in Connecticut, hopping between the legs of a turkey vulture that was feeding on a possum carcass. The titmouse was pulling hair out of the carcass right under the vulture's chin.

You can draw birds into your yard with food, sure, but it's really interesting to use other commodities they want, like eggshells (they eat them for calcium), water, nest sites, and nesting material. By providing the universal things birds need, you stand a chance of getting many more species, including ones which don't eat seed, like warblers, swallows, vireos and tanagers, to name a few.

Bill of the Birds got this groovy nesting material dispenser from a manufacturer (Loretta's Blue Star) who wanted us to test it. It's just a cylinder of wood with holes drilled through it. It came with a package of mohair and a sort of crochet hook with which you pull the mohair through the holes. Unfortunately we can't find any trace of the manufacturer to get more mohair, because this one titmouse just cleaned us out.
It went into a frenzy of hair gathering.

Durn stuff gets in your eyes. I love this shot.


We could never figure out where she was taking it, except deep into the woods. I yearn to have another titmouse nest in our bird boxes; we've had one in 17 years and I'm dying to paint the babies. Paint portraits of the babies as they grow. Not paint the babies.  But maybe if we keep putting the high-ticket stuff out, we'll luck out.

Pfft! Hair!

A low-tech version of this dispenser is a little wicker basket stuffed with animal hair--dog or horse coat trimmings, even beauty salon sweepings. I don't recommend dryer lint Hollofil since they are much too absorbent and will soak a nest if they get wet. Lord knows we have a lot of Hollofil around here that could be going to some use.

Patrick Star bites the schnitzel.

Warbler Photography, Quick and Dirty

A migrant white-crowned sparrow hops amongst the dandelions and spent lilac flowers.

It's here, that time of spring when everything happens too fast. There were still migrant blackpoll warblers singing this morning, sounding, as Jeff Gordon points out, like a bike wheel out of true: tsit tsit tsit tsit tsit.

I look at my spring bird photos and know I must post them before they go bad.

We won't go bad. We stay around all year.


One of the cuter tufted titmouse displays--presenting the fluffy butt. Good thing they're both presenting at the same time. Nobody gets insulted.


A cardinal sits with a white-crowned sparrow. That little crown stands out like a logo--you can identify this bird at a ridiculous distance.


This pair of cardinals is always exchanging sweet seed kisses.


Meanwhile, the blue-winged warblers are making our old decrepit orchard a wonderful place to be. Part of the courting razzmatazz of the blue-winged warbler is spectacular chases, looping in and out of low prickly vegetation.

Most of the looks you get are like this:


and then they're off again. But sometimes you get a clear look at the warbler's disappearing tail.


or its back as it pauses to catch its breath.


And then sometimes, if you stand around in the briar patch for an hour or so, waiting and taking dozens of pictures, one pauses long enough for you to fumble the manual focus onto it before it wings away again. Autofocus is not an option, with so much bramble in the way. The camera will pick an extraneous twig and focus on that instead of the bird. Maybe I'm weird, but I absolutely love trying to get my lens on a warbler and manually focus him into a decent image. Maybe because it's almost impossible. I love a challenge.

This isn't publishable, but it's good enough for me, and a heck of a nice way to spend a morning before the bus comes.

A Petulant TItmouse

A telephoto lens can give you tunnel vision. You focus down on the bird you're after, and you may completely miss whatever's going on around it. This was a classic case of photographer's tunnel vision. I had the titmouse in my sights and was shooting away when suddenly the bird's bill opened and it began to emit a high, shrill Seeee Seeee Seeeee! What in the world??

I swiftly twisted the telephoto zoom, widening the field of view, to find that a Carolina wren had landed on the Zick dough bowl rim.



It was obvious that the titmouse didn't want to share the dough, felt threatened by the wren, or both. It stayed in its mondo-aggro pose and shrieked and shrieked.

In a comical moment, the wren turned to look at me, as if to say, "Are you getting this ? Because this bird definitely has a problem, and nobody would believe it if you don't get a shot."


Yes, dear, and that titmouse is being a total baby if you ask me. I'm getting it.

I agree. I think I'll show him how unimpressed I am by this over-the-top display. (Scratches cheek).

Photonote: An ISO of 1600 will freeze the blurred motion of a bird's foot!
Science Chimp note: The Carolina wren is an over-wing scratcher, and please note the white spangles on its lower back feathers. I have a theory about those, to be aired in a later post.

Eventually, the wren picked up a few nuggets of Zick dough and departed, leaving the titmouse the reigning dog in the manger.



Hm. That went pretty well. You weren't taking pictures, were you?

Beauty on Ice

Sometimes, when it's so cold you don't even want to stick your nose outside, the colors are so beautiful that you MUST put on coat, hat and gloves and do your duty as an intrepid liver of life. Chet and I walked out to the mailbox to see Phoebe and Liam off to school. The hayfield was a cluster of diamonds.Each stalk of dried Queen Anne's lace was that much lacier.Chet Baker made his way through all that beauty, holding up first one paw and then the other. See how his mouth is all drawn up? That's his cold face.
The milkweed pods had a special magic.Back home at the feeders, things were hopping.

Our gorgeous female hairy woodpecker paused in her search for more suet.

The male red-bellied woodpecker glowed like a hot coal in the single digits.A cardinal offered up his own coals, his tinged with ash.
It's good to get out on cold mornings.


This morning at daybreak, I heard three peents from a woodcock in the field. Just three peents, no display flight. "I'm here. But it's too cold to think of love." I was glad to hear him, and I wondered what he'd been through. While we were gone, our feeders all went empty; all the Zick dough I'd labored to make up in advance had never been put out. It had been in the single digits and we'd had four inches of snow, topped with ice. I grieved for my bird friends, what they'd been through in the worst of the winter without me to help them. Today, I put out three feedings of Zick dough, and three bluebirds, a bunch of cardinals, a red-bellied woodpecker, and the leucistic junco Snowflake (who I've renamed Queen Frostine) came to partake. They're so glad I'm home, and I'm so glad to see them! I know they don't need me as much as I think they do.

I'm running around, re-provisioning, taking out garbage, doing laundry, cooking, watering, digging out. Treated myself to a Shila massage, trying to re-align muscles and bones bent by carrying a backpack full of lead-weight optics all over Guatemala and North America. I was amazed how much more in-tune I felt after some adjustment.

I hope frosty scenes like these will be a distant memory now, in the latest, coldest early spring I can remember. The daffodils are budding anyway. Here's a little titmouse. He looks as wistful for balmy breezes as I feel right now.It's about time for some Guatemala color, don't you think?

Watching at the Window

Lately, I've been tethered to the drawing table, doing a journal cover. I don't know why my number keeps coming up for the Auk, but it does, and I'm not arguing. If they're not sick of me yet, I'll do another cover for them. I've had the ivory-billed woodpecker flying through the fall bayou, the long-tailed manakins dancing, and now I'm working on a subtly beautiful fringillid. Fun!

It's a terrific hummingbird summer, after a horrible one last year. Last year, my high count at the feeder all summer was four birds at once. This year, it's 14, and the humming and bickering and thrumming and chittering never stop. I LOVE it. I stand right next to the feeder and play with my camera and the willing subjects. I've got endless flight pictures of hummingbirds now. Like this one. I know it's no prizewinner, because I was too lazy to make sure there was a nice background, but I like seeing them frozen in mid hummm.

I like even more seeing them sitting on favored perches, and feeding from the flowers in my garden. This little dude sits in the birch right outside the studio window most all day, every day. He's guarding the cardinalflower bed directly below him. Oh, how I love to take pictures of him, trying to get his gorget flashing. Almost:

And better:I sneak glances out the window every time I go to dip a brush back into the paint. And I see the most wonderful things, so I keep the camera with its 300 mm. zoom lens on and ready at hand. I especially like watching the bath on these dry, late-summer days. It's almost never empty, especially when it's just been cleaned. The birds really appreciate my scrubbing it with Comet to get all the slime and droppings out of it, so I do that about every fourth day. Then, they literally line up to bathe there. Birds know from clean: they have to, to keep those flight feathers in top condition. They hate to be dirty, and they don't like dirty water or feeders, either.
This time of year, we've got oodles of young scarlet tanagers, as well as molting adults in every motley plumage. We've noticed that scarlet tanagers are very feisty birds. They love to chase and fight and defend what they believe to be theirs. Like the entire Bird Spa. Bad judgement on this young tufted titmouse's part to challenge Miss Bossy Boots. Titmice are feisty, too. This one gives a mewling call and threatens with open bill. But it still won't go in the water with that big toothed bill pointed at it. And finally: the shot I guess I was waiting for. I was waiting for all of them, really, but this is the kicker. The titmouse reminds me of Garuda.
The tanager won, as it has in every confrontation I've witnessed. Notice that she is sitting right on the bubbler, turning the spa into a tanager bidet. And feeling not one bit apologetic about it, either. Maybe she just had a birthday and is feeling like she's entitled. The titmouse had to wait to bathe until she went up to to the birch to scratch and preen. Note: tanagers are overwing scratchers--they bring the leg behind and over the wing to scratch the face. So are hummingbirds. Raptors, parrots and waterfowl, to name just a few, are underwing scratchers. Just another little thing to notice and watch for...Hmm. What are woodpeckers? Doves? I can't remember. Must watch and see.
The wingbars are a function of the bird's youth. I'm not even sure this is a female, though her bathing habits might suggest as much.
When we go away, one of the things I ask our housesitters to do is to keep the bath full. Running out of seed or suet dough is no big deal, but on this dry ridge, water is the most precious commodity we offer the birds, and we take the responsibility seriously. If you do nothing else in your backyard, get some clean moving water going. The rewards, like the water, continually recirculate.