Coastal Journal: spring’s aviary sights and sounds

There are more surprises this time of year than new leaves covering the trees and blooming flowers you had forgotten were there.

There’s also more to hear than the familiar yard birds calling for their mates.

You never know when you might suddenly catch movement and a flash of color out of the corner of your eye. Instead of old friends, like robins and cardinals, you are surprised to see a bright blue indigo bunting or other colorful migrant hopping from branch to branch among the leaves.

You might hear birdcalls that aren’t familiar. My favorite this time of year is the call of the great crested flycatcher that has arrived in the neighborhood for the summer. Its loud “wheep, wheep, wheep” is as insistent as a crow, but far more exuberant.

Many migrants keep on going farther north to nest, but the flycatcher stays here with us, building its abode in a tree hole or big nest box. Like the flycatcher, many migrants are insect eaters that go south in the winter to eat insects, and then, as the weather warms up, they follow the insects’ awakening back up the coast.

That’s the migrating pattern of the brilliant blue indigo buntings that many of you have been seeing recently. As nesting season wears on, those of you who live down in more rural areas are apt to see indigo buntings because they frequent open spaces and agricultural fields where many insects live.

Just this week I got photos from Rich Corbin, who snapped a male indigo bunting in his Princess Anne Plaza yard. Ray Haring, who lives in Isle of Wight County, also reported he had two males at his feeder.

Corbin and Haring may have had female indigo buntings in their yards, too, and not known it. The females are a nondescript, sparrowlike brown – not very obvious. So are female blue grosbeaks. But the male blue grosbeak – bright blue with cinnamon-colored and dark wings – is a crowd-pleaser. Unfortunately, one of these handsome fellows recently flew into Andy Fine’s patio door at the North End and died.

When migrating this time of year, birds are all on a single-minded flight to their nest area. They are vulnerable to predators, automobiles and more. In this case, I imagine a hawk chased the grosbeak, and it flew into the glass door.

These beauties also nest in this part of Virginia but more often in brushy agriculture areas where – you guessed it – insects abound.

Many male birds dress in their most brilliant bib and tucker this time of year because they are in their breeding colors. Most females remain drab, which allows them to be camouflaged in their nests.

On the other hand, it’s not always that easy. Occasionally a young male, born last summer, will arrive and confuse you totally because it isn’t clad in its full-blown colorful male attire.

Just recently Mike Potter sent a photo of a summer tanager male that looked as though it were tie-dyed in red, yellow and green. The adult female tanager is a drab greenish yellow, while the male is bright red – but the youngster was a combination of the two as its adult feathers continued to come in. These beautiful birds also nest here, though they are not seen very often.

I’ve found that the National Audubon Society’s “The Sibley Guide to Birds” is the best guide around to help you identify males, females and young. David Sibley, author and illustrator, usually depicts all of them and points out the differences when necessary.

And this time of year, it’s especially important to have. The book takes the “Aha!” moment when you see a beauty in the trees and turns it into a “Eureka!” moment when you find you can identify it.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

Lisa Rose sent in a wonderful story about a rescue of baby ducklings from a storm drain in Windsor Woods, carried out by Tony Bullard and Jessica Denniston. See it on my blog. And also look at the blog to see Stuart McCausland’s photo of a cottonmouth moccasin at Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge and Amy Beach’s photo of a garter snake dining on a toad in her Harbour Point yard.

Early one morning on Crystal Parkway in Bay Colony, Anne Clifford was quite excited to see a large female deer in her yard!

Marianne Seibel sent a photo of a young white ibis and a great egret on the same branch at Lake Charles in Thoroughgood. “Strange limbfellows,” she called them.

Robert Brown was bike riding in Dismal Swamp State Park in North Carolina, and he said butterflies were abundant, especially zebra and palamedes swallowtails. He sent a photo of a handsome zebra, whose caterpillars must dine on pawpaw leaves. (See the image in the photo gallery on the left side of this web page.)

Gwynn Trinder wrote that she has a “ton of baby monarch caterpillars” and sent photos of them munching away on milkweed in her Bay Colony yard. She also has black swallowtail caterpillars dining on her parsley.

Harvey Seargeant sent an interesting photo of two yellow-crowned night herons at Portsmouth City Park, but he couldn’t decide whether they were “rivals or lovers.” Carolyn Brown sent in a photo by her son Nick, 11, of a yellow-crowned in their Lakeview Shores yard.

Brown also photographed an osprey arriving at the nest with a fish near West Neck Marina. See Seargeant’s yellow-crowned and Brown’s osprey in Thursday’s Close Encounters. Deborah Stone-Richard photographed an unusual nest on the Elizabeth River. Woven like a covered basket with a side entrance, it is probably the abode of an orchard oriole.

Julie Coari snapped some beautiful photos of a little female hummingbird up close in her Kempsville yard! Connie Owen photographed a male ruby throated hummingbird that struck a glass door at her home in Cape Charles on the Eastern Shore. The little bird was able to fly off soon thereafter. (See the image in the photo gallery on the left side of this web page.)

Bob Capria in Great Neck sent a photo of a female pileated woodpecker working over a bare portion of a pine tree. Female pileateds don’t have the red mustache that males have.