SEASON OF OPPORTUNITY (6/07/02)

For the past several months, it’s been hard to discern what month or season we’ve been in. Temperatures hit the 90’s in mid-April. It snowed in mid-May. We may be having a heat wave when you read this. The birds, however, seem to know that it’s spring and time to nest or migrate . Only the goldfinches won’t settle down until at least midsummer as they wait for the thistle down with which they line their nests.

We know our screech owls fledged their young successfully on May 17 when we realized that an adult was no longer hanging out of the box that afternoon. That night we heard the young calling from the thick pine stand across the road Regardless of the weather, owls probably have no difficulty finding prey in their nocturnal forays.

However, we have no idea how the insect-eating birds are managing, with the exception of the black-billed and yellow-billed cuckoos. From the way tent caterpillar nests are proliferating on wild cherry, apple and crabapple trees, cuckoos will be encouraged to raise large families, as those pupae are cuckoos’ staple food. Studies show that the number of young raised by cuckoos fluctuates with the availability of tent caterpillars, and few other birds are able to tackle those thick, cottony webs.

Some birds, of course, get sustenance from a lawn that is chemical-free. The other morning, I watched as four flickers, no doubt a family, a mixed flick of starlings and grackles and several robins all worked their way through one small area of our yard, each gleaning or probing for goodies both in the grass and below the earth. I could also see evidence of a skunk’s nocturnal mission of a similar nature.

Parents trying to feed their nestlings can keep their own bellies filled by stoking up at our suet and seed feeders, but as for their young ...we don’t know. All birds in the nest need protein, the kind that comes from any type of bug. Usually, of course, there would be every sort of crawling or flying creature abroad, but it takes warm weather for these to hatch. I’ll bet if we put meal worms out on a platform — as some folks do during the winter for bluebirds — robins, catbirds and others would gobble them up! Perhaps by the time you read this, such steps won’t be necessary.

Some birds find other ways to feed themselves and their young. Cowbirds let foster parents take on the job. Blue jays and crows rob smaller birds’ nests, often those of robins and catbirds, of both eggs and young, while hawks may steal the same from the crows and jays!

A while back, the following report appeared in a Sandwich newspaper. “What a day (we have had) of birdwatching! Saw the butcher-bird down in the lower pasture, heard the bobolinks in the hay field, counted 3 chewinks in the salt-spray rose, golden winged woodpecker, crow blackbird, partridge, sparrow and fish hawks, purple martin, Wilson’s plover, eave swallows, with a few sheldrakes still on the pond, Wilson and olive-backed thrushes...”

Do you feel as though you need a translator for that last paragraph? If so, it’s because it was written in 1915. Not only have the birds’ names changed since then, so have their distribution. I didn’t know some of the current names, but thanks to the response of subscribers to the birding hotline, I’ve been able to identify all of them. The butcher-bird is today’s loggerhead shrike, found only rarely anywhere in Massachusetts now.

We still have a few fields where bobolinks stop on their way north. Chewinks (today’s rufous-sided towhees) are abundant, the golden-winged woodpecker must be the flicker, crow blackbird referred to bronzed grackle, a subspecies of today's common grackle. It also went by the name of crow-billed blackbird. The partridge is possibly our ruffed grouse, although Paul Fitzgerald, a Massachusetts resident with a hobby of old bird names, suggests that the Sandwich spectator was undoubtedly referring to bobwhite. He states, “The locality of the report matters because every quail in North America was called ‘partridge’ colloquially, as were the ptarmigans and even some of the grouse. But I'm sure that in your case it's a Bobwhite.”

Sparrow could mean any type, and yesteryear’s fish hawks are today’s ospreys. Purple martins no longer call Cape Cod home, although they nest on the South Shore of the Mainland. Wilson’s plovers still bear the same name, but they are a southern bird of beaches, seldom appearing in our area. My guess is that the Sandwich birds were really killdeer, a much more likely field bird.

Eave swallows are cliff swallows that build jug-shaped nests of mud under the eaves of buildings, seen here only occasionally in migration. Sheldrakes are today’s mergansers, while the Wilson thrush, known today as the veery (also called tawny thrush in the past), is only a migrant on the Cape but a resident of New England’s woods. The olive-backed thrush is currently known as the Swainson’s thrush.

GRAPHIC: Yesterday's Wilson's Thrush = Today's Veery