Bird Notes

A friend asked how dog Max responds to the blue heron. Easily answered, with hackles up and roaring bark. Each and every time. Started with the inaugural flyover that sent Max chasing to the fence. Continues with the heron’s morning takeoffs and evening glides home to roost.

Perhaps it’s a size issue, maybe it’s the noise—even that word a kind descriptor. Somehow the heron pushes out a sound both a croak and a gak. A croaking gak, a gakking croak, I could not say. Even the three offspring this year drew Max’s ire. Young or adult, herons be damned.

Max gave chase when the first geese came in over his head, but now he rarely acknowledges their comings and goings—sometimes 50 in a flight. Even the noisy launches don’t rouse his interest.

Something there is about herons, to Max at least.

At this moment a blackbird is fluttering around a Cooper’s hawk in the Grandfather Tree. I mention this non-skirmish only to explain how it is I spend so much time watching birds. It’s the vista out back, not that I am any kind of birder.

I did, however, take part in the local Audubon Society’s fall count. Nothing particularly interesting on that one day here. No bald eagle, no anhinga, no red-tailed hawk. In fact, the next day I saw a red-tail out here for the first time. And a tufted titmouse. Go figure.

Rarely a day passes without some action on the bird front. A lot of squabbles. Mockingbirds getting into with mockingbirds. Bluebirds getting into with bluebirds, jays with jays, cardinals cardinals. And they all antagonize other species, some days relentlessly.

Sometimes it seems more play. Watched one afternoon two mockingbirds chase each other around the small trees in my yard as if they were racing pylons. Not once or twice, but dozens of times.

Guess that is what catches my eye so often, the chasing. Watched three crows one morning chase a red-shouldered hawk out of a pine and across the lake, and as they neared the tree line on the other side, the hawk reversed course and chased the trio back to the same pine.

The babies, too, will stop me mid-chore. Baby mockingbirds, cardinals, jays, geese, and the herons. One in particular stood me up—first sighting in my life I am mostly sure—a baby dove.

I never see the doves act aggressively. Do remember seeing an adult mockingbird jousting with a big male cardinal. While their little ones were pecking in a neighbor’s raised bed, the adult birds couldn’t have been louder or more violent in their flight.

I went back to digging—startled at some point by the quiet. Happened to look up. On the roof from left to right, mockingbird, dove, cardinal. Made me wonder. Oh, I know, instinct, always, only instinct.

The babies? Were in the bed still, all just fine in their little world.