Cabbageheads and duck snorts

Naturally
I fought the lawn and the lawn won. I retreated indoors, plopped down in a chair and listened to a caller tell me of a wild turkey terrorizing a walk-in basement window this spring. An American goldfinch is currently battling with my office window. The goldfinch fights politely, to my estimation. A chipping sparrow had a brief tussle with the glass earlier. There were no skirmishes featuring cardinals or robins this year. A great crested flycatcher was the year’s marathon brawler. It fought various windows of the house for several weeks. I worried it was ignoring important bird duties. It didn’t reach terminal velocity while striving for world domination, but the flycatcher walloped its reflection. Its attacks have ground to a halt.
Wipe that smile onto your face
As a tour leader, I took many group photos. There are the magic words, words with weight, used to make one smile. I’d say prunes, say cheese, smile, smile you’re on Candid Camera, whiskey, lottery winners, cabbageheads and duck snort. A duck snort is a softly hit ball that goes over the infield and lands in the outfield for a hit. Chicago White Sox announcer Ken “Hawk” Harrelson popularized the term.
Red admiral butterflies kept me company as the tree swallows fledged. I needed to walk past their nest box a few times each day. Each time, the male buzzed my tower. As the nestlings neared the point of fledging, he hunted me down in the yard to fly at me. He seemed happy to be unhappy to see me. The youngsters fledged in the morning. Took to air like experts and headed to a lake.
I saw a great-tailed grackle in Minnesota. The bird is a prolific producer of clacks, clatters, wheezes and trills. The male is nearly 1.5 feet long with a long tail shaped like a boat’s keel and the female is about 3/4 that size. There were 500,000 birds in one roost in south Texas. The population increase is due to urbanization, industrial agriculture and widespread irrigation.
Research reveals
Research shows that zebras have stripes not for camouflage, cooling or individual recognition, but to confuse biting flies.
Research by Marie Perkins, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, studied seven songbird species for mercury levels. Six species showed increasing levels and all six have declining populations (rusty blackbird, palm warbler, wood thrush, olive-sided flycatcher, saltmarsh sparrow and northern waterthrush). The red-eyed vireo was the one species that didn’t exhibit increased mercury levels and its population is increasing.
Q&A
“How clean should I keep my hummingbird feeder?” Clean enough so that you’d be willing to drink the sugar water. A typical hummingbird lifespan is 3-5 years.
“There is a nesting hawk on my southern Minnesota property that tries to catch birds at my feeder. Is it a sharp-shinned or Cooper’s hawk?” Cooper’s hawk as per breeding bird surveys. Sharpies nest in dense stands of mature coniferous and mixed deciduous-coniferous forests with well-developed canopies.
“What was a barn swallow called before it became the barn swallow?” The Oxford English Dictionary dates the English common name "barn swallow" to 1851 though there is an earlier instance in an English-language context in Gilbert White's book “The Natural History of Selborne,” originally published in 1789: “The swallow, though called the chimney-swallow, by no means builds altogether in chimnies, but often within barns and out-houses against the rafters.” Where did barn swallows nest before barns and chimneys? Probably in caves. Europeans refer to the barn swallow as the swallow. Thomas Jefferson called it the American swallow. I’ve heard people call it the country swallow. The barn swallow is the national bird of Austria and Estonia and in many cultures, a barn swallow nest on a barn is good luck. Legend says the barn swallow got its forked tail after it had stolen fire from the gods and given it to humans. Angry gods shot flaming arrows at the bird, one hitting the swallow’s tail, burning away its central tail feathers. Since then, the barn swallow has had a forked tail. Peter Kalm, a Swedish naturalist who visited this country in the 1700s, wrote that barn swallows nested both inside and on the outside of colonists' homes. The barn swallow is the most widespread of the swallows.
“Why are there so many monarch butterflies flying across the roads?” Roadsides are productive habitat for monarch reproduction, but the largest mortality is believed to occur during the fall migration.
“How many broods do chickadees have?” Black-capped chickadees have one. Second broods are rare in chickadees. Replacement broods, begun after losing a first brood, may have fewer eggs.
Thanks for stopping by
When the dew is on the grass, rain will never come to pass. When grass is dry at morning light, look for rain before the night.
“There are never enough 'I love you's.’”―Lenny Bruce
Do good.

©Al Batt 2021

Red admiral butterflies use members of the nettles family as host plants. Photo by Al Batt

The Killdeer. You have to love a bird that calls out its own name. Imagine if all birds did that.

A House Wren parent doing its sanitation duties.

The male Carolina Grasshopper commonly crepitates, producing a crackling series of snaps or clicks in flight. My knee does that when I fly out of a chair.

The scientific name of the Dogbane Leaf Beetle is Chrysochus auratus, which means “made of gold.”