Things that fly at night

I've been hearing our resident screech owls more often lately, almost always between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. The whinnying "B" song seems to be the preferred call right now, though I sometimes hear the soft, trilling "A" song too.

I'll get my own audio of both sounds one of these nights to throw up here. Maybe even a photo, if I'm lucky.

Sometimes I hear owl sounds that are neither but seem to be from the same birds. Do Western and Eastern Screech Owls hybridize here?

I have no idea what the difference in sounds means, whether one is territorial and the other is a mating call or just what. And I'm too lazy to look it up at the moment.

As I sit and read on the back porch, another flying critter has just dropped in. I noticed because it threw a bat-sized shadow across my page.

It's a huge, resplendent moth that I initially identified as a white-lined sphinx moth (Hyles lineata), which I've seen here (and afield nearby) before and we call a "hummingbird moth" in these parts.

On second thought, though, I'm going to call this one a Vine sphinx (Eumorpha vitis), a related hawk moth common to the Gulf States. It really is quite striking. The caterpillars eat, well, the leaves of vines -- grape vines, as you might guess from the species name, but also Virginia creeper, seasonvine and grape and oak ivy.

This moth has huge eyes and looks quite fierce, though it's a twilight and night-time nectar feeder. When I approached it with the camera several times, it assumed a defensive stance on each occasion and put one foot forward, as if preparing to box.I like the little feller.

Pretty soon I'll turn that false moon off so he can navigate off into the night.

Raptors

I'm notoriously bad at identifying raptors. Caracaras and the common vultures I get every time. Ospreys, too. Bald eagles -- the adults, at least -- are hard to miss. I can reliably make a kestrel, and I once saw a wild Aplomado falcon.

Many of the others, though, are just a jumble of talons and hooked beaks and barred-striped-spotted underparts. I'm pretty sure I've assigned many birds that didn't belong to the Red-tailed hawk clan, though I've likely misidentified far fewer Red-tailed hawks as something else.

Today at lunch I was sitting quietly at the table on our back porch, reading, when I heard a commotion at the bird feeder. I looked up to see a very noisy male cardinal. Nice. Then, I saw a grayish blur flutter across the back of the yard -- heard it too; White-winged dove, I assumed.

A minute or so later, a chunky bird landed on the fence just a dozen feet away. I glanced up, thought "dove," and went back to my book. Then it dawned on me: that was no dove. I look again, to find a smallish hawk peering back at me. The hawk sat on the fence for more than a minute, then hopped into the neighbor's photina bush, fluttered back to the top, peeked at me again, and then flew off.

The whole while I was intensely cataloguing: dark gray/black head and back, rusty barred chest, wide stripes on tail, dark beak, faint eyebrow stripe ....

As soon as the bird flew off, I dashed inside for the books. I turned first to the falcons, because of it's small size and longish tail -- and also the fact that it was hanging around my backyard. Nothing there fit the bill, so I started flipping through the pages.

As best I can tell, our visitor was a Sharp-shinned hawk, which looks much like a Cooper's hawk, only smaller. It's no surprise, then, that Sharp-shinned hawks -- winter visitors in this part of Texas -- primarily eat songbirds. I hope it doesn't too terribly often, but I'd be glad to see it again that close when I have a camera at hand.

Today's hawk was the second bird-eater to visit the neighborhood in recent weeks. Several weeks ago, on several different nights, a pair of Great horned owls held a hoot-off all across the back of the yard and into the greenbelt. It's mating season for Great-horned owls, and mating season is when they are the most vocal.

Great horned owls dine on their little cousins, Eastern screech owls, among other critters.

[Red-tailed hawk in flight, photo ©2006 Walter Siegmund, used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. Illustration of Sharp-shinned hawks in the public domain.]

More cool birds

I must be getting old. My brother reminded me this past weekend that I'd given him a hard time last year about sitting out back of his new house, drinking coffee and watching the birds.

"You're getting to be just like Dad," I said.

Seems like we're both getting to be just like Dad.

Papa lives in Longview, and from his back porch he watches several varieties of woodpeckers, mockingbirds and thrashers, jays and cardinals, doves and I'm-not-sure-what-else. He is engaged in a running battle with the squirrels. They have their own feeders in the yard, but still try to get to the bird food. His latest ploy is to smear the bird feeder poles with axle grease.

Pineywoods humor, I guess.

Our backyard bird count is up to ... 14 species, now, not counting the vultures that wheel overhead. With the arrival of the first real cold front of the year, I'm looking forward to seeing more northern species push through on their seasonal journey south.

A recent repeat visitor to the yard is a single golden-fronted woodpecker. It's quickly become my favorite, with its bright orange nape patch and finely detailed black-and-white back. It's the only bird in the yard that will take on the thuggish white-winged doves.

The other day, the woodpecker left the suet feeder and flew right at a dove parked on a nearby branch. There was a feathery explosion, the dove departed post-haste, and the woodpecker returned to the feeder.

I quietly applauded.

I often hear the golden-fronted woodpecker before I see him, a soft "churrrr-kek-kek-kek," or sometimes the knocking of his bill as he tests various oak limbs for soft spots and insects.

He's recently discovered the peanut butter I left smeared into the crevices of an oak tree. It was gone after three visits.

TPWD ornithologist Cliff Shackelford recently helped me identify another "new" bird to our backyard -- a pair of Lesser goldfinches. There are lots of small yellow birds in Texas -- finches, warblers, vireos -- and it's going to take me a while to sort them all out, I'm afraid.

Home for lunch one day last week, I counted 10 species of birds in the backyard at the same time. That was not only fun to watch, but pleasant to listen to as well; it was a riot of birdsong.

Another work colleague, Bruce, who produces TPWD's PBS show, suggested a neat trick using the call of the Eastern Screech Owl. Twice I've been able to call one of the resident owls in to the back porch by playing the "A" song (see "The Owl Pages" link in the column to the right).

Bruce suggested playing it during the day, beneath a low-hanging limb.

Songbirds of all types seem to be powerfully motivated to harass a raptor should they come across one, and owls are frequent targets of this mobbing behavior.

Sure 'nuff, by playing a loop of the owl song on my laptop (strategically placed underneath a low-lying bush), I soon had a dozen birds of half a dozen species lined-up in the vicinity. Pretty cool.

[Top to bottom: Golden-fronted woodpecker, Carolina chickadee, House finch, Lesser goldfhinches (with a female house finch), Carolina wren]

Even as I write ...

Even as I sit outside and write, wildlife happens.

Earlier, as I was busy moving old blog posts over to this site I heard the distinctive "B" song of an eastern screech owl, Megascops asio. It's a haunting, falling tone; really, quite unmistakable and a little bit spooky. Then, I heard the "A" song, a melodious trilling.

These (relatively) little owls (8-9 inches long with wingspans of 21-22 inches) are quite common in central and southeast Texas, and their range overlaps with the western screech owl subspecies through the middle and southern parts of the state.

Screech owls are active only after sunset and eat the usual owl fare: rodents like shrews, mice and rats, but also bats and birds. They'll even snag large insects on the wing, and have been known to eat fish, crawdads and scorpions.

At a work gathering at the Parrie Haynes Ranch the year before last, one of our video producers took a recording of screech owl calls and a PA system into the woods.

Some of my colleagues who accompanied him told me that half a dozen of the small owls flew down around them and perched in trees around the clearing in which they stood.

Clever boy that I am, tonight I hopped right over to The Owl Pages, scrolled down to the eastern screech owl recordings, and started playing them on my computer. After about two minutes, Tam stuck her head out to tell me dinner was ready.

As I got up to go inside, I heard a clatter above my head. It sounded as if something was running across our patio roof. I looked up in time to see a large, brownish bird flying back into the yard.

A screech owl had flown under the porch, into the light, and then circled back into the night. The clattering I heard was its wingtips beating against the underside of the roof.

Cool.

I sense a fun evening coming on in a week or so ... something that involves sitting out by the fire ring with red lights and a laptop and my 8-year-old.

In other news

In other news we've had buckets of rain, again. This time it was courtesy of Tropical Storm Erin, which made landfall just north of Rockport early Thurs. morning. The creek is flowing, and -- I couldn't help noticing today -- it's awfully pretty as it sparkles beneath the junipers and oaks in the late afternoon sun.

What is a "wet-weather creek?" Well, it's an intermittent stream. A sometimes -its-there, sometimes-its-not watercourse. The Edwards Plateau is a karsty kind of place, and a lot of our streams sink right through the porous limestone (and through caves and crevasses) into the Edwards Aquifer. Our neighborhood is smack-dab in the recharge zone for the aquifer, so it's no surprise that some of our creeks disappear almost as fast they appear.

This phenomenon makes for some lovely juxtapositons, like the prickly-pear cactus in the middle of the stream pictured above.

As I was leaving my office this afternoon I walked over to the wildscape garden that grows just outside the entrance to my building. There I was startled to find a grasshopper roughly the size and color of a canary.

It was clutching the stalk of a Turk's cap and it was so large, and so bright, that at first I thought someone had put a toy there as a joke. And then it moved.

Naturally I had to get pictures. I've posted them to BugGuide.net -- a fabulous site -- and so far have this educated guess as to what it is: "One of the bird grasshoppers in the genus Schistocerca."*

Speaking of wildscapes, that's something Tamara and I are giving some thought to. As I'm fond of mentioning, we have a great backyard.

There are a couple -- three -- non-native shrubs I'd like to see gone, but the laurel and oaks and ashe juniper are all healthy and beautiful. The oaks have a nice understory of brush that the birds really appreciate.

Oh -- the owl's back. Two yards over it sounds like. Time to crank up the owl song. I'll just let it play as I type ... see what happens.

Anyhow. Wildscapes. Yeah, so we're studying-up on what we can do to make our yard even more wildlife friendly. A water garden is a sure thing. But does the English Ivy really have to come out?

A couple of nights ago we had our biggest backyard visitor to date: ol' brer 'possum. I surprised him, he surprised me. He fled up an oak tree and I grabbed the camera (see the second photo on the page).

This morning as I was waiting on the cable guy, a brilliantly striped butterfly fluttered by. Turns out it was a zebra longwing (Heliconius charithonia). One of the fascinating habits of these butteflies, also called zebra heliconians, is that they tend to travel a circuit or "trapline," following a particular route again and again as they gather food.

I found a red spiny orb weaver in the oak grove at the back of the yard two days ago. I think it must be that connection to my childhood, when I found these spiders so fascinating, but I just can't get over how cool it is to have three different color phases of this animal in the yard.

For the birds

I think I mentioned that we put two bird feeders up. The one with the mix of seeds has been quite popular, and not just with the birds. The suet/peanut mixture (probably the wrong time of year) has been visited infrequently, mostly by titmice and chickadees.

Jays, cardinals, Carolina chickadees, black-crested titmice, white-winged doves and wrens all come through daily. A particularly enterprising squirrel also has made a couple of runs at the feeder.

On day three, I took it down and swapped out the sturdy rope it was hanging from with 30-lb. monofilament. I also hung it farther out on a limb and away from the trunk of the tree.

The squirrel has been pretty frustrated since then.

I wrote "Carolina chickadee," (Poecile carolinensis) but the birds I see here may in fact be black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapilla), or hybrids of the two. They all look about the same. One way to tell them apart is by their songs. Carolina chickadees have a four-note song, black-capped chickadees a two-note song.

The hybrids -- you guessed it -- invariably sing a three-note song.
These birds often will pick up a seed from the feeder and fly with it up to a nearby branch. "Tap-tap-tap-tap-taptaptap ..." the bird will hammer it open, then flit back down for another.

We'll call them Carolina chickadees for now. We're a bit south of the range of the black-capped, and smack-dab in the middle of the Carolina's summer range.

The cardinals have been fascinating to watch. There is one male adult and a fledgling that visit together fairly regularly. The fledgling, which will feed itself when dad's not around, will cheep "feed me" noises and shiver his feathers from a nearby branch when dad's on the feeder. The adult male dutifully takes him cracked seeds and puts them in his beak.

Cardinals are monogamous and typically mate for life. Males actually take on the majority of parental care, at least when it comes to foraging for the youngsters.

One theory is that because there is a sex bias among cardinals -- there are more males than females -- the males who have mated have to work hard to avoid "divorce." Does this mean China is in for a period of doting dads?

The owl, apparently, has thought better of a repeat visit to the porch. Oh well, another evening perhaps.

[I've since discovered this grasshopper is an Alutacea Bird Grasshopper, Schistocerca alutacea.]