May We?

Well, Allan really hates that I call any part of springtime "summer" but Happy Summer! Apparently. May always is summery. The question is will June be Juneuary. And I honestly cannot say.

In the meantime, we abide. 

 As promised last week, we did find herons! Lots of them!

Herons build their nests at the very top of trees, so it can involve a lot of craning (har har), but then TA DA. At least twenty nests with adults on top and little babies underneath begging for food. The noise is rich and stirring. Little herons making the clacking buzzing noises.

It's hard to really appreciate the full scale from close up, so let me borrow from a video that I took while there. 

Each nest had herons in it. 

It's actually quite impressive what can fit in those nests

Probably a few bunnies in there as well. Definitely little ones and sometimes more than one adult. 

Of course there were plenty of crows. A small group of them were mobbing a red-tailed hawk when we first arrived. Others had settled and were just about to get some allopreening on. 

In time. 

And still others were hanging out near the herons cawing their little hearts out in between enigmatic rattles. 

The herons were also joined by a cormorant who stopped in at a nearby branch

Along the rest of the park, there were countless gulls, another cormorant...

... And a very chill cobra chicken

Very cool. I am hoping we can go back in a few weeks. Maybe over Mother's Day Weekend, although we already have plans for that Saturday, and I'm not sure what it being a holiday will do for the crowds on Sunday. 

Good Mother's Day vibe though! And about all the "activity" we needed.

Allan caught a cold from this very extroverted girl who seems to wander free-range around our neighborhood stopping random neighbors to share pictures on her cell phone and tell stories in that way of extroverts. I wasn't sure whether Allan found this awesome or awful, but she seems to enjoy it, so yaya for roving extroverted girls. But extroverted people are serious vectors for disease, and they tend to have a much smaller "personal space" bubble on average. Such is the curse of outgoing people!

Allan was a little sniffly last Saturday, a snot machine on Sunday and officially eating ice cream for breakfast (yes, I know, but that's all that worked for her) and sleeping in on Monday. Basically, she caught the college girl virus and she's now rushing for a sorority. She does still have kind of a gravelly Natasha Lyonne vocal fry. 

I don't want to jinx anything (knocking on all our whole woods and whatnot), but nobody else in the house seems to have caught it...

...yet... but it's now been a week so that's a reasonable incubation period for something she literally came down with in less than 24 hours! Maybe it was super mild in the background of generalized allergies, but overall, this is about the 5th or 6th time that Allan has been sick, and I haven't caught anything awful from her. I'm staring to wonder if my immune system actually works appropriately sometimes? Or it's just always in such overdrive that I wouldn't notice if it did. Either way. Small mercies.

Either way, we've continued (mostly) on our regular neighborhood walks, despite her cold and my sprained toe (long story, but hey it's not broken!)

On Wednesday we were visited by a pair of ring-necked ducks!!! Ok, so nobody in the world actually knows what that means or why that's cool but assume it's super cool. 

Ring necked ducks are weirdly named, but they do technically have a very faint ring of "chestnut" color around their necks. Sort of. The drakes anyways. I honestly don't see it. They do have a kind of Nike swoop pattern of white and cool rings around their bills that is quite iconic, though!

We also have been enjoying the increased activity of all manner of swallows!

Swallows!

The first pair we saw were probably tree swallows. It took a lot of looking up and comparing, because they look an awful lot like violet-green swallows, but with minor differences that are harder to note when they're flitting around at the speed of light every which way. 

Tree swallows, meanwhile, have a white belly and blueish top and black wing tips/rump, while violet-green swallows have a white belly and violet-green back with bluer wing tip and rump. Violet green also has white higher up the face, and a more flatly even tail than the more mermaid like fin-tail of a tree swallow. Which honestly it hard to spot from the usual distances, but hey, nice to know. 

Since you mostly see these birds zipping around the sky and doing death defying acrobatic at top speeds, it's actually pretty hard to distinguish the two unless they (1) turn in just the right way for the sun to catch their wings, (2) land somewhere for a while to catch a breath (only ever happened with barn swallows so far). I'm happy that ebird added a tree/violet-green swallow entry on their checklist, because i rarely have the chance to distinguish them well. 

Meanwhile, a whole new population of swallows have shown up and they are fairly distinct, even from a distance. 

Barn Swallows!

We counted three nests in the Arena where Allan rides, as well as several adults just bouncing off the walls and rafters. 

Barn swallows are beautifully colored in a blue and rusty red. They have a vintage superhero look, chrome and metal wagon style. This is appreciable because you can tell them apart from a decent distance and you are more likely to see the flash of rusty colorations as they swoop over you than any of the more distinct field markings, etc.  Barn swallows also have a particularly forked tail, which helps with id on the fly (har har)

In other new sightings of the week, we saw our very first cowbird!!!

You are right, they do not look anything like cows! This is a female cowbird, our very own native brood parasite. I wrote about them a bit in my last post. They lay eggs in other birds nests and the host species tend to raise them. Unlike some brood parasites, they don't outright kill their foster siblings, but they still lead a bit of a violent life (the female cowbird will destry host eggs and nests if her egg is damaged or destroy one egg to replace with hers). They are also kind of cool. 

The females keep track of multiple nesting sites with a highly developed hippocampus that helps them keep straight where each nest is and how close it is to egg laying. Cowbirds, are generalist brood parasites, meaning they lay in several different species' nests. Meaning a lot of different tracking and adaptation.

They also somehow manage to figure out that they are cowbirds and not whatever their parents are. It's not fully understood how they do this, but there is a sort of a trigger in hearing another cowbird that brings one to understand their own identity. Cowbirds as young as five days old respond to a cowbird chatter call, which is somewhat similar to the begging cry they make. Cowbirds have a unique auditory processing system that is split in two parts: one part helps them learn the songs of their host species, while the other innately knows their own songs

As soon as they fledge, they seek out and flock with other cowbirds. Sometimes they actually sneak out at night to find their own kind. 

This may seem kind of obvious that they would choose to be with the birds like them, but it's actually a really exceptional feature of brood parasites and not guaranteed. Typically, birds imprint - meaning whoever raised them become their model for their identity and future mates. This happens frequently with pet birds, who treat their human owner like a mate. And to some extent, humans who are not raised by humans never quite develop the way we expect humans to (language in particular is dependent on an early exposure window)

Also, Cowbirds don't have access to mirrors (or necessarily an understanding of reflections in the first place) to notice how much they differ. Cowbirds do have an obvious sense of their plumage and size, but they rarely see their own reflection in the way humans do most of their lives. There is some research that cowbirds do take visual cues, nonetheless. When researchers mark their visible plumage with specific markings, they are drawn to other birds with the same artificial markings. 

More interestingly, the chatter call has to be heard within a certain developmental period. When cowbirds were kept in cages with canaries for their first winter, they learned canary songs and started courting canaries. When in Rome... 

At any rate, this cowbird was hanging out with a flock of starlings, so maybe she didn't get exposed to the right chatter call. Or maybe she just like starlings. It's always possible. They're both pretty well vilified. 

At any rate. We have survived a decent chunk of the weekend and a drive to Sedro and back, and now we're off to walk around before it gets too hot! Happy May

May the Fourth be with you when it comes.