A white-breasted nuthatchery

I hope the incubating nuthatch in this box was satisfied with its mates' choices of carry-out.  

During incubation he served his lady a lot of legless carpenter ants, and she accepted them eagerly. 

Occasionally he served her a red ant, but . . .

the mainstay was caterpillars (which Mr Smiley identified as those of noctuid moths).  He also delivered shelled sunflower seeds from our bird feeder.  

He was a bit of a show-off. His acrobatics were eyecatching, . . . 

  but he didn't hang around after deliveries. 

I was puzzled by the occasional delivery of squirrel fur, a feather, and perhaps paper mache from wasps' nests. 

At these times he was also photographed peering into a gap in the box. 

The old nest box was coming loose at the backboard, and I gather the materials were intended for nest maintenance -- an attempt to chink the gap with fuzzy bird oakum.  

Finally the hen appeared with a fecal sac, and I knew the eggs had hatched. 

Apparently she made hasty exits, because the camera trap never caught this action again. 

When the chicks hatched, spiders and small beetles were added to the mainstay of caterpillars . . . 

and then moths replaced caterpillars.

The camera snapped one youngster the day before the family suddenly disappeared.

Except for yellow rubber-band lips and short tail, junior looked just like its parents.

The little imp also looked vulnerable, especially clinging to the box.

The next morning . . . (insert a heart-rending "oh no" here) . . . my camera caught several images of a Steller jay on top of the nest box.

I immediately checked it out with a flashlight.

The box was empty. There were no nuthatches at the feeder either.

I started to think the worse. Did the jay eat the fledglings? (Of course it did, you damn fool. Wasn't it just there, looking for more?)

It would have been so easy to nail the little buggers, and that's probably what happened. (Hey, you're a biologist. This is how it works.)

Two weeks later four nuthatches showed up at the feeder.

If the jay dined on tender nuthatch, it didn't get all of them.

Messy nest builders

This may be evidence that some birds are wasteful builders of nests.

When Craig and I found the big pile of sticks on the ground, we thought it was just another wood rat's nest.

Then we changed our minds.

It was not against the wall of the cliff, and directly above it was a raven or raptor's nest.

This was a pile of construction waste, probably accumulated over several years.

Whoever it was, they were not very efficient.

We will check up in a couple months to see who the current builder is.

Mallards and my clueless bird dog

[The hen is incubating a clutch of ten eggs under the fallen pine.

Her head is right under the branch.]

The mallards have split from the flock on De Sabla Reservoir to nest along the flumes.

We encounter two nesting pairs every day when Fred gets his "walkie" along the flume trail.

The ducks were skittish when they were looking for nest sites, and always flushed at our approach.

The commotion usually flustered Fred. 

But I have to credit him for giving chase the one time he seemed to actually see them.

[She covers them with leaves and down when she leaves the nest.]

Now they are setting on eggs, and lie low. 

So we just walk on by. 

I see one hen on the water every day now, and Fred doesn't even notice.

So, what I want to know is this: if it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, and smells like a duck, why is my half-breed Labrador so clueless about ducks?

More screech owls

After several days of adjusting camera position, I managed to get 4 more photos of the screech owl in flight (2.7% of 143 photos). I'm not finished with this yet. Now that I know the flight path, I'll try one or two more angles.

The nice thing is that the birds have habituated to the camera. Notice that now I am using the plural. A pair of consecutive photos of owls leaving the cavity proves that there is a pair, but I still can't tell them apart.

In this week's batch of photos there were still no images of owls carrying prey. I assume they are feeding away from the nest, but expect the male will deliver food when the female is incubating.

Does any reader of this humble blog know if screech owls regurgitate pellets away from the nest? Doesn't it makes sense for a nesting owl to keep the nest area free of cues to predators? There certainly is no sign of pellets in the vicinity of this nest tree.

A mossy gym sock in a tree

Photo: California Academy of Sciences

Many years ago when I was in junior high school the California Academy of Sciences had a diorama of nesting bushtits. The nest was a fine work of animal architecture that looked as soft as a wool sock. The engineers were tiny bits of bird fluff perched in the nest's domed entrance and on a nearby twig.

I never failed to pay a visit to that diorama and other favorites on Saturday excursions to the academy, but I never managed to find a bushtit's nest, which is probably just as well.

The bird-nest-collecting phase of my youth ended abruptly one August day when my family returned home from summer vacation. When we entered the house our legs started to itch. The itching quickly spread upwards, and soon we were all scratching wildly. We were feeding thousands of hungry fleas.

My mother immediately concluded that my bird nest collection was the cause and unceremoniously consigned it to the garbage can. I felt it was an unfair rush to judgement. I mean, we DID have a dog and dog bedding in the house. However, if a bushtit nest had been among those discarded treasures, I might still be in therapy.

My appreciation of bushtit nests lay dormant for nearly a half century, but when we returned to California, I was thrilled again to watch these self-absorbed bits of fluff foraging in the oaks around the house.

 I knew something was up two weeks ago when on two consecutive days I encountered a pair in the vicinity of a particular canyon live oak.

 Then I discovered a "mossy gym sock", their unmistakable feat of engineering--dangling 8 feet above my head.



The next day I drove a post into the ground under the nest. It was no small feat getting the camera trap into position.

Gauging the position of the motion sensor in relation to the nest hole was a trying experience, because the camera was at the end of 4 lengths of interconnecting square tubing.

Then I discovered that the limbs and the bird nest changed position almost daily!

Apparently the wind caused the branches to interlock differently at times. I finally resorted to three guy lines to adjust the camera's position on a daily basis.

The bushtits overcame their fear of the camera on the third visit.

Then they disappeared down the hole, and the nest alternately vibrated and bulged here and there as they lined the inside with plant down.



The next day the 1 gigabyte memory stick was filled to capacity with pictures of the oak leaves lashing the camera. Spring breezes had triggered the camera every 4-12 seconds.

Now I understood why bushtits make nests shaped like socks.

Two days later, I got a few superb shots of the bushtits in the still of the morning, but I lost the files due to sloppy computer technique.

Finally, after two weeks of twice-daily visits I got the pictures I was seeking--the male and the female (with the silver eyes) in the nest hole--just as I remembered them from the Cal Academy in the late 1950s.



Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Library Assistant Karren Elsbernd for scanning the image of the bushtit diorama, and the California Academy of Sciences for permission to reproduce it here.