Nature Notes: Songs of the Season
No two springs or summers are the same. June may continue the string of warmest months since records have been kept. It was also dryer than usual. Do high temperatures and droughts go hand in hand? There used to be a local guru I could call for answer that question, but Long Island’s most longstanding and celebrated weatherman, a farmer and resident of Bridgehampton, Richard Hendrickson, is no longer with us, having passed away earlier in the year.
Without a doubt, having just witnessed the fantastic blooming of the mountain laurel in the terminal moraine of Bridgehampton, North Sea, Noyac, and Water Mill, this spring was one of the best for tree and shrub flowering in decades. Beginning with the shads in mid-April, then sequentially the sweet cherries, beach plums, wild cherries, dogwoods, mountain laurels, arrowwoods, elderberries, and, lastly, just beginning, swamp azalea. It’s been a knockout year for the whites, as well as for their sweet aromas. Too bad there are so few honeybees around to take advantage of them.
The spring birds arrived a bit early this year, probably because of the record warmth in late February and March. It seems that red-breasted male robins were everywhere come April. Then, come May, gray catbirds became the favored ones. In my 70 years living on Long Island I have never seen so many catbirds. Catbirds, brown thrashers, and mockingbirds are all in the same family. They mimic thrushes. They are the “new agers” of the birdsong world; they make it up as they go along, sometimes as with mockingbirds, even on a fully moonlit night.
Pretty much all of the other birds have distinct songs that they repeat while staking out their territories. Unless I use an amplifier, I don’t hear a lot of them and so am dependent upon younger ears to keep me in touch with those males that sing and call in higher ranges. Kate Epstein, who has been hearing the same bird over and over again, both at Albert’s Landing in Amagansett and the end of Mile Hill Road in Northwest Woods, described it to me. She tried playing birdsongs, but could never hit upon the one that went “do re me fa sol la ti do” in an ascending scale.
When I was only 20 and working during the summer of 1954 at the New York State Department of Conservation’s game farm in Ridge, I often heard a song like the one she described. It was coming from a prairie warbler. I emailed back and she searched her birdsongs. “That’s it,” she replied. Victoria Bustamante has been hearing the same series of notes near her house in northeastern Montauk, and she agreed it was a praire warbler.
Jane Ross has been busy over the years tending quite a collection of birdhouses on an old farm by Georgica Pond. Georgica Pond isn’t doing so hot, but Jane’s birdhouses are almost fully occupied. Her bluebirds, which have nested there for five years now, except last year, fledged five young after having had a first set of nestlings fail. “Wiped out by a raccoon,” she guessed. She thinks they may try to raise a second family in the same box.
She put out dishes of mealworms to help them along. She has four boxes of tree swallows, two of which fledged five young, two of which are on their way to fledging. Another box had four dead hatchlings; she thinks a May cold spell might have done them in. Jane also has a pair of house wrens occupying more than a single box and a pair of great crested flycatchers are nesting. They are the species that often adorns their nest holes by hanging a molted snakeskin; it’s thought to ward off potential predators. Then, too, there is a pair of Baltimore orioles nesting somewhere nearby.
Jane is an international education consultant, of which there are not many. I wonder which she enjoys most, her vocation or her avocation? I would think the latter, inasmuch as she is so good at it and birds are so appreciative of those that look after them.
Following two disastrous years, Joe Giunta reports a good year for bluebirds and tree swallows. It seems that southern flying squirrels, new to the South Fork in the new millennium, have been raiding the boxes, especially those at the East Hampton Airport. Joe has had to move many boxes away from the tree line and altogether abandon a trail at Abraham’s Path. However, this year things have been looking up. As of Monday, 36 bluebirds and 50 tree swallows have fledged. If things continue as they are going, Joe, who has been tending bluebird trails along with his volunteers for nearly 20 years now, might end up with 75 fledged bluebirds, which would make this summer a very good year.
Some common birds, however, seem to be in short supply. Carolina wrens are wanting in many areas, such as in Hither Hills Montauk where Jane has had them for several years running. I haven’t been hearing their chatter either. It’s the first time they’ve been silent in my Noyac yard for years. Towhees, ovenbirds, and whippoorwills are in short supply. A few weeks ago on a warm, still night with a full moon, I drove 45 miles of back roads in Bridgehampton, Noyac, North Sea, and Water Mill, stopping to listen for five minutes at 35 different pull-offs. Not a whippoorwill did I hear. I did hear lots of gray tree frogs singing their breeding tremolos from sites that held water and saw the first firefly of the year lighting up along a wooded shoulder.
I’m sure some of you have watched red-winged blackbird males chasing crows. Crows are notorious nestling stealers and have very sneaky ways of going about it. Two crows will approach a nesting area, red-winged blackbirds will chase one away, often for several hundred yards, the remaining crow will swoop in and steal a nestling or two.
While checking out the magnificent cactus blooms along Long Beach Road in Noyac the other day I observed a fish crow, the smaller relative of our common crow, being chased by two male red-wings. I wonder if the fish crows have learned a thing or two from their bigger brothers since they’ve settled in among them.
No whippoorwills, no bobwhites. What’s happening out there in birdland? I’ve been asking all kinds of people from all parts of eastern Long Island from Montauk to Riverhead the same questions: Any whippoorwills? Any bobwhites? Almost all say no, and often times they qualify their answers with, “I haven’t heard one of those call in 10 years or so.” The senior citizens among us almost all know the bobwhite’s call, as it used to be clarion cry for the Rinso soap commercials on the radios before TV. Rinso seems to have bit the dust as well.
People have been inquiring about deer lately. Many residents have been missing them. This is the first year in the last 10 that my daylilies haven’t been eaten before flowering. However, I notice that some of those near the edges or roads have been plucked off their stems. Last Thursday, coming back from Montauk in the fading light I was delighted to see 27 in the fields along Further Lane in Amagansett, 23 of which were in the big field on the north side of the road formerly known as the Rock Foundation property. Maybe the deer are getting tired of us humans — as I am — and keeping to themselves.
I’ve noticed very few among the road kills I survey in my trips back and forth. Squirrels and opossums continue to top that list.
Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].