They fruit in the spring. When millions of birds are migrating or breeding.
Doh.
Those purple splats don't seem so awful anymore.
A few days ago 20+ CEDAR WAXWINGS were in my neighbor's Mulberry, which got me
thinking about the tree.
A couple SWAINSON'S THRUSHES have also been hanging around:
http://jcfox.net/Swainson's%20Thrush.jpg
And a male SCARLET TANAGER came in yesterday afternoon:
http://jcfox.net/SCTA1.jpg
He came back and perched a little closer:
http://jcfox.net/SCTA2.jpg
That shot is a little washed out, but I like how you can see the way the wing
feathers stack up, with the outermost primary on the bottom and the three broad
tertials on top, and the groups of coverts. I'm going to remember that
structure
the next time I'm looking at a sandpiper and someone says something like
"notice
how the distal margin of the tertials have a scalloped, chocolaty appearance
with a tawny edge" and I go cross-eyed trying to figure out what they're
talking
about :-) It'll be a small step forward, though, since shore birds have
different wing
feathers than passerines. Sigh. One can only keep trying to learn, no?
A good resource for native plants, with color photos, which includes the native
Red Mulberry, Morus rubra, is here:
http://www.nps.gov/plants/pubs/chesapeake/
For DC area birders, Nature by Design in Alexandria is a nursery that
emphasizes native species:
http://www.nature-by-design.com/
FWIW, the Gray-cheeked from Weyanoke May 19 is here:
http://jcfox.net/Thrush.jpg
A good Bicknell's site is:
http://www.atl.ec.gc.ca/wildlife/bicknells_thrush/e/index.html
But I also found this site:
http://www.cs.umass.edu/~stemple/bithsite/index.html
which posits (somewhere in there) that Gray-cheeked sings the same song
repeatedly and Bicknell's doesn't. It may be true or not, or be helpful or not,
but there it is.
Good night,
John Fox
Arlington
