The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

In the first occupation of the nest box, a Brown-crested Flycatcher delivers breakfast to the brood.

July 5, 2022

Summer doldrums.  The fray of thunderstorms stretches and relaxes into days of heat and calm...until the next monsoon frenzy.  The equilibrium part of punctuated equilibrium, the term biologists use to describe evolution’s long periods of quiescence marked by isolated episodes of sudden change, as in the rise of new species.

Like the days of quiet incubation between the laying and the hatching.

Or the stillness of the watching between the seeing.

It’s been three weeks since the appearance of the nightingale-thrush, the highpoint of June’s 66 species of birds, the year’s 115 birds, and certainly a punctuation on the yard’s “life count” of 169 birds.

Almost six inches of rain has the oaks blushing with tender carnelian leaves.  Green furs the landscape, calling for the brush mower and weed whacker.  The summer’s first tomatoes swell and glow, ripe for the picking and eating straight from the vine.

This morning, warm juice on my chin, I settle into the equilibrium of the yard.  Pairs of bushtits scurry for insects through the trees, the males dark-eyed to the females bright.  The brown-crested flycatchers announce each arrival at the nest box with penetrating, liquid brit, brit, brits and a rolling brrrrrg!  Their young have hatched and the parents ferry insects into gaping and bottomless mouths.  Female Anna’s, broadbills, and violet-crowned hummingbirds pluck lint and hair from the clothesline where I’ve clipped it.  A broadbill has chosen the chicken coop for a nest site, and on a hanging branch she weaves a walnut-sized cup of irony from gray cat fur.

The building material is courtesy of “feral” Bandit, who takes his mornings intermittently between vigorous brushings and birdwatching from my lap.

Bandit says he only punctuates the cowbirds.

A female Bushtit pauses among the branches of a blushing oak.

A Violet-crowned Hummingbird at the clothesline in nest-building mode (above and below).

A female Broad-billed Hummingbird makes use of a feline hairball.

More Bushtit. Because you can never have enough Bushtit.

Thanks for supporting the Big Yard! More to come….