At the Dunkin Donuts parking lot

Four grackles make a donut dance.
First one cuts in and then the next,
and tossing high their heads, they catch
the crumbs of glossy minuet.

The cinnamon diminished by
sharp yellow beaks now grows as close
as earthbound herbs can get to sky:
A shift of wings and up all fly.

Baby starlings love Cheez-its

I hadn't heard the two baby starlings cheeping from their nest in over a week, but didn't necessarily think that boded badly: not to be gross, but no flies hovered near the nest, no parents flew around looking a bit lost (though that's probably just projection on my part).

Earlier this week I threw some cheez-its out in the parking lot-- is that bad of me?-- and the next thing I knew, there were six adult starlings and six babies! I could tell the babies because they were smaller, though not by much, and still brown and not yet the iridescent black of their parents. One silly baby would peck a few crumbs herself and then wait for a parent to feed her more! Glad they're OK for the time being.
Photo: Wolfpix at Flickr

Do you watch starlings? Starlings watch you!

Science Daily reports that starlings and other birds can tell if you are watching them, because they are watching you! Experiments show that if you are near a starling's food and looking at the food, the starling will stay away, but if you are just as near but looking away, the starling will approach and eat.

Starlings are intelligent creatures-- maybe not up there with crows, but pretty smart. They have a wide repertory of their own songs and are good mimics of other birds' songs and repetitive neighborhood sounds.

The starlings where I work have two babies this year, and had them considerably earlier than last year's fated infant. I go in and out of my building a number of times a day, and each time i do, I say, with as close to the same tone as possible, "Hello, little starlings! Hello, little starlings! How pretty you are! How pretty you are!" Maybe somedfay I will hear a whistle with the same intonation; at the least I hope they will be less wary of me.

This is the time of year when starlings fall out of their nests. A good site obout starlings and how to care for them can be found at Starling Talk.

Starling Saga: please don't fall out of your nest!

Well, the starlings have refurbished the nest under the eaves of the building where I work and yesterday morning I found two-thirds of an empty pale blue egg. When I got home I saw another empty blue egg under the house's eaves that hadn't been there in the morning. I had this image of a starling calendar: mate on April's first Wednesday, finish building nest, lay eggs, hatch babies-- on different days but simultaneously across the city.

Does a bird's offspring inherit the nest of the parents? Where I used to live, there was a pair of starlings under the eaves for twenty years!-- four or five generation's worth, as it turns out; a starling in the wild lives from five to seven years, although domesticated starlings can make it into their teens.

Last year the baby starling at work fell out of his nest three times; twice I was there to put him back. the third time happened over a weekend; the bird was dead on my arrival.

So to this year's starling, who I could hear today faintly chirping: stay in your damn nest until you can fly! I don't want to have to resort to the whole Circle of Life mantra for comfort.Just do the right thing and be one of those long-lived starlings. Now if my readers will just say to themselves, "I do believe in starlings, I do, I really DO!".

My starling didn't make it

Drove into the parking lot at work today and there was my baby starling, quite dead, quite dessicated-- I worked at home yesterday so it could have fallen any time from Friday night through yesterday. I was saddened but not terribly surprised.

After work I treated myself to supper at Casa de Nana. I ate outside on the deck. At one table two young women and a guy were talking about how much it sucked that one of the girls wasn't going to be working where they all worked anymore. About the third beer, two of them passed from laughing too loud to weeping in silence.

Three young guys came in, two blond and crew-cutted and one with a small dark goatee. Never did find out much about him-- he mostly just listened-- but one guy was an actor and the other on active duty in the Army.

The actor said, "People think its just pretending, but no-- you have to really become the person you're playing."

The soldier said, "I dreamed I was in solitary confinement and then I got out and I was walking down this long hall and it seemed like I was walking forever."

Drawing by Gregor Laird

Putting the tomatoes in, saving (maybe) a starling

Once I read a sentence in a National Geographic article about color that said: "In New England, they call it 'the color.'" No, we don't, I thought, no idea what the article was talking about. A few months later, in October, I found myself saying to a friend, "The color isn't supposed to be very good this year-- too dry a summer." Context is everything.

Well, in New England we "put in" our tomatoes, peppers and other vegetables, and that's what I did this Saturday and Sunday-- a bit late in the season but not too late. Most of the stores had put away their seeds but I managed to find string beans and bought plants for everything else. Sunny, dry, hot, breezy: a perfect weekend to be outside.

Today as I stepped outside my office door to go home, I found a bewildered baby bird sitting on the pavement. It was not one of those thumb-sized, almost embryonic babies that you always find already dead, yet it was not fully feathered enough to be a fledgling-- needed a bit more growing. There's a starling's nest in the overhang outside my office and I've been following the parents' progress in and out and the cheeps of at least one baby for some months. Clearly that's where it came from.

Could I put it back myself? The baby opened its yellow mouth and looked at me. I went and got a chair, but I was about two feet too short. I went back into the building to look for someone taller than myself. There was one guy, but he said,"Oh, no, you can't touch them, the parents will reject them." He was busy and didn't want to be bothered. Back in my office I called the Audubon Society in Lincoln to ask: Is this true, or a myth? A myth, the naturalist said. And if I find this bird back on my sidewalk tomorrow, what would I feed it? I can't tell you that, she said, because it's illegal to keep a wild animal. You'd have to look it up on the Internet.

No ladder in the building, but suddenly I realized that if I moved my car under the overhang, and climbed up on it, I could reach the nest. So I moved the car, and gave it a trial climb first-- yes, I could reach. Back on the ground, I picked up the bird with some trepidation-- would it struggle?-- but the baby was calmer than I was. I put it back in its nest and told it to be good and that I didn't want to see it back on the pavement tomorrow.

I know that anything can happen, but the life of a bird feels especially precious right now.

25.5 million birds are missing in this country, according to a new Audubon Society report. Some 20 species have declined by an average of 68%. "Forty years ago, there were an estimated 31 million bobwhites. Now there are 5.5 million," Verlyn Klinkenborg reports in a poignant, must read editorial in the New York Times, Millions of Missing Birds, Vanishing in Plain Sight.

While the reasons for declining bird populations are complex, I want to mention two because they are both within our control to change in the short term.

100 to 900 million birds are killed each year in this country because of collisions with glass, mostly because they are disoriented by and fly into lighted windows. Given the urgent need to reduce our energy consumption, getting buildings to turn off their lights at night only makes sense.

At least 100 million birds a year are killed by cats. In Wisconsin alone, cats killed 7 million birds last year.

I know many cat owners (and I used to be one of them) who let their cats outside and say that it's just part of the circle of life when their cats kill birds. I want to say, Please think again. With 60 million feral cats in this country, birds don't need any additional predators.

While my friend Holly encounters a bear and three cubs in her back yard (she lives in Northampton), and it scarcely seems unusual these days, little lives disappear around us and we don't notice. When was the last time you found a toad in your back yard? Or saw a butterfly other than a Monarch, although even those are in decline? And birds? An absence of movement in the air, an absence of shadows that fall on you in the garden, a silence.