Tag Brown-Headed Cowbird

Carolina Wrens with the Wrong Baby

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When you sit in your backyard watching the bird feeders as regularly as I do, occasionally you get lucky and see something really out of the ordinary. I had one such a sighting on a June afternoon. I was reading my book in the yard, keeping an eye on the feeders and my camera on my lap, just in case. I noticed that I had a Carolina Wren on my feeder. While I have had House Wrens and Carolina Wrens in my yard before (just last summer a pair of House Wrens occupied one of my birdhouses) they are still a rare enough visitor to illicit a little extra excitement from me. So I was happily snapping away for quite a while. Long enough to realize that it wasn’t one Carolina Wren visiting my seed feeders, but a pair. They seemed to be visiting the feeder, stocking up and flying off. To feed a baby I assumed, which is a safe guess regarding that type of behavior in June. After a while I thought about the situation in more detail. Wrens had been in my yard before, but never visited the feeder because…suddenly it clicked that they only eat insects. They do not eat seeds or feed them to their nestlings. So what the heck were they doing carting off all my seeds?!

At the rate they kept disappearing and reappearing I decided they couldn’t have been going very far. So I decided to investigate. Very slowly I got up from my chair and slowly skirted my way around the bird feeders, making a very large circle so as not to scare and scatter the other birds eating. From my new vantage point I could see that the Carolina Wrens were landing on a low branch in one of the trees that represents the boundary between our yard and the neighbors’. So very, very slowly and making many long pauses along my way, I slowly advanced toward the branch in question.

Once I made it more or less directly under the tree, the whole picture began to take shape. What I found on the branch was a giant fledgling. Well, giant compared to the Carolina Wrens. It was exhibiting typical fledgling behavior, making lot of noise, moving awkwardly and opening its mouth to indicate that it was hungry. While I was trying to determine exactly what this fledgling was and how it fit into the larger mystery of the Carolina Wrens and my birdseed, one of the wrens landed next to this massive baby and began to feed it the seeds. And it all became clear. Well sort of.

After some research I was able to determine that the fledgling I had seen was a young Brown-headed Cowbird. As I mentioned in my post about them, Brown-headed Cowbirds do not incubate or raise their own chicks. Instead they lay their eggs in the nests of other birds in the hopes that some will survive. Many birds recognize the Cowbird eggs as impostors and either remove the eggs from their nest or destroy the eggs. However, still other species, such as the Wrens that feature in this story, keep the Cowbird eggs and treat the chick as their own.

Of course one could choose to look at this tale with cynicism and negativity. Yes, it is awful to think that the Carolina Wrens eggs likely perished and the pairs was left with this huge demanding impostor. Almost an ugly duckling story, if the ugly duckling had been less sad and much more demanding (which, in reality, as a young swan, he probably would have been). And then there is the obvious question…how dumb are wrens that they think this thing could possibly belong to them? Even as a baby he towered over them both. But what really grabbed at me was that they had figured out to feed him what it was he needed to eat. How many other animals would have realized… “honey he really doesn’t seem into the spiders and the grubs, maybe we should try seeds and see what happens?” How did they know? Instinct? Because if it is instinct, that opens an even greater realm of possibilities. If they have the built in instincts to feed the Cowbird babies, perhaps nature gave them the instincts so that the Cowbirds, rejected from so many nests, would find one species of willing foster parents. So while many bird lovers are bemoaning the fact that the Brown-headed Cowbird kills the eggs of so many different songbird species, maybe they should stop and consider that nature does everything for a reason. The Cowbirds are just as necessary as the Carolina Wrens.

Bird Watching in the Days of Social Distance

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As so many of us are entering into our fourth week of self quarantine because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the struggle to maintain some sense of normality and sanity continues. As many of us work from home, or try to work from home, and so many others are faced with unemployment during the crisis, it is important that we continue to experience the calming effects of nature and the outdoors. And this we can do right in our own backyards and gardens. Just walking outside your door to do some yard work in the sunshine and fresh air can help to ease some of the tension and anxiety, even if just for a short amount of time. You should think of your yard as your sanctuary. This is especially true now that many of the parks in northern New Jersey have been closed to the public. Those of us who are used to traveling to the birds must now be content with seeing only those birds that come to visit us.

March did not come in like a lion this year, but it demonstrated variable and unpredictable tendencies that fluctuated between lion and lamb all month. Thus far April seems to be more accepting that spring has arrived. In our house we know that spring has arrived when we start to be awoken daily by the hammering of a Woodpecker on the outside of our house. I am not sure if it is the same Woodpecker every year, or even every morning, but our vinyl cedar shake shading seems to really have a special attraction, which is lacking in the dozens of trees in a 3 yard radius.

Watching the feeders right now is like a reunion. All our summer favorites have returned from their winter abodes and are getting settled back in. And those winter residents that never left us seem to be venturing out a bit more than they do in the winter, taking advantage of the change in the weather to begin bulking up. Even if we cannot see them all, we can most certainly hear them. With so many birds in the neighborhood establishing their territorial boundaries, searching for mates and seeming to be generally happy that the sun is somewhat shining, the neighborhood is alive with bird song.

Just a few days ago I decided to put my finch feeder back out on the post and see if I could attract New Jersey’s state bird, the goldfinch. In less than twenty-four hours I had success. The males were still molting into their bright yellow summer outfits, but they came none the less. I have been very pleased with the variety of birds I have seen this early in April. This includes some less frequent visitors, such as a curious Carolina Wren and a chatty Brown-headed Cowbird. Even one Dark-Eyed Junco is still kicking around. He seemed unconvinced that winter has left for good, but I think he is alone in that thinking.

Besides being as hungry as ever, they also seem to have that nesting bug. Both of my nest boxes are already humming with activity as two pairs of House Sparrows do their part to increase the population.

So try to take a few minutes each day to go outside and take it all in. The world hasn’t ended and life is going to carry on just as it always has. We will be able to get out to our nature preserves and parks soon, so just hang in there and take quarantine one day at a time.

Brown-Headed Cowbird

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The Brown-Headed Cowbird is often considered an unsavory character of the bird feeder crowd. Perceived like a seedy, back-alley character from a gangster film, many bird watchers chase the Cowbird away from their feeders. They see the Brown-Headed Cowbird as only a nuisance, taking food from the “pretty” birds. In many ways that could easily be a metaphor for human nature and life, but we won’t dwell on the greater philosophy and psychology behind it.

Brown-Headed Cowbirds are in many ways the loners of the bird world. But this loneliness is self-inflicted. The Brown-Headed Cowbird does not build a nest in which to lay eggs. Instead, the female leaves her grayish-white eggs with brown speckles in the nests of other birds. They are the only parasitic bird to reside in New Jersey. Their eggs have been found in the nests of over 200 different species. Some of these birds recognize an imposer and abandon the nest or remove the Cowbird egg. However, many other species raise the Brown-Headed Cowbirds’ babies along with their own young. It is this leaving of their young, like orphans, to fend for themselves in an ugly duckling situation that leads me to pity them.

But while this behavior may seem appalling to some bird lovers, especially those of us particularly partial to songbirds, we need to remember that such is the nature of nature. Brown-Headed Cowbirds were probably laying their eggs in the nests of other species long before man, pencil and paper in hand, decided to study and record his behavior. We shouldn’t judge them harshly for it.