Penelopedia: This & That in Northfield

Female Baltimore Oriole
A gorgeous female Baltimore oriole amid light green maple flowers against a brilliant blue sky. Irresistible!

This is a phenology post as well as a bird post. Here it is May 12, and the large maple in front of our house is only just flowering, before leafing out.

Late Thursday afternoon a male rose-breasted grosbeak was feeding from a caged feeder designed to exclude larger birds such as itself. It was quite successful in reaching its head through the cage to retrieve spilled sunflower chips from the bottom.


After I took the photos and did some research, I realized that this is an immature male in its first breeding season. When in full breeding plumage, a mature male's head will be fully black, the rose color will deepen, and the brownish streaks will disappear, leaving the bird with its stunning black, white and rose-red coloring.


What a beautiful bird.


On this date in 2011, I posted a photo of a male and female (shown below) on one of our other feeders. You can see how the immature male in the photos above is like a blend of the female and the mature male shown below.
Rose-breasted Grosbeak pair (2011)

I saw my first Baltimore oriole and first rose-breasted grosbeak of the season yesterday, within about 15 minutes of each other. I'd put the oriole feeder up in the snow late last week, and just put the hummingbird feeder out yesterday. I haven't spotted any hummingbirds yet. The grosbeak was trying to eat from our caged feeder that only allows small birds inside, and was probably finding that quite frustrating.

Rose-breasted Grosbeak (2011)
I didn't see any rose-breasted grosbeaks at the feeders last year, but in 2011 they appeared at the feeders on May 7. Rose-breasted grosbeaks winter in southern Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America and northern South America. Read more about them at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's All About Birds site.

Baltimore orioles have appeared in early May the last couple of years. Here's a photo from last year. I've written more about orioles here. They winter in much the same areas as the grosbeaks, plus Florida.

Baltimore Oriole (2012)
Within half an hour last evening I saw birds of brilliant orange, rose, red and blue -- an oriole, a rose-breasted grosbeak, a cardinal and a blue jay. No goldfinches, though. I remarked on this sudden richness of colorful birds in May two years ago, saying I felt like Dorothy stepping into the technicolor world of Oz.

The horrendously late spring this year, including heavy snowfalls in late April and early May, has our bluebird season off to a worryingly slow start. It seems likely that there has been significant mortality for these insect-eating birds, since the insect season is also starting slowly due to the cold.

Tree swallows on overhead lines
By this time last year, we had 20 bluebird nestlings already! This year we have just started to get out to check the boxes, and we barely have any nests that are more than a few strands of grass, let alone having eggs or nestlings.

We have only seen two bluebirds yet this season, one male and one female, seen on different days at our prairie-habitat trail, where one of the four boxes today had a substantially complete bluebird nest. Tree swallows have been much more conspicuous on or near several of our other boxes. Perhaps tree swallows, which eat flying insects in the air, may have had an easier time finding food than bluebirds, which pick insects off the ground.

We have complete or nearly complete chickadee nests in two of our boxes, while last year we had no complete chickadee nests.

We plan to move some boxes from a couple of areas that last year produced wrens but no bluebirds.

Follow our whole bluebird trail adventures here: Bluebird Trail.

This morning I noticed a small red squirrel foraging under our feeders. Its coat was clearly in mid-molt, which can be seen especially in the photos below.



An information sheet about the red squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) from Northern State University in South Dakota states: This species of squirrel molts its fur coat twice each year. The summer coat appears in late spring and is brownish red on the back and sides and white on the belly. The tail is reddish on top and gray underneath. A ring of white fur around the eye is characteristic of this species. The winter coat comes in by September and is denser and longer than the summer fur. In winter, a red stripe stretches from neck to tail and the tail fur becomes more reddish on top. Reddish brown tufts of fur develop near the ears for winter also. I hadn't realized that red squirrels really are redder in the winter, though they certainly look very red in contrast to the snow.


The Minnesota DNR says the red squirrel is found throughout Minnesota but is most common in coniferous forests. They eat conifer seeds, acorns, mushrooms, hickory nuts, walnuts and maple seeds. They clearly enjoy the seeds that fall from our bird feeders (primarily sunflower at this location), as well.

I've previously written about red squirrels making tunnels in the snow. Fortunately, our recent snow has almost completely disappeared.

This squirrel could well be supporting babies right now. The Minnesota DNR says:
Red squirrels mate in late winter. They nest in hollow trees or build a 12- to 19-inch ball-shaped nest in a tree top using leaves, twigs and bark. In early spring, females have two to five babies which are born hairless and weigh less than an ounce. The young squirrels are independent within 12 weeks. In late May two years ago, I captured some video of young red squirrels playing at the foot of a tree near our house.

This was the scene through my living room window at about 7 a.m. yesterday. The official snowfall in Northfield was 6.8 inches.


Here are some of our daffodils, which had just struggled into bud during the warmth of the past week. On Sunday it hit 81 F.!


In this return to winter, I've noticed starlings (above, in tree) coming to eat from our suet feeders, which I don't remember ever happening before. I cropped the photo to show the leaf buds which are finally swelling.


I've read on the MNBird listserv that Baltimore orioles have been sighted in the region, so despite the snow I put grape jelly in the oriole feeder and hung it up this morning. Hummingbirds often arrive around now, as well. 
With very few insects, little spring growth, virtually no flowers yet, and last year's seeds and berries pretty well picked over, birds and other animals are facing a tough situation. Continue to put out a variety of high-quality bird foods (small and larger seeds, nuts, suet, jelly, even hummingbird nectar) to help at least some of them get through this.
Facebook birders were abuzz yesterday over Greg and Linda Munson's photo, shared by the Zumbro Valley Audubon Society (based south of here, where they got even more snow) of a Canada goose faithfully incubating her eggs while chin-deep in the snow. 

Much of the snow melted yesterday, but it is snowing again this morning. That is supposed to turn to rain, and we should be back into the 60s and low 70s in another two or three days. Hang in there, birds and people.

During a far-too-short trip to the San Francisco Bay Area for a reunion this past weekend, Dave and I went out looking for shorebirds in the aptly named Shorebird Park near the Berkeley marina. We saw a nice variety of species we don't see often or at all in Minnesota. Two of these were the willet and the whimbrel, both seen picking their way along next to shellfish-encrusted rocks at the edge of a wide, flat beach.

Willet
The willet is a large, straight-billed shorebird, mostly gray in its winter plumage and a more mottled brown in summer. It's an elegant bird, to my mind, and is most often seen alone. We have seen them in Minnesota, but not often.

Whimbrel 
Here's the whimbrel. Look at that bill! How would you like to go through life with that on the front of your face?  It's well-suited to its job, though: apparently the curve of the whimbrel's bill exactly fits the shape of the fiddler crab's burrow, perfect for reaching in and pulling the crab out.

The Cornell Lab says about the whimbrel (which has also been known as the Hudsonian curlew):
One of the most wide-ranging shorebirds in the world, the Whimbrel breeds in the Arctic in the eastern and western hemispheres, and migrates to South America, Africa, south Asia, and Australia. It uses its long, down-curved bill to probe deep in the sand of beaches for invertebrates, but also feeds on berries and insects. The only other time I've seen a whimbrel was along the rocky northern California coast in March 2009.

Whimbrel (front) and Willet
Here they are together. While you can't see the full bill of the willet in this photo, you can get an idea of their relative size and coloration. Both are considered large shorebirds, weighing roughly between half a pound and a pound, but the whimbrel is the larger of the two.