I have some photos to post when I can ( basically when we get home) but in the meantime…
We were in Brittany for a week and… from a nature spotting point of view it was, well, nothing new. The reserve at Séné was cool, and we saw more spoonbills than you could reasonably shake a stick at. But nothing out of the ordinary to report.
Here in Normandy we’re in a cabin on a heavily wooded vacation site. We get chaffinches on our deck looking for crumbs - I put some out, of course, but all that did was promote a huge fight over territory. Oops. But the most interesting thing…
The bar area is in old chateau outbuildings. The bar itself has a poorly maintained flint wall with many cracks and holes - and, oddly, a single bird nesting box attached to it. In the cracks and holes, dozens of sparrows have nested. You can get yourself a beer and sit and watch constant feeding of chicks. There’s a constant cacophony. It’s a brilliant time waster. But I also saw something that I haven’t seen before.
Your best view is the single nesting box. I saw a chick push a fecal sac onto the lip of the nesting box opening! A parent appeared a couple of minutes later and delivered food, then picked up the sac and flew off with it. How cool is that? I have a mental image of sparrow A saying to sparrow B “Well, at least I don’t have to tell him to tidy his bedroom!”
Yesterday afternoon, our two junior falcons jumped up to the ledge of their man-made nesting box. That’s about a four inch hop. I watched Mom encouraging them. They are looking bigger than her because they still have a lot of down, but the down is disappearing fast as real feathers come in. Now that they know how to get to the ledge, it has immediately become their preferred position. They are also learning how to tear into meals themselves and get a bit impatient waiting for Mom to do it.
I was inspecting our horse fencing yesterday and in a brushy corner a turkey hen ran out, followed by six or so little turkey chicks. Made my day.
The six mallard ducklings are still alive! And they are small ducks now, no longer ducklings. Previous years the mallards would have a huge communal nest, hatching 15 or more. Then one hen would try to care for them and they’d die/disappear one by one until one or two remained. I prefer how they did it this year.
Walking the puppy the other day, we’d come across a very young bird, still full of down sitting very still by the sidewalk. The nearest trees were about 20-30 feet away. We decided to keep moving when we heard mama mockingbird squawk at us, not wanting to make an enemy of the mockingbirds. When we came back from the other direction, it was gone.
I’m guessing that was fledgeling attempt number one for someone.
We rarely see the chicks, but sometimes we’ll see a hen walking through the tall grass, and all the grasses continue moving in a long trail behind her.
So I’ve mentioned before that turkeys roost in the trees around me…
Daybreak at the very tippy-top of a reasonably tall cypress (50’?) across from my sun-room (and shot through a glass window). I’m on a hill well above the base of the tree so he was roughly about level with me.
Anyway I also thought this was sort of neat, kinda. Three in a tree (well, four - but three species). A pair of house finches, a dark-eyed junco (singing) and a lesser goldfinch in the background, all sharing the top of an isolated tree in a field. I guess a good vantage point and tolerant flocking seed-eater etiquette trumps any territorial animosity, even during breeding (and bug-hunting) season:
That same male house finch (I think) showing off his colorful back/rump:
Apparently it is somewhat diet-related and like many birds can vary with the seasons. It seems the more carotenoids in their food, the more intense the color and the types consumed can effect hue. Just anecdotally the house finches just south of me tend to look a bit more washed out and orangeish, at least to my eyes. My area and northwards seem a bit redder.
Here in Topeka we have had three young falcons in a box downtown. Two were female and grew faster than their brother. They have fledged and are now out in the wild somewhere. The make still has a way to go but he’s thinking about getting on the ledge. There are two 24/7 cameras so one can always check in on the birds. I didn’t think the male would make it but now that he doesn’t have to struggle with his two sisters to get fed he’s doing fine, just has grown more slowly.
Mallard hen and her six ducklings. We had just tossed some fish food and so there are goldfish there. The ducks eat the fish food and the goldfish and koi nibble the ducklings feet, causing repeated startling.
Well, about thirty years ago, I drove out to East Kent, to the only place in the UK where you stood a realistic chance of finding a Lizard Orchid. There were, I recall, three sites; my East Kent site; Rye Harbour - which is a vast area (of land) - good luck finding anything there; and somewhere in the Thames Valley where, it was thought, a single Lizzy had been spotted half a dozen years earlier. So East Kent was a no-brainer, and off I went - and Lordy, I found two or three. It was quite a coup.
Last Friday we were nosing about on the Pointe d’Agon (a kind of sand dune reserve in Normandy) and … you know what comes next. As ever, this image has been cropped by Google photos - click for the full image.
Actually, you don’t know what comes next. I was excited, of course; these guys - because there were half a dozen of them! - were up to a half meter tall! Wow! And a little further on - more! And a little further on…
I was excited for the first hundred or so. Obviously I didn’t count them, but I imagine we must have walked past about a thousand. The next day, out with friends, we visited a couple of open gardens further north along the coast. Both had lizzies growing on the road verges outside the garden, and as weeds inside the garden. I guess it took thirty years, but…
(Actually, I believe lizzies are more widespread in the UK these days - global warming and all that. The name derives from the idea that each of the little flowers looks like a lizard going about its business.)
We stayed for a few days on the same vacation site that we visited last September. That site had a huge and spectacular cattle egret roost (see post 1835) which I was looking forward to seeing again. Okay, this time you really do know what’s coming next. Not a single cattle egret. Now, I easily get the idea that an extended family might move out looking for better food sources up or down the coast or whatever - but an entire roost of several hundred birds? Them’s strange critters, them egrets.
What we did see was these two cuties. They’re swimming in dense weed in a pond.
That makes me happy to hear. I’m not sure of the gender of this pair, but could be one of each as one does seem slightly smaller than the other and not as quick to feed but they are both up on the ledge and one is flapping her wings like mad today, building strength. I think it is just a matter of days before she is gone and her sibling will be only a day behind. Last year, only one of five hatched and fledged but that might have been a good thing as Mom appeared to become a single parent fairly early in the process.
@Treppenwitz I’ve never even heard of a Lizard Orchid. That one looks a bit done in by the hot, dry summer. Here, the local orchids are Showy Lady Slippers and had grown quite rare. There is an effort to protect them but our own hot, dry summer isn’t helping.
I used to watch a falcon cam in Rochester New York, on the Kodak building. One year there were five eggs and all of them hatched and fledged. It was extraordinary.
