Wildlife Wednesday
Birding Belize Day 2
I was again awoken promptly at 6am by the song of the still-unseen Spot-breasted Wren and, before breakfast, I took a walk down to the farm where I had my first sighting of an agouti, a big, tailless rodent.
Fernando met up with me at the restaurant and we headed out. Once again we dipped on the Ornate Hawk-Eagle, which has a nest on the property, but we saw two species of kite, a Hook-billed and a Double-toothed, and an Orange-breasted Falcon on our way to the botanical gardens.
At the botanical gardens I learned that all-spice isn’t a blend of spices, but that it’s the name of the dried, ground fruit of a myrtle tree that’s native to Central America. I also learned that Belize was important to its British colonizers because of logwood, a tree that produced several dyes that were important to the textile industry in Europe. Because of this, most of the trees were chopped down and it’s almost extinct now.
I think I was most excited to see a Tropical Royal Flycatcher at the gardens. These birds have a very colorful crest that they use in courtship displays, though the one we saw didn’t display it. We also got to see a Rufous-tailed Jacamar.
After the botanical gardens we had lunch at a local restaurant then continued on to Cahal Pech, a Mayan ruin surrounded by the city of San Ignacio. In ancient times the hill would’ve been completely grass without the trees that are there now and you could see for miles. Because Fernando’s expertise is in archeology and history, having him be my guide there was perfect.
Cahal Pech isn’t the historic name of the city, but it’ll be used until that name is discovered. It means “place of the ticks” ; not a very grand name for a royal family’s home! One of the most notable things about Cahal Pech is that it’s one of the only Mayan ruins where you can still see some of the original red paint in the bedrooms. Another cool thing I learned is that ceramics were used to expand the walls outward and that these layers can be used to date things.
While we didn’t see many birds at Cahal Pech, the few we did see were pretty exciting ones, including a perched Double-toothed Kite and a Middle-American Screech-Owl. I also got to see green iguanas and several more agoutis.
Birding Belize
My favorite time of year is spring. That wasn’t always the case; when I was a kid, I loved autumn best of all. I loved the lingering warmth with its hint of chill, the sweet smell of the dead leaves as they crush to powder under your feet, and of course, Halloween. But now that I’m a birder, though I still love fall, spring holds my heart.
Birds are never more active or exciting to watch as when they’re in the midst of courting and nesting. Every year, all of a sudden, it’s as if today is the very first time they’re alive and they’re desperate to live everything right away. I was told that early to mid-March is the ideal time to go to Belize because all the birds there would be singing and easy to see either nesting or getting ready to migrate, and it’s true.
I flew into Belize City the afternoon of March 6th and was picked up by Fernando from Black Rock Lodge. Black Rock Lodge is an eco-lodge in the rainforest along the banks of the Macal River with a focus on birding. My trip to Belize was a first in many ways. I’ve never traveled outside of the country specifically to go birding before and I’d never traveled as far south. I’d also never been anywhere as birdy. Though the drive was about 2.5 hours, it didn’t feel as long as it was because there was just so much to see. I must’ve had at least a dozen new lifers from that drive alone.
When we got to the lodge it was getting dark so I wasn’t able to see much that night, but the next morning promptly at 6am the Spot-breasted Wren woke me with its song. The view from my cabin of the cliff side and rushing river under the canopy of the rainforest was breathtaking.
That first day I took it easy and wandered around the lodge grounds. They grow food for their restaurant and the farm area was the first area I chose to explore. I also walked around the river and watched the Northern Rough-winged and Mangrove Swallows. The Mangrove Swallows look very similar to Tree Swallows, but have white rumps and little white eyebrows. While I sat quietly, a Green Kingfisher perched nearby and a couple of wood rails walked right past me in the brush.
I’m used to being able to pick out where a bird is and eventually suss out what it is, but I had to rely on Merlin a lot to figure out what I was hearing. Because there are a lot of birds that don’t have North American equivalents, it was harder than being in Europe where I could generally tell a bird’s family from its shape or song type and then extrapolate what it was.
The restaurant is an open air restaurant with fruit feeders and hummingbird feeders set up outside so you can watch the birds while you eat. It was there that one of the lodge’s guides, Isaias, met me in the afternoon to take me to go find a Pheasant Cuckoo, which is apparently easy to hear, but very difficult to see.
While his son drove, we made several stops along the way to check the Ornate Hawk -Eagle nest (no sign), take in a Green-breasted Mango on her own nest, and watch Baltimore and Orchard Orioles eat nectar from the flowering trees along the road. When we did finally get to the cuckoo spot it wasn’t too hard to call it in and it was much bigger than I expected! I learned that it is actually related to the cuckoos in Europe and like them, it will also parasitize other birds’ nests.
I slept somewhat better that night than the previous night, which was good considering the next day was my big day where I would go to the botanical gardens and the Mayan ruins of Cahal Pech!
Wildlife Wednesday
A Light in the Darkness
January is named for the two-faced Roman god, Janus, he that presides over new beginnings, transitions, liminal spaces, and also endings. As you look back on 2023, what will you leave behind? What did you accomplish? What do you look forward to?
2023 was a difficult year for me. I spent a lot of effort trying to force things into being and struggling against things outside my control and with whether I was simply settling in some aspects of life. However, it was also a time of discovery and when I decided that if I don’t make things happen, then they don’t.
This past July I visited Texas for the first time, earning my first new National Parks passport stamp in 4 years at Big Bend (gotta collect ’em all). While there, I logged 10 new bird species for my life list, almost got charged by javelinas(!), and laid eyes on the mighty Rio Grande.
This year I also participated in the Colorado Big Day birding challenge and the WFO Birdathon with my fellow birder nerd friends, led a field trip for Denver Audubon’s Master Birder program, did presentations for Broomfield Bird Club and Foothills Audubon, and finally saw a bobcat. Now I just need to see a mountain lion!
In 2024 I’m heading farther abroad. I won’t make it to Australia next year as I’d hoped, but I will be exploring Belize and I’m so excited! I’ll definitely be documenting that trip! Beyond that, I don’t know where I’ll be or what I’ll be doing in 2024, but I’m excited to find out!
To those of you that celebrate and to those of you who don’t, Merry Christmas. Wherever you find yourself in the new year, may it bring you peace and joy.
Second Helpings
To recap, this past spring and summer I was treated to the intimate details of House Finch and Cooper’s Hawk breeding/nesting behavior. I put up a nest platform for my House Finches and a pair readily took to it and ended up hatching 3 chicks. Unfortunately for them, a pair of Cooper’s Hawks decided to raise a family in the neighborhood a few doors down and the House Finches didn’t stand a chance.
Foolishly, I didn’t take the finch nest platform down after the first batch of chicks disappeared because I didn’t quite realize that House Finches are one of the songbirds that will reuse an old nest. More importantly, the new female was much more secretive than the previous one and I didn’t realize she had taken up residence until there were already eggs. For fear of disturbing her, I didn’t implement my “brilliant” hawk-deterring idea.
On May 16th there were 5 eggs in the nest. As we know, birds typically lay 1 egg a day as it’s energetically expensive to produce and lay eggs. That means egg-laying began on May 11th.
On May 26th, however, when I checked the nest after the female flushed, there were only 4 eggs. This indicates that the female sensed one of her eggs wasn’t viable and got rid of it. I noticed this before with both my Northern Flickers and Black-capped Chickadees. Just 3 days later, all 4 remaining eggs had hatched!
The whole time this was going on, the Cooper’s Hawk parents were in full control of their territory, which included my yard. My feeders were barely visited most of the spring and summer with only the bravest or dimmest birds risking it all for an easy meal and the big maple in my front yard was the Coop’s second base of operations.
Every day I feared that the Cooper’s Hawks would find the finch nest and raid it, but day after day went by. The finches’ eyes opened. They grew feathers. Perhaps sensing the mortal danger they faced, the chicks were very quiet. I also rarely saw the parents visit the nest and feared that they had abandoned them to starve, but the chicks’ full crops definitely showed they were being fed.
I had started to hope the finches would make it. By the time of my last photo of them peering warily out at me on June 10th, they were already 13 or 14 days old and the timeline for House Finch fledging is between 12 and 19 days.
Then tragedy struck. As I lay in bed on the morning of June 16th, I saw a dark shape dart past my window and heard the male Cooper’s Hawk strike the nest platform. Though I slammed my hand against the glass of the window, the Coop wasn’t deterred. Nature, red in tooth and talon.
Both House Finch parents, especially the female, were beside themselves. They kept flying to the empty nest and all around, including landing on my garage roof as if searching for the missing babies. I felt terrible and, even though she couldn’t understand me at all, I kept telling her that her babies were gone.
In a bit I got dressed and went out to my front flower bed to do some weeding, but while I was there, the female finch landed on my neighbor’s mini trellis, still chirping up a storm. Once again I opened my mouth to reason with her, only there was an answering chirp! One of the chicks had somehow managed to escape the hawk attack and was on the ground under the trellis! Trial by fire had forced it to fledge before it was mentally–but crucially not physically!–ready. Reunited, the baby finch took ungainly flight, following its mother to the crab apple across the street where dad was waiting. Then the three of them flew off.
I don’t know why the Cooper’s Hawk waited to attack the second finch nest. I can’t imagine he didn’t notice they were nesting. Maybe he was waiting for them to be at the right size to make them a fit meal for his own chicks? I hardly think it was to give the finches a fighting chance; nature isn’t that merciful.
I never knowingly saw the surviving finch chick or its parents again, but the Coops raised 2 chicks and they hung around my yard for the rest of the summer. One of them was visibly bigger than the other: a boy and a girl, little clones of their parents.
Hawk Watch
I apologize for how long this post has taken to get out.
In March of this year, I began to be woken up by insistent calls from a female Cooper’s Hawk. These weren’t the typical kek-kek calls I normally associate with Coops, but more of a raspy waah sound.
This was a big bird, so I knew it was a female right away–male raptors are always smaller than females–but what was the meaning behind the call? On March 18th, I found out; apparently the waah call is an invitation to copulate.
After mating, I noticed the pair appeared to be interested in a large tree a couple of houses over, which I had a great view of from my backyard. In Cooper’s Hawks, the male is the one that builds the majority of the nest, and I watched him break small branches from my partially dead maple and fly them to the chosen tree. Typically it takes about 2 weeks to complete the nest.
In addition to nest building, the major role of a male raptor is to keep his mate and nestlings fed and the male of this pair was an excellent hunter. The most taken prey seemed to be House Finches and House Sparrows, probably because they’re the most abundant in my area, but I also discovered feathers from some unlucky Northern Flicker and ones that were most likely from a Eurasian Collared-Dove.
After a successful hunt, the male Coop would call his mate off the nest to the big maple in my front yard where he would give her her meal. He’d then take over brooding duties until she was done eating.
Unlike falcons that kill quickly with a bite to the back of the neck, hawks squeeze their prey to death with their talons. Sometimes they pluck their victims while they’re alive before chowing down. Many times this past spring and summer I would be sitting on my patio while feathers snowed down from their favorite perch and I would sometimes find gruesome tokens of past meals on my walkway.
The bigger the bird, the longer the incubation period. For Cooper’s Hawks, incubation is about a month. Like most birds, they lay one egg a day and won’t incubate until all eggs are laid. They tend to lay between 3 and 5 eggs.
Chicks are born with a layer of white “natal down” that is supplemented with a second layer of “thermal down” after about 10 days. This thermal down helps better insulate them against heat and cold.
My first real glimpse of the chicks was on June 16th when they were white, fluffy things between the rapidly leafing out branches. If this white fluff was their thermal down, that means they probably hatched in early June and the eggs were laid sometime around the beginning of May. Given this was a whole month after dad, presumably, finished their nest (around April 1st), it could mean this was a replacement brood or the parents just took longer to get down to business due to the cold weather and early spring hail storms.
I think you can probably guess at this point what happened to my House Finch chicks…
Finch Firsts
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Wildlife Wednesday
Empty Nester
When last we checked in with the Black-capped Chickadee family, there were 4 live chicks and an egg.
About a week after hatching, the chicks were beginning to look more like birds. Feathers were growing down their backs and starting on their wings. Although their eyes wouldn’t open for another 4 or 5 days, they were already starting to preen like adult birds. Clearly this is an innate behavior in chickadees as there’s no way they could mimic what they couldn’t see either parent do.
While only the female Black-capped Chickadee incubates the chicks, both parents are active in feeding. As mentioned previously, sometimes the male will also do some mate-feeding, which the female then passes along to the chicks. The mystery of what the parents were feeding became clear as I saw the chickadee parents on my suet feeders often. Sometimes though I caught sight of them feeding a moth or a caterpillar. More and more, the female would tip herself beak down into the nest after feedings and poke around. I believe this was so she could expand the nest to accommodate her growing brood.
By week 2, the chickadee chicks were starting to look more like chickadees and were getting more vocal, clambering to be the first to get the food offered by their parents. Due to the small confines of the nest, they would often lay on top of one another seemingly without much of an issue. I thought this made sense because I thought they also roost together to keep warm in winter, but apparently unlike other birds like bluebirds, chickadees roost singly.
Most of the literature I’ve read says that Black-capped Chickadees take 16 days from hatching to fledging, but on day 15, other than exercising their wings a bit, they showed no real hurry to fly. Granted, this may be due to a late snow that occurred right around the stated fledge date, although chickadees fledged on day 19 at this nest in New York, which the author notes is the average for their yard.
May 25th, day 20, was the appointed day. The chicks were VERY busy hopping around the box and flapping their wings beforehand. Probably because they had some extra days to prepare, they fledged in quick succession. All but one chick had fledged by the time I got outside with my camera around 8am.
While the parents flitted around, calling encouragement, the chick would hop up to the hole, stretch out and look around for a few seconds, calling back, then disappear back inside. Finally, the chick decided to take the plunge and jumped out of the hole, fluttering the few feet into the nearby aspen saplings.
I haven’t seen the chicks since, but I’ve seen adult chickadees, presumably the parents, at my feeders. I can only hope the chicks are doing okay, though the fledgling period is the most dangerous for young birds. If they have survived, they’ll be just about ready to leave their parents and go off on their own; Black-capped Chickadee fledglings typically only stay with their parents for about 10 days.
And now, the mystery of the egg. When I cleaned out the box, the nest was pretty dirty and unkempt, but I didn’t initially see the infertile egg. Feeling the nest though, I definitely felt something hard. Sure enough, mama chickadee had buried the egg deep inside the nest. With their small beaks, I suppose this was more efficient than trying to pick up the egg and remove it from the nest as the Northern Flickers did.
Good luck, little chickadees! I hope I see you again even if I don’t recognize you!
New Colorado Naturalist 