Of course, I stupidly did not write down any dates. But I think it has been about a month since I saw the nine babies. Now two or three mommy birds are keeping together with only about a dozen babies--now much larger.
This below was taken about a month ago. Now they can fly and they have a beautiful set of feathers.
The Cuteness Attack babies from a few weeks ago have gotten so big--and now they are learning to fly!
Momma goes first and then one by one, the babes... I love their shadows.
Dork-eye Junco
Sometimes described as attractive, or even “flashy”, this twerp is actually just another grey american sparrow. But this doesn’t stop it from flitting to and fro all over the forest floors, making its loud, painfully high-pitched trill, and scratching around for food with its feet.
The male’s song is a loud trill of the same note, repeated up to 23 times. It can last for several seconds and is irritating enough to be heard from hundreds of feet away.
Color: Boring. It’s got a white under-belly, as if anyone cares.
The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America
From Jenny Odell in the Believer:
The California towhee, a beige midsize sedan of a bird, does not have what we would ordinarily call a song. Instead, it emits a loud, periodic beeping that sounds like a smoke detector running low on batteries—a noise my dad refers to as a “chirp bomb.” You’ll hear it from below rather than above, since towhees like to forage through leaf litter, quickly jumping forward and back in search of bugs. My neighborhood in Oakland is full of this mix of dry rustling and beeping.
California towhees aren’t as simple as they seem. While they look to be colored a dull brown all over, closer inspection reveals a bit of orange streaking just below the beak and under the tail, prompting me to nickname them “secret orange-butts.” Their sound repertoire, too, is more complex than chirp bombs: very occasionally, I will hear one or more of them let out an agitated sound, descending in pitch, that I can compare only to someone using a squeaky marker on a whiteboard to draw tighter and tighter squiggles. This signals towhee drama, as far as I can tell, since it coincides with the birds chasing one another through the shrubbery.
Most of the time, though, the beeps are all you hear. Generic as this “song” may seem, it is actually quite geographically specific: the range of California towhees is restricted almost entirely to California and Baja California. And because they are present all year round, the steadiness of their chirps has begun to remind me less of a smoke detector and more of a clock marking local time.
First appeared in Riverteeth Journal on May 24, 2020
風薫る五月
In the Japanese taxonomy of breezes, the perfumed winds(風薫) blow just before the south-easterly winds of the rainy season, which arrive later in the month. Known as the plum rains (梅雨)—so heavy, the downpours are said to knock the ripening plums right off their branches. When that happens, it is the yellow sparrow wind (黄雀風) that is blowing. The ancient calendar is filled with times when one thing is transformed into another. In this case, Chinese legend has it that when this wind blows, the fish in the ocean turn into tiny sparrows.
Cleopatra knew all about winds. She traveled the Nile on a boat whose sails were perfumed in sandalwood and rose water. Adorned with purple sails so perfumed, Shakespeare said, the winds were love-sick with them.
In Los Angeles, May is the time of “peacocks screeching in the palm trees.” Their desperate longing can be heard for miles around. Still weeks away from “June Gloom,” when a heavy marine layer blankets the city in thick mist, in May the roses bake in the LA sun.
May is also marked by the flowering of the jacaranda trees. Strange that hardly anyone mentions them, since the world turns purple in May. That’s when I become Cleopatra for a few weeks, living in a cloud of purple perfumed blossoms.