Rock pigeon.
I’d barely awakened when I hear it: the flute-like call of a tufted titmouse. A rising call, repeated four or five times in this case. The bird must’ve been perched in the big oak overhanging the corner of the house where my bed is. I jumped up and threw on my bathrobe, grabbed my camera, headed for the bright back deck, newly splashed by the rising sun. Sure enough, the titmouse was calling from almost directly overhead—either in the oak branches or those of the adjacent maple. Trouble is, titmice don’t move around much when they’re singing their sweet spring song. In the twenty or thirty seconds my bare feet could stand the cold, I didn’t manage to see it. But I did hear another titmouse singing a similar song in a tree a couple hundred yards to the north.
Do you see the gray squirrel's eye?
In those sun-splashed twenty or thirty seconds, I also heard the soft call of a white-breasted nuthatch—and the two-note love call of a black capped chickadee. Back inside, I confirmed the temperature: 9 degrees (F). Clearly, our birds’ libidos are stimulated by the lengthening photoperiod, not the temperature.
After showering and dressing, I stepped out back in hopes of finding more love-sick passerines. Instead, I found a couple gray squirrels. One stared at me from around the great trunk of the big oak; the other poked its eye—and only its eye—out of its hollowed-out knothole.
Not long after, I made a trip to Rockland. En route, I was amused to see rock pigeons completely covering the south side of the little pitched roof above an old restored factory building in town. We humans tend to forget what it’s like to find warmth where you can find it—out of habit, or instinct. (Witness a dog or cat in a sunbeam.) And in a low tree above the yellowed grass of a vacant Rockland lot, a female cardinal chipped her warning in the direction of black-and-white cat. A chorus of house sparrows chipped and cheeped from behind me. And a solitary pigeon sat on a cable, eyeing me.
Eventually the temperature warmed into the 20s (F). Blue sky and sun all day. I saw no ducks—didn’t visit the shore—but inshore birds seemed active despite the chill. It’s easy to forget that days lengthen in February, the month when eagles nest and dooryard birds practice their spring love songs.
Today’s List
Tufted titmouse
White-breasted nuthatch
Black-capped chickadee
American crow
Herring gull
Rock pigeon
Northern cardinal
House sparrow
Downy woodpecker
Northern cardinal (♀).
Tags: American crow, black-capped chickadee, downy woodpecker, herring gull, house sparrow, northern cardinal, rock pigeon, tufted titmouse, white-breasted nuthatch
