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June 1,1998
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The starlings have hatched. I think they hatched on Saturday, at least that's the first day I heard them peeping to be fed. I looked through the tiny crack through which I can see partially into the nest. I couldn't see the babies but I did see the mother arrive with a bug in her beak to feed the young 'uns. I mean I was practically eyeball to eyeball with the mother without being noticed. I watched her make a couple of feeding trips before I accidentally made enough noise to startle her. Now, on Monday, the babies are so loud and hungry I can hear them from my office even though they are in the bedroom and I have the Red Sox game on the radio. According to the Stokes book, they take 3 weeks to fledge. Assuming the first day I heard them is the day they hatched, I'm in this relationship until the solstice! Eeek! Not only that, but starlings usually hatch more than one brood per season. Oh no! I've got to get the nest out of there as soon as this brood fledges. I have seen both the male and the female bring bugs to the hatchlings. I can't see well enough to identify exactly what species of "bug" they're eating. Starlings are omnivorous so there's probably a lot of variety. I think one of the food items today was a caterpillar. It was still wriggling in the adult bird's beak. We had some weather last night. Tornado warnings were in effect here until 2:00AM this morning, but all we got was severe thunderstorms. And I do mean severe. I thought the world was ending, but it wasn't. A possible tornado hit Worcester near the airport (near where Mark the hermit potter lives). Winds in excess of 90 mph were measured there; I don't know about here - I don't have a weather station set up here yet :-). For some reason, the weather people need to do some kind of investigation to determine whether the Worcester thing was a tornado or just a really high wind. Power is out all over central Massachusetts but I never even lost power during the worst of last night's lightning and high winds with torrential rains. What's odd about that is my house lost power Friday night during a much milder (but still frightening) thunderstorm. I wasn't home when it happened. The storm hit while I was driving home from niece duty at Kevin's and rushing to get to a reading by Donald Hall, one of my favorite poets, at the Andover Bookstore. I was late for the reading, but so was Donald Hall. He was coming down from New Hampshire in the same storm I was driving in. Anyway, like I said, it wasn't as bad as last night's storm, but for some reason my power stayed on last night. The starlings woke up though and I could hear them peeping plaintively over the sound of rain and thunder. I don't know if bugs and caterpillars counteract the effects of thunderstorms. Now that would be an interesting thesis topic: evidence of stress related eating in baby starlings... starlings confusing fear with hunger... think of the possibilities. All the while, Wilbur is getting extremely frustrated. He can hear and smell the starlings and he knows they are right there in the bedroom, but he can't get to them. He has knocked just about everything off my dresser in an attempt to position himself properly. He's even charged the air conditioner head first. When he sits on the window sill above the air conditioner the adult bird leaves the nest scolding an obnoxious buzzing call. She sits on the lilac bush and scolds for awhile and then flies over to a pine tree across the walkway. Now, I have to wonder why they selected that nest site to begin with, since Wilbur watched the nest construction eagerly from the same windowsill. Do they somehow know he can't get at it? If they weren't a pestiferous weed species introduced from Europe and crowding out the native species they'd be really interesting birds to watch. Around here they're only crowding out the house sparrows, who are also introduced and are also crowding out the native species. The likelihood of purple martins or some other such elegant bird nesting in my air conditioner is slim to none anyway. As I was writing this, the phone rang. It was Roberta wanting to know if I could hang around for awhile after work at the cat shelter on Wednesday to help her with her new e-mail account. She asked me to send her some e-mail so she'd have something to read. I couldn't think of anything to say since I was already talking to her... so I wrote the following:
That could almost work as a poem. Now where was I with the starlings? Oh yeah, they are fascinating. I wonder how come they never caught on as pets? Anyway, the bird life around my house, while vibrant and active is not all that interesting from a listing point of view: starlings, house sparrows, mockingbirds, robins, blue jays, crows, grackles, mourning doves, and pigeons. That about covers it. Some house finches put in an appearance from time to time, and I can hear redwing blackbirds somewhere nearby. In bad weather a few ring billed gulls and a few herring gulls mysteriously appear on the roof of my building and an occasional raptor appears when the pigeons are thick. So I don't think the starlings are wrecking the place for other bird species. I think the developers did that years ago. |
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