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June 6,1998
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The starlings have gotten a great deal louder and, as far as I can tell, the mother is no longer brooding them under her wings. She and the father are still feeding them however. And they get really hungry at dawn. I hear them begging for food and I hear the adults banging around coming and going with ants, caterpillars, and some grub-like thing, and something that looks vegetable (like a seed ) instead of animal. They drop the food directly into the gaping beaks of the young. Last week the babies looked like they were all mouth. All I could see was great gaping yellow-orange beaks and sometimes a glimpse of gray skin. Now they are growing into their beaks, so to speak - they look a little more proportional to their beak size. They also have soft gray fuzz covering the reptilian skin. And like I said, they're loud and hungry and get up at dawn. Consequently, so do I. Only I eventually go back to sleep. The trouble is I then wake up with that logy feeling I get when I sleep during the day. Ick. After coffee with Tom, and a walk with Joan-east and Priscilla, I drove down to Providence to pick up Nancy for an expedition to Bristol to check out this swan nest we found there last week. The nest is on a little island in Silver Creek, very close to the road. We figured since the cygnets at the cove had already hatched and were swimming along behind the mother before we got to see them, we'd check to see if the Bristol brood had hatched so we could see cygnets at a younger age. When we got there, the female was still on the nest. No evidence of hatching. The male was patrolling the water in the creek around the little island. A herring gull landed close to the nest and the male attacked ferociously. First he drove the gull into the water with his beak and long powerful neck and then pounded him with his left wing. He kept pushing the gull completely underwater. As soon as the gull's head would surface, the swan would whack him and push him under again. with great fury. It was one of those horrifyingly mesmerizing moments you used to see on nature specials. Somehow, the gull managed to escape and swim over to some reeds on the bank, where it sat for a long time shaking itself to dry off I guess. Another flash of white breast, resolved itself into a black crowned night heron walking slowly across the little island, fairly close to the nest. The swan did not attack the heron however. At the edge of the island, facing us, the heron was only maybe 15 feet away - maybe less - and easy to identify with the naked eye. Its yellow legs and feet were spectacular in the setting sun. Its elegant black head and thin white plume made it look exotic. I've never been this close to a heron of any kind, not even in a bird blind, and this black crowned night heron was right in front of me, bold as you please. It was thrilling. The heron flew off slowly and we tried to follow it back into the reeds but it vanished. The reeds were filled with redwing blackbirds and we saw at least one belted kingfisher in flight. All of this was in a fairly developed area of Bristol in front of a school and across from a couple of fried clam joints that scented the air with that unmistakable smell of New England summer - greasy fried quahogs. |
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