Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

Well, it seems those birds really are dark-eyed Juncos. Max, at work, positively identified them from the blurry photo I posted a few days ago. Jo also managed to trace them in one of her books.

With the weekend here, we managed to get some better shots of the birds in the brightness of today’s early afternoon sun. I’ve put these photos up on our gallery.

It’s a real joy to witness the parents coming back to the nest with food for the chick. The chick itself is a rare sight, seen only when it hears a noise and cranes its neck upwards, expectantly looking for a fly to be dropped into its maw.

Watching for the return of the adults has now turned into a popular pastime in our household, along with peering between the branches of the tree above the nest, trying to determine from where the unseen juncos’ chirping is emanating. The adults seem to like to spend time perching in the tree, merrily chirping away. Perhaps the chirping is to comfort the lonesome chick; I really have no idea.

Often, though, both parents will fly away, only to return some time later with what appears to be a juicy fly in their beaks. As often as not, they’ll then spend some more time on sentry duty in the tree, before flying down to the window box to drop off their tasty quarry into the chick’s oversized beak. And then the cycle repeats, but for some reason never gets boring.

In the early evening, the parents will return to the nest and settle in for the evening, the chick totally obscured under the parents’ plumage.

I have no idea how long it will take the fledgling Junco to reach adulthood and take to the air. At that time, I’m assuming the parents will abandon the nest, as it will presumably have served its purpose. Based on the chick’s scrawny appearance and tiny size, however, I’m guessing we have at least a few weeks left to enjoy sharing our patio area with these uninvited yet delightful guests.

Well, it turned out that our one adult bird was actually two adult birds, plus at least one chick.

When I came home from work this evening, I managed to catch a glimpse of a gaping mouth, craning upwards out of the nest. Soon afterwards, either the mother or the father showed up and perched in a tree above me, so I made myself scarce indoors. I plugged in the trusty digital camera and set about trying to photograph the parent. Unfortunately, it’s a small bird and was too far away, so the shots were pretty useless.

Eventually, the parent decided the coast was clear and headed down to the nest. It appeared to have something in its beak, probably food.

A short while later, the other parent turned up and landed on top of the fence. He or she was carrying what looked like a small worm in its beak. Sure enough, it, too, made its way down to the nest. Sarah had arrived home by this point, and she managed to grab a shot of it on the fence, while I peered at it through the binoculars.

The photo isn’t great, because the bird was darting around and made a difficult target on which to focus, but it’s probably good enough for a decent ornithologist to be able to identify the little fellow. It appears in cropped form below.

So; is it, in fact, a Junco?

Dark-eyed Junco.