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July 18, 2002 - All about birds: a grab-bagThe Suffolk Times • July 18, 2002 All about birds: a grab-bag Times /Review photo by Paul Stoutenburgh One of the most talkative small birds is the house wren. If you have one in your vicinity, consider yourself fortunate, for it's not only a noisy little bird but one of our best insect eaters as well. To ME, A GARDEN Is a wonderful place and, of course, a wonderful place to relax. The best time for me to do this is in the early morning when most of the world is fast asleep. Just recently my early- morning time came after we had that brief shower during the night. Everything was dripping with water and through my canvas shoes I could feel the coolness of the wet grass as I walked momm into the garden. Focus I'd sit in my favorite chair, an ON old one that NATURE most would have thrown out long by Paul ago. It's the per - Stoutenburgh fect setting for my garden. As I sat there, the ever - present crows were flying around. Don't know what they had been eating. Some of my chicken feed, I'm sure, or some of the scraps I had thrown out from the house. They were calling away. Then out back, by the windmill, there were three birds flying about. You've all seen this. A small bird dives on the crow. We think the rea- son is that crows are notoriously known as nest robbers and their sharp eyes, and instincts developed over eons of time, let them ferret out birds' nests with eggs or baby birds in them. These red - winged blackbirds were not going to let the crows get near their nesting grounds, so the crows were driven off, with these small birds in hot pursuit. The other side of the coin is that the crows defend their own territory. If you have ever heard a conglomer- ate of crows, and the massing of the troops, it's usually when they find an owl or a hawk in their territory. Word goes out to all the crows in the area and they all home in to assault the intruder. Another interesting garden visitor is a little wren called a house wren (my dad always called her "Jenny wren ") that goes in my bird boxes. I Why would there be an egg on someone's front lawn? have about 16 new boxes that my kids gave me. I've put them up in the pasture and in the garden. The little wren, like most wrens, has built in every of them. I can see small sticks poking out where wrens have been in and built nests. Why they build all these nests and use only one no one seems to know. In our thinking, in which there is a reason for everything, it's possi- ble that by taking up all of these houses with false nests, the builders will discour- age other wrens from moving into their territory. This wren is one of the most talka- tive birds we have. As I look around at one of the boxes they're working on, this wren will come within 10 feet of me and go right on with her work. You know people call me and I appreciate their calls. Sometimes I have the answers and sometimes I just can't find an answer for whatever it is the person is concerned about. Take, for example, the egg that was and on a caller's front lawn. Why would there be an egg on someone's front lawn? It was bigger than a chicken's egg and the measurements were meticulously taken by my caller. I thought it might be a swan's egg, which is pretty big, but they hadn't seen any swans around their yard. So the next best thing was to go to the books and check out egg sizes. And, sure enough, the egg size corre- ponded with a Canada goose, and e surely have enough of them around, but why,did the egg get dropped off in this man's front yard? Perhaps the nest had been washed away or perhaps vandals had gotten into it. And when the bird went to lay the egg in a nest that had been ripped apart, what does she do with an egg that is ready to be laid? She drops it in someone's front yard, I guess. Well, at least we solved that problem. Then a man called from Nassau Point to say he had a strange bird at his feeder. This is always a tough one. He said it looked like a cardinal and it had a cardinal's bill, which is that big heavy bill used for cracking seeds, and it had been taking sunflower seeds. It didn't have the cardinal's top notch but instead it had a black head. Now, that one really threw me. Black head and red body. . Now, there is no such thing in our local bird world that looks like that. The closest I could come to it would be an oriole, but that has a pointed bill. So I looked in a book that a friend had given me years ago on caged birds, and as I went through the pages I came to the weaver fami- ly, which included one with a scarlet body and a black head. Many of these birds in the finch family are used as caged birds over- seas and also locally in some of our pet shops. This might have been the case with this bird; probably what happened was that the owner was cleaning out the cage and the bird flew out and is now on its own. We get these rarities every once in a while and we have them for a short time and then they disappear. But they are not equipped to live in the wild. They were probably raised from young in a cage and the wild world out there soon absorbs them. I've jumped around a bit. I went from crows to blackbirds to wrens to goose eggs to an unknown bird — all interesting parts of the world we live in and it does me good to have peo- ple call when they are curious and observe the world around them.