the mark haley holler: Project Oriole

Have you noticed how, whenever any group wants their initiative to sound cutting-edge, they drop the article and change the juxtaposition of the words "project" and whatever the project is about? I think the government started it. If that's the case, then the cutting-edginess is really laughable. I mean, when was the last time the government was on the cutting edge of anything? And anyway, what does everyone have against the "the?" Not the band. Never mind.

Well, I am on the cutting edge of birding. Oh, yes. Not because I am any kind of record holding birder (see movie The Big Year) or because I have any kind of really special equipment. As a matter of fact, my equipment is laughable. I took this picture of the heron who fishes at our pond by holding my digital camera up to one side of my binoculars. No, I'm on the cutting edge because in pursuit of birds, I have been doing a lot of cutting up of string. It started like this: I kept seeing something to large to be a Goldfinch and too orange to be a Western Meadowlark. I never got a solid enough glimpse of it to figure out what it was, and it was driving me bazonkers, as we say around here. There were several possibilities in my bird field guide, but I never got a long enough, close enough look to be sure. I even took to wearing binoculars everywhere I went. Washing dishes without dipping ones binoculars is a real acrobatic act, by the way.

Then last weekend, we were working on digging the post holes for our raised bed garden and I caught sight of it in the nearby pine tree tugging at a piece of twine the boys had left tied there. Was it a Kentucky Warbler? No, too yellow. A Yellow Warbler? Not yellow enough. ARG! The next day, I was in the laundry room, when I noticed out the window the same bird landing at our construction site, tugging at the guide strings we had placed. I got a good look at it when it flew over to the swing set to tug on a string left tied there by some crazy scheme of the boys' and mine. Ah-ha moment!

Checking me out while I check her out...

Being coy on the side of the pine....

This was a female Northern "Baltimore" Oriole, gathering string for her nest. I was delighted. In the past, I have seen only one Oriole around my yard. All attempts to attract them failed. Only hummingbirds came to my "oriole feeder." Only ants came when I nailed an orange to a tree. Nothing but raccoons and opossums came when I left out dried fruit pieces; and since I think opossums are the creepiest animal to walk the earth, I gave up. But now, with renewed hope, I started leaving bits of twine about 12-18 inches long stuck to trees all over my yard. It worked like magic. Like. Magic. Suddenly I had not one, but about three separate pairs of orioles regularly visiting to tug on my strings and flit away again. I found that the males will come if the females do, much to my great delight, and I have spent the last week being distracted by a whole new, living set of shiny (orange!) objects.

During this process, other lovely discoveries have come about. For one thing, my lovely Mockingbird friend has two fuzzy babies in her nest now instead of brown speckled blue green eggs. She had three eggs, but one seems to have been a dud. I was going to collect it and preserve it until I read that I could get fined $500 just for having it. If I'm going to pay $500 for the privilege of having an egg, it'll be made of gold or perhaps Faberge. Right... those things are priceless...

Also, I have seen four Zebra Swallowtail butterflies this spring when, in the last six years altogether of living here, I had only ever seen one.

And while battening down the hatches for a storm that was blowing in, I found this little fellow who, after meeting us, will never mistake a roll of bird netting for a good log hiding place again. While I'm glad we found him and put him safely in a tree, I will miss his really loud, close trills whenever I am outside working under the canopy of our porch. Last, but far from least, I've found that our decrepit old marten house has been taken up, not by martens, but by a sweet little family of Eastern Bluebirds. Whether or not I'm setting any records, this has been a Big Year so far for me.