Backyard Birds at the Creek House: Everyone Who Showed Up

Part of the Our Creek House series. It starts with the barred owl who declined to be photographed.

The owl wouldn’t be photographed. Fine. He made his position clear, and I respect a creature who knows his angles.

The rest of this property has no such dignity, and thank God for that, because they’ll sit on a branch in good light and let me work. I set the Z 5 up at the feeders with the 24-120 on it, ran the tether to my phone, and collected the loud, feathered, ridiculous cast I promised you last time.

A downy woodpecker and a Carolina chickadee feeding together on a mesh suet-nugget feeder at the Creek House — The whole post in one frame: a downy woodpecker who got there first, and a Carolina chickadee who does not care.

If you’ve never shot birds, the ratio is humbling. You sit still for an hour and you come away with four or five frames you’d show anybody. The tether is what makes it bearable, because the camera can sit six feet from the feeder while I’m twenty feet off in a chair with my phone, and nobody has to be brave about it. But mostly the job is waiting, then a burst, then more waiting, and then going through a couple hundred frames that evening to find the one where the eye is sharp and nothing’s clipped and the background isn’t a mess.

I love it. I used to do this for money, and I had forgotten how much I love doing it for nothing.

Every one of these has a holdout, though. The owl essay had the owl. This one has the pileated woodpecker, who is roughly the size of a crow, arrives like a small dinosaur, and has never once lowered himself to the feeder while I had a camera pointed at him. He works the sweet gum instead, at his leisure, in his own time. One day.

About that hawk

I told you about the red-tailed hawks last time, riding thermals over the back of the property with that high, lazy spiral that says “I have nowhere I need to be and everything below me knows it.” What I didn’t have then was a picture.

I do have one, and I’ll be straight with you about it: it’s an old frame. Years before the owl, one of them came down out of the thermals and sat on a limb long enough for the long lens to do what a phone could never do for me in the dark. I have never gotten another like it.

A red-tailed hawk perched on a limb, showing the dark belly band and brick-red tail — The red-tailed hawk, from years back. Note the dark band across the belly and the brick-colored tail: that is the bird I thought was on my roof in June.

The hawk I did get this year, and got wrong

Here’s the thing about being certain of a bird: it is the fastest available route to being wrong about a bird.

In June one landed on the peak of the roof and stayed put long enough for me to walk outside with my phone and take my time. I called it a red-tail out loud, because that is what we have, and that is what I had just spent a whole essay talking about.

It isn’t one. The underside is barred rusty orange from throat to belly, with none of the dark band a red-tail wears across its middle like a cummerbund. The folded wing is checkered black and white. The tail is banded. That’s a red-shouldered hawk, a different bird entirely, and I worked it out later at the computer with the frames open and my confidence somewhere down around my ankles.

So: two hawks. One that rides the thermals, and one that sits on my roof and judges me.

Two views of a red-shouldered hawk on the peak of a roof, showing rusty barred underparts and a checkered black-and-white wing — And that is the bird that actually was. Rusty barring all the way down, checkered wing, banded tail. Red-shouldered hawk.

Now, the feeders

The cardinal pair, of course. Three woodpeckers: downy, red-bellied, and once in a while the magnificent pileated I’ve already told you thinks he’s above all this.

A male northern cardinal in full red perched on a tube seed feeder — The cardinal pair are the reason most folks put a feeder up in the first place, and he knows it.

A male downy woodpecker with a red patch on the back of his head clinging to a mesh nugget feeder — Downy woodpecker. The red patch on the back of the head is what makes him a he.

A red-bellied woodpecker with a bright red crown feeding at a lantern-style feeder on the deck — The red-bellied woodpecker, named for a red belly you will never once see. Look at his head and tell me who signed off on that.

The pine warbler is a muted gold rather than flamboyant yellow, and folks mix it up with the goldfinches. To be fair, that only works in winter, when the goldfinches go drab and olive and modest. A breeding male goldfinch in May is unmistakable neon and could not be confused with a warbler or, frankly, with anything else outdoors.

A pine warbler, olive-gold with two white wing bars, perched on the rim of a feeder in early spring — The pine warbler in March: muted gold, modest, two clean wing bars. This is the one people call a goldfinch, and in winter I understand why.

Bluebirds. A thrasher that bullies the bluebirds. Tufted titmice. A Carolina wren, who deserves her own paragraph and gets one in a minute. House sparrows. A brown-headed cowbird, doing what cowbirds do, which is lay eggs in other birds’ nests and leave, the absolute deadbeats. Northern mockingbirds. Both nuthatches, white-breasted reliably and red-breasted when they pass through. Carolina chickadees. House finches. An eastern towhee scratching in the leaf litter like a tiny dramatic chicken. An eastern phoebe.

An eastern bluebird at a mesh nugget feeder, with a bald male northern cardinal in late-summer molt on the seed tube behind him, a single feather left standing on his head — The bluebird is not the story in this frame. Look past him, at the seed tube.

Because that cardinal has no head.

Near enough, anyway. Cardinals and blue jays will sometimes drop every feather on their heads at once instead of a few at a time, and for a week or two in late summer they go around bald and gray and faintly reptilian, with one feather left standing straight up like a flag on a bare hill. It is alarming the first time you see it. It is completely normal, it means nothing is wrong with him, and it grows back.

A white-breasted nuthatch working head-down on a mesh nugget feeder with a house finch on the seed tube behind it — White-breasted nuthatch, going down the feeder headfirst because it is the only direction they know. House finch in back, upright, like a normal person.

A brown thrasher, the state bird of Georgia, standing on a deck rail beneath a hanging feeder — The brown thrasher: state bird of Georgia, bully of bluebirds, and fully aware of both.

Two views of northern mockingbirds at the Creek House, an adult on a shepherd hook and a streaked juvenile on the arbor — Northern mockingbird on the left. On the right, this year’s model, still spotted and still working out what the job involves.

And a rose-breasted grosbeak on his way through in spring, which I looked up twice because I had briefly and enthusiastically convinced myself it was something rarer.

Crows and starlings overhead, not at the feeders.

The ghost

And then there’s this one, who I have no name for and only a partial explanation.

Cream-white all over, dark eye, and the same stubby cone-shaped bill as the house finches it was sitting six inches away from. Which is, for me, the answer. It’s a house finch. It’s a house finch with leucism, which is a pigment problem: the melanin doesn’t make it into the feathers the way it’s supposed to. Not an albino, because the eye is dark, which means the bird is making pigment somewhere. Just mostly not where you can see it.

A leucistic house finch, cream-white all over with a dark eye and a stubby conical bill, feeding at a mesh nugget feeder — The ghost. A house finch with leucism, which is a pigment problem and not a rare bird, no matter how badly I wanted it to be one.

I want to be honest that I spent a while wanting it to be something else. It is the most ordinary bird at the feeder, wearing the wrong coat.

The one that sounds like a cat

The gray catbird deserves more than a line, partly because he’s earned it and partly because he is the one who will actually sit still for a camera.

Gray all over, black cap, long tail he flicks around like punctuation. He works the suet feeder right out in the open, which is a little out of character, because catbirds are supposed to be skulkers, birds of the tangled edge that you hear far more often than you see.

A gray catbird with wings spread and tail fanned at a mesh nugget feeder — The gray catbird, who will sit for a camera, and who apparently knows it.

And you do hear him. The name is not a metaphor. He makes a low, complaining mew that sounds exactly like a cat somewhere in the shrubbery, and our first summer here I went out looking for a cat.

He’s also the third mimic on this list. The thrasher who bullies the bluebirds is a brown thrasher, which is the state bird of Georgia and behaves precisely like something that knows it. The mockingbirds are the same family. So is the catbird. All three of them can borrow another bird’s song and pass it off as their own, which means a fair portion of what I hear out there on a June morning is quotation, and I have no way of telling how much of it is sincere.

A gray catbird with a black cap and long tail perched on the tray of a mesh feeder — That black cap, and the long flicking tail. He mews at me out of the shrubbery every single summer.

Marlowe

And the blue jays. Chief among them Marlowe, yes, named after that Marlowe, and if you know, you know.

He is exactly the same size as the other jays and somehow takes up the space of three. He runs the feeder like a bouncer working the door: everybody clears out when he drops in, nobody argues the point, and he knows it. I’ve decided to stop resenting him and start admiring the commitment.

The wren in the barn

The Carolina wren is her own thing.

Every spring she nests inside the barn, which we built ourselves and whose doors don’t quite meet at the top, and she squeezes through that gap to raise her brood up in the roofline. The same barn doubles as my seed-starting operation, which means every single trip in to water the tomato and pepper seedlings becomes a small diplomatic mission.

She flutters around above my head. She squawks at me. I talk back to her. It’s just me, mama. I’m not here for the babies. I’m just watering, I swear.

She’s the one who sits the nest and dive-bombs me on the way in. Papa spends those weeks flying back and forth with food and bits of nesting material, tireless, while she stands guard. But she comes back every spring, so she must know I’m safe, even if I’m annoying when she’s trying to raise a family.

We coexist for about six weeks. Then one day I’ll come in to find the fledglings clinging to the window screen from the inside, working out the concept of wings.

Three Carolina wren fledglings clinging to the inside of a window screen in the barn — Three of them on the inside of the barn window screen, working out the concept of wings. This is the day the doors go wide open.

Those are the days I throw the barn doors wide and leave them open, so they can find their way out into the world.

And then the barn is mine again until next March.

The hummingbirds, who are terrible

We go through about ten pounds of sugar a month from April through September, just on hummingbird feeders. Mostly ruby-throated. Mostly furious.

Hummingbirds are tiny jewel-toned thugs who will spend more energy chasing each other off a feeder than they would spend just sharing it, which is one of those things that sounds like a metaphor for something, and I refuse to say what.

I put out multiple feeders spread around the property specifically to defuse the arguments. It mostly works. They mostly still fight.

A ruby-throated hummingbird hovering at a red nectar feeder — Ruby-throated, briefly not fighting anybody.

The geese, who own the place

Canada geese do not visit. Canada geese arrive.

They come up out of the creek and they walk: across the back lawn, up the side, down the driveway, single file or in pairs, at a pace that says they have an appointment and you are not on the calendar. They do not hurry when a car turns in. They do not hurry when Remy spots them through the window, which is a whole event on our side of the glass and which they have correctly assessed as noise.

They’re not here for the feeders. They’re just here, the way a neighbor who has stopped asking is just here, and eventually they leave the way they came, and the yard is mine again on a technicality.

Two Canada geese walking down the driveway past the house — They do not move for cars.

Two Canada geese crossing the back lawn at the Creek House — Up out of the creek, across the lawn, and on with their day.

The one argument I’ve ever won

If you’re wondering why the squirrels aren’t in this story: the suet nuggets are hot pepper. These, specifically, and I buy them by the sack.

Birds don’t have the receptor that registers capsaicin, so they taste nothing at all and eat happily. The squirrels take one bite and file a formal complaint.

A close-up of a mesh feeder packed with hot pepper suet nuggets — Hot pepper suet nuggets, packed in the mesh. Birds taste nothing at all. Squirrels file a formal complaint.

That’s it. That’s the whole trick. It is the only argument I have ever won on this property, and I’m going to keep bringing it up.

Still not a yard

So here’s the same thing I said standing in the dark listening for owls, except now I’m saying it in full daylight with a laugh.

This is not a yard. This is habitat.

It is also, apparently, a diner I run at considerable expense for a clientele of thugs, deadbeats, bullies, one very committed jay named Marlowe, and a delegation of geese, none of whom have ever thanked me.

I wouldn’t change a thing.

P.S. The wren still has not read the last post and squared up with me again exactly as predicted. Same beams, same squawking, same watering can. I’ve made my peace with it. She has not.

P.P.S. Ten pounds of sugar a month sounds absurd written down and I stand by it. Four parts water to one part sugar, no dye, no honey, no store-bought red stuff. Change it every few days in Georgia summer or it goes bad and you’re doing harm instead of good.

P.P.P.S. I stand by the suet cage prediction too. Two more seasons, tops, before the pileated wins outright. When it comes down in a heap, y’all will be the first to know.

Creek House Wildlife #2: Everyone Else Who Showed Up