It is early March, and romance is on the minds of many of our year-round songbirds. Their plumages are at their spiffiest and their voices are as fine-tuned as they will be all year. They seem anxious to get on with the task of baby-rearing. For some, the season already is under way.
Some observations:
— Bluebirds are flitting about with nesting material in their beaks. And how glorious is their blueness. Other blue-feathered songbirds (blue jays, indigo buntings, blue grosbeaks, cerulean warblers) may be just as blue. But in early spring, I can’t imagine a more brilliant blue than that of the bluebird.
— Just as brilliant is the redness of male cardinals. I regularly hear them singing their courting songs now, trying to win over a female while at the same time warning other males to stay away. As an extra touch, a male cardinal will try to woo a female by feeding her seeds. If she accepts, they will mate and then sing to each other in soft, bubbly whistles for the rest of the year. It’s one of the strongest pair bonds in the bird world.
— Male white-breasted nuthatches also offer food morsels to potential mates. To further impress a female, a male nuthatch bows and spreads his tail and droops his wings while swaying back and forth before her, as I observed this week. White-breasted nuthatches nest in cavities, as do Carolina chickadees, tufted titmice and brown-headed nuthatches, all of them potential competitors for nesting sites.
— Another favorite songbird in full voice now is the brown thrasher, Georgia’s official state bird, which has one of the largest repertoires (as many as 2,000 songs) of any bird, including the mockingbird, which also is singing loudly and lustily now.
— Carolina wrens, which sing cheerily all year long but with seemingly more vigor in early spring, started nesting in late February, according to a neighbor, but I haven‘t seen any of their nests yet. They also are cavity nesters but aren’t very particular about where they nest.
But this is only the beginning. The full glory of the spring nesting season in Georgia is still weeks away, when our neo-tropical songbirds — warblers, tanagers, flycatchers, vireos, thrushes, ruby-throated hummingbirds — return from their winter homes in Latin America. It is then, on a morning in April, that you may hear more than 30 species singing vibrantly at the top of their little lungs.
IN THE SKY: The moon will be new on Monday — a thin crescent low in the west just after dark, said David Dundee, Tellus Science Museum astronomer. Jupiter is high in the south just after dark. Saturn rises out of the east a few hours before midnight. Mercury, Venus and Mars are too close to the sun for easy observation.
