Subject: bird on a wire
Date: Jul 3 17:22:48 1996
From: jbroadus at seanet.com - jbroadus at seanet.com


VG swallow time has arrived with all its frantic urgency. The last few days
one of our swallow boxes has been in perpetual motion. Female hangs on
outside of box, three tiny racoon masked faces peer out, then female and male
make swoops in front of the box, with the female adopting a shallow sort of
wing flutter as she passes by. All sorts of twittering, then you start
hearing mayhem as the youngins start trying to fly-- but inside the box so
it doesn't quite work. Then, yesterday, the box erupts with three not
particularly good aerialists trying like crazy to follow adults around the
house. Rest break- three new birds on the wires, lined up and confused for
just a quick preen, then off and around the house again. Female then does a
clever trick-- she scuttles back in the box and flies out with a feather,
heads out over our pasture and drops it, and three missles dive bomb it as it
floats (completely uncaught) to the ground. Today they're gone, but we have
another box starting to tweet at us.

At the first of spring Clarice and I put up a bluebird box on a grassy
wetland we were surveying near Graham. (We spotted a male western bluebird
there last spring, rather late, and put up a box, to which we returned to in
the winter and to find a bluebird nest had been installed. This spring,
much earlier, we saw a pair of bluebirds there so we put the box back up and
on a return trip found it full of bluebird eggs, so we got the landowner
interested and he let us put up two more boxes). We hadn't had an
opportunity to return till last weekend, we were headed down Meridian on
another project. We drove out to the site and found a cloud of VG swallows
laying claim to the boxes. One box sported 5 in pinfeathers, one had 4, and
the box the bluebirds had nested in had a swallow nest added as a second
story and a ball of hatchling swallows, so young as to still be pink and
wiggley. This seems awfully late for them to start a brood, so I suppose I
can speculate (till someone proves me wrong) that "our" bluebirds kept the
box fully occupied until just a little while ago. The cloud of adults (This
little wetland is pretty good for birds, has several rotten snags and lots of
bugs) thoroughly chatised us for our trespass.

All of this amounted to a pretty full day, it seemed, but we were still on
our way to the mountains just west of Mineral to take what we expected would
be an easy drive on some logging roads to a reported patch of rhododendron
macrophyllum that we'd heard a report about and wanted to catalogue. Got one
mile off the pavement and found the road had succumbed to last winter's
flood, so like mad dogs and English folk we started walking up a gated
Weyerhaueser road just before the noon day sun. Three miles and 1800 feet
higher we managed to find the reported rhody patch in a clear cut, hanging
out over some cliffs at 3400 feet. While mapping the rhody patch we saw a
raptorial sight which, surprisingly I guess, we have never seen before. A
fully adult plumaged bald eagle came swooping by the ridges riding air
currents like any red tail on the move. Don't really know why, but I was
surprised and after thinking about it I can't remember ever seeing a bald
eagle in the Washington Cascades like that. Gotten used to thinking of them
hanging out on the coast. Maybe he thought he was a T.V. or something
(incidentally, I have been seeing more and more bald eagles where I never
used to see them. An adult on Clark's Creek in Puyallup, several juveniles
winging over the house; I take it they are expanding in style).

Anyway, back to boxes. Chickadees started a second brood.
-------------------------------------
Name: Jerry Broadus
jbroadus at seanet.com
901-16th. St S.W.
Puyallup, Wa. 98371
206-845-3156
07/03/96
17:22:48