Summer World_ A Season of Bounty - Bernd Heinrich [24]
The young’s begging “cheeps” in the nest are barely audible to us (presumably the low volume reduces the chance that they will become an advertisement to predators, since birds in safe nest sites, such as woodpecker young in solid tree holes, are almost always continuously noisy). After the young leave the nest the parents “chip” and the young “cheep” in answer, but they call more loudly now so that they can be found and fed. Their varied vocalizations are not words. They convey emotions that I may not feel as they do, but that I can understand.
In the first week of April the presumed female (males and females have identical garb) began carrying mud in her bill from a puddle in the driveway. She plastered it onto the thin ledge, the edge of a board, under our back porch. She also brought back green moss from the woods, and reinforced, decorated, and camouflaged the nest with it. Later, after the nest cup was finished, she picked up stray dog hair and grass fibers to line it, and then in the last week of April she laid one immaculate white egg a day, until she completed a clutch of five. By this time she had become used to our comings and goings and would rarely flush from the nest. The eggs hatched after a two-week incubation. The yellowish pink chicks were covered with only a few sparse plumes of white fluffy down.
By early June, when the young were almost ready to leave the nest, I saw one parent come with a big grasshopper in its bill. Only one baby gaped; the brood must have been well fed. Then there was a downpour, and immediately afterward I heard an animated “phee-bee” song. But this one was not delivered from a perch near the nest, as usual, nor was it coming at dawn, the usual time for song. It was, instead, coming near dusk. I looked up and there he was like a skylark or a woodcock circling high in the sky, but only for a few moments. Almost immediately in this rare outburst he set his wings stationary, circled, and dived back down.
At six o’clock the next morning I heard a fluttering commotion of excited “chips,” and saw one of the young tumbling out of the nest. It caught the air with its wings, and awkwardly fluttered off into the woods. One of the parents was flying all around and with it, continuing to make excited “chip” calls. The other young had apparently already been launched, similarly. I found one of them perched on the ground under my truck. By afternoon all was quiet around the house—no more phoebe activity. However, the next day I found the whole brood of five stubby-tailed youngsters lined up on a dry twig under the leafy bough of an ironwood tree a short way into the woods.
Already at the next dawn one of the adults was chittering back at the old nest. It was expressing renewed interest in starting the season’s second nesting cycle. Two days later the female was repairing and relining the nest to get it ready for her second clutch. Meanwhile, as she was incubating, her mate took on the responsibility of feeding the fledged young. These young fledged on 11 July.
In 2005 we moved to another house down the road. It reeked of cat piss, and it probably never had a phoebe; there was no phoebe ledge for a nest. My wife attended to replacing the rugs in the house and I attended to placing a phoebe ledge outside. I took three little pieces of board and nailed them each in a different place under the roof, to give the birds a choice of nest sites. As we hoped and expected, a phoebe pair did arrive during the first spring and inspected the nest sites I had provided.