Wildlife nest-and-baby season is well upon us near the end of a Michigan June. My friend Sue saw wren babies hatch, fledge, and leave. She said they were remarkably cute. So are the baby mallards we’re seeing now. They’re at the stage where they have pretty gold markings incised into their brown fluff, each duckling a little different from the others. They stick pretty close to the mama duck, hustling after her en masse when she moves a few inches from where they’ve been feeding, and falling into a row behind her for longer treks.
From the cottage we recently enjoyed on Saginaw Bay, we watched flotillas of Canada geese and their goslings motor past. Distinctions between one family unit and another were unclear, although destinations seemed a matter of consensus. We never saw, for instance, some geese going one way while the rest went another.
Starlings disported themselves on the cottage lawn, notably a group of two babies and their mother. The baby birds were as big as their mother, yet still expected her to feed them, rarely straying more than a starling’s width from her side. As the mother continued to feel her remit included feeding the youngsters, the arrangement seemed to be working out.
On the other hand, a juvenile robin in our yard might have overstayed its welcome in the parents-feed-me zone. It was standing in our side yard, all by itself, with its mouth open, presumably waiting for food to arrive. In the time that I watched it, no one came to feed it, and it never closed its beak.
Bitterns–long-necked, long-beaked birds of the heron family–rely on their protective coloration to hide from danger, helped along by tipping their bills up and swaying back and forth to blend in with the shape and motion of reeds. I surprised a juvenile bittern on its own at the pond. It looked distinctly uncomfortable, then initiated the tip-and-sway maneuver. “That only works when you’re at least near reeds,” I thought at it. “It’s less effective when you’re standing on a log with nary a reed in sight.”
Walking with my friend Rhonda, her two English cockers, and Rascal yesterday, I saw swooping behavior around the fountain at a retention pond in the neighborhood. Whenever it’s hot out, I look for cedar waxwings snatching insects from the air over that pond and in the spray of the fountain. Little fliers were darting and diving there yesterday, but they were too small to be waxwings, even baby waxwings, and didn’t look or act like hummingbirds. So what were we seeing? Dragonflies. Really big dragonflies, the B29s of Dragonfly World, with wings iridescent in the sun.
On the same walk with Rhonda, she pointed out a rabbit nest surrounded by a ring of long grass, in an apartment complex’s lawn. I’ve seen such nests, lined with rabbit fur, mowed around in neighbor’s lawns, but this grass was part of a commercial account. We wondered how the person on the mower discovered this nest. Did someone point it out? Or was the person so bright of eye and quick of reflex as to identify it and change course in time to avoid destroying it?
Baby rabbits, in their turn, can make remarkably quick course changes. In the time before Rascal, our dog Lindy flushed a whole nestful of baby rabbits from their hiding place in deep shrubbery. They shot out the other side of the garden and right through the openings in a chain link fence without ever slowing down. Amazing. Those openings at their widest are under three inches.
On another walk this week, I came across bluegill spawning beds in a pond formed by the partial detention of the water of Traver Creek. I’ve been watching for them to appear. Male bluegills create the beds around this time every year, craters in the silt of the shallow water, with artfully arranged pieces of gravel in the center to speak to the discerning female. The male stays by the bed he made, guarding it against pushy neighbors while, at the same time, trespassing as much as possible on neighboring beds. This makes for a lot of activity in what looks like a lunar landscape under water. We used to see bass spawning beds at Bass Lake, where our cottage was, when we were kids, and sometimes the water would churn with the exertions of amorous fish.
Then and now, this is a busy time of year for all manner of critters, creating new families, raising progeny, growing into maturity, and otherwise going about the business of life in Michigan in June.
24 June 2022