old and young

The place is filled with birds, mostly moving around with their young. Common Grackles are everywhere and just a few moments before I wrote this a young grackle was sitting on the ground right outside the porch window where I am writing this, begging to be fed by its somewhat more wary parent. There are also troupes of Chickadees and Titmice and there was at least one White-breasted Nuthatch accompanying them (and honking the way nuthatches are supposed to honk, which is what attracted my attention in the first place). Young Baltimore Orioles have been calling their distinctive call from the treetops and noisy House Wrens are in the understory and on the edge. One House Wren was singing loudly in a big old evergreen in a neighbor's yard. But just back of the bank of our pond, only a few minutes later, there was a whole family of House Wrens with a singing male and at least four young. I'm beginning to think that there may be more than one brood or breeding pair of these birds in the vicinity.

Terns have started to reappear on the creek. They are mostly Common Terns but at least one of them was a Forster's Tern in non-breeding plumage (making it easy to ID). We have been seeing this southern species more and more in the late summer and autumn migration but now they are appearing in breeding season. They are, I think, nesting at Moriches Inlet/Cupsogue and there is a chance that they could start breeding on one of the Shinnecock Bay islands. This Forster's was flying with a adult tern in breeding plumage but, try as I might, I could not turn the latter into anything but another Common Tern.

Eric Salzman