marauders

Another cool cloudless morning with some wind (but a bit less than yesterday's heavy gusts).

My favorite seat by the pond, with its wideview of creek, marsh and bay, has been fruitful. Yesterday's bird of the day was a hummer, picking insects off the Ivo and Baccharis bushes, almost in front of my nose. Today's featured birds were a Black-crowned Night Heron dropping into the middle of the marsh and a bird hawk flushed up from the middle of the marsh by two very angry Willets. This smallish accipiter -- it may be the same one I saw a couple of days ago being chased by Red-wings -- high-tailed it across the marsh to the south and disappeared into a clump of trees. I would normally call a sleek small hawk like this a Sharp-shinned but this species is rare on LI at this time of year (I once investigated the subject and could not find a confirmed breeding record for the island; our breeding accipiter is the Cooper's Hawk which has been increasing here for a number of years). So I have to admit the possibility that the bird is a male Cooper's (the males of many raptors are noticeably smaller than the females and the male Cooper's is not that much bigger than the female Sharp-shinned!). Both times, the bird was far and moving fast, making further ID difficult. I'll keep looking for it.

Speaking of Red-wing vs. raptor. the tailless male Red-wing at the head of the marsh that I mentioned before is not such a weak flyer as I thought. Adult crows, now with their newly launched fledglings around, have become very prominent and commonly perch on dead stubs in said Red-wing's territory. The prominence of these big black birds (we can call them honorary raptors) enrages the blackbird and, tail or not, he goes after the crows with vim and vigor. They are several times bigger than he is with large dangerous beaks but that doesn't daunt No-tail, who does his best to chase them away, His advantage is aerial dexterity which makes you wonder why these birds need tails anyway.

Eric Salzman