Surprise!

My worst fears were not realized: there are two young in the hummingbird nest!

How do I know? The nest is not that far above eye level but there is no way that I can look inside without causing havoc. But I could see two tiny beaks that weren't there before, both aimed skyward and sticking up just high enough above the edge of the tiny hummingbird nest.

Mama stopped sitting because her eggs hatched. And she stayed out of sight as long as my threatening presence was still in view. When she was incubating she was much bolder -- probably because she had to insure that the eggs were properly covered. Now that the young are out of their shells, she has become much more skittish about giving away the nest location. I pulled a chair from the nearby pond edge and situated it in a shady and somewhat more distant spot thinking that if I hunkered down and presented a lower, less threatening image, she might come in. She did indeed show up on a dead branch in the neighorhood but refused to go to the nest. Even more remarkably, a ruby-throated male showed up and perched quite visibly on a higher, more distant dead branch, allowing the morning sun to show off his glittering t ruby-red gorget. Papa? No way to know. The male hummer is notorious for having nothing to do with the nesting process and this fellow even seemed to swipe the female as he took off. Nothing daunted, she ignored him and flew to another conspicuous spot to wait for my departure. And depart I did with the assurance -- mine and hers -- that her babies were doing all right for now!

Having had luck with the hummingbird nest, I went out into the marsh to check on the Clapper Rail situation. The tide was low and the open area in the middle of the marsh had very little water. And sure enough, there was a Clapper at the near side edge doing her or his toilette in the morning sunshine. This was an elaborate process and, although I'm sure the bird saw me, it continued to spread its wings to dry and operate on straightening out its numerous feathers with that strange implement, its heavy, curved, yellow-and-black beak. No sign of any other rails, young or old.

The three Flickers that I described in a recent post are still in the area and, if I was puzzled before why there were two males without any sign of competition for the one female, I was even more astonished to see one male feeding the other! The obvious explanation was that the second male was a fledgling flying with his parents, learning flicker ways but still being fed. I could now see that the youngster was slightly smaller than his father but otherwise looked almost identical. Apparently there is no obvious juvenile plumage for young flickers. I'm not even sure that the apparent female was not simply another offspring from the same flicker brood.      

Eric Salzman