Rainbows and Rude Birds

Driving over to my Mitten Strings meeting last night, the rain was light and yet the skies were still bright; I had a feeling before long we'd see one of these:

It's faint, but can you see the rainbow there?

The funny thing was, as I drove, I passed two different people standing on their front walkways - necks craned, eyes watching the skies. I wondered, as I drove along, if they were watching for a rainbow. The skies were really just ripe for one. I was glad that I was not the only one tuning into the atmospheric conditions.

Speaking of tuning in, and while I have you here, I have to tell you a quick little nature story. This was going to be one of my Nature Notes, but it's involved enough to warrant a post of its own. :)

The other day, I was standing at the kitchen sink, the windows wide open as I worked. I could hear a band of blue jays making a fuss in the woods. As I watched, I could just make out their dark shapes, hopping from branch to branch - there had to be six or seven of them. Their sounds were not quite the screeches one is used to hearing from jays, but rather a soft and incessant chattering. I figured there must be a hawk or cat in the area making them nervous - for all their obnoxious behavior, jays are known to sound the alarm to warn other species of a predator close by. (We once witnessed a bunch of jays ward off a hawk one day, saving a tiny red squirrel in the process.) Anyway, I called the boys to the kitchen to listen to the strange sounds and Bookworm immediately remembered that last spring we watched the jays do a similar thing ~ and that it all centered around a brown-headed cowbird.

You see, here's the thing about the brown-headed cowbird; it has quite a little racket going. The female lays her eggs in another bird's nest - even kicking out one of the resident eggs while she's at it. She can lay up to one egg a day throughout the nesting season, and she never makes a nest of her own.

Apparently, some birds, the blue jay for one, are able to recognize this offense and remove the alien egg from its nest. Many birds have no idea though, and from what I understand this is called a parasitic behavior. Last year we watched several jays haunt a cowbird pair all around the top of our spruce tree. It went on all afternoon! At the time we didn't know much about cowbirds, we just figured the jays were being their usual pushy selves. Turns out they knew just what they were doing!

Fast forward to this year, and Bookworm's educated guess - and sure enough, about a half hour later, after the din of the jays had settled down, I could hear a strange bird song off in the woods. I did a quick google for "brown-headed cowbird song" and sure enough, that's what it was! We've been listening to the brown-headed cowbirds for a couple of days now. They are definitely present somewhere deep in the woods, but so far the jays have not taken further offense.

Moral of the story ~ another little nature mystery solved, another bird song learned. And I love that we connected with our environment in this way. Today I'm going to have the boys write up a story about this observation and we'll adorn their pages with drawings of the jay and cowbird. To that end, I'll print out images from this neat online coloring book I found at the Cornell site. Science and language arts in one neat little package!

Well, I hope you all have a nice Thursday ... looks to be showery here, but that will only make all this green even greener. See you all again sometime soon! :)