My favorite bird in the garden
Don’t tell the other birds, but my favorite bird in the garden is the little house wren.
While other birds are beautiful in some gaudy, outlandish way — like cardinals, orioles, goldfinches, or even robins — the tiny wren’s beauty lies in its simple, classical, dappled brown look, like a tiny refined Englishman in a tweed suit.
Its song, however, is anything but simple. During mating season, the male will stake out his territory atop a likely birdhouse and fill the air with trills and whistles whose complexity would make any classical composer envious.
He will then go to work gathering twigs and small sticks to start building a nest inside the birdhouse. He won’t finish it, because between jaunts to find just the right twig, he will sing that marvelous song in hopes of attracting just the right mate to witness his industriousness.
Lured by his song, she will enter the house to check out his handiwork while he sits by, hoping she finds it acceptable. If she does, it is only then that she will agree to a partnership with him, and they each head off to find more building materials, working together to finish the nest.
How can you not fall in love with a shared union like that?
After they have mated, she begins laying their fertilized eggs — one each morning for a week or so. They will take turns guarding the nest while the other dashes off to find something to eat.
Once all her eggs are laid, she will sit on them day and night, and he will bring her food. When she leaves for brief periods, he will sit atop the house singing a short song every 30 seconds or so to reassure her that he is on the job.
In about two weeks the babies hatch.
When that happens, mom and pop work nonstop finding caterpillars, moths, and grubs for them to eat, which they prefer over seeds. Most of their hunting is done under the foliage in my nearby garden, another reason why the wrens are my favorite bird. They live at my level, going about their business as I go about mine only a few feet away. It’s as if we have an arrangement — my garden attracts insects, many as pollinators but even more as defoliators, and the thankful wrens keep the munching insect population in check for me.
As the babies grow, mom and pop wren are tidy neighbors. With almost every visit, they feed their babies, then reach around to junior’s south end to grab a small white bundle of excrement, which they carry some distance away to dispose of. I like to think of it as a neighborly courtesy, but they’re probably doing it to eliminate any evidence of vulnerable babies in the neighborhood. Potato, potahto.
In less than three weeks, the young — as many of seven of them — are ready to fly the coop. This spring’s babies left my birdhouse on June 30, and the newly liberated young’uns are one more reason that the wren is my favorite bird.
Baby wrens leave the nest almost fully grown and feathered exactly like their adult parents. They’re nothing like baby robins, those laughable lummoxes in speckled jammies you see squatting in the middle of the yard, helplessly begging to be fed by mom and dad. Young robins are pathetic, pampered poops, and all they need is a little video game in front of them to complete the picture.
But not so with young wrens, who hit the ground ready to launch into adulthood. Oh, they’re still kids, so their first flights are sketchy at best. Because they concentrate so hard on the mechanics of flight, they don’t focus all that much on navigation. One of them this summer fluttered up and briefly landed on my arm, happy to have found someplace soft to crash, only to launch off again when mom and pop scolded him to find a more appropriate landing zone. I didn’t take it personally, because mom and pop know that I’m a friend and ally. But still, it’s a lesson their kids have to learn — as a general rule, don’t land on anything wearing a baseball cap.
Within a day or two, they’re off around the ‘hood, a new little clan of wrens doing all the things that wren clans do. Mom and pop still feed them a bit, but spend most of their time teaching the kids how to find food that didn’t just come from the tip of a parent’s beak.
But even that little wren clan won’t last long, because within a few weeks mom and pop will be at it again for their second nesting go-round of the summer in the little wren house. The little ones will be on their own, gradually finding their independence from each other.
Mama Google tells me that the couple that returns to the nest isn’t necessarily the same couple that left it. It’s hard to tell because they’re all feathered alike, but sometimes mom might return and take up with some other pop, or maybe pop with some other sweetie. Or maybe it will be some other couple altogether.
That second brood is starting right now in my yard, and I’m not exactly sure who my new neighbors are.
But if they’re all cool with it, then so am I. With a wink and a nudge, I welcome them back to make the second half of my summer a delight once again.
After all, who am I to question the comings and goings of my favorite bird in the garden?
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at [email protected]
