Say hello to early nesting birds
The calendar says that it’s winter. But for much of the natural world in coastal California, life is clearly awakening as abundant water and already lengthening days give their cues. Grasses are green, wildflowers begin to bloom and trees prepare to spread their leaves. For birds, the most universal drama of spring is the nesting season, with all its several stages: the declaration of territorial claims, mate attraction and pair bonding through song and displays, construction of the nest and laying of eggs — all of these precede the actual raising of young. And for several birds, these behaviors are already underway as January draws to a close.
Among the most familiar of early nesting birds are hummingbirds. Unlike in the East Coast, California is home to hummingbirds all year round, with Anna’s hummingbird being Marin’s local species. While many songbirds time their nesting to align with booming insect populations a little later in spring, even these first months of the year offer quite a lot for hummingbirds, from native sources of nectar like manzanita flowers, naturalized sources such as eucalyptus and other imported trees and shrubs, and more directly human-provided food sources from hummingbird feeders.
This plentiful availability of nectar allows hummingbirds to begin their nesting process early —January nests are not uncommon, though you can continue to encounter active hummingbird nests all through spring and into summer. (Anna’s hummingbirds can raise two broods a year.) As with many neighborhood birds, males advertise their health and vigor through song and visual displays. Their songs are long, jumbly affairs of copious pops and crackles, often accompanied by their simpler visual display of nodding their heads back and forth as the sun glimmers on their iridescent head feathers.
Most dramatic are their display dives, when males climb some 70 feet into the air, then hurl themselves towards the ground before pulling upwards at the last moment with a loud “pop” emitted by their tailfeathers as they slam on the brakes. Female hummingbirds watch all this, mate with their chosen partner, and then go their separate way to construct their tiny nest on some inconspicuous tree branch and raise their two children without any further assistance from the males.
Hummingbird fathers are not great role models. But another group of early nesters — hawks and owls — typically display much more parental cooperation. Larger predatory birds also often start nesting in December, January or February. Alignment with food abundance is again a major component in their timing, but one important difference when comparing the schedule of, say, a great-horned owl or a red-tailed hawk with that of a small songbird is simply how long the child-rearing process takes. House finch eggs will hatch in two weeks, leave the nest two weeks later and then be more or less ready for independent life a month or so after that. For large hawks and owls, all of these stages take longer. Great horned owls incubate for more than a month, take more than 40 days to fledge and continue to associate with their parents for months beyond that. Owls start a nest now, finches perhaps in April, but their time of maximum offspring insatiability might not be so far apart.
Hummingbirds, hawks and owls are the standout early nesters of the neighborhood. But the first cavity-nesting songbirds are not far behind. While the majority of songbirds build open-cup nests, a smaller subset construct their nests within naturally formed tree cavities, woodpecker-excavated holes or human-provided bird houses. These more sheltered homes allow a greater tolerance for late winter rain and cold, while their relative scarcity means that grabbing a prime nesting site earlier than your neighbor is also a major consideration, leading to earlier average start times. So put up bird houses now. Local cavity nesters include titmice, chickadees, wrens, bluebirds, nuthatches and woodpeckers.
And as you walk out your doorway or into the woods on these first days of nascent spring, listen to the birds’ great yearly drama commencing. The duets of great horned owls ring out into the evening. Hummingbirds climb and dive again and again to demonstrate their irrepressible impetuosity. And in the January trees, the plain gray titmice, usually so sandpaper-voiced, burst out with clarity and vigor, singing their songs of spring’s awakening.
Jack Gedney’s On the Wing runs every other Monday. He is a co-owner of Wild Birds Unlimited in Novato and author of “The Private Lives of Public Birds.” You can reach him at jack@natureinnovato.com.