Where to see young birds in Marin
Spring is the nesting season for birds. Last time out, I discussed birdhouses, a valuable preliminary tool for certain cavity-nesting songbirds. But for some birds, the nesting process is already well underway — some babies are already out and about! Today I’d like to talk about how to see and recognize young birds, which is not always as easy as it seems.
In some cases, though, it is. A minority of local birds have what are known as precocial young, meaning that they are able to see and move and feed themselves more or less immediately after emerging from the egg. Such precocial young are easy to identify, being much smaller than their parents and dressed in the familiar downy feathers of youth. While there are relatively few local birds with precocial young, certain species are quite common: Mallards, Canada geese and swans can all be easily seen at local ponds such as Las Gallinas in San Rafael, Stafford Lake in Novato or Ellis Creek in Petaluma. If you want to see cute little baby birds, ducks and other waterfowl, they should be your first stop.
There are a few other birds with precocial young. One of my favorites is the pied-billed grebe, a somewhat duck-like species that bears its stripey little babies on the backs of the parents during their early days. Common mergansers might also be seen giving piggyback rides to their chicks at Alpine or Bon Tempe Lake. The North Bay also has a smattering of shorebirds that breed locally, with American avocets, black-necked stilts and killdeers all producing fuzzy little babies that trot along after their parents on long, gangly legs. Around the woods or your neighborhood, turkeys or quail also have precocial young.
In the backyard and away from the water, almost all birds instead have what are called altricial young — these babies are quite helpless at birth, highly dependent on their parents and unable to walk or fly for weeks. This has some major consequences for our odds of noticing them. First, you probably won’t — these young will stay in the nest for at least a few weeks. And when you do see them, newly emerged from the nest, they will be essentially fully grown and equal in size to their parents: You cannot recognize baby songbirds by size. Instead, clues to their youth largely fall into two categories: plumage and behavior.
The degree to which recently fledged backyard birds look similar to their parents varies by species and age. Many birds will look largely the same, while a relatively minority have clearly distinctive patterns. Young robins and bluebirds, for instance, have lots of dots or speckles on their breasts. Young spotted towhees and dark-eyed juncos have an overall streaky pattern instead of the crisp black heads of the adults. Newly fledged house finches will generally resemble adult females, but bear wispy “horns” for the initial days of their life out and about in the world. One subtle clue of appearance is a widespread and reliable indicator of youth, however: the unfeathered area around the edge of the beak known as the gape. This is often relatively prominent, the remnant of the bright-colored mouths that gaped open in the nest to prompt parental feeding.
For birds that look largely the same as their parents, is there any way to identify them as recent fledglings? There can be some behavioral clues. The most common distinctively youthful behavior is begging, in which young birds follow their parents around while they crouch, flutter their wings and open their mouths as they request food. (In some species, adult females will imitate this behavior to solicit “courtship feeding” as they test and prime their male mates for parenthood.) Young birds will also often appear clumsier or uncertain in flight or in pursuit of food — take those moments of hesitation to pull out your binoculars and look for the tell-tale gape or other elements of immature plumage.
May is a wonderful month. Go to the ponds and enjoy the ducklings and goslings. Watch in your yard for streaky or speckly fledglings missing their landings or staring obliviously into the world. And listen for the clamor of the insatiable young birds, seeking satisfaction for their painful hunger from their diligent, faithful parents.
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.