Who's Poor Tom Peabody?

Captive White-throated Sparrow at Last Mountain Bird Observatory banding station.
Margaret Madsen photo

The first time I remember hearing a White-throated Sparrow sing was in Prince Albert National Park camping with our young children in the '60s.

"That's Poor Tom Peabody," John announced.

"Who's Tom Peabody?"

"That bird. He calls his name. Poor Tom Peabody-Peabody-Peabody. We used to hear him all the time in northern New Brunswick."

"There is no bird named Tom Peabody," I sniffed. "What's his real name?"

John couldn't answer and because we weren't sharp eyed enough to spot the singer, his true identity remained hidden for decades. until we finally visited the Maritimes. Everywhere we went I asked people if they knew the proper name for Poor Tom Peabody and always the reply was, "That's what we call him."

And then we hit pay dirt in the form of a retired florist in Tide Head who was also a birder. "That's the Northern White-throated Sparrow. But the guide books say the song is oh-sweet-Canada-Canada-Canada."

"But what does it look like?" I asked.

"I can show you," he said, and fetched the most exquisite hand-carved and painted duplicate of a little bird I had seen earlier at a friend's farm in Nova Scotia. I pulled out the little coiled notebook I always carry in the pocket to list the birds I see and to record details of birds I don't know so I can look them up later: streaky brown sparrow-like, light underneath, white spot under chin, black and white stripes on head, bright yellow streak above eye, like yellow eyebrow.

Tom Peabody finally had a proper name!

Tan-striped morph photo taken out our kitchen window by grandson Theo.

I thought I was seeing another unidentified bird the first time I noticed this variation of the White-throated Sparrow. It was my grandson Theo, 10, who set me straight.

The Ubiquitous Sparrow

Redpolls at breakfast - Margaret Madsen photo

Chickadees are the first birds to arrive again at first light this Boxing Day but as soon as it's fully light, those wretched sparrows descend like a plague. I've been trying to photograph them to prove what a demanding and unruly mob they are, but the moment I lift the camera, they scatter far and wide. The charming little Redpolls aren't as nervous and just continue with their breakfast.

When we first moved here, we set up feeders with black sunflowers in one and mixed seed in the other. The sparrows seemed to prefer the smaller seeds, leaving the sunflower seeds alone and because we didn't want to attract the sparrows, we abandoned the mixed seed, using only sunflowers in the winter. Well, that plan failed. The sparrows soon developed a taste for the sunflower seeds and now can clean out all the feeders in just a few days.

Someone told me that the advantage of having a mob of sparrows visit is that they attract other birds and actually, this might possibly be true. There are often Redpolls or House Finches or other kinds of sparrows mixed in with them. If we look closely, we're often surprised.

John hates sparrows for another reason - he thinks they deliberately single out his vehicle for attack, dropping their splotchy white bombs on it. This was a really great problem for him when we lived in Delisle where Manitoba maples (box elders) grew in the front yard and provided perching privileges over the car when he parked on the street. He would gnash his teeth and say really unprintable things. In the summers, there were a lot of grasshoppers that splattered yellow gobs on the windshield and hood when we drove on grid roads. But it was the greasy carcasses caught in the radiator that drew the sparrows. "Darn things think we've brought home take-out dinner for them," he would growl.

Merry Christmas!

John, beloved feeder of birds

Merry Christmas!

Here's my darling John making sure the birds have their Christmas dinner, too. Like all the pictures of birds at our feeders, it was taken through the kitchen window. As you can see, the evergreen on the right provides shelter and a landing place for the birds and they also like the dwarf lilac hedge. On the left side of the feeders is a large clump birch.

Chickadees snatch one sunflower seed at a time and flip over to the birch to crack it open. The Blue Jay on the other hand appears to fill his gullet with a lot of seeds and then takes off across the street to his own secret spot. The wretched House Sparrows descend in noisy mobs and spew seeds everywhere. I have no suet out at the moment but a female Hairy Woodpecker performs awkward acrobatics to cling to the feeder and pound seeds. Red-breasted Nuthatches visit the trees but I have not actually seen them at the feeder. Redpolls are delightful little visitors and prefer the tray feeder or eating off the ground.

I have great admiration for all the tough birds that survive our harsh prairie winter, even the usually frowned upon magpies and ravens. I always smile when I see a magpie in flight - his wings appear to be rotating like a garden whirligig. A raven on the other hand flies with a loose-jointed flapping and a twanging sheet metal sound.

Merry Christmas, everyone, and happy birding!

Owl Moments

This photo of a young Snowy Owl was taken a number of years ago near Eagle Creek west of Delisle. Apparently you can tell the age of a Snowy by the amount of dark barring. The older the owl, the whiter it is and while females retain some dark spots and barring as they age, old males can be almost snowy white. We haven't noticed any of these winter "ghosts" around yet this year.

Last winter we stopped to watch an almost pure white owl on top of a power pole adjacent to the highway. The light was such that his yellow eyes almost seemed to be glowing. Unfortunately,we didn't have the camera with us. He was there when we went to Humboldt and still there when we came back.  When Mom was in the nursing home in Wakaw, Snowy Owls seemed to be perched on the same power poles week after week when we went to visit her.

This talk of owls reminds me of my most embarrassing bird watching moment of the year. We were coming home after picking up our dog from her grooming session at G...'s Trucking west of Spalding (doesn't everyone take their dog to the truck depot for grooming?) and out the corner of my eye, I spotted what I thought was an owl on a fence post quite some distance from the road. John stopped when I screamed and we both got out to look. He thought it was an old rubber boot upended on the post. I, on the other hand, swore I saw ear tufts and proclaimed it to be a Great Horned Owl. We had no binoculars with us so we couldn't settle the argument.

Next morning I convinced John we should go back over to check if the Great Horned Owl was still around in the same spot. And it was! John was still muttering "rubber boot" but he drove off the grid onto a side road to get a better look. Definitely ear tufts. Definitely a Great Horned Owl. Not. It was one of those plastic owls designed to scare other birds away, perhaps mounted there because the farmer had trout in his dugout.

As I say, it was not one of my finer bird watching moments.

Chickadee Cafe

Dining for one - Margaret Madsen photos

Here's an idea for a project to do with your grandchildren-children-little darlings anywhere. We simply smeared a large pine cone with chunky peanut butter. First we wound a wire around it to suspend it from the plant hanger. It didn't take this chickadee long to find it.

Hannah, 9, and Adrienne, almost 7, busy making "feeders."

And this is Theo, 11, slathering on the peanut butter.

We brought these giant Ponderosa pine cones home from a visit to BC. After the kids spread the peanut butter, they sprinkled their cones with mixed bird seen and hung them in various spots in the yard. By the time we were back inside the kitchen, a chickadee was already sampling the treat hung in the lilac bush!

My darling little birdwatchers

It thrills my heart to have my grandchildren share my excitement about bird watching. They were all preschoolers when we went on our first bird watching expeditions. Cameron, the eldest, was a very serious and responsible child and handled my binoculars with great care but my favorite early story about Cam was really more about our new car than about the birds. John had just bought a new Mazda and I called Cam early in the morning one chilly March day in Winfield, BC where we lived at the time, and asked if he wanted go for a "spin" with with me in the new car before school. He was in kindergarten at the time. Of course he wanted to go, and we hit all his favorite spots from the dock at Okanagan Centre where he like to fish to the fast food place where he like to eat. On the way back to the school, we stopped on Bottom Wood Lake Road where the Red Winged blackbirds were in full chorus. I hit the button to roll down his window so he could hear the "konk-la-ree" chorus. After we had had a good listen and a good view of the "soldier" birds, I attempted to shut the window. I pressed every toggle switch on my arm rest and succeeded only in opening every window in the vehicle. Nothing I tried would close the windows. Because it was such a cold day, I had to drive very slowly to the school lest I freeze my poor grandchild. Of course we were late and only later did I discover one had to lift the toggle to close the window.

His sister Megan, 3, demanded equal time bird watching. When I went to pick her up for her first solo trip, she was waiting on the front steps with her backpack filled with snacks - essential for any successful expedition. We drove into a pull out along Wood Lake where there were Common mergansers not far from the shore. I focused the binoculars and then handed them to her asking if she could see the "ducks".

"Oh Grandma," she cried. "I see one with green messy hair and one with red messy hair."

Now isn't that the perfect description of a pair of mergansers in breeding season?

She was still a preschooler when she wanted to keep her own record of birds we saw on our outings. Sometimes she asked how to spell and sometimes she improvised, which explains, for example, the elegant duck, "canvis pac." And she always asked challenging questions such as: Do dabbling ducks close their eyes when their heads are underwater and their butts in the air?

Ian would rather do something exciting with grandma like golf but still absorbed bird knowledge. I remember Kristin telling me about an outing with the Moms & Tots group to a Vernon park with a creek running through it. When one of the moms pointed out the "ducky", Ian, who was two at the time, corrected her immediately. "That's not a ducky. That's a mallard."

Today's picture is of the next group of darling grandchildren taken last May when we were on our mini-version of the Bailee Birdathon - Hannah, Adrienne and Theo. All three are great little birders. Theo has been with us twice to the bird banding station at Last Mountain Lake and finds the whole process fascinating. Before Adrienne started school, she was using my binoculars in their back yard and suddenly cried, "Grandma, I think I see a parrot in the tree." What she had spotted was in fact her first oriole, brilliant orange and black, rivaling the most colorful bird she knew, the parrot Magoo at Uncle Karl's house.

P.S. Dabbling ducks have their own built-in version of swimmer's goggles - a transparent eyelid that closes when they submerge.

Inside looking out

Margaret Madsen photo

I know I have a lot of nerve calling this blog Prairie Birds when I am simply an old duck who likes watching birds, not an ornithologist nor any kind of authority. This time of year all my bird watching is from inside the house looking out or from inside the car driving somewhere. Today's photo, for example, was taken through the kitchen window on a snowy cold day - a feathered fugitive seeking shelter on the feeding tray of a cedar "barn" we brought back as a souvenir of a trip to Kentucky. I spend hours at my kitchen table with my morning coffee or afternoon tea just watching what's happening outside my window.

Earlier I watched a Sharp-shinned Hawk perched in the leafless birch eating a victim from the adjacent feeders (hopefully said dinner was a pesky House Sparrow). The hawk appeared to strip the meat from the bones, carefully leaving intact the ligaments that connected the skeleton together. I watched through binoculars as it methodically munched its way up and down and around the skeleton till there was nothing left but bones still hanging together. It probably sounds like a rather unpleasant thing to watch, but trust me, it was no worse than watching a person attack a KFC drumstick or a slab of barbecued ribs.

Another avian diner I found fascinating was a Northern Flicker (Yellow-shafted) I first noticed on the lawn looking for ants last summer. He moved over to the sidewalk where he must have discovered a bonanza because he jack-hammered his way along with precise determination. Flickers don't look like ground feeders - aren't they woodpeckers, for heaven's sake? And another piece of flicker trivia I discovered when I picked up a feather - the shaft (quill) is actually yellow. Until I saw that feather, I didn't realize the name was literal - I simply thought yellow shafted have yellow armpits and red shafted show red when they fly.