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Stranger in the nest
Published November 12, 2009
He drew his feathers in close and in response; she fluffed up hers. He rocked his body side to side while standing in front of her, then they both quivered their wings.
Soon, three tiny white eggs with brown spots were in the bottom of the basket-like nest that hung from the fork of the tree limb.
One day they came home from foraging and, to their surprise, found four eggs in the nest. The egg was grayish with some brown, but larger than vireo eggs.
Papa must have counted the eggs 50 times and finally came to the conclusion they must have miscounted, although he did give mama vireo a few questioning looks.
And so he and momma accepted the newcomer as their own and later stuffed tiny spiders and bugs in its mouth. As the baby grew, it demanded more of the food and it was hard to sneak a bug past it to the other three babies.
The nest was now crowded as the new baby grew. The original three were hanging onto the edge as best they could and struggling to be fed.
As they feathered out, the three red-eyed vireo babies began to exhibit some of the field marks that make the bird so distinctive. The soft brown back and gray head, the white eyebrow and dark line through the eye, a soft yellow breast and, of course, the red-eye.
The late arrival was larger than the other babies and there was no red-eye. The dark back and greenish underparts looked nothing like any vireo papa had ever seen, and it got worse as summer faded and fall migration neared. The bird began to molt and turned into a very strange teenager. The brown head was covered with a tannish color.
Obviously, this was not a red-eyed vireo, but mama and pops adopted it as their own, even though it was crowding the other three babies out of the nest.
If you have not guessed, the intruding bird was a brown-headed cowbird who had no nest to go home to because his lazy mother did not build a nest, but laid her egg in another’s.
In many cases, the bigger bird crowds out the babies and the host bird and even dumps them out of the nest. The struggle for food also kills many of the baby birds.
But even with the death of their own babies, the red-eyed vireos will raise the orphan as their own.
Learning a lesson from the red-eyed vireo, I stood right in front of Jackie who was in the kitchen making a pie. I drew my self up as tight as I could and rocked from side to side and then began to quiver.
When I woke up in the emergency room my head was spliting. She told the doctor I had fallen while rocking and quivering and hit my head on the corner of the table.
Don’t ever sneak up on a woman who has a rolling pin in her hand.
E.M. “Bosie” Boswell is a member of the American Birding Association and the Audubon Society. Contact him at 6413 Stonewall, Greenville, TX 75402, or e-mail bosieb(at)geusnet.com.
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