By Rachel Hudson
Summer.
For many people, summer means outdoor adventures, abundant sunshine, beach trips, no school, and as many vacations as one can cram into those precious few months. For me, having grown up in miserable, muggy East Texas, summer has always meant: stay inside where it’s safe and cool.
I am not a hot-weather person, which is one reason I moved to Washington (though recent trends in temperature have me questioning my decision every year now). July is often akin to a dead, windless zone in a vast ocean for me when it comes to birding. Gone are my beloved masses of migrating shorebirds, skies of geese and ducks, thrills of swans and cranes and rare discoveries. The bright warblers of spring are harder to spot in the dense leaves of summer, and although I dearly love the tanagers and orioles and vireos, I am spoiled with all of them singing and nesting within 2 miles of my home each year.
So, I rarely, if ever, leave my house during the hotter months of the year. However, this does not mean I am not birding; it only means I am birding in a different way. During summer, I tend to quite literally practice “armchair birding”, where I sit in my cool home and listen. Outside, there are still birds singing and calling in that summer heat, and I can hear them all from where I sit by my closed window. (My single-pane windows are rubbish at blocking sounds.) I cannot see any of them, and I have no intention to. Birding, to me, isn’t only about seeing a bird. It’s about hearing them, as well as getting to know them, their behavior, their habits, their individual personalities. From where I sit by my window each day, I can listen and learn…
There is a European Starling who has learned some sort of strange, loud, machine-like whistle that reminds me of a parrot; he likes to sing atop the pine tree to my right. There is a Western Tanager that will call and call and call, “Pur-dee!”, from the deciduous trees one street up the hill from me, especially in the mornings. A Black-headed Grosbeak decided to be cheeky one day and began to sing his song from the same spot the Tanager usually calls, tricking me that morning into believing it was the Tanager singing. He didn’t last long… perhaps the Tanager booted the Grosbeak out of his territory. Every now and then, I hear various “chip” calls from warblers, usually Yellow-rumpeds, but sometimes more exciting things such as Orange-crowneds will appear, and I will never forget the morning I heard a MacGillivray’s Warbler singing in the brush below where the weird Starling hangs out. California Scrub-Jays raucously clamor about at random times all day, every day, and anyone I happen to be on call with at the time will inevitably hear them through the microphone and point them out.
Lately, however, the action really picks up after sunset. My neighborhood has always had Great Horned Owls in it, and this year, we seem to have a bumper crop of them. The pair of Great Horneds appear to have successfully raised 3 chicks to fledging. I haven’t actually gotten a good look at any of them (…it is dark, after all. The picture above is of a different young owl), but in my chair by my window, I have heard all the fledglings screeching every night for the past month. They beg and screech and click their beaks and stumble through branches as they learn to fly. Some nights, they even land on the roof of my home! Their calls are almost deafening at times, and have attracted attention from my neighbors (whom I have now educated, as one night 3 of my neighbors stepped outside when the fledglings were very close, at the same time as I had opened my door to get a recording of them. I filled everyone in on what it was they were hearing, and they were all very impressed by the owls). A longer, quieter recording of the owls can be found here: https://ebird.org/checklist/S112280068, and a shorter, louder recording can be found here: https://ebird.org/checklist/S113877870 .
Perhaps, in light of all this, I should change my perspective on summer birding. The windless ocean of summer I find myself in may be dull on the surface, but if I look beyond that, into the depths below, there is actually quite a lot of life out there. All one needs to do to find such life is to be still, and consider things in a new light. I may not see many birds in summer, but I do still enjoy them in a different way, and that’s perfectly okay.
Photo credit: Young Great Horned Owl, by Rachel Hudson
