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Cliff Swallow nesting under eaves

Cliff Swallow Starting a nest
Hello, I have a pair of birds trying to build a nest under my covered porch on an audio speaker placed near the ceiling. The birds are light colored on the stomach and grayish/brown on the back with a dark head and beak. They do not have the forked tail feathers of a barn swallow. The nest material I discovered yesterday was made of damp decayed leaves, moss and mud.

The pool/porch area is quite busy this time of year and is not where we want birds eating, nesting, pooping, or swooping on the family. Can you help with the identification and offer any suggestions to deter them from nesting under the porch roof. Your opinion and assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Cliff Swallows have a chestnut-brown throat, blue/gray back and crown, brown wings and tail. Their nape, forehead and belly are white and their tail is square-ended. They breed across most of US including Michigan from May until mid-September.

Cliff swallows build their nests in areas where water is readily available because they eat a ton of bugs. Their nests are gourd-shaped and mud-like in appearance and usually consist of sand, silt and clay. They can be found commonly under the eaves of houses or under many large and medium sized bridges.

A way to live with a nest might be to erect a platform above your speaker to keep the droppings from falling onto your porch. After nesting season is over, you can remove the board and wash your porch.

A way to deter the birds is to hang helium-filled shiny, silver, mylar balloons in the area. This usually scares the birds away.

Another possibility to discourage them would be to stretch a clean white plastic sheet over the speaker so there is no place for them to get a grip for nesting.

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Photo Share: Marsh Wren

Photo by Simon Pierre Barrette
The Marsh Wren Cistothorus palustris lives and breeds all across Michigan from April to October in the large cattail and bulrush marshes. Not easy to spot, they are a reclusive bird that zip about in short bursts to hunt flying insects. If you are in a marsh, it is more likely that you will hear the wren's distinctive, gurgling, rattling trill.

Thank you for sharing your photo! If anyone else would like to share a photograph of nature send it to bloubird@gmail.com and I'll put it on the Friday Photo posts.
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Water for birds is important during the dog days of summer

It’s Time to Provide Water

During the hot and often dry conditions that make up the “dog days of summer," you will be doing yourself and your birds a big favor by providing them with a reliable source of water.

Water is very important to birds. Whether they are feeder visitors or not, birds need water. Offering a dependable source of water is probably the simplest and most important step you can take to greatly increase the variety of birds in your yard.

It can also significantly increase your enjoyment of your birds by allowing you to watch their often comical antics as they drink, bathe and preen.

However, as entertaining as it is for us, water (or the lack thereof) can be deadly serious for birds. Birds must be ready to fly at all times, and bathing is a critical part of feather maintenance and staying in top-flight condition.

Water is also vitally important when it's extremely hot and a bird’s ability to regulate its body temperature can become stressed. Birds do not sweat and must remove excess body heat through their respiratory system. So when temperatures rise, a bird's respiration rate increases, sometimes to the point that it can be seen panting like a dog. This activity dehydrates birds and increases their need for a reliable source of water to replace lost fluids.

So, while the addition of a bird bath, fountain or mister to your yard can supply hours of enjoyable bird watching entertainment for you, it may also be providing a lifesaving necessity.

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No-mess Blend vs. Safflowers Seed

Is no-mess blend better than safflower seed? ~ East Lansing

At the Wild Birds Unlimited East Lansing store, No-mess Blend is our number one selling seed blend by far. Personally it is the only blend I use and it is the first blend I recommend to everyone that comes into the store.

The first ingredient is Sunflower seed without the shell. That’s the favorite of most seed eating birds like cardinals, grosbeaks, and finches. The second ingredient is peanut pieces. Peanuts attract all the bug eating birds like chickadees, woodpeckers, wrens and jays. And then there’s a little millet without the hull thrown in to attract all the ground feeding birds like the juncos, sparrows, and doves. 

As a result, No-mess blend will attract all the feeder birds and leave no shells on the ground or grow any weeds. And 20 pounds of No-mess blend is like buying 40 pounds of any other blend because you are not paying for shells that would just fall to the ground. Pound for pound it’s the best value.

Safflower seed is a good seed too. People that choose safflower usually do so to deter blackbirds, starlings and squirrels. Safflower is a bitter seed that most mammals will avoid and the shape of the shell makes it hard for the blackbirds to crack.

If squirrels drive you nuts or blackbirds and starlings crowd your feeder, you might try the safflower solution.

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Stomping puffball mushrooms

One of my favorite summer memories is taking a walk in the woods stomping on a puffball mushrooms full of spores. Poof! Poof! Poof!

Puffballs come in many sizes, some as small as a marble and some as large as a basketball. The name "puffball" refers to three genera of fungi, Calvatia, Calbovista, and Lycoperdon.

Puffballs start out as white, round, ball-shaped mushrooms attached to the ground with little or no apparent stem. As the fungi matures, it turns brown and spores mature within a sac, unlike other mushrooms that have a cap with spores within gills on the underside of the cap.

When the puffball spores are ready to disperse a little hole usually develops on surface of the ball. The spores escape when hit by rain, animals or hmmm…by some “other” means.

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Find out why they are called Grackles

I’m not sure why, but the name of the Common Grackle is the bird people have the most trouble remembering (i.e. Cackles, Gackles, Big Bad Blackbirds). As it turns out, it was one of the most difficult birds to name too.

Diana Wells writes in her book 100 Bird and How They Got Their Names, that when naturalists first came to explore North America it was difficult to determine to which genus these birds belonged. In between the size of a crow and starling, the common name, grackle, came from gracula, which is Latin for the Jackdaw or small crow.

In the 1700's, Carl Linnaeus a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of binomial nomenclature, gave the grackle their scientific name Quiscalus quiscula. This is from the Latin quis, which means “who” and qualis, which means “of what kind?”

In Michigan, Common Grackles eat lots of bugs, beetles, grasshoppers, caterpillars, spiders, crustaceans, mollusks, fish, frogs, salamanders, mice, and other birds like sparrows. As they gather in the fall their diet changes to more seeds such as corn, rice, sunflowers, acorns, tree seeds, fruits, and garbage.

By October most Common Grackles have left Michigan to forage and roost in large communal flocks with several different species of blackbirds. Sometimes these flocks can number in the millions.

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How birds disperse seeds

You’ve waited patiently all summer for the the fruit on your plants to ripen. Tomorrow they will be at their peak for picking. Then in the morning you discover you’ve been hit by Berry Thieves! If the fruit is ready, a variety of birds can pick a tree or bush clean in a day.

Fruit grows on trees, bushes, climbing plants and on shrubs and several species of birds love them. Purple mulberry splats decorate the sidewalk as the berry season begins in mid-Michigan and as the season progresses so does the color of splats. For birds, the range of fruit and the extended length of the season during which various types become available provides many songbirds a nourishing lifeline year round.

The quest for survival has led plants to develop delicious and ingenious ways of making the animal world compete in sending their seeds out to new lands. The yummy, bright colored, vitamin packed, flesh of the fruit conceals and protects the seed within. Birds and berries are a remarkable example of Mother Nature in action. Birds eat the produce and spread the precious seeds contained in the berry over a wide area. They extract or excrete the undigested seeds enabling the plant to grow and spread.

There is no doubt that plants are one of the world's most successful life forms. They are able to survive in virtually every environment imaginable, from the driest deserts to the wettest jungles. There are even tough “weeds” poking up through the cracks in the cement. Plants evolved countless methods of producing and spreading seeds. So don’t blame the birds for stealing all the fruit. They are being used in Mother Nature's master plan to spread tiny packages of genetic material across the land to ensure the survival of her planet of plants.
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