Immature Behavior

Robert and I went for a nice hike-and-bird (or walk-and-gawk, as I call it) outing at McKinney Falls State Park this morning and saw a nice array of the usual Austin-area breeding birds. I was especially happy to get good looks at baby bluebirds and cardinals, who look quite silly - the bluebirds were only partly streaked with blue and the cardinals, who could not yet fly, were doing a good job of pumping their wings in expectation of later flight ability. We also saw a young dove who was still figuring out the flying thing; he made a few false starts before he finally got going.

But the best sighting to my mind was a group of about 6 immature red-shouldered hawks. At one point, we startled their big mama out of a tree, where she had been feeding one of her young, and she flew straight past us, very close, with a bloody rat in her talons. (It's a close look when you can so clearly identify the prey species.) Then we started hearing this call that Robert said sounded like a blue jay with the piano pedal pushed to soften it. I said, Maybe it's a baby blue jay. But no - we quickly discovered that it was one of the young hawks, mewing at mommy for food.



This is all made the more ridiculous by the fact that young birds very quickly achieve a size near or equal to their parents. One of the goofier (and sadder) things to watch (which we did not see today) is a tiny parent bird feeding a much huger young brown-headed cowbird. (Cowbirds practice nest paraticism; instead of making their own nests, they remove the eggs from another bird's nest and replace them with their own. This is a major problem for endangered species like the black-capped vireo.)

I also particularly enjoyed watching a wren and a lizard on a branch; the wren kept moving around and the lizard kept trying to stay out of sight of it.

We saw one bird fly past us that completely boggled our minds. It is not obvious to me that there is any bird in the ABA bird area that looks like that. Of course, I am wrong, but it seemed so unfamiliar that neither Robert nor I even knew where to start looking in the book. My best description is that it looked like a miniaturized (perhaps large dove-sized) Mississippi kite.