For the past three months we’ve had a pair of Say’s phoebes nesting a foot from our front door, on a two-inch ledge above our dining room windows. We don’t use that door much in the warm part of the year anyway, and with the mesquite gone, along with its shade and transpired water, we will likely use the door even less, at least in summer. So having a wildlife maternity ward in operation doesn’t cramp our style much.
It’s a nice nest, built in stages over weeks. We cheered as a brood of four babies were laid, hatched, raised a hellacious racket waiting for mom and dad to bring them insects to eat, and then fledged. It was a little surprising to see mom continue to build the nest after that brood left, but soon enough new hungry cacophonous beaks peeked out over the lip of the improved nest. Say’s phoebes do “double brood” with some regularity, a bit of jargon meaning raising two consecutive clutches of eggs, which phenomenon I persist in remembering as “double-clutching,” possibly because I used to own a 1960 VW transporter pickup1.
Say’s phoebes are found throughout western North America from Alaska to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, depending on the time of year. It’s an impressive migration for a bird the size of a finch. Say’s phoebes are year-round residents along the US-Mexico border, and for good reason: deserts offer an abundance of both nesting sites (ledges with a cliff face below and an overhang above) and food (insects). They seem to ask the same rhetorical question I ask myself when the weather gets this hot: “Why would I want to go anywhere else?” When the American Ornithological Society gets around to the Say’s phoebe in their drive to rename birds whose existing names honor colonizer scientists of the 18th through 20th centuries, “Desert phoebe” would be a good substitute for the Say’s phoebe.2
And of course that second brood had not yet fledged when the heat wave now bedeviling New Jersey got its start in the Southwest, with temperatures in our neighborhood getting up to about 116°F. This is not a remarkable temperature for the Mojave Desert… in July or August. In May and early June it was a little unusual.
About a week ago la mujer que amo was attending to some task or other near the front door, and she let out a horrified gasp. The second brood’s chicks had been sitting on the ledge outside the nest for a day or two at that point, so it wasn’t too surprising to see one of them on the patio tile six feet lower.
What prompted the horrified response? The bird on the ground was not looking good. She picked it up and put it back up on the ledge. Checking a moment later, she saw it again on the ground. She held it as it died. It didn’t take long.
The nest is empty tonight. I’m hoping the unfortunate chick’s siblings escaped a similar fate. They were only a few hours from fully fledging, so it’s possible they’re happily sitting in the shade of a palm and eating cool, refreshing dragonflies. That’s what I’m telling myself.
They picked a really tough couple of weeks to hatch, though. And those weeks may become much more common very soon. A recent resurvey of desert species first surveyed under the early 20th Century naturalist Joseph Grinnell found that many desert birds have suffered steep declines since Grinnell’s time. Climate change isn’t the only likely factor: habitat destruction certainly plays its part. But as far as the Say’s phoebe is concerned, human activities are actually a net positive, in that we build and maintain potential nesting habitat for them on our houses and shopping malls, and spread water and garbage everywhere, thus subsidizing the bugs they eat.
As the desert warms, those animals that can retreat to the relative shelter of burrows are still hanging in there. Aside from burrowing owls, birds lack that option. Their fates are tied to air temperatures.
Our resident phoebes likely still had a net positive reproductive year, what with that first brood andthe possibility of 75 percent of the second making it out of the nest, and even if only a third of the offspring survive the depredations of hawks and cats and such, that is nonetheless two more phoebes in the world coming from our front door nursery. Of such fragile reeds are pointless hopes woven.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-clutching_(technique)
The Say’s phoebe was named by Charles Bonaparte — yes, one of those Bonapartes — to honor Thomas Say (1787-1834), often called the Father of American Entomology. Say was an interesting fellow: a follower of utopian socialist Robert Owen who ended up dying at age 47 in the Owenite community at New Harmony, Indiana, Say named about 1,000 beetle species and co-founded the the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (ANSP) in 1812. The Academy, which still exists, is the oldest natural science organization in the US: sort of the Smithsonian of its day. As Interesting as Say was, his wife, nee Lucy Way Sistare, was definitely the more interesting of the two. A talented scientific illustrator and malacologist, she and Say married at New Harmony in 1827. Fourteen years later, and seven years after Thomas Say’s death, Lucy Say became the first woman to gain membership in the ANSP. She survived her husband by 52 years.
As a friend of mine likes to tsay, Earth is a hard teacher. I can't resist writing Lucy Way Say. tee hee