Curious Facts

Everything below is in the book — each fact links straight to the page it comes from.

Anna's Hummingbirds kept trying to feed from the flowers on ladies' hats. The author reports "many instances of their flying to the flowers on ladies' hats, thinking that they were real ones." The same birds liked human company enough to nest "in vines on trellises or piazzas of dwellings," binding their nests of woolly plant fibres together with cobwebs. Read it in the book →
A nestling vireo took four minutes to swallow a whole dragonfly, then napped for fifteen. The male vireo stripped a large dragonfly of "wings and all but one leg" and thrust it headfirst down one youngster's throat, leaving an inch of body protruding. "For fifteen minutes this little bird lay quietly in the bottom of the nest, at the end of which time he again bobbed up, as hungry as ever." Read it in the book →
Nestlings are fed fairly because hunger makes them stretch higher. Watching a vireo brood, the author noticed the feeding was self-regulating: "The more hungry a little bird is, the higher it will reach, a fact that insures their being fed in rotation." The smallest chick, a day or two younger than its nestmates, simply raised its mouth above the others' when its turn came round. Read it in the book →
A Veery was so quick she photographed herself out of existence. The plate showed "the nest and eggs appeared beautifully but there was not a trace of the Veery although she was standing on the edge of the nest when I pressed the bulb." In three days of watching over the eggs, the bird actually alighted on the nest only twice while he was present. Read it in the book →
Touch the stump and it "belched forth little wrens". Arriving on the morning the young wrens were due to fledge, the author found that "As soon as I touched the stump it seemed as though I had pulled the trigger of a gun." He clapped a hand over the hole, but "they poured out through my fingers." Read it in the book →
Robins minded the hidden photographer more than the camera three feet from their nest. "Curiously enough they did not care so much about the camera which was so close to their home as they did about me, hiding behind a tree a hundred feet away." His solution was to drape the camera in his focussing cloth, leave it up the tree overnight, and return with enough thread to trip the shutter from a distance. Read it in the book →
The Veeries decided the camera was a nuisance that would eventually go away. The pair returned, discussed the leaf-covered camera "in low tones" for several minutes, flew off, came back ten minutes later and talked some more. "Evidently they thought the camera was something that would remove its unwelcome presence after awhile and they were going to wait for it to go." Read it in the book →
Chickadee fledglings left the nest via a man's shoulder and hat. The young birds were photographed at two feet through the removable back of a nest box, entirely unafraid; they then quit the nest "flying first to Mr. Forbush's shoulder, then to his hat and thence out into the wide, wide world." Read it in the book →
No hollow trees? Wire chunks of rotten birch to the sound ones. The author's recipe for keeping chickadees on a farm is winter feeding plus improvised real estate: "Even if the orchard contains no trees with decayed limbs, in which they can nest, they will remain if you wire short sections of decayed birches to some of the trees." One chickadee family, he notes, kept every shrub about the house "entirely free from plant lice during the season." Read it in the book →
A male Redstart perched on the camera and rode the shutter tube. Working from a bush ten feet off with a long rubber release, the author found the bird entirely unbothered by his apparatus: "Several times he lit upon the camera and once he swung upon the long rubber tube for several seconds." Many exposures failed anyway, "because of the rapidity of his movements." Read it in the book →
A wren sang with his beak full — omitting the notes that needed tongue-work. "Jack" devoted so much time to music that his mate brought twice as many loads of food. Singing round a mouthful of insects, "he could get in all the gurgling notes but he had to omit many of those that called for a rapid motion of the bills." Read it in the book →
Chuck-will's-widows have been found with small birds in their stomachs. These large southern relatives of the Whip-poor-will "devour anything that happens to be a-wing at night and that will go in their enormous mouths" — including, apparently, small birds caught in flight between perches. Read it in the book →
Kingbirds spot an insect fifty yards off, and you can hear the kill. From their lookout perches, "so keen is their sight, that they will note passing insects at a distance of fifty yards and dash out to seize them, a loud snapping of the mandibles testifying to their success." Even nestlings are fed grasshoppers, dragonflies and cicadas. Read it in the book →
City Robins nested near people on purpose, to escape the English Sparrows. The author reckoned these Robins had already suffered at sparrow beaks and "decided that the best way to avoid further trouble from that source was to trust to the protection of mankind." His verdict on the introduced sparrows is blunt: "The ruffians and our native song and insectivorous birds, through no fault of the latter, can seldom live peaceably in the same neighborhood." Read it in the book →
Cuckoos may start incubating after a single egg, days before the rest arrive. Both American cuckoos build "very shabby nests, mere platforms of a few twigs," and lay at wildly irregular intervals, sometimes with several days between eggs — yet "The bird often commences to set when only one egg is laid." Read it in the book →
Fledglings that wouldn't pose were simply carried back and re-focussed. Finding the whole brood had quit the nest overnight, the photographers hunted down the missing pair and returned them to their siblings, "who had already been carefully focussed in the camera." Having discovered flight, the young birds refused to stay put: "Time after time, they made short excursions and had to be brought back." Read it in the book →
A Downy Woodpecker kept ambushing a wren for the crime of singing nearby. Every time the wren "lifted his head, swelled his throat and the liquid notes just trickled through his vibrating mandibles," a gleam of black and white came at him. "Alighting on another stump, the wren again burst into song, only to be pursued by the Downy as before" — the giveaway that the normally peaceable woodpecker had a nest in that fallen apple tree. Read it in the book →