13 May 2026
Hello Everyone,
Most recent news. There is concern about P3 at Cornell who appears lethargic. Send positive wishes, please. I fear we are losing P3.
The four chicks of Monty and Hartley were ringed this morning and determined to all be males. This is going to be fun!!!!!!!!!
It was 14 C on Tuesday. What a glorious day! Ann took Don and Toby for a long walk along the river path near us. Toby was super tired after! We went for another walk after dinner. It was so nice. The first Rose-breasted Grosbeak was in our garden today. I could only see a single male. It arrived around 1230 and was still here at 2030 foraging on the ground under the lilacs.
All about Birds says:
Rose-breasted Grosbeaks breed in moist deciduous forests, deciduous-coniferous forests, thickets, and semiopen habitats across the northeastern United States, ranging into southeastern and central Canada. They gravitate toward second-growth woods, suburban areas, parks, gardens, and orchards, as well as shrubby forest edges next to streams, ponds, marshes, roads, or pastures. During migration, grosbeaks stop in a wide variety of habitats including primary and secondary forest, wet and dry forest, shrub thickets, pine woods, shrubby dune ridges, scrub, urban areas, and wetlands. They spend the winter in forests and semiopen habitats in Central and South America, often in middle elevations and highlands (up to about 11,000 feet in Colombia).
During the breeding season Rose-breasted Grosbeaks eat a lot of insects, as well as wild fruit and seeds. They mostly feed on berries during fall migration, and on their wintering grounds they have a varied diet of invertebrates and plant material. Grosbeaks usually glean their food from dense foliage and branches. They also snag food while hovering, and sometimes fly out to hawk for insects in midair. The animal portion of their diet includes beetles, bees, ants, sawflies, bugs, butterflies, and moths. Their vegetarian fare includes elderberries, blackberries, raspberries, mulberries, juneberries, and seeds of smartweed, pigweed, foxtail, milkweed, plus sunflower seeds, garden peas, oats, wheat, tree flowers, tree buds, and cultivated fruit.
The male may help the female choose a nest site, which is usually in a vertical fork or crotch of a sapling. Nesting plants include maple, red-berried elder, balsam fir, eastern hemlock, and spruce, and may be in wet or dry areas. They are usually in forest openings, overgrown field edges, old pastures, shrubby roads, railroad rights-of-way, gardens, parks, or residential areas. The male and female each may test the nest site’s suitability by settling into it and turning around several times.
Rose-breasted Grosbeaks are common forest birds, but their populations experienced a slow decline from 1966 to 2019, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey. Partners in Flight estimates a global breeding population of 4.7 million and rates them 11 out of 20 on the Continental Concern Score, indicating a species of relatively low conservation concern. These birds nest in saplings, so numbers could be dropping as forests mature over the eastern United States. Rose-breasted Grosbeaks are commonly trapped for sale as cage birds in their wintering range because they look and sound pretty, and this has had an unknown impact on their population.
Image credit: “Rose-breasted grosbeak male” by Doug Greenberg is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
As always, I thank you for your lovely notes and for sharing your personal stories with me. I love hearing about your walks and the encounters with birds living near you! Please don’t stop. I never get tired of reading about wildlife – never. All the creatures of my garden – and our planet – bring me great delight as I know they do you.
We have had a very calm few days. There is nothing nicer. Don seemed to be building up to ‘something’, and Friday morning, his anxiety got the best of him. (I am fine). Individuals with dementia do not lose memories like those with Alzheimer’s, but they have a slower processing time, which shows up as difficulty in communicating. His psychiatrist increased his anti-anxiety medication by 50%, and it was as if a miracle had happened. On Saturday, he said to me, ‘Don’t let the bad break us.’ I certainly won’t. My neighbour, who is finishing up some rails on the deck, said today he would have given up long ago, adding that I was ‘one tough cookie’. It made me smile.
If you are dealing with someone with dementia, make sure that routines are simple and followed every day and that there is ‘calm’. I cannot emphasise the latter enough. Quiet music in the background, walks outside – it doesn’t have to be anywhere exotic, and positive support.
Typically, in our part of Canada, gardens are now started on or after the May Long Weekend, which is also Victoria Day, in celebration of Queen Victoria’s birthday. That is this weekend. Each year, we choose a colour, making certain that we have something ‘red’ for the hummingbirds. Don decided that red would be a good overall colour after I came home with some red Gerber Daisies today to put in an old French jardiniere.
Our weather is very hot and there could be issues with wild fires starting. This is quite bad for the wildlife. We are waiting for the ducklings and goslings to hatch.
So what is going on in Bird World?
The first hatch for Maya and Blue 33 at Manton Bay is VERY strong! Head held high demanding food!
This does not look good. Well, as I said, there is concern about P3 at the nest of Big Red and Arthur. This is very sad. I do not believe she has ever had a chick die as a nestling before this year, and I honestly do not think P3 is going to make it. We lost another chick during hatching this year. P1 and P2 look great.
Glaslyn females visiting other nests when they take breaks.
Another US osprey nest failure at Sun Coast with the death of the osplet.
It is absolutely insance to poison wildlife.
Another great video from SK Hideaways of Sandy and Luna doing beaky kisses: https://youtu.be/8p8GKklfutw?
And Monty and Hartley’s kids out of the box! Chaos reigns. https://youtu.be/lpnLXUv1DfY?
That’s it for today. The weather is too good not to be outside. Take care everyone. See you soon.
Thank you to ‘PB’ for keeping me posted on nests including P3. Thank you to SK Hideaways for their videos and for those who post on FB about recent nest happenings. I am grateful to the owners of the streaming cams that allow us to view the good, the bad, and the sad.
