Birds, like much of the natural world, follow a more or less regular schedule. March fills the air with a rising swell of song, April sees the arrival of many of our summer birds, and May and June are when baby birds are everywhere you look (with some to be seen in the adjacent months if you look). Yet except for a few ubiquitous water birds, namely mallards and Canada geese, most birds pass their brief adolescence in near invisibility as far as the human majority is concerned. This article will tell you how to lift that veil – what to look for in order to see more baby birds.
Baby Bird Basics: The Great Divide
Precocial young: the few, the walking, the fuzzy
The infant life of different bird species is broadly divided into two categories known by the scientific terms of precocial and altricial. The first, “precocial,” is easy enough for us to grasp, cognate as it is with our more common word “precocious.” The precocious Mozart performed contrapuntal improvisations for the courts of Europe at the age of six; the young of precocial bird species begin to run about and peck for food at the rough age of six minutes.
The key feature for such early activity is a walking or swimming lifestyle, rather than one entirely dependent on the advanced art of flying. Ducks and waterfowl, shorebirds, and “game birds” like turkeys and quail all fall into this category. The consequence for the human observer is that these are the birds that offer a relatively extended period of cute, visible fluffiness, since we can see them out and about exploring the world soon after hatching.
Given that most ducks and shorebirds nest to the north, however, we have relatively few local bird species that fit into this category. Our easily visible birds with precocial young are pretty much limited to the following:
- Waterfowl: Mallards, Canada Geese, Mute Swans (Stafford Lake, Las Gallinas, Pacheco Pond, and various less prominent bodies of water)
- Other Waterbirds: Pied-billed Grebe, Common Gallinule (these need a bit more vegetative cover: Las Gallinas and Pacheco Pond)
- Shorebirds: Killdeer, Stilts, Avocets (all are abundant in winter, but only a small number of these shorebirds stay to nest locally: look for killdeers at Hamilton and Stafford Lake, stilts and avocets along Binford Road at Rush Creek or at Shollenberger Park in Petaluma)
- Game Birds: Wild Turkey, California Quail
Altricial young: most backyard birds
If you are a little songbird nesting up in a tree somewhere, you are not going to leave the nest until you are capable of flying. Nearly all our local breeding birds other than the above fall into this category of early nest-bound development; young of these species are termed altricial. Given the secrecy with which birds hide their nests and the rapid development of the young (perhaps 10-14 days from hatching to fledging for most small songbirds), this earliest period of a bird’s life will remain largely invisible to most casual observers. Your best opportunity for seeing birds at the nest will be to look carefully at the birds in your yard: depending on the species, most birds will establish nest sites between March and May. Identify the birds around your home, look up what kind of nest they build, and watch where they go.
Once they fledge and leave the nest, however, there is still a period of some weeks during which young birds can be recognized for the clumsy non-prodigies they are. In size, recently fledged songbirds are fully as large as their parents, and their plumage is often nearly identical to that of adult birds. So how do you tell them apart?
For the first few weeks after leaving the nest, behavior is your best indicator across the spectrum of typical backyard birds. Recently fledged birds can fly, but they cannot find food for themselves. Instead, they will follow their parents around, vigorously begging to be fed with heedless, insistent cries and a widely shared posture involving crouching, flapping the wings, and opening wide so the latest food delivery can be made into their gaping gullets. As they become incrementally more self-reliant, they will beg less insistently, while still following their parents, and gradually begin to find food for themselves. The exact timeline of development varies depending on the bird species, but for most small songbirds, functional independence will be achieved within the first two months after fledging, often freeing up their parents to get to work on a second brood.
There are also some differences in appearance that you can look for to identify young birds when they are not actively begging. The most consistent spot to observe is known as the gape, a brightly colored and unfeathered area around the beak (see the chickadee above). The basic evolutionary purpose of this one aberration from adult plumage is that a big yellow thing opening wide (and emitting a loud plaintive whining) triggers the feeding instinct in the parent birds and so is retained for a time even after the young leave the nest. Beyond this, plumage differences between young and adults vary by species; some birds launch into the world dressed in essentially adult garb, while others have certain tell-tale signs of immaturity. For example:
Fluffheads
In the first few days after fledging, various birds may show small remnants of downy feathers. This is highly typical of our most common backyard bird, the house finch, which often shows these “horns.”
Zicard2
Go easy on the bright colors
Many birds are famous for bright colors, which often serve as a way to advertise fitness, particularly of males (“I can spend extra energy to make myself extra conspicuous to predators and still thrive – I must be a particularly capable individual”). When you are young and your immediate goal is to survive rather than to attract a mate, maximizing your brightness may not be the most effective strategy.
Rick Leche
Jerry McFarland
Don Bartling
Susie Kelly
Extra streaky
One repeated variation on this theme of improving camouflage in young birds is to be extra streaky in preference to the solid, high contrast colors of adults.
Joseph Higbee
S. Hunt
These are among the most notably different of our common local birds. For most other backyard species, especially very plain birds like titmice or California towhees with no dangerously bright colors in the adult plumage, young will look essentially like adults in their overall garb. Look for the unfeathered gape, the sudden population increase where there were previously mere pairs, and the replacement of spring’s singing with summer’s infantile clamor.
Header image: house finch and begging fledgling, photo by Jerry McFarland on Flickr
Wonderful AND fun – thanks, Jack!
You are wonderful to do the work necessary to share these bird features with those of us too busy or too lazy to exert ourselves. We greatly appreciate your efforts.
The recently fledged barn swallows are lined up on the deck railing, mouths open! Annoyed parents edge away, fledged babies just edge along with them.
The babies, fluffy and persistent, always make me laugh. Poor parents! The recent storm knocked down the newly-built and empty of eggs barn swallow nest under my top deck and I examined it – what a marvel. I think they’re rebuilding right now.