Summer fiesta at my home features dancing butterflies, musical birds, and rhythmic acorns. Cabbage white couples air dance flirtatiously. Oak titmouses play birdie marimba. Black oak acorns keep the beat with help from an unseen woodpecker. Other butterflies, like Huge Speedy Yellow guy, make guest appearances along with hummingbirds. These aerial entertainers enjoy the deck flowers then race (yellow guy and hummers) or waft (everyone else) across the yard to the Albizia tree’s flowers.
I’ve decided Big Yellow is a cloudless sulfur. A male, I think (they are larger than females), seeking a mate or seeking many mates (he doesn’t tell me his plans). He repeatedly rushes through the air looking as if he’s late for a date. The butterfly website says, “Males patrol with rapid flight, searching for receptive females.” That guy has rapid flight mastered, but there’s either a shortage of receptive females or he is in high demand and is rushing to meet all commitments. (Perhaps he is many different guys, they don’t tell me that, either.)
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Other butterflies performing this year include common buckeye. S/he was very agreeable and posed. These butterflies aren’t sexually dimorphic: males and females look the same.
California sisters are abundant again this year, finally, after several years of near-absence, as are other butterflies, perhaps due to winter rains helping nectar and host plants to flourish. Sisters enjoy the apricots that the raccoons and birds left untouched on the ground beneath the tree. These butterflies usually are common in our oak woodland and lower elevation forest because oaks are the larval host plant. A huge black oak hangs over my house (see below) and others are intermixed in the remnant forest patches around me.
I see western tiger swallowtail regularly and, once, saw one wandering monarch. A few pipevine swallowtails, anise swallowtails, plus unidentified skippers and coppers visit the Albizia tree (silk moss). The sky is hazed by smoke from the interior Coast Range Cold Fire over 100 miles away.
The Stars of summer fiesta are two DIY mariachi oak titmouse birds (pretty sure of this ID; correction or advice is welcome). They are busy birds who rush in, grab a seed, and fly off to perch and eat it. Only time I see them standing still is eating and, briefly, while playing music.
One guy (gal?) was watching another titmouse drumming his beak on the wind chime cylinders to make them ring ting ting ting-ting. When the first bird left, observer bird flew in and made a bigger chime with the entire metal trellis. He began on a lower arch, tapping his beak against the metal. Whole trellis chimed clang clang clang. (These photos are taken from indoors, across the room, looking out the side window where the parrots sometimes hang out.)
Then he went up to the top arch and tapped with his beak again for a louder more resonant tone cluung cluung. The trellis isn’t supporting any plants right now, it leans against the deck railing. As the small bird shoves off to fly away, the trellis bounces against the railing and makes a deeper tone that the bird repeats by landing and taking off again a few times. Boong. . . booong . . . bong.
Both titmouses return several times a day to play the trellis marimba and listen to their music (but not together, they’re soloists). My parrots are accustomed to them now and carol “hola” sweetly, but titmouse isn’t as sanguine about seeing the bigger parrots staring at him through the window.
The boong, clang, cluung, ting are backed by the steady drumming of a woodpecker in the forest trees behind the Albizia. Tat-tat-tat tat-tat-tat. Black oak, who hangs over the house, joins in by dropping acorns that bounce off the roof and deck: thunka thunka thunka.
From the back of the house, it’s easier to show black oak’s size but doesn’t show how the branches hang close to the roof.
By sunset, hummingbirds, titmouses and butterflies have found roosts and are silent. After dark, acorns still fall thunka . . . thunka and someone, maybe a nighthawk, perches in black oak’s branches above my roof and sings peent . . . peent . . . peent.
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