Last Thursday morning it was pleasant and cool on the porch as I drank my morning coffee and watched two ruby-throated hummingbirds spar. It was a nice break from the hot, humid day before, although more was probably coming. Two chickadees were feeding at black oil sunflower feeders, which is a sure sign that September’s about to arrive.
One looked like the Southern Carolina species and the other had white on its wings and looked like the Northern black-capped . But when visitors ask me if the chickadee they’re seeing is a black-capped or a Carolina I just answer yes. In the Lehigh Valley and across into parts of New Jersey we’re in the chickadee hybrid zone where the two species interbreed.
An individual can look and sound like one species but still have the DNA of the other one. A first-year male American redstart was hawking insects in a tree not far from the chickadees. At this stage in its life this wood warbler that may migrate as far south as northern South America doesn’t resemble its name.
Young males are yellow, white, and gray, but when it becomes an adult the yellow areas will be orange/red. In that part of the front yard several single yellow sunflowers had germinated from fallen seeds. But a lot of the sunflowers David plants, and he plants thousands, are colored and multiflowering.
Autumn Beauty and Chocolate Cherry produce multiple flowers on a single stalk and will bloom for most of the summer. Recently atop a 2-foot-tall sunflower plant that’s only.