Blue Grosbeaks

Hadley, MA was blessed, yet another year, by these wonderful birds!

The male is a real eye catcher.

The hard-working female is also beautiful when you get to know her.

She’s the hero of this story.

The next photos are of a bird that I had assumed to be the mother but, as it turns out, it must be a chick from their first brood. Full maturity doesn’t occur until 3 years of age and males and females look identical for the first several months. I often saw this bird flying about, hunting but also trailing the mother later on. I can’t tell if there was only one from that brood still in the area, but I never saw more than one at a time. In any case, a beautiful bird.

I often saw this grown chick following the mama around

but I never saw her feeding it.

During my first few visits, the male was hunting for bugs for the chicks,

still hidden in the nest.

Sometimes the hunting went well and sometimes, well…

But this year my focus was more on the chicks, trying to find them in the underbrush and watching them grow; seeing the mother feeding them and then, as they got more mobile, watching them chase her through the undergrowth and steal from one another. My almost daily visits gave me a cool insight into their development.

Finally spotting a tiny chick

Initially, I could only find them when the mother flew into the hedge to feed them.

But once I got used to spotting them, they were everywhere!

Meanwhile, here is the male, stunning in the early morning sun…

while Mama is dashing here and there

with about 5 hungry chicks to feed.

This is the way the feeding is supposed to work, I presume.

But sometimes it happens that a sibling butts in and steals the food right out from under his beak! In this case, I think the mother really was trying to give the bug to the intended chick until the second one clamped down on her beak.

Getting good shots in the underbrush is tricky,

especially when they get photo-bombed by a Yellow Warbler.

One time I thought I had been watching a baby being fed until I blew the pictures up on the computer. Then I saw that it was actually the baby that had caught the grasshopper, but the little guy could’t get it placed correctly in his mouth to swallow it. So the mother gently took it out, flipped it around and gave it back to the chick. I hope you enjoy the series.

Mama is always on the lookout for new morsels for the chicks.

Watching the Mom coming in from the chick’s perspective, sort of.

On my last day with the grosbeak family, I only spotted these two chicks who had flown a nice little distance to get to the bare tree to dry off from the underbrush. They were looking scraggly but very much alive.