Luckily, the plants that flowered in spring and early summer will begin to produce berries. By the end of the summer, there are fewer caterpillars and other insects to eat. Catbirds must shift their diet with the changing season to get ready for migration. The environment changes a lot over the course of the summer. After a few more weeks when they are strong enough, the fledglings that survive will leave their parents to explore their surroundings. Most of the fledglings won’t survive for more than one week. This makes fledglings an easy target for predators, especially outdoor cats, which often spend time hunting for birds in suburban gardens. They are also not great flyers yet and are just beginning to get used to the new world they have launched into. The fledglings are still very weak and need to gain a lot of weight to survive. At this point, the young catbirds are called fledglings, and they will join their parents in a hunt for insects to eat. Once the nestlings are big enough and have grown the feathers they need to fly, they leave the nest. This high-protein diet is necessary, because the nestlings have to grow to the same size as their parents before leaving the nest-a period of less than two weeks! The parents and young feed on a variety of insects during this time, especially caterpillars. Both parents quickly get to work feeding the nestlings. When the eggs hatch, the nestlings (birds that have hatched but have not left their nest) emerge helpless with closed eyes and no feathers. During this time she has to spend most of her time on the nest, so she is vulnerable to predators. She incubates the eggs, sitting on them to keep them warm, for about two weeks. Once the nest is complete, the female will lay one to six bright, turquoise-green eggs in the nest. They often weave bits of colorful plastic they find into their nests. The catbirds that are still here use their songs to stake out territories for building nests.įemale catbirds build their nests in dense shrubs using thin twigs and grasses. Within a week or two, only the birds that will stay for the whole summer are left in the area. Many of the catbirds we see live far north of the city and are just stopping through during their migration. When they first arrive, there are a lot of catbirds, and the city is full of their songs. BreedingĬatbirds begin arriving in Washington, D.C., in late April and early May. They have used many of the tracking technologies you will explore in this set of lessons to research the gray catbird’s annual cycle. Catbirds can be found in many different habitats, so scientists at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center have been closely studying catbirds for more than 20 years in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. When singing, the gray catbird is a mimic-its song is a collection of sounds it has heard throughout its life. These birds are called catbirds, because their distinct call sounds a bit like a cat’s meow. The gray catbird is a songbird that is common to wild areas, suburbs and cities across most of the continental United States during the spring and summer months. To illustrate the full annual cycle of migratory birds, we will take a closer look at the gray catbird. The Full Annual Cycle of the Gray Catbird
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