By Karen Gleason
As much as I love sitting in my cool and quiet studio early in the morning, sipping my first cup of coffee and writing in my journal before the sun comes up, I always look forward to returning to my little apartment at the end of the day and spending the last few hours of daylight back in the studio at my desk/drawing table.
The table faces a bank of windows looking toward the backyard and the east, and I picked this room for my studio for that purpose, so I could watch as many sunrises as possible from this second-story perch.
Over the past week, I’ve noticed a lot of activity in the mulberry tree growing in my backyard. Several days ago, I began paying more attention to the activity and realized that the tree’s slender branches are starting to bear a bumper crop of mulberries.
Because of those berries, the mulberry has become a bird magnet.
I know a lot of people don’t like having mulberries near their homes because the birds, once they’ve gorged themselves on mulberries, can leave, ah, rather colorful, staining waste on parked cars and sidewalks, but there are few trees that can attract such a wide variety of birds.
On one evening last week, I stopped working entirely so I could pay more attention to the show going on just outside the window.
At least a half dozen Western Kingbirds had staked out the tree as their personal buffet and were settled on perches throughout its upper branches, occasionally sallying out to pluck a juicy mulberry.
Western Kingbirds are common summer residents throughout Del Rio, although they tend to be more numerous on the drier and more open north side. In south Del Rio, the Western Kingbirds’ cousins, the Couch’s Kingbirds, are more common.
Western and Couch’s Kingbirds are lookalikes, and the best way to tell them apart, at least for me, is to get a good look at their tails. The Western has a solid black tail with clean white edges on each side and it presents a squared-off appearance. The Couch’s, on the other hand, has a dark tail with no white, and it presents a more rounded appearance.
All species of kingbirds, as their name implies, are loud and proud, quick to take offense and equally quick to drive off possible predators with shrill calls and flapping wings. They are definitely birds not afraid to punch far above their weight: I have seen nesting pairs of kingbirds harry and harass away Red-tailed Hawks many times their size.
