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looking down on a blue-gray?
At Day 50, we are in limbo. We have the lyrics of that old song by The Clash running through our heads, "Should I stay or should I go?"
Yet, given the choices, we elected to stay.
To say a blue-gray gnatcatcher is petite is like saying an elephant is a jumbo. We’d be stating the obvious, the elephant in the room so to speak. And to be politically correct, they know they are petite.
To say a blue-gray gnatcatcher is petite is like saying an elephant is a jumbo. We’d be stating the obvious, the elephant in the room so to speak. And to be politically correct, they know they are petite.
At .23 ounce, it would take four blue-grays to make an entire ounce, or 64 to make a pound of the diminutive bird that really only weighs about twice as much as a local hummingbird.
Blue-grays eat tiny insects, leafhoppers, midges, gnats, "no-see-ems" and it is hard to see how you can make a meal on such insect minutiae. It’s like being the last kid at the table and you don’t get a wedge of cornbread but the crumbles at the bottom of the pan.
Blue-grays are only here during the nesting season and tend to be high in the trees. If you see one, it is most often its belly or undercarriage you are looking at through the branches.
That’s why the editorial we was surprised to spot one looking for food on the ground with us peering down from the second-floor deck off our periodical room. It was our belly the blue-gray was looking at.
Still, it makes us wonder: are there fewer tiny insects in the canopy? And yet, another sign that the collective biomass of all insects has suffered a major decline?
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