About five years ago in the late spring I heard a noise under the deck and I went out to see what the racket was about. Birds always sound different when they are excited. A black rat snake had crawled up to the nest and was eating one of the baby birds and the others in the nest had flown out and on the ground.
As I said previously I never kill snakes if it is to be avoided, but in this case I was mad! I ran and got my Daisy Red Ryder BB gun and shot the snake. It fell with the bird, which was dying, on the patio. I really regretted it because the rat snake was doing what black rat snakes do - catching prey, but I had been watching the babies and had gotten to enjoy them. Apparently the other birds were ready to leave the nest because they were flyers, of a sort. In a half hour or so they were gone. I am sure they made it. No doubt, the one I photographed this morning is a relative.
The eastern phoebe, Sayornis phoeba, is a rather nondescript little bird - not very many distinguishing marks other than a black beek, which its look-alike, the eastern wood-pewee doesn't have. The two are hard to tell apart on sight. However, the pewee has a song that says, pee-a-wee, while the phoebe's is a fee-bee. So each of the birds tell you what it is.
Both are wonderfully beneficial in that they are voracious insect-eaters. They don't go for seeds you put out and I don't remember seeing either at a suet feeder.
This phoebe that I photographed this morning gave me a wonderful show of its morning ritual getting rid of mites and just general grooming itself and I caught it in the act. Remember I said I used the "shotgun approach?" I must have shot 25 pictures of it, but most weren't good.
These here are pretty good, in my opinion, of a phoebe at its morning ritual.
First the neck scratch...
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