Nature clicks #116 - House Wren

House Wren

I'm always an advocate for paying attention to the wildlife close to your own home. It doesn't  need to be a National or State Park to experience and watch wildlife. Learning about the biology of the animals around your neighborhood will help you to make observations you may have missed otherwise. This becomes even more important if your time is very limited due to a busy working schedule or other things in life that have temporarily higher priorities in life than photography.

Every year the House Wrens have a nest in a box between the flowers right in front of our home. It is a thrill for me to wake up in the morning by the beautiful trilling, flutelike melody the males use to attract a female. The first brood this year was no success. One day I found the bird box on the ground. It was just about the time when we expected the young ones to hatch. The nest box was probably pulled down by a raccoon. The good news is that the male found a female again that will incubate eggs (I don't know if it is the same one since the wrens are not always monogamous) .

Usually the males are quiet while the female sits on the nest, except if an intruder comes close to the nest box. However, whenever the female wren leaves the nest to get some food for herself, the male starts singing in a kind of gurgling outburst that is repeated in short intervals. The goal was to get a photo where the mandible is in fast motion but the eye and other parts of the bird a still sharp and in focus. The key for this picture was to shoot several bursts with 7 frames per second. Quite often the wren closed his eyes or there was simply too much motion of the whole bird. Nothing really big, but despite I was not able to invest much time in this little shooting session I'm happy with the result.