Beverly Graves, age 13, of Cross Plains, Tennessee, for her question:
What is a grosbeak?
His name means Fat Beak, and you would expect to find him in the bird world where' beaks of all sorts are always in style. Actually the grosbeak is a pretty finch bird. His gaudy red cousin, the cardinal, has the same kind of beak and some people call him a grosbeak also.
A duck uses her flat beak to dribble in the mud. The heron uses his long, thin beak like a pair of chopsticks to pick up fish and passing frogs. The shape of a bird's beak tells a lot about how he finds his food. The grosbeak has a short, very strong beak shaped like a stubby cone. It is fine for grabbing tough skinned beetles and cracking seeds. He also uses it to grab helpings of soft caterpillars and soft, juicy fruits. His pretty plumage is also quite remarkable and like his cousins, the finches, he is a sweet sounding songbird.
The colorful dressers of the bird world usually are the males. Most females wear quiet tones of brown and gray. There are several grosbeaks and, true to this rule, the males are more gaudy than the females. Grosbeaks are almost as large as robins and they feel most at home in leafy shrubs and trees. Several types visit North America for the summer and stay long enough to bring up families of young grosbeaks. They spend the winter in South America and return to us the following spring.
The so called evening grosbeak flies north to Canada and also settles in our Western Mountains as far south as Arizona. The handsome father bird has a yellow body with black and white wings and his sturdy beak is white. He was named the evening grosbeak because people thought he sang only at sundown. Bird watchers now claim that he sings more often. The black headed grosbeak wears a black cap and jacket with a bright orange brown vest. He summers in the West. The blue grosbeak summers in the Southern states and the gray and red pine grosbeak favors the piney woods of Canada.
Our favorite member of the family is the rose breasted grosbeak. He brings his wife to spend the summer in our northeastern states. The handsome Poppa bird wears a shiny black cap and jacket with snowy white plumage on his chest and under his tail. His striking black and white outfit is set off by a vivid red pointed bib under his chin. Mrs. Red Breasted Grosbeak wears a drab looking outfit speckled with yellowish browns. Farmers welcome these grosbeaks and call them the potato bug birds. This is because they are very fond of potato beetles. All the grosbeaks are welcome visitors because they remove caterpillars and other insects pests from our crops and feed them to their growing children.
Grosbeaks build rather shabby nests, often as high as 20 feet up in the boughs. Their favorite building material is rootlets. The eggs, as a rule, are pale blue and speckled with brown. There may be three, four or five of them in the nest and the young birds are ready to fly away after a few weeks. The parents have time to bring up a second and sometimes a third brood before the summer ends and the time comes to fly south.