Eastern phoebe chicks huddle Sunday in a nest at Six Mile Lake in northern Dickinson County. (Betsy Bloom/Daily News photo)

This photo was supposed to celebrate a second successful nesting this year by our resident eastern phoebes at Six Mile Lake.

I’d watched over the past weeks as beaks began to poke out the sides of the nest their parents have had for years above the light on my mom’s quilting shop.

Each summer, a pair has managed to raise at least one brood to fledglings in this nest, made from mud, moss and leaves mixed with grass stems and animal hair. Sometimes they’d switch to the light over the entrance to the pole barn for the second batch, which phoebes usually produce in the average breeding season.

The nest site appears to be a good one for them, given the number of young phoebes that could later be seen learning to pursue flying insects — they are part of the flycatcher family — in the open yard in June and then again in late July.

The phoebes had become so reliable I took it for granted this pair would follow the trio from the first 2024 nesting to move on out into the world. I snapped a few photos of the grumpy-looking fledglings Sunday morning and headed off to work.

Monday, they were gone.

Perhaps they did take that first flight. But ominously, the parents were nowhere to be seen or heard, with that raspy “fee-bee” cry that gives them their name.

And one side of the twin-bulb light seemed to have been pulled downward.

Through the rest of the week I looked and listened. Nothing.

Had something climbed up? We have a window box planted with flowers and vines underneath the light. But that’s been there for decades and never seemed to be a problem before.

Had a flying predator — owl, crow, jay — managed to cling to the light and nest just long enough to snatch up the chicks? According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All About Birds website at www.allaboutbirds.org, “Both sexes (of phoebes), but particularly the female, attempt to defend the nest against such predators as snakes, jays, crows, chipmunks, mice and house wrens.”

I’d rule out a house wren, as they’ve been conspicuously absent these past couple years after previously nesting in a box we put up on the garden shed. I miss their singing on the bear weathervane atop the shed.

The others, however, all are present in good numbers in the neighborhood. The chipmunk was a surprise to see on the list of threats — mice, too — but I do know red squirrels are opportunistic omnivores that have been known to eat baby birds as well as eggs if they can find them.

We also have a healthy population of raccoons, though the flowers in the window box likely would have shown damage had that been the culprit.

The fledgling stage is considered one of the most vulnerable periods for songbirds, with online sources stating the mortality rate for some species can be roughly 40%. It’s one reason why species such as the American robin will do two broods a year.

But phoebes, perhaps because they do favor nesting atop such things as light fixtures and under eaves that are less accessible, seem to have better odds of making it to migration time.

So I’ll keep watching and listening, hoping the phoebe family has not just eluded predators but my efforts to find them as well.

Betsy Bloom can be reached at 906-774-2772, ext. 240, or bbloom@ironmountaindailynews.com.