Category: Birds and Birding

Pretty bird

Five North American birds that I find exceptionally beautiful to look at. I’ve been fortunate to see all of these, at one time or another.

  • Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Tyrannus forficatus). The bright red in the axils is something special.
  • American Kestrel (Falco sparverius). The adult male is a delicate sonata of rufous, black, and slate blue.
  • Sanderling (Calidris alba). It’s the grayscale basic plumage that I find especially fine.
  • Painted Bunting (Passerina ciris). The male is a little flashy: a guilty pleasure.
  • Great-tailed Grackle (Quiscalus mexicanus). I like the subtle iridescence of all the grackles. The Great-tailed has the mostest in the tail department.

The waxwing slain

Toronto’s glass-and-steel skyline is an architect’s delight, but quite deadly to fall migrant birds. Despite Canadian government regs that make newly-built towers less lethal, there is still great room for improvement. Ian Austen tours the city, and picks up a few carcasses, with Michal Mesure and volunteers for the Fatal Light Awareness Program.

Some links: 62/a

Two recent articles pertaining to food labeling: First, Gustave Axelson recaps the labels vying for your attention as you shop for bird-friendly coffee.

…coffee sellers don’t always advertise that their coffee is Bird Friendly. “Probably about only 10 percent of coffee from Bird Friendly certified farms carries the Bird Friendly stamp on the package,” said Robert Rice, a research scientist at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center.

For example, Starbucks and Whole Foods sell some coffee from Bird Friendly certified farms. But they don’t see the need to make room on their packaging for a separate label that appeals to a relatively small—and silent—minority: birders.

Next, Mark Bittman proposes labels for packaged food that put the information you need right up front. A caption to the print version of the story recommends scanning the standardized list of ingredients in today’s packaging, not necessarily reading it in full:

…if the list of ingredients spans an entire paragraph, chances are you don’t need it.

I like Bittman’s red-yellow-green color codes, and I like the prominence of the Welfare measure. It would be nice to give more visibility to ingredients to which various consumers are allergic or intolerant.

Damage control

Meera Subramanian reports on current efforts to reduce bat and bird mortality at wind turbine sites. Progress has been made even at the eagle-deadly Altamont Pass.

In Cádiz [in Spain], temporarily shutting down turbines has worked because the biggest threat is to migratory birds, which pass through only occasionally. Similar methods could reduce mortalities along the migratory bottlenecks in Central America, Europe and Asia, says Miguel Ferrer, a conservation biologist at Doñana and a co-author of the Cádiz study.

But that tactic will not work in Altamont Pass, which has both migratory and permanent avian populations. Instead, companies there are making headway by replacing small, ageing turbines with fewer large ones. Choosing sites carefully can help, too. “Raptors do not use the landscape randomly,” explains Doug Bell, wildlife programme manager with the East Bay Regional Park District, which manages parklands and monitors wind farms around Altamont.

Gateway drug

Tawny Fletcher tempers her exuberant invitation to beginning birders with visits to experts Kimball Garrett and Alvaro Jaramillo.

Los Angeles County: home to Hollywood, the Sunset Strip and some of the awesomest birding hotspots in the country.

“It’s partly, of course, because there are so many people here that if a bird shows up, somebody’s going to find it,” explains Garrett. “But it’s mostly because of the diversity of habitat.” We’re talking mountains, marshes, coastline, chaparral, desert, oak woodland and more, people! That’s a lot of different kinds of food and shelter that are irresistible to a lot of different kinds of birds.

ᔥ Birdchat

Close enough

When reality gives way to art: somewhat fanciful behavior is pictured in a splendid poster (ca. 1926) by Oscar Rabe Hanson promoting commuter rail service in Chicago, part of a long article by J. J. Sedelmaier. The ducklings following the adult Wood Duck would more likely be single file, and more closely bunched. More critically, the little ones would be following a hen, not a drake.

There’s a hole in that

Laura A. Tyson et al. report an artificial nest cavity design that European Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) don’t seem to like, or at least the starlings at their northern Ohio field test site. The team tested PVC tubes with a diameter of 10 cm, mounted horizontally and capped at each end, the opening restricted to 5 cm. Bluebirds, swallows, and wrens like the plastic boxes just fine, but no starlings used any of the 100 structures in two years of testing.

Gwynne decoded

As far I can tell, Charles Goodnight is the only writer to use the name “Dirt Dauber” to refer to birds in the swallow family (Hirundinidae). Everyone else reserves that name for various species of wasp. From his The Making of a Scout, some frontier navigation wisdom:

‘The scout had to be familiar with the birds of the region,’ continued the plainsman, ‘to know those that watered each day, like the dove, and those that lived long without watering, like the Mexican quail. On the Plains, of an evening, he could take the course of the doves as they went off into the breaks to water. But the easiest of all birds to judge from was that known on the Plains as the dirt-dauber or swallow. He flew low, and if his mouth was empty he was going to water. He went straight too. If his mouth had mud in it, he was coming straight from water.’ (pp. 42-43)

Goodnight is cited in S. C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon, p. 198. David Sibley writes that American swallows of the genera Hirundo and Petrochelidon use mud to build nests. All are permanent Texas residents, at least by today’s distribution maps.

Some links: 57

Making connections: a roundup of nature stories that have caught my eye recently:

  • GrrlScientist recaps a recent paper by Dan Strickland et al. that looks at the dependency between Gray Jays (Perisoreus canadensis) and conifers like Black Spruce (Picea mariana). The jays cache perishable food items like berries and mealworms, wedging the morsels into cracks in the bark of trees. Spruces supply a natural preservative, retaining the moisture of the stored snacks, that other northern tree species (birches, maples) don’t provide.
  • Rick Wright rereads Ludlow Griscom’s (1890-1959) master’s thesis, revised and enlarged for publication in The Auk in 1922-23 (part 1, part 2). The paper presents a field identification key to ducks of the east coast. In his emphasis on flight characteristics for distinguishing birds at middle- to long-distance, Griscom anticipates the current emphasis on jizz.
  • Sharon Levy summarizes recent research on the relationships between crop-pollinating bees like Apis mellifera and flowering plants in proximity to crop land: hedgerows of trees, introduced weeds, what have you. What may be the key to the bees’ success is the degree of plant diversity, be it native or alien.
  • Maria Dolan reports on the habitat threat to of Vaux’s Swifts (Chaetura vauxi). These west coast birds, like their eastern congeners, Chimney Swifts (C. pelagica), are dependent on old brick chimneys for roosting (historically, they used hollow trees, which have also become scarce as old-growth forest declines). But rickety brick piles, especially those in earthquake zones, are prime candidates for demolition.

Merriam to Robbins to Kaufman

Laura Erickson surveys more than a century’s worth of North American birding field guides.

A quantum leap in field guide quality took place in 1966, when the Golden guide to field identification Birds of North America was published by Western Publishing.

This was co-authored by Chandler Robbins and Bertel Bruun, illustrated by Arthur Singer, and edited by Herbert Zim. The “Golden Guide” made a great many innovations—in fact, I’d argue that this guide included more valuable innovations than any field guide before or since.