Category: Birds and Birding

Bank on it

Catherine A. Lindell, Ryan S. O’Connor, and Emily B. Cohen make a contribution to what we know about songbirds’ nesting success in active and abandoned coffee plantations and active pasture. Specifically, they studied White-throated Thrushes (Turdus assimlis) and Clay-colored Thrushes (T. grayi) in Las Alturas reserve (for four breeding seasons) and Rio Negro, an active coffee farm (unfortunately, only for one season).

These two species of birds, congeners of our American Robin, do not migrate north to the U.S. to breed (there are some records in south Texas for Clay-colored Thrush), in contrast to the charismatic migratory wood warblers (used to promote shade-grown coffee) that feed in forests and plantation overstories in the winter months. The thrushes of the research prefer to nest on the ground or low in a tree. The slightly surprising results of the paper are that nesting success is only indirectly affected by type of land cover, and the effect is through how well the terrain provides concealment from predators. In particular, nesting in a steep bank in pastureland provides the greatest protection (the nest can’t be detected from below, and cattle can’t trample it).

There is a scintilla of a hint that the birds can be more successful in an active coffee plantation—more humans means fewer predators—but keep in mind that only one year of data is available.

I’ll let the authors summarize the research’s conservation implications:

Conservation recommendations based on land-cover type would be relatively easy if we could rank land-covers as to the quality of habitat they provide for target species and if rankings were consistent across species. Our results indicate these conditions are not met for these species.

Smith decoded

So. So the fact is, at the end of the 4th century Greenwich was covered in the kind of plant life and so on that grows over the places no one goes to or uses. Probably there was a lot of ancient wildlife which came when that happened, the equivalents of frogs and hedgehogs and the kinds of things that come and inhabit places like on Springwatch on TV. On that programme they tell you how to make a wilderness in your garden so that live things will come and visit it or even decide to make their homes there. Some of them can be quite rare like the bird that is called a willow warbler which used to be widespread but now there are hardly any. But the point is, places that right now right this minute are places people go to in London and do not think twice about being in, can seriously just disappear. (There but for the, p. 286)

Ali Smith’s ten-year-old narrator Brooke has the gist of the conservation argument, but her facts regarding the status of Willow Warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus) are not quite there. Across Europe, the bird is not listed as a species of concern; it’s only in Britain that populations have fallen off, placing it on Amber conservation status.

Good for something

Dr. Caren Cooper is collecting data on variation in House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) eggs.

Because House Sparrows are a nonnative species, they are undesirable inhabitants of nest boxes in North America, but they are an easily accessible study species that can be used to address ecological questions without disturbing native birds.

Researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology are studying this species to help better understand the enormous variation in eggshell patterns and color. House Sparrow eggs exhibit an extraordinary amount of variation. Eggshell coloration and pattern may vary with available calcium, sunlight patterns, or habitat quality, and are expected to differ seasonally and geographically as well.

NestWatch participants are encouraged to submit digital photographs of eggs to Dr. Cooper, together with sufficient information to make scientific comparisons. Follow the link for more details.

Some lists: 10

Five (and five more) obsolete common names for birds, taken from the index to Richard H. Pough, Audubon Bird Guide: Small Land Birds of Eastern & Central North America from Southern Texas to Central Greenland, 1946 and 1949, and their modern synonyms.

Lichtenstein’s Oriole
Altamira Oriole (Icterus gularis). M. Heinrich Lichtenstein (1780-1857) was honored by Johann Wagler by naming the oriole for him.
Bandit Warbler
Common Yellowthroat (Geothlypis trichas). The old name has a lot more mojo.
Batchelder’s Woodpecker
Downy Woodpecker (Picoides pubescens). Another eponym that perhaps was a casualty of lumping species together, in this case Gairdner’s Woodpecker, Nelson’s, and Willow.
Cham-chack
Red-bellied Woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus). I’d say, “like it sounds,” but the bird doesn’t sound like that at all.
Forest Chippy
Worm-eating Warbler (Helmitheros vermivora). Described in the field guides as having voice like a Chipping Sparrow.
Grease Bird
Gray Jay (Perisoreus canadensis). Along with several other equally uncomplimentary names.
Huckleberry Bird
Field Sparrow (Spizella pusilla). Apparently a preferred nesting substrate.
John-chew-it
Black-whiskered Vireo (Vireo altiloquus). This name-sayer name actually works. It’s also known as Whip-Tom-Kelly. Poor Tom.
Pork and Beans
Common Nighthawk (Chordeiles minor). Yet again, supposedly onomatopoetic. I don’t hear it.
Flame-crest
Golden-crowned Kinglet (Regulus satrapa). Another case where the old name is short, descriptive, and to the point, while the new one reads like a committee report. Sort of like the difference between the original Metro station names and the hyphenated jawbreakers we have today.

In wolf’s clothing

Nick Davies and Justin Welbergen report a novel form of Batesian mimicry: in this case the breast barring that is shared by Common Cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) and Sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus). Rather than an harmless species mimicking a harmful one, here the indirectly harmful species (the brood parasite cuckoo) gains easier access to host Reed Warbler (Acrocephalus scirpaceus) nests by resembling the more direct threat, the predatory raptor.

(Summary by The Economist.)

Spenser decoded

So I’m working my way through the evening’s ten pages of Spenser and I come to a passage in Book II, Canto XII of The Faerie Queene where he apparently feels the need to demonize certain species of birds and flying mammals:

Even all the Nation of unfortunate
And fatal Birds about them flocked were,
Such as by nature Men abhor and hate;
The ill-fac’d Owl, Death’s dreadful Messenger,
The hoarse Night-Raven, Trump of doleful Drere,
The Leather-winged Bat, Day’s Enemy,
The rueful Strich, still waiting on the Bier,
The Whistler shrill, that whoso hears, doth die;
The hellish Harpies, Prophets of sad Destiny.

Whistler is glossed by the edition that I am recording as plover, and I don’t know where that disrespect is coming from.

But it was Strich that caught my eye. The word, perhaps already obsolete when Spenser used it at the end of the 16th century, refers to the various petite screech-owls, and was formed through some sort of collision between the sound the bird makes and the ominous, bloodthirsty Strix of classical mythology—or at least so Oxford reasons. To add to the confusion, nowadays Strix names a genus of much larger owls, among them the Great Gray Owl and Barred Owl, and it is the nominate genus of the True Owls family, the Strigidae.

Under escort

Gary Stix profiles Omar Fadhil, ornithologist and researcher with the University of Baghdad. Field work in Iraq presents special challenges.

Whenever I go out, villagers always ask, “What the hell are you doing here?” I never engage them directly. Instead I get out my binoculars, set up the camera tripod and take out my bird books. I show them pictures of the birds I’m looking for and, when possible, let them look through the binoculars at the birds themselves.

After a time, they often warm to me. They point to a bird in the book and say, “We’ve seen this one but not that one.” They become my scouts. Despite the war, I have found six new species that had never been seen before in Iraq.

Sky blue

I live on an island at the edge of a maze of estuaries, at the convergence of a bay and a sound, a place full of waterbirds, even in the dead of winter.

Janice P. Nimura goes birding on the East River.

…they were gadwalls, not mallards. The female looked mallardish, but the male was different, with dove-gray feathers, paler at the tips, over a black rump. Understated and elegant, like a morning coat. I love the word “gadwall”; it sounds Dickensian, the name of a prosperous man of business, paddling about on the social pond.

Beginners’ parallax

Chuck Almdale assembles a mini-handbook for field trip leaders on how to help others find the bird you’re looking at.

In an open area, twelve o’clock is always straight ahead, six is directly behind, three and nine are 90 degrees right and left, respectively. Other hours fall in between. For a vertical object such as a tree, twelve is the top, three is ½ way down on the right side, and so on. …12 o’clock is not simply the direction in which you happen to be looking at that moment.

An alternative

They are the worlds that obey me, kinder and finer worlds: in many of them, for example, I’d have no teeth.

Because I believe I’d do better with a beak. So why not have one? That shouldn’t be impossible. I feel a beak could make me happy, quite extraordinarily content: sporting something dapper and useful in that line—handy for cracking walnuts, nipping fingers, tweezing seeds. Not that I’ve ever fancied eating seeds, but one can’t predict the path of appetite.

And beaks come in different sizes: that’s a plus, along with the range of designs. The toucan would be good for parties, shouting, grievous bodily harm. Ibis: mainly funerals and plumbing. Sparrow: best for online dating and eating crisps.

—A. L. Kennedy, “Story of My Life”

Another survey

Paul Baicich and Wayne Petersen report in the current Birding Community E-Bulletin:

Researchers at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, are studying the risks and benefits to birds caused by human behavior and technology (e.g., alternative energy efforts, cats, windows, and communications) as they are perceived by Americans with varying interests in birds. The researchers do not expect those responding to the survey to know the degree of risk associated with each of these behaviors or technologies. Indeed, some consequences remain unknown. The responses on these perceived risks will help more fully understand public opinions and behavior. The responses are expected to provide tools to raise bird conservation awareness.

In the closing pages of the survey, the researchers share some statistics about avian mortality that are rather surprising.

Please take the 25-minute survey.

Providence trip report: 1

Drew Whelan’s report to the ABA conference at Providence, R.I., about disaster response along the Gulf Coast to the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe is less than encouraging. Cleanup efforts are hindered, it appears, in any number of ways—from well-intentioned protocols that protect NWRs, to corporate bungling. Drew’s images of oil-soaked booms washed ashore into coastal marshes and apparently abandoned are especially disheartening.

The American Birding Association continues to collect funds in support of recovery efforts.