Birdchick Blog
The thrushes are hitting my neck of the woods. My only gripe is that they are not singing. Usually, I hear them singing their flutey, self harmonizing whistles, but now they are all lurking low in vegetation, tossing leaves for bugs they can chow down on and continue their journey north.
Hermit thrush at T.S. Roberts Bird Sanctuary. Here is what their song sounds like.
Swainson's thrush at Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge. Here is what their song sounds like.
The Mississippi River has been flooding a bit in downtown St. Paul, MN. It's an exciting time for us park rangers at Mississippi National River and Recreation Area. I've been out taking photos for the park's Facebook Page of the progessing river levels and can't help but get in some spring birding when I'm out and about. See the tangle of trees on the right behind the rail? There were a pair of song sparrows lurking in there.
There was no singing on territory but anxious chips from the pair. I think they were looking for food and I wondered if they had nested in this spot last year when the river was lower. Now they arrived and were perplexed at the dramatic change in water level. Normally, the river is about 9 feet and when I digiscoped the above image it was over 18 feet. Soon the river will recede and the birds can go along with their nesting plans.
There's plenty around for the song sparrows to eat. I saw this early spring insect near the trees (that white stuff in the back of the photo is unmelted snow--yes, we still have some). There were bird feeders nearby by too, chock full of millet so the song sparrows should be fine.
Ducks have been enjoying the high water, foraging in the grass right off the river. Above you can see 2 mallards and an American black duck. Remember the whole meme of Ducks Wear Dog Masks?
Apparently black ducks have do too, it's not just mallards. Their dog mask is a bit more subdued.
A big thanks to Non Birding Bill for filling for a day. I had a moment of panic. Every year, my agent sends me a nice card with a note of a charity that received a donation in my name for Christmas. This year, I didn't get a card. I kind of panicked. I have an author friend who had a GREAT book agent. She wrote a very successful book that won awards and then began working on her next book. Working on that next book went one year, into two years, well on it's way into a third year. And then one day, her agent dropped her. I had no idea an agent could drop you. When I didn't get a card, I had a moment of, "Oh crap, I'm gonna get dropped!"
I buckled down and worked a fourth draft of the bee book I've been working on the last year and a half. In the middle of all of this on Christmas Eve, we received a lovely box from my book agent that included lots of lovely cookies. I suspect that I'm not getting dropped, but nothing like a healthy dose of fear to get a writer to finish something. I suspect I have more tweaking to do with this draft, but it's shaping up to be quite the story and incredibly different than anything I've written before.
I finished the draft right before New Year's and decided I needed to do some birding New Year's Day. For the past few years, we have camped out at Mr. Neil's for New Year's and I have a leisurely morning of watching winter birds from the kitchen window on January 1. This year, Mr had incredibly exciting plans for bringing in the New Year in Boston with his special lady friend (as opposed Doctor Whoing in the New Year with NBB and myself) so we chilled with friends in our neighborhood (and I mean chilled literally, I don't think it's been above zero since the New Year began--on the upside, lots of coffee and snuggling for me--whoot).
I thought I would start the New Year with an owl and headed to the screech-owl spot but that bird was tucked someplace warmer. I've tried several times for a snowy owl at the Minneapolis/St Paul Airport and have come up empty every time, it was no different January 1, perhaps no snowy there this year? I then went to Big Willow Park which has been good for northern saw-whet owls in the past and could find no sign of an owl. It was not the most pleasant temperature for hiking so perhaps I wasn't giving it the try I normally would. I finally decided to go for some birds that I know I would see--the crow roost in Loring Park. I texted Non Birding Bill and asked if he wanted to come with me (the crows meet his requirements: big, obvious, easy to see). I grabbed him and we followed the lines of crows heading towards the roost in late the afternoon.
In the winter, as afternoons start to fade, you might notice lines of crows flying towards a central location. The lines will come from all directions towards a central spot. Crows are flying from all over to a central night roost location. Studies suggest that crows will fly as far as 20 miles from their roost spot foraging for food during the day. Then in late afternoon, they fly back to the roosting spot. A roost could have literally thousands of birds gathering to it. I'm not sure of the exact numbers of the Minneapolis roost, but it would not surprise me if it went past 100,000 crows.
The crows are all over Loring Park and along the bike path near the new Twins Stadium. I think the crows chose the southern part of downtown Minneapolis for a roost because there would not be as many natural predators. Also, an irritated farmer couldn't shoot at any of the crows to drive them away. This roost still has at least one predator to worry about--great horned owls. They start their breeding season in Minnesota now. You can bet your bippy that a great horned will take a crow or two on the outside of the roost this time of year. It's one of the reasons they attack owls during the day.
As we watched the amazingly huge sheer number of crows, it struck me that this was incredibly similar to watching the sandhill cranes coming in to roost on the Platte River in Nebraska. I wonder why some birders (including myself) place such a mystical value on cranes but not crows. I'm not anti-crow, but I've noticed this roost before, have always that, "Yeah, I need to check this out," but never do. Yet, I've invested a lot of money in 9 or 10 trips to Nebraska--I've even taken others. I've frozen my tookus off at dawn in a blind and yet, here's this cool gathering of birds practically in my backyard that I can watch from the warmth of my vehicle or from one of the many eateries or bars in downtown Minneapolis. Perhaps I am like the locals in Kearney, NE who smile thinly and say, "Oh, yeah," when you tell them how excited you are about their 40,000 sandhill cranes.
I think I'll schedule the January Birds and Beers someplace in Loring Park so we can watch the roost. The parking might be a bit trickier, but we'll have one heck of a show with all the crows coming in. They should keep coming until their breeding season kicks in in March. I've never paid attention, but I wonder if the roost gradually disperses over a period of weeks or if the break up of the winter roost happen rather quickly as pairs set up territories?
NBB and I tried to get some video of the crows so you could hear them (and the traffic) and get an idea of the size of the roost. This isn't even half of the roost:
Here's another video near Dunwoody of crows staging. It's the sound of all the crows that you can't see that amazes me:
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UPDATE: Commenter Ren has this video of the same crows flying in to the roost. This video was taken from an apartment building looking down on the crows coming in to the Minneapolis Roost. It's a very cool view!
This is a brown dipper that we saw in Kazakhstan. Apart from being brown, it looked just like the American dipper we can see in the western US--right down to the white eyelids!
More coming.
I spent the day birding around Arrowwood NWR while in North Dakota with my buddy Kate Fitzmeier. And when I say "around," I literally mean around--it was completely flooded, note the the flooded road above.
Some roads were more flooded than others. Check out the Slippery When Wet sign above--I'll say! I was sad we couldn't take this road, last year it led to the refuge's bison heard. I was also sad for the refuge itself, just about every building experienced severe flooding.
Though many roads were closed, some like this road did make for a nice path for birding. Kate stayed with the vehicle, she was on a mission for some badger. We found some holes in the hills that looked very badger-worthy.
When we arrived, some pelicans and gulls were loafing on the road. You might notice that some of the pelicans have little horns on the top of their beaks. They get those during mating season and then after they mate, it comes off (So does that growth on the bill signify that they are horny?--insert bad joke grown here). When I've been out to pelican rookeries for banding, we could sometimes find horns on ground that had been shed...they looked like old nasty toe nails. As I walked down the road, the pelicans assessed my movement, "Is she really coming this way? Do we really need to move?'
Once out on the water, I felt as though I was getting disdainful looks, I had disturbed their valuable loafing time.
There were quite a few western grebes out on the water. Some were at the very beginnings of their courtship ritual. We didn't see any actual dancing, but there was some head bobbing and pre-dancing stops going on.
Quite a few shorebirds were running around. We saw a ruddy turnstone (not pictured above) and then several of the above peeps who didn't seem to care about people one bit. I was confused by one of them and had to enlist the help of South Dakota shorebird guru Doug Buri. I've gone on one of his shorebird workshops which are great and I highly recommend him, one year I need to do his sparrow workshops. He told me long ago when I lamented about shorebird id that my problem was that I looked at shorebirds from too far away, when you have them close, it's easier to identify them and it certainly is true that it's easier to get an id if they are close.
This day, my challenge was that the peeps kept running towards me as I was trying to take a photo. I kept having to back up to be able to focus them in the scope because the kept running towards me. I took the above photo without the scope, at one point the sanderings were barely six feet from me. I left my shorebird guide at home and was not having much luck deciding on an id of the larger peeps with internet searches, so I emailed Doug some photos.
Fortunately, I was able to get some size comparison shots. The smaller peep on the right was so tiny, I was convinced it was a least sandpiper, but then noticed that the bill and the feet were the same color...that can't be a least sandpiper. Doug confirmed it when I sent him the photo that it was a semi-palmated sandpiper. Now, what could the larger bird on the left be?
The larger peep ended up being a sanderling and I needed Doug's help to figure that out. He said the reason was that I was probably not used to seeing them in variable breeding plumage, but I think my confusion was habitat. When I see sanderlings on the coast, they are fairly easy to id since they constantly run back and forth with the surf. Not so much surf on the North Dakota prairie. There is another way to tell them apart rom other shorebirds--they don't have a back toe, but trying to see that when they are darting around in grass, it a bit hard to see.
If you ever have the fortune to find yourself near the Pacific Coast of Guatemala, one of the must stops should be Rincon Suizo in Tecpan, Guatemala. Half the reason is the food, the other half is the birding potential!
I have to say that I had one of the best breakfasts of my whole entire life here. Much of the food was pre-ordered for us on the road and this place was no exception. The original meal included beans, plantains, tortillas, eggs and hot sauce. But when I entered the restaurant, all I could smell was bacon and I was a woman obsessed, I asked if it was possible to add bacon to my meal (I offered to pay extra) but they gave it to me--it was the best bacon I ever tasted, it was grilled.
The tortillas are out of this world too and I am forever spoiled. Every place we went for a meal, whether it was breakfast, lunch or dinner, you heard the familiar patting of women preparting the thick, fresh delights, not like the thin, papery ones at my local grocery store.
We took a trail behind the restaurant which led to a clearing surrounded by a woods, full of wind and a little bit of cloud. Our quarry was a bird called a pink-headed warbler which just might be the snazziest warbler out there (which is saying something because in general most warblers are fairly snazzy to begin with). The wind whipping through the trees, the slight howling was slightly ominous but only added to the adventure of the search, especially as we ascended the slopes and my heavy breathing and heartbeat just added to the sound.
There were quite a few familiar birds like this flock of rose-breasted grosbeaks. At least three are in the above photo, two females and a male. I wondered if any of this flock would make it up to Minnesota. I normally write blog posts pretty much as they happen, but I'm enjoying doing these Guatemala posts so early in the Minnesota spring, even though I was there in February. While I see on Facebook and Twitter that my birding friends in the southern US are getting warblers and sparrows, I'm still waiting, finding joy in highs of 40 degrees. Looking back to Guatemala is a pleasure.
This was a hermit thrush that caused a bit of debate in our birding group. When we first saw it at a distance, some in the group thought it was a gray-cheeked thrush. It ended up being a hermit thrush, still a delightful bird, always happy to see a familiar face.
One of the cutest birds we saw was a tufted flycatcher, which is reminiscent of a tufted titmouse. I have to say that will never be a hardcore lister because I just do not care about my flycatchers as much as I should (I am not one to put up a strong fight for a willow or alder flycatcher if it's in the fall and if you know what I mean by that reference, you know too much about birds). But this dude is cute, easily distinguishable by its crest, and hangs out in the open making it easy to identify.
As I look at these photos, it's interesting to note that while we were here, I didn't get photos of colorful birds. Non Birding Bill would say that is natural since I don't pay attention to colorful birds, I'm only interested in brown birds. But we saw some really cool colorful birds, one being a red-faced warbler (do follow the link, it's a great bird) and we did finally see the pink-headed warbler. I just did not get a good photo. Mike from 10,000 Birds got a pretty good shot of it though--isn't that just a dynamite bird?
It's also funny that I have so many brown bird photos because what struck me most about the native people was how important color is to their culture and to their day to day lives. While we were birding in the woods, this group of women came out of the woods. I was a good distance away and digiscoped them. They were off to work probably in nearby fields and here they are in beautiful colorful dresses.
In many of the places we went birding, we would come across family groups of women going about their day to day lives. One of my favorite moments was coming out of the woods in pursuit of a bird and finding a group of Mayan women washing their clothes in a stream. The vibrant clothes were spread to dry on the banks as they finished the wash and their small children played nearby. A young girl, no more than four or five was holding her mother's machete. I wanted to get a photo, but her mother shook her head, "No." I had to respect her wishes and completely understood. I don't like my photo taken on laundry day either.
But color just played a huge roll in the day to day life of people in Guatemala. I wondered what it must like for someone to come from a country like this were even a guy who sells buckets uses color in his merchandising comes to someplace like Minnesota and sees the winter where it's white and then early spring when it's several weeks of gray and brown--how monochromatic and hard to deal with! That's got to be huge culture shock.
Hey, any people from my hometown in Indianapolis free on Sunday, March 29, 2009? I'm doing a digiscoping workshop at Eagle Creek Park right after the Sunday morning bird walk!
The bird walk starts at 9am (there's a fee to enter the park, but the walk and digiscoping workshop are free) and then I'll do a brief powerpoint showing my photos (the good, the bad, the downright weird). The workshop will most likely start at 11:30am (or when the walk is finished). I'll show you how to do digiscoping, help you where I can with your equipment and afterward, we'll put it to practice. Bring your equipment or if you don't have it yet, but you are thinking of getting started, bring your digital camera or your scope and we'll look them over and see what would work best for you.
Digiscoping is a fun way to get souvenier photos of birds at the feeder or on bird walks!
I got totally punk'd by my alarm on Friday morning. I was supposed to be at the San Diego Bird Festival headquarters by 5:30 to film a couple of morning live shots for KUSI with Karen Straus. My iPod alarm went off at 4:30 am, I gradually woke up, brushed my teeth and opened my laptop to check the weather. The laptop read 2:38am. I thought that was odd. I checked my hotel room clock and it read 2:36am. It was then that I realized that my iPod was still on Minneapolis time and not San Diego time.
Karen and I did a few segments with weatherman Joe Lizura--he and his camera man were a hoot. I think we may have startled them and they were afraid we would say "I'm here to see a pair of brown boobies!" on air, but we kept it mild. I even managed to video a couple of minutes of Joe interviewing us live (and demonstrate digiscoping). I stop just as he's about to ask me about the World Series of Birding:
Here's an actual digiscoped photo of the black-crowned night heron right outside the festival vendor area:
Don't forget, there's still time to vote for your favorite guest blog entry!
So, what the heck was I doing in Central America? I was part of the Fifth International Birdwatching Encounter in Guatemala. It was group that included bird guides and bloggers from Japan, Denmark, the US, and even Ecuador. One of the participants was Rick Wright of WINGS Birding Tours and I felt like I got some kind of great deal because he's a walking field guide. What a treat to have his bird knowledge along. He really is a birder's birder, we were talking popular culture and he didn't know what a Cosmo Quiz was. You want to be out in the field with a guy who has his head filled with the finer nuances of empidonax flycatchers as opposed to "What Kind Of Sexy Are You?"
Where do I begin with my Guatemala adventure? I think with volcanoes. This was the first time I had ever been to a place so chock full of volcanoes. Let's face it, this was the first time I'd been out of the country (at least to the point where a passport was required). The whole time, I kept looking around and asking myself, "How the heck did I get here?"
Our first day of birding was at Finca El Pilar, a private shade grown coffee farm being converted into a nature reserve. We went above the coffee farm to get some of the local specialties and incredible views of the surrounding volcanoes. We birded a few days here so I'll have lots to tell you.
Some of the volcanoes that we encountered during our visit, like Fuego are active and you can see little puffs of smoke coming off the top all day long. I digiscoped some of Fuego's smoke above. How can you not feel like you're not on an adventure if you're surrounded by active volcanoes?
I was expecting a complete and total sensory overload when it came to the birds, but was incredibly surprised by the number of familiar faces down there, like this eastern bluebird. It had a bit of a different accent than the eastern bluebirds I hear up in Minnesota and one of the guides mentioned that it was a more local variety, down to having a duller look than the bluebirds I'm used to. Still, the first few days, their calls really tripped me up.
When I wasn't seeing species I could see at home, I was at least seeing species similar to what I can see at home. There were all kinds of crazy looking thrushes, check out this pair of rufous-collared robins (be prepared for rufous to show up a lot in species names, whoever named the birds in Central America really liked that in their names). It's a highland thrush and looks similar to robins we see in the US.
Another somewhat familiar bird was the black-headed siskin, here's a pair above. While the siskin irruption still rages in the US, I was still able to see some siskins at El Pilar.
Check out this rufous-collared sparrow (there's that rufous again). It's a great looking bird, reminiscent of a white-throated sparrow. These birds were seen all over. Speaking sparrows we did see some introduced species like house sparrows and rock pigeons, but this was the first birding trip that I ever been on where I did not encounter one single starling. No starlings here...can you imagine? Ten days and not seeing a starling--crazy!
While we were doing all this birding, I at one point could have sworn I heard several bees buzzing. I looked and could not see any hives nearby. I started to wonder if elevation sickness was closing in or if my tinnitus had switched from its usual high pitched ring to buzzing. Then I noticed a small water basin and took a peak...
There they were, a small swarm of honeybees gathering water for the hive. You sometimes can get honeybees coming to birdbaths or ponds when it's try, water is necessary for comb construction. I asked the owner of El Pilar and he said that he did not keep bees, but perhaps they were his neighbor's bees. Or they very well could have been from a wild hive. It was fun to hear that familiar buzzing.
We found a camper while above the coffee farm and I got a giggle at the Ron Paul sticker on the back. I didn't know anyone in Guatemala would be pro Ron Paul?
And now it is time for me to head into the Park Service. More on Finca El Pilar and Guatemala later.
And don't forget to vote for your favorite guest blog entry!
Hello blog readers! Or should I say hola lectores del blog? I am back from my Guatemala birding adventure and am sorting through photos. I want to thank everyone who entered the guest blogging contest. There were many fantastic blog entries and I'm sorry that we couldn't post them all. Be sure to check out the voting for the top ten and select the entry you liked best (I'm having readers decide because Non Birding Bill and I had a tough enough time picking the top ten, let alone the best of all 53 entries).
I had a great time and learned something very interesting while birding in Central America: digiscoping is really hard! I'm pretty good at digiscoping, I'm fortunate to be able to do it often and I'm very familiar with my equipment. I can set up the shot and get my camera on the right settings without really thinking about it. I'm also very familiar with North American birds, I can sometimes predict how they will move on a perch to get a shot.
It was not the same in Guatemala, I had all new vegetation to figure out and the birds moved in different ways.
When I give digiscoping workshops, one of the things I hear the most is how someone can't get their equipment to work--usually because they've taken (at most) 20 photos that all turned out crappy and they don't understand why. You have to take dozens, if not hundreds of photos to get one decent shot. The more you work with your equipment, the more prepared you will be when a bird shows up and in the "perfect" pose. I've helped out at enough optics booths to know that many people buy their scope and digiscoping equipment right before they leave for a trip of a lifetime, barely enough time to get familiar with their equipment. If I had a tough time, how could someone with new equipment possibly get anything good going to a new area, with new birds, and not know how to work the camera and scope?
So, here are some conclusions that I came to while birding in Guatemala:
First, I had to pick my battles. I figured out quickly that I was going to be in sensory overload being around so many new species. The group we were with was very much a listing group, not so much a photography look. We'd try like the dickens to see certain species, but not really try for photos. So, when a cool ass bird like a pink-headed warbler was found, I needed to decide, "Do I want to try and aim the scope on a warbler, quite possibly missing it completely or do I want to really savor and watch this amazingly colorful warbler?" With most new species, I chose to watch the bird instead of trying to digiscope it. I did go for the pink headed warbler after a minute and the best I got was the above photo. You can see part of its head and vent from behind a leaf in the above photo.
Second, the lighting conditions in the neotropics were rather crappy. In the forest canopy, it's shady and many birds had a knack for perching with the sun directly behind them. Add incredibly tall trees and precarious scope angles and you end up with a blurry shot of a collared trogon (above).
However, there were many times when birds perched nearby, the lighting was not too bad and I could get that great shot of a berylline hummingbird--right down to its little white socks. So, I didn't get photos of every single bird (or even very good ones) but I do have some great stories and amazing birds to share.
