Turkeys In Trees

Man, that is a bleak landscape.

I went out the other day with Non Birding Bill to look for golden eagles. I know, NBB going birding?  What??  Well, we've both been busy doing shows, he went to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show and then I went to Atlanta for AmericasMart  We're basically just two spousal ships passing in the night this month. He was so desperate for my company that he willingly offered to go driving around with me to look for golden eagles.  Since it was mostly in the car, he was cool with that, it wasn't like being pestered by bugs looking for sparrows. The landscape was overcast and covered with snow. When we got to the road, we laughed and I asked, "Where is the horizon?"

I was checking for the Golden Eagle survey conducted each winter by The National Eagle Center. We checked the same area where I found goldens last year.

Alas, no golden eagles on the route this year, but lots of bald eagles. After we finished our survey route, we headed to Colville Park in Red Wing, MN and found this bird.  See the eagle in the upper left corner? People were practically driving under it.

It appeared to have something wrong with its eye that's facing my camera. It never moved and the bird usually kept it closed.  I wonder if it had gotten in a territory battle and got a talon in  the eye? Colville is a good place for this bird. There's open water all winter, lots of waterfowl and the nearby power plant stuns fish, leaving an ample food supply. I'm not sure if this bird will recover but it's possible.  We've seen healthy one eyed birds come into Frank's banding station.  It's not always gloom and doom.

We saw a ton of wild turkeys on our travels, that's NBB grabbing some turkey footage from the car. Turkeys are supposed to be one of the reasons we now have a wintering population of golden eagles along the Mississippi River on the Minnesota/Wisconsin border--the goldens have been observed taking turkeys as prey. We saw quite a few turkeys in trees, you'd drive along and wonder why there were a dozen black garbage bags in the trees and then realize it was a flock of turkeys feeding on sumac berries.  Check out this turkey:

Waaaaaaaaay at the top of that tree!  That turkey looks like she's surveying her kingdom. There were several turkeys in the tippy tops of the trees, I think something on the ground flushed them up.  It's weird to see a turkey so high up. I've seen them in the tops of trees around the beehives, usually after a fox or coyote has moved through. I took turkeys in the tops of trees as a sign that a golden eagle was not actively patrolling this patch of sky.  Still, I love the picture of this huge bird balancing on a high branch, watching the surrounding snow covered bluffs.

Here's that same turkey but this time what she looked like through my spotting scope.  I may go back to look for goldens again.  One day of no birds could just mean they were tucked in the bluffs somewhere.

Twin Cities Snow Shoeing

I have accepted the snow and have taken to snowshoeing.  Partly because my park got a whole bunch of snowshoes this winter and I'm doing some programs one on January 21 and the other on February 19.  I need to practice because I have a tendency to walk with my toes out, which inevitably leads to me stepping my shoes and tumbling ass over tea kettle into the snow.  I was out with a bunch of rangers at the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge last week and it was so cool.  We found just about every textbook thing you could find on a snowshoe hike: coyote tracks, otter tracks, rodent tracks that end with feather prints and...

...even a fresh antler shed!  That's a couple of my fellow rangers in the photo.  The antler had six points on it.  That's pretty incredible when you consider how deeply this refuge is embedded in the urban Twin Cities.  This shed was so fresh, it hadn't been chewed by any mice yet and it still had a bit of blood on the spot where the antler was attached.  Too cool!  I think it wasn't even an hour old.

After the snowshoe, I hung out at the feeders at the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge.  Check out all the spots of red, the cardinal activity was off the charts.  There were even more in the above photo, but at least three were cropped out.

I find comfort in watching the steady stream of activity at bird feeders.  Little things like blue jays filling their crops so full with peanuts that you can see the overflow in their open beaks.

I was surprised to see a white-throated sparrow hanging out at the feeders, but for whatever reason, this bird didn't go further south.  It's got a good food supply and cover at the refuge.  If it can dodge the local sharp-shinned hawk, it just might make it.  Here are some other birds visible in the falling snow around the refuge:

Female cardinal (with a female house finch down at the bottom).

Male house finch.

2 Caracaras In 1 Year

Winter and lots of snow brings with it cabin fever. We have lots of modern conveniences that help ease that tension, like Netflix Watch Instantly and Amazon Streaming and alcohol! You don't have to go to a rental facility, you don't even have to wait for Netflix to arrive in the mail--you can have most any movie...even things you shouldn't watch like Dagmar's Hot Pants delivered right to your tv with the press of a button. But that leads to things like watching Inception several times in a row, which for me leads me to vexing states: either I need a more exciting job or I have no idea what reality I'm living in.  Bwaaaaaa. But being cooped up is a great time to go through photos and put them in storage since I'm running out of space on my laptop.  I have so many birds that I have not blogged!  Holy crap, I completely forgot the caracaras!

One species was observed during the Rio Grande Valley Bird Festival at Laguna Atascosa.  I remember looking at their images in field guides as a kid and thinking, "How cool would it be to see one of those?"  They are one of the birds that attract me to Texas.

Man, stick a cigar out the side of this bird's beak and you could confuse it with Groucho Marx. I'm not sure if you can make it out in the above 2 photos, but there's a yellow bulge on the caracara--that's a full crop.  These birds eat quite a bit of roadkill and will forage for insects too.  Man, what must it be like to get a nice big fat food baby in the middle of your chest and then have to fly around.

I have to admit, it kind of grossed me out to watch the bird preening around the bulge.

The second species of caracara I saw in 2010 is a yellow-headed caracara on one of the field trips with Canopy Tower in Panama.  I didn't get the weird crop/saggy yellow boob view on this one, but it was cool to see nonetheless.

So random bird blogging coming soon.

Random Starling

I know they are non native and cause problems, but I do love the look of starlings in winter plumage.  This is a bird in my neighborhood resting after a good gorge on hackberries.

Do You See That Pauraque?

I'm going to start this post off with landscape shots that have a brown bird called a common pauraque in them.  See if you can find the bird(s) and at the end of the post, I'll put up the photos pointing out where they are and you can see if you were able to find them.

Let's start with an easy one, there's one common pauraque in this photo.

There's one pauraque in this photo.

There's one pauraque in this photo.

This is the hardest one, but there sure is a pauraque in this photo.

There are actually 2 pauraques in this photo, one easy...one almost impossible.

Most of my birding time during the Rio Grande Valley Birding Fest was spent at Estero Llano Grande State Park.  Partly because I love it but also because some of my other favorite birding sites in the area were closed due to flooding.  I went there several times with both Birdspot and WildBird on the Fly.  One of the target birds on the trails is a common pauraque, a nightjar that is similar to nighthawks and whip-poor-wills.  I've heard them and I've seen them flushed on roads at night in Central America, but I've never seen a roosting pauraque.

I knew people were seeing between 1 - 3 at a time and I was hopeful we'd find more than one.  We sure did, above is one of the pauraques.  With that cryptic brown plumage, you can understand how they might be easy to miss.  They are active at dawn and dusk and fly around to catch insects with their mouths wide open.  Don't let that tiny beak fool you, it belies a mouth worthy of any mother-in-law.

The park rangers and other birders were very helpful to point out the general areas of where the nightjars were being seen, but you still had to some work.  Here's the trail near alligator lake where they typically have been found roosting.  Note the white sign, it warns people to stay on the trails so the pauraques do not get flushed.  Note the pile of brush on the left side of the trail, that's where the pauraques were.  I suspect the brush was placed there to encourage people to stay on the trail and not wander in looking for the birds and inadvertently flushing them.

Check it out: Disapproving Pauraque! We found one right away and I was happy for that.  These nightjars were a challenge to digiscope.  Number one: they were in the shade.  I could get around that by using the timer on my camera and minimize camera shake for a long exposure.  However, the second and the most challenging problem was that the birds were too darned close to focus in my spotting scope!  The sticks that were protecting the pauraque roosting location blocked some angles and I wasn't about to move the sticks, they were there to help the pauraques. But with patience and creative angling, I managed to grab some shots.

As I was setting up the above digiscoped shot, I found a second and then a third, each closer than the last.  The third pauraque we found was literally three feet away from the trail. Finding the pauraques reminded me of morel hunting.  Once you find one, you instantly see all the other mushrooms surrounding you.  It was the same with pauraques, once you found one, the other popped out like an image in a magic eye painting.

Many of the pauraque photos like the above bird were not digiscoped because they are just too close.  I always wonder how many owls I pass under on a regular basis, not I wonder how many pauraqes, poor-wills and other nightjars I have almost stepped on in my birding travels.  The pauraques did seem to be everywhere in South Texas.  Birdspot and I were wandering around Frontera Audubon, watching a brown thrasher that was working some leaves, when all three  of us--especially the thrasher jumped with a leaf toss flushed a pauraque.  I wonder how often other birds flush nightjars.  And I wonder if they are irritated because of the scare?

And now to see how you did with finding the pauraques in the first five photos:

Here's common pauraque number one.  This one may have been too easy, that eye sticks out.  But I walked past it at least twice before I finally realized it was three feet from the trail.

Hidden pauraque #2.

Pauraque nestled all snug among sticks.

I realize that even though it's circled, this pauraque is hard to see, so here is a zoom in of the cryptically plumaged nightjar:

Even up close, you can see how well their feathers work in their habitat!

The one in the front is fairly obvious, but the one in the back is really hard to see.  Here's a close up:

See, there really is a parauque by those sticks!

Ah, nothing makes me as happy as looking for brown birds!

South Texas Redheads

These are some redheads bathing and splashing against the sunset at Leonabelle Turnbull Birding Center in Port Aransas, TX.  I took this particular photo through my spotting scope.  The redheads were not at the best sun angle, but with the splashing, I thought it was an arty shot.

It was a huge flock of birds.  At first glance I would have guessed 1500, but in the scope, the redheads just kept going.  We estimated that there were close to 4000 redheads were in this raft.  I half wondered if any of these birds had been counted on our aerial waterfowl surveys on the Upper Mississippi River.

Suddenly, the flock of redheads took off.

Something must have spooked them.  There are warning signs about alligators around the boardwalk, so my guess is that an alligator went for a duck.

One of the benefits of being one for 4000 is that you are less likely to be the one nailed by a gator.

Once the flock what in the air, you could really get a sense of the size and agree that yeah, there must be close to 4000 birds there.

I couldn't help but notice other species mixed in with the flock and making mental notes.  In the above photo there are a couple of scaup mixed in--can you pick them out?  I still crack up that even though I was on vacation from my waterfowl surveys, I'm still attracted to ducks in large numbers.