Friday Links & Updates

The cardinal that I found building a nest on my street last week has begun to incubate eggs.  I talked with the construction dudes and they said that the tree is not slated for removal.  They recently installed a light pole next to the tree and last night Non Birding Bill and I watched how she remained absolutely still while pedestrians walked right by the tree and the construction dudes laid down some asphalt.  I don't know how she stands the noise. I tried some fabulous shade grown coffee this week Birds and Beans.  Shade grown coffee is great for birds, it gives them habitat to feed and roost in when they are on their wintering grounds.  I visited some shade-grown coffee farms in Guatemala lat February and found many familiar birds living on them--indigo buntings, Wilson's warblers, Baltimore orioles, painted buntings, and western tanagers just to name a few.  The coffee came from Wild Birds Unlimited in Saratoga Springs in NY.  Give it a try, it's not too heavy and and has a smooth flavor--I had the medium roast, it had a chestnut-sided warbler on the bag.

It's a bad year for peregrine falcons in the UK.  According to the Telegraph, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has received 50 reports of peregrines found shot, trapped, poisoned or had their chicks stolen already this year, with more cases waiting to be processed.  Also disturbing is the discovery of a racing pigoen with a capsule full of poison attached to its leg. The RSPB blames "rogue elements" within the pigeon racing and game shooting communities, who blame them for the loss of their birds.

On the lighter side, if you ever wondered if birds fart, it's being debated over here.  theh debated started when a photographer got a photo of a myna and it looked like the bird's vent (butt) had feathers spread out as if air was passing through.  I think the splayed vent could also be explained as a cloacal protuberance (aka bird boner).

The American Bird Conservancy has been pushing for Cat Indoors! for years for the safety of wild birds since cats are an introduced predator (and considered a loss of habitat) but many cat owners refuse saying that they love their cats and don't want to deprive them of the outdoors.  Well, if you love your cat, you might want to reconsider having them outdoors.  The Journal of Widlife Management now says that cats are a prime souce of food or coyotes:

"We observed 36 coyote–cat interactions; 19 resulted in coyotes killing cats. Most cats were killed in residential areas from 2200 hours to 0500 hours during the pup-rearing season. Single coyotes were as effective killing cats as were groups (>1) of coyotes."

And if you are thinking, "Oh, I don't have coyotes in my neighborhood," you might want to read this story about a man who studied the urban coyote and found that up to 2000 live in Chicago, IL.

David Sibley has made his field guide available online...how much longer until he becomes an iPhone application?

The McAllen Chamber of Commerce's Convention & Visitor Bureau is looking for a "McAllen drink." You create a drink and send it to their website. I think it would be fun to come up with a drink that represents the great birds in south Texas.  Think of the possibilities for names:  The Screaming Chachalaca, the Roseate Spoonbill, Kiskadee Sunrise??  The girl drink potentail is endless!

Cornell Lab of Ornithology is looking for people to help out with their CamClickr website.  They have live cameras positioned at active bird nests all around the country. Since 1999, they have archived more than eight million images from these NestCams. To help sort through the images, they developed CamClickr—an online tool you can use to view the images and sort them into albums, then tag each image by the type of behavior you see: preening, eating, feeding chicks, etc.  Looking for a way to fill some downtown or want to volunteer for some bird research without spending a lot of money on gas--or better yet, want a way to get your kids involved in nature and put their mad computer skillz to good use--give CamClickr a try.

And to end on a weird not, The Birdcouple had a gruesome yet fascinating story on their blog on how people figured out the birds migrated rather than burrow underground or turn into mice in the winter.

Some Phalarope Fun

I found some phalarope photos that I had forgotten about.  These are some red-necked phalaropes that we saw on the Steppes in Kazakhstan.  When you are learning shorebirds, phalaropes are ones that can be easy to distinguish from the others, they have a unique shape, can be quite colorful and they are just plain fun to watch.  They spin around in the water kicking up sediment and food below.  No matter what country you are in, you can spot that spinning characteristic easily if they are around.

Plus, phalaropes are so pretty, look at that burgundy highlighted with delicate gray and white, touched off with some black.  Above is a Wilson's phalarope seen in a pothole just outside of Arrowwood NWR in North Dakota during the Potholes and Prairie Bird Festival.  That's a great thing about North Dakota, just driving to your destination will reveal great birds.  We couldn't get into the NWR because of the flooding, so we just drove around it and in the puddles were birds.  I was with my friend Katie and she would pull the van over while I sat in the back, opened the side door and digiscoped the phalaropes.  Birds tend to not mind vehicles, just what comes out of a vehicle.

Here's a pair of Wilson's phalaropes preening. If you are not familiar with phalaropes, you might think that is the male in the front of the pair.  It's not, that's the female.

In phalarope world, you have a great term to use that you can impress your friends with at parties: reverse sexual dimorphism.  The females are more colorful and they pursue the males.  They defend a territory and once they have attracted a male and mated, she lays the eggs and heads south to get a head start on migration while the males stays behind to incubate the eggs and raise the young.

Here's a shot of just the male, he is not colorful since he's going to be the one sitting in one spot to incubate the eggs.  It's interesting that the female doesn't partake of any of the chick rearing duties.  She doesn't bring food to the male while he incubates, she doesn't give him a break, nothing.  It's wham, bam, thank you ma'am, she lays the eggs and then says, "See ya!"

I wonder if female phalaropes ever get guilt for putting their migration before their offspring?

Playing With The New Swarovski Digiscoping Adaptor

Now that spring migration has settled down a bit, I can talk more about Kazakhstan.  I took out a group this weekend for some birding and one asked, "Why did you go to Kazakhstan?" There were several reasons, the biggest was that I have always wanted to go ever since I read about the country years ago.  It sounded wild, remote and untamed.

The other reason was a bird called the sociable lapwing (kind of a very snazzy killdeer--seen above).  Swarovski Optik is a species champion of this bird through BirdLife International.  It's a bird population that has dramatically declined in recent years and is of great concern.  It's not certain what the original population was on the Steppes of Kazakhstan.  There was a count of 5,000 birds in 1990 and another count in 2002 put their numbers at 1200 in 2002.

Current research suggests that the decline of the sociable lapwing is due in part to unevenly grazed habitat.  Sociable lapwings used to live among ungulates known as saiga (do click on the photo of the saiga, that is one crazy looking ungulate). As the saiga declined, so did the sociable lapwing numbers.  Incidentally, there were about 2 million saiga on the Kazakh Steppes in the 1950s, but a dramatic decline hit in the 1990s because of poaching--Saiga horn is used in traditional Chinese medicine as a fever cure.  The lapwings apparently really liked the way the Saiga grazed the grasses to make watching for predators good for them when they are nesting.

Swarovski and BirdLife International has made it possible for teams of locals to come out and monitor the lapwings, work with the locals to appreciate the birds and hopefully avoid the nests, and to work with cattle owners to graze in a way that mimics saiga grazing and is favorable for the lapwing.  Note the young faces who are part of the Kazak research team, it's local people working with their birds and their communities, not a bunch of foreigners coming in and telling people how to manage their land.

Swarovski is also coming out with a new digiscoping adaptor called the UCA.  It's a bit more universal in the sense that many different cameras (even small video cameras) can be attached to the scope and it slides off easily.  When we were taken to the sociable lapwing area, we were asked to test out the new adaptor.  I have to admit, being on a trip of a lifetime and seeing unbelievable life birds, that last thing I wanted to do was learn a new adaptor for my camera and scope.  But it was surprisingly easy to figure out.

Now, the challenge became how to get twenty some odd birders close to skittish ground nesting bird when there isn't a lot of cover.  I don't think we were all that sneaky behind that power pole.  The researchers had us march in a single file line towards the lapwings, but the rightly suspicious birds just kept walking in the other direction.

We had to be careful, because the females easily flush of the nest and the research team did not want to risk losing one valuable nest of this declining bird.  We were getting great looks at the birds, but they were too far away to get great photos.

Plus, heat shimmer was really starting to become a factor.  The area behind the cow looks like a van Gogh painting.  I even took a video and it looks like a raging forcefield is behind the cow.  You'll note that a lone man walks behind the cow, apparently oblivious to the rare and sensitive birds nesting around him.  That's part of the research team's job is to work with locals and let them know about these cool birds and hey, maybe don't walk right through their nesting territories right now.

We went out in search of other birds around the Korgalzhyn State Natre Reserve with the adaptors and we were able to get some cool shots.  Above is a citrine wagtail--isn't that a fabulous little yellow bird and so accommodating to perch out in the open.

I was even able to digiscope a warbler with the new adaptor--and those aren't easy.  I have to say, warblers over in Europe and Asia aren't anything like our warblers here in the Americas.  Above is a booted warbler and it pretty much looks like all the other Euro warblers: small, brown and fairly non-descript.  Other warblers you can see over there are reed warbler, Hume's warbler, and Savi's warbler--brown, brown, brown.  I'm used to prothonotary warbler and blue-winged warbler.  I'll never complain about fall warblers in North America again.  Even an orange-crowned warbler in the fall is more colorful than a booted warblers.

I also got some amazing shots of a female common redstart...they look a bit different than our American redstarts.  It's not a wood warbler like what we see in North America, it's more like a flycatcher.  The males are quite snazzy, but so are the females with their red tails.  Since she was so accommodating, I thought I would get some video of her with the UCA.  My Fuji FinePix E900 does video as well as photos:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WptkbSWFwiI[/youtube]

While on the preserve, we also found a nice mudflat to check out for some waterfowl.

Above is Corey from 10,000 Birds and Dale from Discovering Alpine Birds getting some shots of the ducks and shorebirds.  Some of the species we saw included spotted redshank (gotta love a black shorebird), red-crested pochard, white-headed duck, and white-winged black tern.  There were some familiar birds too.  I heard gadwalls calling and I went to grab my cell phone (gadwall is one of my ringtones).  Then I remembered that my phone didn't work in Kazakhstan and looked overhead.  There were three gadwalls flying over--ah the familiar in a strange land!

We also saw black-winged stilts and pied avocet (that's the avocet pictured above, distinctive with their long, upturned bill).

As we ended our time on the Kazakhstan Steppes, an Isabelline shrike popped up.

I was surprised at the photos I got using the new adaptor that I had not worked with before in a place where I was unfamiliar with the birds.  I don't think I will trade in my DCA for digiscoping with my Swarovski scope, but if my current camera craps out and the next one I get does not work with the DCA, I could see myself using a UCA.  It's a bit larger, so doesn't fit in a pocket as neatly, but it is light in weight could be hooked around a finger.