This week in birds - #23

A Snowy Egret in breeding finery cools its feet and waits patiently for a likely snack to reveal itself. 

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Wildlife rehabbers are among the most selfless, dedicated, and, at this time of year, sleepless individuals around. They often do their work in a room of their own house or apartment, but, in New York City, there is now a new facility dedicated for the work of  rehabilitating injured or orphaned wildlife.  

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The National Geographic website has posted some wonderful pictures of songbirds. Give yourself a treat and fly by for a look.

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In my book, photographing wildlife of any kind is never easy and dragonflies are definitely in that category, but here are some suggestions that are supposed to make photographing dragonflies easier. 

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Fifty years ago this year the publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson gave an impetus to a fledgling environmental movement in this country. Reading it sent chills down the spine of many that summer. It depicted a world of horror; not an imaginary one but one that was happening right before our eyes. If you've never read the book, this summer might be a good time to do it. It is still relevant and, unfortunately, some of the horror is still happening.  

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Six thousand acres of primary rainforest in Guatemala have been set aside to be protected for the preservation of endangered reptiles, but the conservation area will benefit all wild species in the area including many birds.

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B95, a legendary 19-year-old Red Knot, has been sighted on a beach in New Jersey. 

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Many endemic Hawaiian birds are facing extinction because of habitat loss and the introduction onto the islands of invasive species that prey on the birds or compete with them for breeding territories. The "Scientist at Work" blog in the New York Times recounts efforts to save the birds. 

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A public outcry in the U.K. has caused the government to abandon plans to trap Buzzards and destroy their nests. These birds are a protected species, so why was the government going to kill them? To protect pheasants and preserve them for humans to hunt and kill! The Buzzards kill pheasants to live. The humans kill pheasants for sport. I think the Buzzards control the moral high ground here.

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Look! Up in the sky! It's not a bird! It's not a plane! It's Venus and it is transversing the sun next Tuesday just at sunset. If you are in a position to watch the setting sun, you may see the black dot that is Venus crossing its face. If you miss it next week, you'll have to hang around until 2117 to witness the transit of Venus on its next trip across the face of the sun.

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Conservationists are asking the U.S. Forest Service to stop logging in a post-fire area near Lake Tahoe in order to save chicks of the endangered Black-backed Woodpecker that are in nests there.

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Large moths, known as sphinx moths or hawk moths and sometimes mistaken for hummingbirds, are able to discern from the humidity emanating from a flower whether or not it is worth their time to visit. Clever moths!

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Around the backyard: Things have been quiet around my yard this week. The heat is getting to the birds, even as it gets to the birder. Except for the morning chorus and the late afternoon chorus, during much of the day, birdsong is mostly absent. The birds are continuing to hit the feeders pretty hard.

In emptying the feeders, the birds often get a helping paw from one of these characters, one of many local fox squirrels.

Regardless of the heat, Daddy Cardinal continues leading his newly-fledged brood around the yard, introducing them to all the best places to find food - another reason why the feeders are often empty these days!

  

Wordless Wednesday: Great Blue Heron

This week in birds - #22

Female Orchard Oriole among the reeds at Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge last week.

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Cattle Egrets are very common here in summer and their appearance is very familiar to anyone who takes time to notice birds, but a very unusual egret has turned up in Florida. It is buff-colored rather than white and is almost orange in spots.  

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In the New York Times this week, a scientist wrote about his research on the effects on its birds of forest fragmentation in Hawaii.

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Also in Hawaii, an introduced bird, the Japanese White-Eye, is expanding its range and driving native birds out of conservation areas that were set aside for them. 

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A new survey of the population of pygmy three-toed sloths found less than 100 surviving in the wild.

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Great Egrets, a very common bird to us, is very rare in the United Kingdom. It has caused a great deal of excitement among birders there to learn that these birds are nesting in their country for the first time. Volunteers are protecting the nests to see that no harm comes to them.

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And also in the UK, their oldest Osprey, a 26-year-old bird, has just hatched her 48 chick. She's been nesting in the same spot for 22 consecutive years.

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In more unusual news of nesting birds, Black-crowned Night Herons are nesting in downtown Oakland!

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The brown argus butterfly of the UK is expanding its range farther northward, apparently in response to hotter summers. It may be one of the species that actually will benefit from global warming.

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Though it is still seriously endangered, the California Condor population now stands at 405 birds, a remarkable increase over the 22 birds that were alive just twenty-five years ago.

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A new study shows that, for Song Sparrows anyway, promiscuity doesn't pay. Mating with birds outside the pair bond had less successful results than mating within the pair.

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The color of a bird's bill can often indicate its health. The brighter the bill, the healthier the bird, and thus the bill can be an signal of the bird's ability to successfully breed.  A new study of storks confirms this.   

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Around the backyard:

My little family of bluebirds fledged successfully on Thursday. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures, but I was happy to see them around the yard today. My yard can't have too many bluebirds.

I heard a Baltimore Oriole calling from my magnolia tree today but it was well-hidden among the dense leaves and I could never get a look at it.

I continued to hear my "rain crow," the Yellow-billed Cuckoo, around the neighborhood this week. Now, if only he would bring me some rain!

Here are a few more pictures from my trip to Anahuac last week.

A young Little Blue Heron, still mostly white.

Lesser Yellowlegs (I think).

Black-necked Stilt - lots of those around.

Double-crested Cormorant.

Blue-winged Teal pair.

An "authorized" Laughing Gull. Wonder what an unauthorized gull would look like?

Have a safe and happy Memorial Day weekend and never forget what we commemorate with this holiday

Barn Swallows

It was always fun to visit Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge in summer to see the swallows. The refuge was famous in former years for the Barn Swallows which nested in the eaves of the visitors' center that stood at its entrance. The visitors' center is gone now, destroyed as so much else was by Hurricane Ike, and it has recently been replaced by a state-of-the-art new center that is actually several miles away from the refuge, two miles off Highway 10E at the 810 exit. It is a beautiful center and serves not only Anahuac but other wildlife refuges in the area.  

Where the old visitors' center used to stand, a new gazebo has been constructed, and the Barn Swallows have returned and now nest in the gazebo. When we were there last week, it seemed to me that there were not as many nests as in previous years, but still there were plenty of the beautiful fast-fliers around.

Some of the nests appeared to have young in them, but most still had brooding parents sitting on the eggs.

As I walked around the pond next to the gazebo, I saw evidence that some of the pairs of birds had already raised their young.

I came upon this dead limb which stretched out over the pond and it had five fledgling chicks lined up in a row on it. They had obviously just left the nest within the last day or so.

At first I had thought there were only four babies, but when I looked at them from another angle I could see that there were five.

While I watched, the parents would fly by every few minutes and bring food for the hungry chicks. They fed them literally on the fly, only hovering briefly to deliver the meal.

One of the parents decided to take a rest on the limb. It's hard to tell if this is Mama or Papa since they essentially look the same, but the female is slightly lighter on the belly, so I think this is probably Mama.

The babies seemed in no hurry to stretch their wings and sat tight with their parent, while the other parent continued to deliver food.

Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge is still recovering from the devastation caused by Ike, but the swallows are back in good numbers, and that is a very good sign.

Wordless Wednesday: It's good to be king(bird)

Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge: Common Nighthawk

I have mentioned here on different occasions in recent years about how I have missed the sight and sound of the Common Nighthawk over my yard in spring and summer. They used to be quite common - as their name implies - but in the last two or three years, they just haven't been around. I'm happy to say that has changed this year. Any late afternoon, they can be heard as they wheel around the sky searching for flying insects. I saw three in the skies over my backyard just this past weekend. All of which leads me to the conclusion that these birds are more plentiful in the area than they have been in recent years. I didn't realize just how plentiful though until we went to Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge last Friday.

As soon as I got out of the car, I heard the sound of nighthawks hunting overhead, even though it was well up into daylight hours. These birds are usually at their most active at dawn and dusk, and they can sometimes be seen and heard hunting at night on moonlit nights or around lights in urban areas. But it's not totally unheard of for them to be flying during the middle of the day and they certainly were on this day. Everywhere we went their voices could be heard.

More typically though, the birds settle down during daylight hours and they are so cryptically colored that they often go unnoticed even when they are right out in plain sight. It was really a matter of chance that, on Friday, I started noticing the birds everywhere I looked!

This was the first one that I saw on a fence post next to the road. These posts are convenient places for many types of birds to perch and rest, or perch and sing as the various members of the blackbird family often do.

After I noticed the first one, I began seeing that every fourth or fifth post along the way seemed to have a nighthawk sitting atop it!

One even perched on the barbed wire. This is an unusual pose because the bird's legs are short and its feet small in relation to body size. It's not really made for perching. When it perches in a tree, often it will sit lengthwise on the limb rather than across the limb as most birds do.

You can see that lengthwise-perching behavior in this bird that was sitting in a tree. You can also see how very well camouflaged the bird is. If its eye is closed and its head is down, it just looks like a bump on the limb and you wouldn't give it a second glance.

The nighthawk is a member of the nightjar (Caprimulgidae) family which is characterized by short bills that open up to very wide mouths. When the mouth is open, it gapes nearly as wide as the bird's head and it uses this big mouth to scoop up insects as it flies about erratically.

This wide open mouth and the fact that the bird often flies over pastures in the late afternoon gave rise to a myth and a nickname, "Goatsucker". The myth goes back at least as far as the third century B.C.E. in Greece where country people claimed that these birds milked goats!

The bird had another nickname in the area where I grew up. We called it "Bullbat." I'm not really sure why but I assume it had to do with the fact that the bird does fly erratically like a bat and it's normally in the sky at the same time as bats, plus it is bigger than the other bats that were around at that time. There is also a sound that the males make during courtship, a kind of basso profundo booming that might recall the voice of a bull. They make the sound by flying high into the air and then going into a steep dive. As the wind rushes through the wing feathers, it causes a distinct "boom" which, if you have heard it, is not easily forgettable. It was part of the background music to the late spring and summer afternoons of my childhood.

The helter-skelter flight of the nighthawk is not so easy to catch on camera, but on Friday, I got lucky.

Two (I assume male) nighthawks were flying low over a meadow and seemed to be engaged in a territorial dispute. I tried to capture the two together but those pictures were just a blur

.Note the very long, narrow wings which give these birds excellent control in the air. The white spot on each wing supposedly can serve to startle insects and perhaps make them easier to catch.

I must have seen a score or more of Common Nighthawks at the wildlife refuge. I don't think I've ever seen so many at one time and place. I assume they must have just arrived on migration and perhaps were hungry which may explain why so many were hunting during the day. Whatever the reason, I was delighted with their presence on this day and delighted with the chance to say hello to a friend from my long-ago childhood.

Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge: Least Bittern

On our trip to Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge last Friday, there were three birds in particular that I had hoped to see: Least Bittern, Roseate Spoonbill, and Purple Gallinule. Well, I didn't completely strike out, but I did go one for three. I couldn't find a gallinule or spoonbill, but the most difficult of the three, the bittern, proved unusually cooperative.

As we headed around the loop that would take us to Shovelers' Pond, we stopped briefly at The Willows. It really should have another name now. The willows that gave it its name were drowned by Hurricane Ike four years ago. Vegetation has grown back but it's quite a different habitat from what it used to be. On this day, I found Orchard Orioles, Northern Mockingbirds, Mourning Doves, Red-winged Blackbirds, Great-tailed Grackles, and plentiful butterflies working the Joe Pye weed.

Just a bit farther along the loop, I caught a glimpse of a big bird flying into the weeds on the right hand side of the road. We stopped and I focused my binoculars to get a better look. I was delighted to find that it was, in fact, one of my target birds, the Least Bittern.

The bird was looking back and forth among the weeds.

Was it actually looking for something, I wondered, or was this part of a display?

Then there was a blur of movement among the weeds and a fuzzy chick appeared. The adult began to feed it. I realize you can't really tell much about this picture, but that is what is happening here. As soon as the baby finished feeding, the adult flew away.

  The chick stood looking in the direction where its parent had flown.

It continued to stand there for a minute, maybe hoping Mama or Papa would return with a second course. Then it dropped into the weeds and completely disappeared! If I hadn't seen it, I would never have known there was a chick there.

One almost has to be lucky to see a Least Bittern, because it lives in dense, tangled vegetation where its narrow body allows it to move about with ease. It is one of the smallest herons in the world and it is well-adapted for life in dense marshes. Its diet is mostly fish and insects and it would certainly find plenty of both at ANWR.

The nests of bitterns are usually widely scattered but they do sometimes nest, as many herons and egrets do, in colonies. In one study in South Carolina, these bitterns nested in close association with Boat-tailed Grackles. It is possible that they have the same association with Great-tailed Grackles at ANWR. There are plenty of those big grackles around.

Their clutch of eggs may number from 2 - 7, but most often are 4 - 5; however, I only saw one chick on this day, although there could easily have been others among the reeds. Both of the parents feed the young through regurgitation. A pair may produce as many as two broods of chicks per year.

Seeing the bittern was really the high point of my day of birding and it happened very early, but there were some other nice moments and nice birds seen. I'll share more of them with you over the next couple of days.