Yellow-billed Magpie - Bird Watcher's Digest

The Big-head Divers: Goldeneyes and Buffleheads

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Species ProfileSpecies Profile

Yellow-billed Yellow-billed MagpieMagpie

Vol. 43 No. 2, November/December 2020

Display until December 31st

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About the Cover

COLUMNS & DEPARTMENTS 6 Letters from Readers

10 Quick Takes Paul J. Baicich

16 Migrations On the Slope Scott Weidensaul

24 Cover Species Yellow-billed Magpie Kenneth M. Burton

34 Identify Yourself The Big-head Divers: Goldeneyes and Buffleheads Alvaro Jaramillo

42 Constantly Counting Chickadees Al Batt

56 Pete’s Tips Learning Vocalizations Pete Dunne

58 The Urban Birder American Birds on Both Sides of the Atlantic David Lindo

92 True Nature The Naturalist’s Dilemma Julie Zickefoose

98 Birdtography The Ethics of Bird Photography Bruce Wunderlich

106 Watching Bird Behavior Brown Creepers and Readers’ Observations David M. Bird

114 Far Afield Birding Oklahoma’s Ouachita Mountain Foothills and Tenkiller Lake Jerry Uhlman

120 Spotlight on Nevada

124 Book Notes

128 Classified

130 Redstart Birding

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Hidden Colors: Yellow-billed Magpie, by Christina Baal. For more information on this painting and the artist, see page 96.

November/December 2020

46 Winter Shower Carmen Christy

50 Mr. Creeper’s Neighborhood: Suet on a Tree Trunk Don Grussing

54 My Way Birding as Meditation Mary Giraulo

THEBACKYARD

64 Fab Five of the Far Northwest John Shewey

68 Shakespeare’s Birds Jerry Dennis

76 See Where They Fly: Banded Gulls in the Gulf of Maine Jon Woolf

84 One Short of a Parliament Eli J. Knapp

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FOUNDING PUBLISHERS William H. Thompson, Jr. (1932–2011) & Elsa Ekenstierna Thompson (1934–2019)

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A Letter from the Editor

T about a decade, which is most gratifying. Redstartbirding.com sales are beating our targets nearly every month. We’re planning a slew of Reader Rendezvous for 2021—more of them, but smaller groups. (Visit readerrendezvous.com for more information.) Our podcasts, Out There With the Birds and BirdSense, are going gangbusters! (They’re available wherever podcasts are distrib-uted.) Circulation of our free, twice-monthly digital newslet-ter, BirdWire, has never been higher and continues to grow. Kind and generous friends have given us money way beyond the price of a subscription for the sole purpose of keeping this magazine going. How could we be less than grateful for how well this small, woman-owned company is doing despite this cursed year?

All this is not to say that business is soaring. Our adver-tising revenue is still far below pre-COVID levels, but we’re still publishing, still chugging along, confident that it will be

—Dawn Hewitt

This is the final issue of BWD for 2020. Good riddance to that year! Colder temperatures, gray skies, and long nights are ahead, but so are winter holi-days! Let’s hope the bleakest seasons of 2020 are behind us!

Bird Watcher’s Digest has proven again and again that we can survive the worst of challenges and tragedies and keep on going. We’re here to stay. Please notice that there are more and bigger ads in this issue of BWD than in the Sep-tember/October 2020 issue, and that’s a huge relief. We hope you will show our advertisers some love by paying attention to those ads! We hope you will visit their websites, check out their products, or consider their events or destinations in your birding plans. Advertising pays for the printing, post-age, and paper of each issue, and you can show support for BWD by letting our advertis-ers know that their ads are well targeted and noticed.

Our magazine circulation is higher now than it has been in

Here’s to a Better Year to Come!


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back. We remain a determined, dedicated, fun, and cohesive team, determined not just to survive, but to thrive in the years ahead.

You can help us out. With holidays approaching, we hope you will consider gift shopping at redstartbirding.com, or a subscription to BWD for a birder friend or family member, or a subscription to Watch-ing Backyard Birds for loved ones whose interest in birds is primarily at the bird feeder or otherwise close to home. A bird feeder and a big bag of black-oil sunflower seeds also make a great gift and can be a gateway to a satisfying new hobby that can be life-altering. Consider surprising your spouse, part-ner, parent, or offspring with a Reader Rendezvous birding adventure.

Let’s all do our best to usher 2020 out with a positive atti-tude, with hope for better times ahead. We’re expecting 2021 to bring good things, good times, and good birds to the BWD family, and that includes you!

Best wishes for happy holidays,

Dawn Hewitt Editor

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Idahoan Approves Spotlight To the Editor: While in the Idaho legislature

I was the proud sponsor of the resolution creating the official Idaho State Birding Trail, so I was very pleased to see you Spotlight Idaho in the July/August 2020 issue of BWD. We truly do have some great birding opportunities. Our recently up-dated Idaho Birding Trail Guide (idfg.idaho.gov/ibt) now lists 275 sites.

My only regret about the Spotlight column was that northern Idaho was not well represented. In Kootenai Coun-ty, where I live, our local Audu-bon members regularly find 200 or more species each year just within the county. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the article, and as a native Montanan, I was also pleased to read the piece about birding in Montana’s “Little Rockies.” A double delight!

Over the years I have en-countered many wonderful articles and photos in BWD, and the July/August issue, though smaller in page count, was big in heart and content.

Your dedication to keep publish-ing a quality magazine through the past difficult year and now with the coronavirus is greatly admired and much appreciated. Thank you.

George Sayler Coeur d’Alene, Idaho

Fan of Musician Wren and JZ To the Editor: I loved Julie Zickefoose’s

article about birding in Ecuador (July/August 2020). In it, she described the joy of listening to the musician wren. I checked it out on YouTube, and it is indeed beautiful. I appreciated her happiness that the new birder in their group was the one who got to see the bird.

The part I liked best, howev-er, was when she expressed that when the stakeout bird didn’t appear, “a watch of breathless anticipation…had to be chan-neled sideways into delight at what was there. Thus we neatly sidestep disappointment at what wasn’t.” Like many people, I have taken this same approach to birding, but I’ve never heard it expressed so nicely. As she


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says, it’s a pretty good philoso-phy for handling things in life that you just can’t control, too.

Janet Shields San Diego, California

Editor’s note: Don’t forget that videos and sound files of some of the bird species men-tioned in stories and columns are linked in the digital edition of each issue. Subscribers to BWD can hear Julie’s recording of the musician wren by clicking a link in her column in the July/August 2020 digital edition of BWD.

Trumpeting Trumpeter Ecologist To the Editor: Thank you for the feature

on trumpeter swans. The amaz-ing success of their return needs to be trumpeted about. As residents of central Min-nesota we find swans the most reliable sighting on our birding drives in the country. Why? Because of one man: “Carrol Henderson,” wrote the Star Tribune, “was responsible for the largest release ever of trumpeter swans into the wild during his tenure as the state’s first and only nongame wildlife program supervisor.”

Dick Schoenberger St. Cloud, Minnesota

Tanager Fanager To the Editor: I enjoyed the scarlet tanager

species profile (March/April 2020). I still remember my first sighting, as a child, of this colorful bird. Perhaps it helped spark my long relationship with birds for the past 50-plus years.

Nearly six years ago we moved to north-central Wisconsin, where our house is surrounded by woods with mature trees. I thought it a great location for scarlet tanagers, but was disappointed until fall of 2018, when two immatures came to our yard. Then in May 2019, we finally had the real thing when a bright mature male found our oriole jelly feeder! This was only feet from our living room window, so we got great looks at him and some photos, too. Is this unusual feeding behavior for tanagers?

Margaret Wenger Athens, Wisconsin

Editor’s note: It is not uncom-mon for tanagers to visit grape jelly feeders, especially during spring migration.

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by Paul J. Baicich

Big Parks, Small Parks, Birds, and Us

Recently, researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle invited visitors to Dis-covery Park—Seattle’s largest park, with 500-acres on the city’s western edge—to submit comments about their experi-ences with nature in the park. The results were examined in an article in January in Fron-tiers in Sustainable Cities.

The findings confirmed the

now well-accepted proposition, with much research to back it up: Urban green space im-proves people’s mental health and well-being. Based on this proposition, many cities are thoughtfully sprinkling pocket parks—and even green roofs—throughout the urban mosaic. We have looked at this devel-opment previously in Quick Takes, from verdant roof gardens to the transformation of small golf courses. W

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Parks: Bigger is better.



But the University of Washington study raised an additional variable: size. The very size of the green space is crucial, since researchers are increasingly examining green spaces to understand how people connect with nature in cities and to design urban spaces that will facilitate and deepen human connections.

Without getting too deeply into the results, the many expe-riences, including gazing at vis-tas, sitting beside water, walk-ing along bluffs, and watching birds, were influenced by the perception of “wildness.” In-deed, 96 percent of the respon-dents linked their experience to wildness. Of course, no urban park offers wilderness, but like many other large urban parks, Discovery Park contains varied habitats, sections of relatively unmanaged land, modest levels of wildlife diversity, old-growth trees, large open spaces, and wide vistas, as well as the chance for visitors to feel a sense of peace and solitude.

The perception of wildness, assert the researchers, has to do with size and space. Results suggest that city dwellers need access to relatively large and even unmanaged parks to get the full benefits of nature in urban areas. Meanwhile, there are ever-increasing pressures on these open spaces, creating

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a “tension—between wanting large urban parks to remain undeveloped, while wanting to develop some of the open space in these parks to address other pressing urban needs,” the researchers muse. “But does developing that land lead to largely unrecognized costs in terms of human well-being and human flourishing?” they ask. Their results suggest that the answer is yes.

We could leave the study by simply concluding that big parks are better than small parks for humans—but how about the birds? And how about situations where small parks can be created—ac-cumulated green spaces that have been abandoned, for example—where larger parks are not a real option? What about the campaign by the thoughtful Trust for Public Lands based on the concept that no American should be farther away from a great park than a 10-minute walk (see tpl.org/10minutewalk)?

Most of the time, larger green spaces are better for the birds, and even some common species require large, contigu-ous habitat (sometimes for-est, sometimes grassland) for viability. But those small green spaces can still provide respite for birds, especially during migration.

Diverse Cropland in the Neotropics

Also in the area of the size and makeup of habitat comes a long-term study from Costa Rica: a 20-year collection of data on diverse cropland. J. Nicholas Hendershot from Stanford University, along with seven colleagues, recently published in Nature an assess-ment of the benefits to wildlife from diversified farms, where crops like coffee are interwo-ven with banana plants, and whose edges often incorporate strips of wild forest—com-pared to crops of monoculture.

The researchers revealed that over two decades, the diversified farms were able to sustain a more stable popu-lation of bird species, while more intensively farmed monocrops exhibited shifts and declines in species’ rich-ness over time. These more di-verse patchworks of farmland provided a degree of stability and security to wildlife that, while clearly not the same as natural forests, was at least similar to natural forests.

This was particularly valid for rare and endangered birds. Diversely cropped farmland was found to contain 59 percent of the endemic and endangered species that were present in wild forests. In con-trast, intensively farmed areas


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of monocrop had only 39 percent, and the number was declining.

Moreover, with intensified agricultural plots, the team documented a 28-percent decline in nectar-feeding birds, suggesting that food wasn’t available for these species. Diversified farms were more likely to be located near or ad-jacent to natural forests, which served as buffers, as opposed to monoculture farms, which typically are in broad stretches of landscape of just one crop.

The researchers examined four environs in Costa Rica—from lowland to premontane

forest—and then pinpointed three types of habitat to ana-lyze within each: monoculture crops like sugarcane and pine-apple plantations, diversified agriculture that included more than one crop type (usually within 500 yards of remnant forest), and untouched natural forest. The data they gath-ered spanned the seasons and incorporated almost 300,000 sightings.

Of course, agriculture can never replace nature; the study showed that nothing can compete with the richness and biodiversity of natural forest. Still, given shrinking protected BR

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The Middle-American screech-owl prefers natural forest habitat in Honduras.



themselves against extreme weather and diseases, both of which can devastate monocul-ture plots.

More Seabird Protection Modern fishing gillnets are

vertical sheets of netting held up by floating buoys, where the nets trap passing fish by the gills. These are constructed from monofilament nylon and are virtually invisible under-water.

This widespread tool in fisheries around the world also poses a high risk of entangle-ment to many diving seabirds. In fact, an estimated 400,000 seabirds are killed each year as accidental by-catch in fishing nets, with nearly 150 different seabird species thought to be susceptible to this danger.

The gillnet problem is how to make the nets visible to birds but not fish. Alas, un-derwater solutions have had, to date, limited successes. An alternate approach would be to discourage birds from div-ing near gillnets in the first place. Researchers thought that conspicuous “eyespots,” found on many creatures such as butterflies, could be used to evoke an avoidance response in some seabirds.

To adapt this technique to the marine environment, BirdLife International and the

areas around the world, some farmlands can become the next best thing for troubled wildlife.

This study may reveal some obvious results, but it is always reassuring to be reminded of the essentials, and it is vital to review cumulative and quanti-fied findings.

Beyond that, although wildlife was the study’s main focus, the researchers were eager to emphasize that diversified farms provided benefits for people, too. Grow-ing more than one crop is a way for farmers to diversify their incomes and to insulate

The Bobby.

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Estonian Ornithological Soci-ety developed a novel floating buoy that displays large, obvi-ous “looming-eyes” that can be seen from a long way off. As the buoy bobs in the water, the tall supporting pole sways, and the eyes will rotate in the wind. Researchers called it the looming-eyes buoy, or, more affectionately, “The Bobby.”

Since last winter, trials have been conducted in Küdema Bay, off the Estonian island of Saaremaa. The bay attracts large concentrations of win-tering seabirds, including the long-tailed duck and Steller’s eider, both of which are at

serious risk due to by-catch. Researchers are monitoring the behavior of any seabirds within 50 yards of the Bobbys, compared to an area contain-ing regular fishing buoys. (No gillnets are present in either lo-cation, making the experiments completely safe for the birds.) If the experiment proves success-ful, the Bobbys could be pro-duced commercially, impacting by-catch prevention and saving seabird lives in gillnet fisheries around the world.

Paul J. Baicich is a co-author of The Crossley ID Guide: Wa-terfowl, published fall 2017.

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II slapped a mosquito the other day—as one does, naturally—and immediately thought about how you can use bears to save birds.

Obviously, there’s a story here.About 15 years ago, I had

a chance to spend a week on the most remote river I’d ever visited, shepherding a group of rich (or richly connected) people through the Alaskan Arctic in a bid to help fund protection for the region through The Nature Conservancy. It was an extraor-dinary experience, with terrific people and amazing birds, and it resulted in several now-deep and important friendships. But it also served, weirdly, as a master class in saying exactly the right thing at precisely the right time.

On the Slope

Migrations By Scott Weidensaul

Rough StartThe trip was the brainchild of

David Banks, then the Alaska chapter director for TNC. He recruited me to serve as a co-leader, but the real heart of the venture was Bob Dittrick, raptor expert and the founder of Wilder-ness Birding Adventures, and his ace guide Nan Eagleson, Arctic birder, biologist, and botanist extraordinaire, both of whom had been working and guiding in the Arctic for decades. Our destina-tion was the Colville River up on Alaska’s North Slope, which, as a lifelong raptor nut, had been a dream destination of mine for as long as I could remember.

I had some buzzard’s luck on the front end; I arrived in Fair- SC

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banks to find that one of my two duffels had not. That meant I didn’t have a sleeping bag, and about half of my already stripped-down wardrobe of field clothes, including rain gear, was AWOL. No problem, I thought. I’d inten-tionally flown in two days early to accommodate just such an issue, which is not uncommon flying into Alaska in the summer. But as hours turned to days, and despite repeated and increasingly frantic appearances at the airport’s lost-baggage office, the bag failed to materialize. As the clock ticked down to the last hours before our departure for the Slope, I raided Bob’s lost/spare gear locker, pulling out badly mismatched rain pants (scarlet red) and jacket

(neon green), a musty-smelling sleeping bag, and then made an expensive run through the huge Fred Meyer department store in town for everything else I needed. Naturally, we then discovered that my “missing” bag had, in fact, been sitting in some guy’s office at the airport for almost two days.

Stunning LandscapeWith minutes to spare I

swapped out my gear, repacked everything on the terminal floor, and managed to catch our small commuter prop plane flight to the tiny village of Bettles, popula-tion 13, just north of the Arctic Circle. From there we switched to two float planes for the 200-mile charter flight to the North Slope,

A clearwater tributary, the Oolamnagavik flows into the silty Colville across the wide, flat Arctic coastal plain.



heading northwest through the Brooks Range and Gates of the Arctic National Park, some of the most stunning landforms on the planet. The spruce forests of the interior fell quickly behind us as we passed over craggy mountains whose gray, rocky peaks scraped the bottoms of low clouds, their tundra valleys green and empty of anything human—a landscape I still ache to explore. Wisps

of rain showers curtained the range, then parted with streaming sunbeams. But ahead of us, the hills rolled down to the flat coastal plain of the North Slope, braided by sinuous creeks and meandering rivers flowing out of the moun-tains toward the Beaufort Sea. In its tundra swales and willow thick-ets would be all manner of far-north birds, like bluethroats, Arctic warblers, and northern wheatears.

Land of MosquitoesIf I had any hesitation about

the trip, it grew from the stories I’d been hearing, for as long as I’d been traveling to Alaska, about the mosquitoes on the North Slope. Mossies are bad in most of Alaska, and I’d experienced some epic swarms in my years there, but everyone assured me that the absolute worst mosquitoes were on the Slope. The worst place on the North Slope, they said, was the Colville River. Oh, and the peak skeeter season? Just about when we were going. Gulp.

So as our pilot circled our landing spot—a small lake near the Etivluk River, a tributary of the Colville—and set the first float plane down with a gentle kiss on the water, I was feeling a little ner-vous. I hopped out onto the right float as we drifted toward shore, pulling up my hip boots and tak-ing the tie-off rope in hand. The sun was shining brilliantly, the air was warm, and there wasn’t a bug

A braided river meanders through the heart of the Brooks Range in Gates of the Arctic National Park.



horizon but barely skipped below it; even at midnight we would have low, rich light spilling across the landscape, throwing every-thing into sharp relief. The river was broad and smooth, flowing swiftly but with little in the way of choppy water, so we could place ourselves mid-channel and, except for an occasional dip and swirl of the paddle to keep the boats aligned, just ride the current and watch the world go by. We saw no one else, nor did we expect to; the lead pilot who dropped us off said that as far as he knew, no one else had floated this part of the river in several years.

At midday we would find a

Broad-winged hawk.

to be seen. So much for the epic mosquitoes of the North Slope, I thought.

I hopped off the float onto the boggy muskeg of the shoreline, and a gray wall of mosquitoes rose up to meet me.

Oh, Lord, were they bad—every bit as bad as we’d been warned. It was a very non-Arctic day, nearly 80 degrees and little wind, and everyone scrambled into their head nets and bug jackets as fast as they could, as we unloaded the plane and schlepped hundreds of pounds of gear and food across the marshy tundra to the firm, rocky banks of the river. Task one (made no easier by the swarming mosquitoes, even after a breeze kicked up) was as-sembling our boats, four canoes and two kayaks. Each boat con-sisted of a heavy rubber hull skin, inside which we patiently pieced together aluminum ribs and cross braces to give it form and rigidity, finally bolting plastic seats into place and, voila! Within a couple of hours we had a small flotilla, packed to the gunwales with gear but, as we found, remarkably sturdy and rugged.

On the WaterOnce we got onto the water,

and especially once we’d followed the fast-moving, whitewater-laced Etivluk to the wide, smooth Colville, the mosquitoes fell away, and we quickly fell under the Arctic’s spell. The sun circled the SC

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An hours-long task made harder by epic swarms of mosquitoes, pack canoes and kayaks must be carefully assembled for the wilderness float trip.



windswept expanse of riverbank where we could beach the canoes and kayaks, unload the coolers, and eat a shore lunch: cheese and reindeer sausage, fruit, crackers, trail mix, always something new that Bob had squirreled away in a series of fresh surprises.

We followed the trails of wolves and bears, moose and caribou in the mud, and we kept an eye peeled for Pleistocene fossils. Bob and Nan have found plenty of mammoth teeth and tusk frag-ments on the river, and Bob told us how he once discovered the huge skull of an Ice Age long-horned bison eroding out of a hillside, far too big and heavy to carry out on the boat he was using. (Leaving it behind was a struggle, he said, but his wife Lisa later colluded with a pilot-friend of theirs to fly back, retrieve the skull and surprise Bob with it that Christmas.)

The BluffsBut the real draw for us, the

reason we were on the Colville instead of one of the many other rivers that run out of the Brooks Range to the Beaufort Sea, was the Colville’s bluffs. In this largely flat, slightly rolling landscape there is little vertical rise, except where the meandering river has created low, sharp cliffs along the water’s edge. These are magnets for nesting raptors, and the Colville has one of the highest densities of nesting birds of prey in the world, compa-rable to places like the Snake River in Idaho.

For the seven days we were on the river, we were rarely out of sight or sound of rough-legged hawks, peregrine falcons, or ravens (which are, ecologically speaking, raptors). As we came in view of a new bluff, one or more of the adult raptors would take to the skies, scolding us with harsh cries

At one o’clock in the morning, the low Arctic sun, just barely above the horizon, illuminates camp on a windswept gravel bar of the Colville River.



as they kept these unusual intrud-ers in view. Most exciting were the many gyrfalcons we encountered, mostly brownish juveniles that had recently fledged.

One day I was at the stern of a canoe with Bob in the bow, leading the group downstream. The river swept left in a big curve, foaming white against the lower edge of a small cliff. “Hey, there’s a PEFA chick!” Bob yelled back, using the bird-banding code for a peregrine. Bob had studied peregrines all over the Arctic in his younger days. And sure enough, a big, fluffy falcon chick—which must have tumbled off its nest ledge—was perched on a rock not far above the water, watching us with curiosity as we drew nearer.

“I wonder if the adults have been taking care of...DUCK!” Bob yelled, throwing himself flat against the bow.

At that moment I heard the cack-cack-cack-cack-cack! of a fu-rious peregrine, and bent double at the waist myself as the big female adult swooshed inches above my head. As she roared up into the air, stalled and rolled into another dive, we slashed the water with our paddles and raced away as fast as we could, hollering a warning to the boats behind us to cling to the opposite shore. We all got through unscathed, and were in no doubt that the grounded chick was safe from any fox or wolf foolish enough to come too close.

Paucity of Big MammalsRaptors were a constant during

our days on the river, but big game was noticeably absent. Normally, Bob said, there would be hundreds or thousands of caribou graz-ing the tundra, but (as we later learned) the herds had moved out of the Colville drainage, taking predators like wolves and bears with them. We found some tracks, and saw moose from time to time where willow thickets crowded the shore. Bob slept with a 12-gauge shotgun by his sleeping bag, the chamber open but a shell ready, and he didn’t complain about the absence of bears; too many close calls over the years. For most of us, though, the lack of big mam-mals was a disappointment

In one case, more than a disap-pointment. One of the travelers, Rhea, represented a large founda-

Making a turn for another attack, a territorial peregrine falcon defends its nest along one of the Colville’s many river bluffs.

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I was releasing a fish when I looked up and saw a grizzly stride out of the willows on the other side of the river mouth, maybe a hundred yards away, heading toward us.

“Rhea, there’s a bear coming,” I said

in as calm a voice as I could muster. “No, don’t run. Reel in and we’ll walk backwards.” I waved my arms, shouting, “Hey bear! Hey bear!” but the bruin acted as though it couldn’t see or hear me—which it might not have. The wind was from the bear to us, the river was rushing and clattering through rapids all around it, and the grizzly wasn’t looking around much as it forded the shallows.

I glanced back to camp, gave a shrill whistle to get their atten-tion, and held up my arms, fingers curled in like claws in the universal “Bear!” signal. (They later said they thought I was holding up my hands to show how big the fish were that we were catching. They cheered and clapped and gave us thumbs-up, then went back to what they were doing.) The bear was closing fast, the nearest climb-able tree was a couple hundred miles to the south, and with the wind blowing in our faces, there was no way to use my protective canister of pepper spray without choking ourselves.

tion with a history of generous environmental philanthropy. She told David on our first evening (only half in jest) that The Nature Conservancy wasn’t getting a dime from them until she saw a bear. It was a promise she re-peated day after bearless day, and as we came toward the end of the trip, I think David was beginning to sweat a bit.

Bear!After our last full day on the

water, we pulled into the mouth of the Oolamnagavik River, which emptied into the Colville. Unlike the Colville, which was milky-gray with glacial silt and had few fish, the Oolamnagavik was a clear-water river, full of Arctic char and grayling. Rhea and I, both fly-fishing aficionados, grabbed our rods and hoofed upstream from camp to where the shallow, braided channels of the Oolam-nagavik came in. Casting dry flies, we were having a blast catching and releasing grayling, marveling at their immense, sail-like dorsal fins and iridescent purple sheen.

Wilderness guides Bob Dittrick and Nan Eagleson.



We kept walking rapidly back-wards across the multiple shallow channels of the river, eyes glued on the bear that was now just 30 yards away and still advancing as we yelled and waved our arms and fishing rods, the bear acting as though it either hadn’t noticed us or didn’t care. Rhea’s eyes were huge, and I suspect mine were bugged a bit, too. I tried to find a position from which I could safely use the spray, but the wind was swirling all around us now.

We reached the southernmost shore of the Oolamnagavik, the grizzly just 50 or 60 feet away in mid-channel. Suddenly the bear stopped, rising halfway onto its hind legs, sniffing the air. “HEY BEAR!” I shouted once again as it dropped to all fours and took a half-leap toward us. My stom-ach gave a lurch; here we go, I thought.

Several things happened all at once. I thumbed off the safety catch on the pepper spray, ready to fire regardless of the risk. The bear slammed to a halt and seemed to notice us for the first

time. Just as it gave a loud, startled woof! and turned tail, racing away from us, there was an ear-splitting Bang! right over our heads. At the noise, the grizzly really hit the afterburners, charging across the shallow channels in great curtains of spray, and vanishing into the willows a hundred yards up-stream. From behind us, at camp, I heard Bob’s voice, faint but clear, as he hollered, “Good bear!”

We soon learned that in those final moments, Bob had real-ized what was really happening, grabbed the shotgun that was never far from his hands, and fired a cracker shell—basically, a big firecracker that explodes in midair—over our heads.

I was shaking as we walked into camp, and Rhea was vibrat-ing like a plucked string. “Did you see…,” she said. “I mean, the bear, it was…” She was having a hard time putting it all into words.

And that’s when David Banks stepped beside her and put a com-forting arm around her shoulder.

“So,” he said, “you saw your bear. How many zeroes can I put you down for?”

That, my friends, is how a con-summate fundraising professional does it.

Author and researcher Scott Weidensaul’s newest book, A World on the Wing, will be pub-lished in spring 2021. He lives in southern New Hampshire.

Grizzly tracks on a muddy river bank

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Yellow-billed MagpieK e n n e t h M . B u r t o n

“I have a magpie mind. I love anything that glitters.” —Lord Thomson of Fleet

Yellow-billed magpie.

Click here to see a video of yellow-billed magpie recorded by

Mary Hanson.


https://youtu.be/VIOtY1e_gH0


IIn the entire continental US, there are only five single-state endemic bird species (that is, birds nor-mally found in only one state); California is blessed with two of them. One of these, the Island scrub-jay, is confined to a single offshore island and seen by rela-tively few people. The other, much more widespread and readily encountered, can truly be consid-ered California’s iconic bird: the yellow-billed magpie (YBMA), Pica nuttalli.

Genus PicaThe world’s seven Pica magpies

are a remarkably similar bunch of showy, black-and-white corvids with blue-green iridescence in their wings and very long tails. They are believed to have originated in the Himalayan region. The YBMA is the smallest of the lot and the only one whose bill isn’t black. It’s very closely related to the more familiar black-billed magpie; in fact, the two are so similar genetically that perhaps they should not be con-sidered separate species at all. (The other five species are the Maghreb magpie of North Africa, the Asir magpie of Arabia, the black-rumped magpie of the Himalayas, the Oriental magpie of East Asia, and the Eurasian magpie of Eu-rope and North Asia.)

We know from genetic analysis and fossil evidence that the ances-tral American magpie colonized Alaska from Kamchatka and

subsequently occupied much of North America. Pleistocene glaciation isolated the California population, which evolved into the present-day YBMA. The black-billed expanded westward again once the glaciers receded, and the two species now occur within 50 miles of each other in some places, separated by the Sierra Nevada. Magpies are not big on dispersal, but the occasional wanderer does make the trip to visit its cousins; yet hybrids have not been report-ed. The 19th-century ornithologist Elliott Coues suggested that it was merely a “perpetuated accident” that allowed the YBMA to evolve and has kept the black-billed from breeding it out of existence.

YBMA Habitat and RangeThe YBMA ranges throughout

California’s Central Valley and in the drier valleys of the Coast Ranges from the San Francisco Bay Area to near Santa Barbara, extending into the low foothills. From my childhood home north of San Francisco, it was usu-ally the first “interior” bird I saw on trips inland. It is typically a bird of oak savanna, a habitat greatly reduced by agriculture and development in California. Few landscapes are more altered than this bird’s historic range, and its distribution and population have been shrunk and fragmented greatly over the past two centuries. It has been extirpated from San G

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Pica nuttalli

What to Look and Listen For

The yellow-billed magpie is a medium-sized corvid, 16½ inches long, slightly over half of which is tail. The sexes are alike (though males are slightly larger) and, as with other corvids, there is no prealternate (spring) molt, so they look the same year-round. Under most conditions, magpies look black with white scapulars and belly; there’s also a narrow gray rump band, and in flight the largely white pri-maries create large flashing patches. The

leading edges of the primaries are black, so the folded wings look black. The wings are relatively short and rounded as befits a bird that doesn’t really go anywhere. In good light at close range, blue-green iri-descence shows in the wings and tail. And, of course, there’s the eponymous yellow bill, along with a variable amount of yellow skin around the eyes. Juve-niles, seen from May to September, have brownish upperparts and creamy under-parts—they’re basically duller versions of their parents. Fledglings are

distinguished by their shorter tails and less yellow bills.

Magpies are not discreet, and if they’re around, you usually know it. Their vocaliza-tions are not as varied as those of ravens or some jays. The most common is a whining, up-slurred call that can be thought of as the “mag” in “magpie.” There are also several variations of chatter calls used to maintain contact or alert flock-mates to food or dan-ger. Males “babble-sing” during the early part of the breeding season; this song is a series of soft, warbling

Mateo County (just south of San Francisco) and Ventura County (just north of Los Angeles). Yet, the species has managed to adapt and is still relatively common in some areas, especially in the core of its range. Even so, it is not at all secure—but more about that later.

By the time John James Audu-bon named the YBMA after Thomas Nuttall (also immortal-ized by Nuttall’s woodpecker and dozens of other plant and animal

Yellow-billed Magpie

species) in 1837, it had been well known to native peoples for mil-lennia. Some tribes regarded it as a symbol of intellect, and many used its tail feathers as ornamen-tation on clothing (especially headdresses), blankets, and cer-emonial poles. YBMAs and their human neighbors shared many of the same food resources, includ-ing grasshoppers, acorns, figs, and grapes.

Given the YBMA’s boldness,





notes interspersed with higher notes and sometimes featuring some mimicry. These songs may function to stimulate females prior to egg laying; try it out on your chickens! (Hey, what harm can it do?)

Where and When to Look

The YBMA is a year-round, sedentary resident of central California. Period. If you draw a straight line from Redding to Sacramento and from there to Fresno and another from Pleasan-ton to Solvang and go out 25 miles on each side of those lines,

you’ll have a rough map of the species’ current range. Within that area, occurrence is patchy, and the highest densities occur in the center, roughly from Williams to Mer-ced and Modesto to Paso Robles. Drive back roads along val-ley edges through orchards and oak savanna in those areas, and you’ll be hard-pressed to miss it. Focus on areas with large, widely scattered oaks on valley floors and gentle slopes and along riparian corridors. A few particularly good locations are Sand Creek Road in Colusa

County, Phoenix Park in Sacramento County, Lancaster Road in Stanislaus County, Quien Sabe Road in San Benito County, and Lake Nacimento in San Luis Obispo County.

Feeding BehaviorMost foraging occurs

on the ground in areas of short vegetation such as grazed pas-ture. During the rainy season, magpies will look for low-lying, saturated areas where worms and insects are driven to the surface, like robins do on wet lawns. In the hot, dry season, foraging activ-ity is highest in early

distinctive and recognizable appearance, and uniqueness to California, it’s no surprise that its name and image have been widely adopted. Among the many busi-nesses named after the bird are the Magpie and Yellowbill Cafés, Magpie Publications, Little Mag-pies Preschool, and Yellowbilled Tours. Two Audubon Society chapters, an online birding group, a winery, and a country club all use the species in their logos.

Not Universally AdmiredIn some cases, however, it

seems familiarity breeds con-tempt. Many farmers and ranch-ers in the region tend to exagger-ate the magpie’s impacts on crops and believe wrongly that it harms livestock. For example, a rancher might wrongly assume that a group of magpies scavenging a lamb carcass has killed it. Mag-pies are also drawn to afterbirths and are sometimes seen, wrongly,

Continued on page 30




morning and late after-noon. Magpies employ a wide variety of forag-ing behaviors including chasing active prey, rummaging in leaf litter, overturning cattle drop-pings, gleaning from vegetation, flycatching, and pouncing from perches.

Terrestrial inverte-brates constitute the bulk of the YBMA’s diet throughout the year, the makeup varying seasonally based on

availability. Grasshop-pers may constitute over a quarter of the overall diet and over half during the dry sum-mer and fall months characteristic of Cali-fornia’s Mediterranean climate. Magpies will capitalize on ephem-eral food bonanzas such as mayfly hatches and tent caterpillar outbreaks. Their diet broadens somewhat in fall, when they eat large quantities of

fruits, nuts, and seeds. They will occasionally eat small vertebrates, which they dispatch either by pecking or, less often, drowning, and they have been observed picking flies and ticks off deer and horses. And they’re not above scavenging, often competing with ravens and vultures at road kills, afterbirths, garbage dumps, and livestock carcasses. They may occasion-ally raid nests of other birds.

Nesting BehaviorYBMAs typically pair

for life, with surviving individuals re-pairing after their mate’s death. Pairs maintain bonds through an extensive repertoire of elaborate signals and rituals including mutual preening, bill touching, and gentle bouts of tug-of-war with twigs or vegeta-tion, accompanied by soft vocalizations; the male generally lets the female “win” these matches, after which she drops the object. “Didn’t really


Notice the iridescent tail of an adult YBMA.

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want it anyway!”Pairs establish and

defend territories around their nest trees. Territorial disputes gen-erally start with lengthy chases and often end in actual fights in which two birds will grapple with and peck each other, potentially attracting a crowd of raucous onlookers that may terminate the con-test. These fights are always between birds of the same sex. As would be expected for a sedentary bird in a mild climate, the onset of breeding behavior is quite early, with nest building beginning in late January in the southern part of the range to mid-February inland and north.

Both sexes con-struct a globular nest of sticks on a mud or dung base nearly a yard across; one nest weighed 24 pounds! Nests are typically placed 30–65 feet high and often far out from the trunk to thwart nonvolant predators. Roughly a third of nests are placed in mistletoe clumps, which provide

an initial foundation. The domed canopy contains two well-con-cealed openings that may improve airflow and provide a back door in case of enemy attack. Inside is a mud bowl lined (mostly by the female) with hair, grass, bark, and/or rootlets.

Long-term pair bonding doesn’t pre-vent a little action on the side, and colonial nesting behavior pro-vides frequent opportu-nities for hanky-panky. YBMA males also seem to have a meddling streak and interrupt up to a third of copulation attempts by mated pairs. Extra-pair copula-tion attempts are typi-cally initiated by males, but the females deter-mine their outcomes. If a male catches his mate in an act of attempted infidelity, he will chase his rival away and herd her back to the nest tree.

Five to seven blue, buff, or olive, heavily speckled eggs are laid starting about ten days after nest completion. Although the YBMA

experiences no nest parasitism (e.g., by cowbirds), it will eject any non-magpie eggs placed in its nest; this may be an evolution-ary holdover from the ancestral Eurasian magpie, which likely was parasitized by cuckoos. Incubation, which is by the female only, lasts 16–18 days.

Both parents feed the nestlings during the day, while the female broods them at night. As the chicks mature and food is depleted, the parents range more widely in search of prey, and the time between feedings increases. Fledging may be as long as 30 days after hatching, and fledglings stay in the nest tree for up to five additional days. Family groups within the “colony” gradually coalesce into flocks that stay together until the following breed-ing season, at which time the young birds leave the flock, often as smaller flocks of their own, and the breeders disperse to their nest trees. —K.M.B.




as a threat to newborn animals. It seems people are always looking for a scapegoat, and the magpie makes a convenient target, both figuratively and literally; ille-gal shooting of magpies, sadly, remains a small but not insig-nificant threat. In truth, the vast majority of what magpies eat are insects generally considered agricultural pests, and they do not attack livestock.

Social, PlannerThe YBMA is a highly social

creature, more so than other magpies. It forages in groups throughout the year, forms large nonbreeding flocks (historically, at least, up to over 800 individu-als), roosts communally outside the breeding season, and nests in what could be described as loose

colonies of three to 30 pairs. YB-MAs typically don’t breed before the age of two, and yearlings often stick together in small groups, usu-ally away from breeding colonies. Winter flocks often select relatively warm sites that facilitate thermo-regulation and minimize energy consumption.

Some of the YBMA’s corvid cousins, such as Clark’s nutcrack-er, are well known for their cach-ing behavior, storing thousands of nuts in fall for winter retrieval and showing an uncanny ability to remember where most of them are. Living as it does in a region known for its mild winters, the YBMA has not faced the evolu-tionary pressure to develop this behavior, and what caching it does is short in both distance and time. Caching by YBMAs is a useful

Female yellow-billed magpies are slightly smaller than males.

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solution for dealing with a discov-ery of food that can’t be consumed immediately or might be stolen (or, in the case of dry dog food, eaten by its intended recipient) but caches are seldom recovered more than a few days later. Life is easy in the California lowlands!

ThreatsWell, it used to be. The very

climatic conditions that obviated the need for the YBMA to prac-tice winter caching also helped make California the breadbasket of the world and the nation’s most populous state. The oak savanna landscape in which the YBMA

evolved is now largely a thing of the past, especially in the Central Valley. Even where it does persist, oak recruitment is greatly reduced by overgrazing, and the native perennial grasses have been re-placed by annual invasive species. (These Eurasian grasses are what now give California hillsides their famous golden color, but it’s a purely human artifact.) Residen-tial and commercial development swallow more of what’s left every year. Fortunately, artificial food sources such as pet food, dump-sters, road kills, and some nut and grain crops help offset loss of natural habitat.

YEAR-ROUND RANGE



Unfortunately, magpies’ curios-ity and scavenging habits some-times lead them into direct contact with traps and poisons used to control predators and rodents; en-tire colonies have been wiped out in single incidents of secondary poisoning, and predator and pest control campaigns in the late 19th and early 20th centuries may have caused major declines and local extinctions of YBMAs.

An entirely new and truly men-acing threat to the YBMA has arisen in recent years. Corvids in general are particularly susceptible to West Nile virus, an introduced mosquito-borne disease that reached California in 2004. Within just two years, perhaps half of the remaining YBMA population was

lost to the disease, which nearly always proves fatal once con-tracted. The YBMA appears to be more at risk from the virus than even other corvids, none of which has experienced comparable ef-fects, likely due to its sociability (a lesson we would do well to heed right now). The Breeding Bird Survey indicates that the species is not recovering. The total popula-tion in 2004 was estimated to be 54 percent of what it was in 1968, when the survey began in Cali-fornia (probably already greatly reduced from earlier levels); in 2017, it was down to 21 percent. These losses, if they continue, will pose a serious threat to the contin-ued existence of this iconic bird. The species is already designated

Parent YBMAs feed their young for about 16 days after fledging.



Near Threatened by the Interna-tional Union for Conservation of Nature, and Vulnerable by The Nature Conservancy.

As I write this piece, humanity is (too quickly?) reemerging from a global lockdown precipitated by a deadly and highly contagious vi-rus. Preoccupied as we are by con-cerns over our own survival and that of our friends and family, our communities, and our economy, there may not be much left over for concern over a bird facing a similar threat. One thing I’ve seen, though, over the past few months as people have hunkered down is an increased focus on and appreciation for what’s nearby, and there’s already evidence that this shrinking of our spheres is

spawning a whole new crop of birders. There may not be a lot we can do about West Nile virus, but what we can and must do to save the bird that defines California is support and promote initiatives and organizations that work to protect and restore its habitat and give it some room to recolonize, re-lieve crowding, and stave off some of the worst effects of the next epidemic to come along. Because it is coming, for the YBMA and for us. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that both we and it will be here and better prepared?

Ken Burton has held innumer-able jobs, most of which have had something to do with birds. He lives in Humboldt County, California.G

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Yellow-billed magpie: a gorgeous show-off.



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FFor a lot of birders, winter is a time they don’t look forward to. It depends on where you live, of course. For some, winter brings a sense of loss of the birdsong and the many birds that leave and head farther south. Yet, if you are in the southern part of our continent, winter often brings in high densi-ties of migratory birds, including waterfowl. Even in the North, in the Great Lakes, coastal areas, and spots that have large lakes or reservoirs, such as in southern Canada and the northern US, ducks can make winter birding a real treat. Specifically, the diving

ducks are the ones we associ-ate with winter in most places. Some of the Great Lakes teem with flocks of long-tailed ducks, as well as massive flocks of

greater and lesser scaup, perhaps canvasbacks and redheads, and if you are lucky you may see scoters, although they are more coastal or restricted to the largest of lakes. Among diving ducks are some species

that will use smaller ponds and even rivers: bufflehead and gold-eneyes come to mind, and these will be our focus.

Before look at the goldeneyes and bufflehead, why not talk a

The Big-head Divers: Goldeneyes and Buffleheads

A l v A r o J A r A M i l l o

Hear the author read this article in our digital edition!

Bufflehead, male.

Click here for bufflehead audio recorded by Lang Elliott

AUTHORREAD-ALOUD

PLAY IT


https://birdwatchersdigest.net/multimedia/bwd-nd2020/birdsong-nd2020-BUFFLE.mp3

https://birdwatchersdigest.net/multimedia/bwd-nd2020/readaloud-nd2020-alvaro.mp3


bit about the relationships within ducks? I think that most birders think of ducks as coming in two major flavors, diving ducks and puddle or dabbling ducks. If you live in the South, you may see whistling-ducks, and, of course, there is the ruddy duck, which, behaviorally, is a diving duck. Genetic research has clarified that the ducks and geese, along with the chicken-like birds, are evo-lutionarily very old, among the oldest lineages of birds, in fact. Yet, within the ducks we find that the division we have made about divers and dabblers is entirely behavioral and does not match the genetic relationships of these waterfowl.

For example—and this may blow your mind—the ruddy duck is more closely related to geese and swans than it is to other ducks! Within the ducks, the diving group that includes the scaup, ring-necked, redhead, and canvasback is more closely related to the dabblers than they are to the goldeneyes and mer-gansers. In fact, the goldeneyes, mergansers, scoters, and eiders group into a separate subfamily within the waterfowl known as the Mergini (which sounds like a yummy seafood pasta, but no, it is a group of ducks). Why all the background on genetic relation-ships? Partly because it adds a bit of context, but it somewhat AL

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The distinctive wing pattern of a female

common goldeneye.



explains why the very different goldeneyes have female plum-ages in the same color pattern as mergansers. The two are related even though their bill types are entirely different. And like the mergansers, buffleheads and goldeneys use tree cavities for nesting.

In the world, there are only two goldeneyes, but the third member of the group is the bufflehead. They all belong to the genus Bucephala. The mean-ing of this word is “ox-headed,” and for those who like trivia, Alexander the Great’s horse was named Bucephalus because it had a brand of an ox head on its haunches. If you had to consider what makes these three ducks stand out, it is that they are kind of big-headed. With a puffy “mane” toward the back of the head, the bufflehead is named for its big head! Although it may not have occurred to you,

it comes from Buffalo-head, and you know our American bison—they are big-headed critters! Of these three “ox-head” divers, the bufflehead is much smaller and has dark eyes. The two goldeneyes are larger and show whitish-yellow eyes as adults. With that in mind, let’s consider the bufflehead first, and then the more similar goldeneyes.

BuffleheadsBuffleheads are adaptable;

they can winter on a small pond or lake, as well as on the Great Lakes or even in harbors in coastal areas. They are not fond of the open ocean coast. This is a small duck, but has a rotund body. It is no coincidence that hunters call them butterballs, as they are small but relatively fatty, which accounts for their rotund bodies.

There is something inherently cute-looking about buffleheads. I think it is the big-headed shape that, with a small bill, looks car-toonish. Adult males are striking in their simplicity of pattern, and look black and white in the field. The body is entirely white, with black upperparts and wingtips, while the head and neck look black, with a big white area on the rear of the head. It is a large area: Almost a third of the head is white—all on the rear. If you get a great look in good light, the black of the head turns out

Bufflehead, female.



to be iridescent, with violet tones toward the front, and green ones toward the back. The cute look and the white on the head help in all plumages, but only the adult male is strikingly black and white.

Females are brownish gray on the body with a dark brown head. Their head patch is oval, oblong lengthwise from just below the eye to the nape. The adult male has a big white fan on the head; the female a well-marked white oval on the cheek. Buffleheads always have dark eyes. A tricky plumage is that of young males, and I have seen them confused for hooded mer-gansers.

Young males look like the females, but by later winter they have molted to a lot more white on the head than a classic female. At this point, it is not just a white oval they show on the head, but a big white patch. If the patch looks too big for a female bufflehead, you may default to thinking about the other species with a big white patch on the head: hooded mer-ganser. However, it is the brightly colored male mergansers that have the patch, not the females, and as is typical of the fish-eating mergansers, hooded shows a long, narrow bill instead of the more traditional duck bill of a buffle-head.

In flight, bufflehead females have only a white rectangle on the

secondaries, while female golden-eyes have more extensive white on the inner wing. The large extent of white on a flying male bufflehead should be distinctive, but also focus on the inner wing, which is largely white. Buffleheads have quick, almost whirring wingbeats in flight. In winter and migration, the bufflehead may be seen nearly anywhere in the US and Canada. It is an exceptionally widespread duck.

The Goldeneyes The two goldeneyes are much

more similar to each other than either is to the bufflehead. We could cut to the chase and say look for the golden eye as a feature to separate them from a bufflehead and other ducks! But juvenile goldeneyes have dark eyes, and some other species of diving ducks, the scaup as one example, also have yellow eyes. While helpful, the eye color field mark has to be used in context.AL

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Common goldeneye, female.



The common goldeneye is widespread in the US and Cana-da as a migrant or wintering spe-cies, while the Barrow’s goldeneye is largely coastal, although a few are found in the Great Lakes annually. Barrow’s is restricted to the northern coasts in winter, being more common in the West and more restricted in the East to the far northeast in the US and the Maritimes in Canada. But lost Barrow’s goldeneyes can show up in a multitude of places, so you need to be aware of their identification. Male goldeneyes of both species are white on the flanks and breast, have blackish backs and rear ends, as well as blackish heads with iridescence in good light. How the two golden-eyes differ is in their head shape, bill size, head pattern, and extent

of white on the body. The classic male common

goldeneye has a large head that bulges on the nape. The head has a greenish iridescence, and the main mark of the face is a round patch between the eye and bill. Barrow’s goldeneye has a gener-ally smaller bill, a puffier-looking head with a steeper forehead, and a more extensive “mane” on the nape than the common. The head of a Barrow’s has a crescent shape patch between the eye and the bill, and in good light the iridescence tends toward violet, depending upon the light angle.

The body of the common goldeneye is more extensively white, particularly on the scapu-lars (feathers adjacent to the back). On common, this area is largely white, sometimes looking AD

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Breeding male and first winter male, common goldeneyes.

Click here for common goldeneyes audio recorded by Lang Elliott


https://birdwatchersdigest.net/multimedia/bwd-nd2020/birdsong-nd2020-COMGOL.mp3


ish than the dark-eyed female bufflehead. Female goldeneyes have a color pattern similar to female mergansers, but again, the mergansers have long and narrow bills, larger and longer body shapes, and a spiky crest or “bed head” look, unlike the more smooth-headed and shorter-billed goldeneyes. The brown-ish heads of female goldeneyes contrast with their gray bodies. When the birds are alert you can also see they have a white ring on the neck immediately below the head. Both species have similar colors, although on average the Barrow’s is darker-headed, more chocolate brown. The key to distinguishing female goldeneyes is the head shape, which differs as in the males: Barrow’s has a steep forehead, almost straight

thinly streaked with black. The Barrow’s has largely dark scapu-lars with white oblong spots, almost like a line of “portholes.” An amazingly good feature to look for even at a distance, or when the duck is sleeping, is that the Barrow’s has a dark “spur” on the breast that is lacking in the common. This breaks up the white profile of the breast on the Barrow’s. You may be able to see the different face patterns when the ducks are in flight; as a secondary characteristic, the in-ner wing is much less white on the Barrow’s than on common.

The Goldeneye GirlsNow for the females—and

this is where the difficulty re-ally lies. Female goldeneyes are larger and grayer, less brown-W

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Barrow’s goldeneyes, female and male.

Click here for Barrow’s goldeneyes audio recorded by Lang Elliott


https://birdwatchersdigest.net/multimedia/bwd-nd2020/birdsong-nd2020-BARGOL.mp3


up, with a puffier mane, giving the head a more oblong look. Then there is the smaller bill of the Barrow’s. The smaller bill and steeper forehead give it a different look.

In winter an additional feature really helps in separating these two: The female Barrow’s tends to get a largely yellowish bill. This is a great feature, but use it with caution. Often this is the only feature people look for, and some common goldeneyes can look more yellow-billed than others. In summer Barrow’s has a dark bill! Use this field mark in conjunc-tion with the head shape differ-ences. In flight, female Barrow’s have very little white on the lesser coverts (forewing), while the com-mon has a substantial white patch there. In flight goldeneyes make a distinctive whistling sound with their wings, and it has given them the nickname “whistlers.”

As an aside, in World War II, Operation Goldeneye was planned

in order to protect Gibraltar from being invaded by Franco’s Spain. This operation was planned by a commander in Britain’s Naval In-telligence Division by the name of Ian Fleming. Name ring a bell? He wrote the James Bond novels once he retired, all from his comfortable estate in Jamaica, called “Gold-eneye.” How James Bond got his name is for another time.

I hope you have enjoyed this contemplation of the goldeneyes and the “buffalo head” as well as how to differentiate them from each other, and from their relatives the mergansers. When you are out enjoying the winter ducks, also take in what a wonderful assort-ment of diversity we have of these gorgeous birds. Ducks are among the fanciest of our birds, and they are great in giving us views right out in the open, for the most part. Sometimes they are out in the middle of a lake, but often there is a good spot where they can be seen up close. Make sure that you consider them with the attention they deserve; the color they bring to winter is enough to make almost all birders enjoy this colder time of the year.

Alvaro Jaramillo is the author of several bird books and has a fun time guiding birding and nature tours. He lives with his family in Half Moon Bay, California.

alvarosadventures.com

ADO

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Another big-headed diver: hooded merganser, juvenile. Adults have golden eyes.


https://www.alvarosadventures.com/

http://alvarosadventures.com


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A l B A t t

HHoly house finches!This is the time of the year

when I’m thankful for many things. I’m thankful I have people I want to give Christmas gifts.

What do I give people who love birds? It’s go-ing to be tough to top what I gave them last year: a plastic mug with my high school gradua-tion photo on it. Should I give them a subscription to BWD (Editor’s note: YES.), books, a field guide (paper or app), a state park sticker, a

Constantly Counting Chickadees

Duck Stamp, binoculars, cam-era, hat, gloves, a notebook to fill the holes in memories, na-tional parks pass, an Audubon (ABA, Cornell Lab, bird club,

nature center, etc.) mem-bership, or a bird feeder?

That’s it. Everybody is getting a bird feeder. I’ll strike a blow for sanity. Ken Burns could do an eight-part series on bird feeders. I’ve made feeders

out of recycled milk cartons and jugs for gifts before, but I grew weary of answering the question, “What’s this supposed to be?”


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Black-capped chickadee.

AUTHORREAD-ALOUD

PLAY IT


https://birdwatchersdigest.net/multimedia/bwd-nd2020/readaloud-nd2020-albatt.mp3


feeder predators keeps me hum-ble. It could be worse. I talked to an Alaskan who told of a brown bear breaking through his garage door and taking a roast from a chest freezer.

You’ll find your bird-feeding guru at another store. Good advice will flow like a river and flatten your learning curve. You’ll start providing the kind of food the birds would buy if they could. For me, that means no milo or red millet, the sprigs of parsley of bird food. Milo looks like a BB fired by an air rifle. With the right food, you’ll be there when a goldfinch falls in love with a yellow feeder and a male cardinal offers a sunflower seed to a female as a symbol of devotion. Get to know your birds. Identify 12 bird species from a window. Then use each bird’s name in a sentence.

I may be a couple of feath-ers short of a hummingbird, but I’ve learned things during a lifetime of feeding birds. It’s important to put the feed-ers outside. And, this is where many failed bird feeders go wrong: Put bird seed in them. I feed birds all year. I figure I eat nearly every day; they should, too. I enjoy their company and don’t want them to move to a nicer restaurant down the road. The late Speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O’Neill

Bird feeding has been a soothing salve during the pan-demic. It has shown us where the birds are and allows us to meet them there. It’s a way to connect with birds in a mean-ingful way and to learn what the fuss is all about. It’s an excuse to get outside and spend quality time filling feeders. It looks good on a resume. I have bird chores. I carry food to my creaky feeders. It’s Fitbit fun. I fill and clean the feeders. I’m their beast of birdin’.

If you go to a store that doesn’t have bird-feeding ex-pertise, a clerk who sounds like he knows everything will tell you to buy a tube feeder and mixed seed with little stuff in it. “You don’t want fat birds,” he’ll reason.

Feeders are popular with squirrels. Sooner or later, you’ll go to a different store to find a squirrel-proof feeder. The bar-ber who cuts your best friend’s brother’s hair has a neighbor who believes Sasquatch, the New Jersey Devil, and squirrel-proof feeders are real. I believe all three are mythological char-acters. Some feeders are squirrel-resistant. That’s akin to smart-phones being water-resistant instead of waterproof. Squirrels are problem solvers. My feed-ers are defenseless against the onslaught of raccoons, deer, and squirrels. Matching wits with



said, “All birding is local.” You’ll see references to O’Neill saying, “All politics is local,” but I know what he meant. Bird feeders are local.

I watched an anchorman-handsome chickadee this morning. A chickadee makes me smile without doing anything more than being. In 2017, I spent too much time in a hospital. Freed from that confinement, I found walking difficult and birding nearly impossible. I decided to count chickadees, with 1,000 being my goal. I didn’t care if it was the same chickadee repeat-edly, if I saw it, I counted it. Each chickadee was like the first bird I’d ever seen. I told no one, holding my own soft celebration upon achieving my goal. Feeders made that possi-ble. On cold days, I warm my-self by rubbing two thoughts

of chickadees together. When snowflakes turn to

blizzards, Project FeederWatch thrives. It tells me the birds I’m most likely to see are, in de-scending order: black-capped chickadee, downy woodpecker, white-breasted nuthatch, dark-eyed junco, blue jay, hairy woodpecker, American gold-finch, northern cardinal, red-bellied woodpecker, and house finch. That’s the Feeder Bird Hall of Fame for my ZIP code.

Feeding birds is finer than frog’s hair.

Happy and merry every day, my friends.

Al Batt is a writer, speaker, storyteller, and humorist who lives in Hartland, Minnesota. His first book is a collection of his stories, A Life Gone to the Birds, published by BWD. Avail-able at RedstartBirding.com.

AL B

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(4)

Left: White-breasted nuthatch, male.

Northern cardinal, female.

Northern cardinal, male.

Female red-bellied

woodpecker.


http://RedstartBirding.com


Northern cardinal, male.


http://www.visitbaytown.com/birdingchallenge


AAn overcast and rainy day in Southern Arizona is uncharac-teristic for January weather. It’s often warm and sunny, but not today. When the clouds lifted a bit, I grabbed my jacket, hat, and walking stick, and hung my binoculars around my

Winter ShowerC A r M e n C h r i s t y

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neck. A little mois-ture wasn’t going to prevent me from en-joying my daily walk around our three-acre property. Rocky the dog decided to join me even if it was wet, so off we went, doing our best to avoid the slipperiest mud.

The two-legged walker had a much tougher time than the four-legged one as we made our way along the fenceline. After the turn to-ward home, a young Cooper’s hawk came gliding in above our heads from the south

and coasted over the storage barn. He swooped low into the garden, then lifted over the roof of the house without a wingbeat. Catching some air, he put on the brakes, and plopped onto the highest branch of the big, winter-bare

Cooper’s hawk, juvenile.



Winter ShowerC A r M e n C h r i s t y

Arizona ash in our front yard.I wasn’t surprised to see

him this misty-moisty morn-ing. Young Cooper’s hawks visit my garden regularly. His parents have been successfully raising youngsters for years in an enormous tamarisk about a half-mile down the way. Had I seen this particular bird before? They all look the same until their adult feathers grow in.

Every spring fledglings courageously launch themselves off the low limbs of that tree. Opening their wings, they flap furiously and plunk down. Tiny dust clouds rise as they hit the ground. They stand there, blinking, for a bit, per-haps to catch their breath, and then valiantly clamber back up somehow and have another go. With wings beating and balance precarious, their first efforts are hilarious, but they learn quick-ly. As they range farther and farther up and down the wash from the tamarisk, their parents stop delivering lunch when they can catch it on their own. Last spring’s batch of adolescents is now almost a year old and about as big as their parents, although not yet red-eyed, and still in their juvenile dress of closely streaked dusky brown and cream.

Growing fast, with enormous appetites and hunting hard for dinner, they haven’t perfected

the art of sneaking into my yard undetected. Whizzing over the lawn from wall to wall they hope to catch something on the fly. Instead they just scare everybody. When my resident flock darts for cover, the sudden wild flapping and frantic ran-dom movements of doves, spar-rows, and house finches throw the young Cooper’s hawks off their game. The occasional adult who hunts here knows how to steal from tree to tree, hiding in the foliage, lurking quietly. But the truth is, nobody is fooled. The birds go quiet. Even Rocky sees him there in the shadows and barks a warn-ing at the Cooper’s hawk.

I paused to watch this young bird sitting in the ash tree, then lifted my binoculars. Something was different about him. Fac-ing east into the wet wind, he looked like he was molting, or had too many feathers, or maybe they were too long. The streaked feathers covering his breast and thighs seemed to be lifting, blowing, and trailing out from his body. I watched the feathers along his sides, long and flexible, stream back over his wings. Under his tail, his covert feathers were so long and fluffy that I thought he might be shedding the last of his baby down, but no fuzz drifted away in the breeze. Then it dawned on me: He was allowing the



schedule as we button up our coats. He settled his blowing breast feathers, then his pure white undertail coverts back into place. He didn’t preen while he sat in my tree. He didn’t reach down to rearrange or zip anything. He just opened his coat of many feathers, let the wind and moisture blow through, and then slowly closed it up again. As he lifted off and headed west following the wind, he tucked in the last of his feathers. By the third or fourth wingbeat his usual sil-houette had returned, smooth and sharp.

Watching the young hawk take a shower this drizzly morning, I observed a bird behavior not often witnessed, an unexpected, engaging view of an avian creature who comes and goes through my garden. I’ve never seen him catch any-thing, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t. There’s a place for everyone in my garden, even the young Cooper’s hawk. He’s welcome, too, especially if all he wants to do is sit in my ash tree, enjoy a refreshing moment, and take a winter shower.

Carmen Christy contributed several joyful backyard bird-watching stories to BWD and Watching Backyard Birds in the past few years. She died in July 2020.

wind to blow the drizzle into his feathers.

As he perched there, he checked around below him. He looked up at the sky, as if to take stock of the weather and the chances for more rain. Maybe he just needed a time out before he went looking for lunch. After a bit he slowly began to pull in and rearrange his plumage.

It wasn’t a fast process. He took his time and seemed preoc-cupied, like we are when we think about what’s next on the

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A juvenile Coop stretches its wings.



THANKYOUBird Watcher’s DigestDear Friends,A decade ago, the publishing industry began to decline—for a number

of reasons. Many people believed that print publications would go the way of cassette tapes and rotary phones, disappearing into the hazy his-tory of our world’s digital communication evolution. Concerned, many of our devoted subscribers asked if they could help us continue to print the bird-watching magazines they loved. Their greatest support was al-ready being shown through their faithful renewals and gift subscriptions, but a few people wanted to do more. Because of these loyal friends, we started the BWD Content Club.

Funds donated to the Content Club are used to support our contribu-tors, as well as our print operating costs, helping us continue to provide great birding content in print through Bird Watcher’s Digest and Watch-ing Backyard Birds. Although we are a for-profit, locally owned small business, some of our loyal subscribers have donated funds each year to support our ever-increasing print and operational costs. This year, sadly, we’ve watched many of our friends and fellow publishers retrench to digital-only formats, and some have closed their doors for good. We, however, are still moving forward, much like “The Little Engine That Could.”

Bird Watcher’s Digest celebrated its 42nd birthday with the Septem-ber/October 2020 issue, and we are incredibly humbled and grateful. We have dealt with great changes and losses—personally, organizationally, and financially—over the past 24 months, yet we are hopeful, strong, and inspired. Why? Because of you.

We thank you, our subscribers and especially BWD Content Club do-nors, with all our hearts for your continued support during these difficult financial times. From all of us at Bird Watcher’s Digest: We appreciate you, and we hope to continue to provide print and digital content that informs and inspires you and gives you great joy for many years to come.

Sincerely,Wendy Clark

President and PublisherBird Watcher’s Digest Redstart BirdingWatching Backyard Birds Reader Rendezvous Birding Tours



A

Mr. Creeper’s Neighborhood: Suet on a Tree Trunk

D o n G r u s s i n G

A brown creeper landed on the trunk (where else) of the oak tree growing near my house in a well-forested, suburban, half-acre yard. A suet feeder is fastened to the trunk about six feet above the ground. The coated wire cage is kept full with high-quality suet—kidney fat from butchered cattle, when I can find it—or with processed

suet available in supermarkets. I like to help and watch all the winter birds that will include suet in their diets.

But the creeper was descend-ing the trunk, away from the feeder. I was outside, filling up a seed feeder only five feet or so away from this interesting little bird. So small. So obscure that I think they are overlooked JI

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Brown creeper, doing what creepers do.

Click here for brown creeper audio recorded by Lang Elliott


https://birdwatchersdigest.net/multimedia/bwd-nd2020/birdsong-nd2020-BROCRE.mp3


by many who feed the birds in winter. Its feathers are such a perfect blend with tree bark that it is not an easy bird to see. It certainly does not have the flair and glamour of the pileated or red-bellied wood-peckers, or the busyness of the downy and hairy woodpeckers. But I always watch for them. And I keep a suet feeder on a tree trunk because I suspect that brown creepers are just not comfortable unless they are on or near a trunk.

They usually hunt by work-ing up the trunk, peering under every bark crevice for insect eggs, pupae, larvae, or what-ever else might be edible. Some people report that creepers will eat peanut butter and sunflower seeds (I suspect this means hulled sunflowers). They are tiny birds and survive on the tiniest foods.

And that is just what this little guy (or girl; creeper sexes are indistinguishable) was do-ing. It was an experienced visi-tor to this location and knew that it could find tiny morsels of suet at the base of this oak tree. It is spillage and debris from the larger birds that feed on the suet. The pileateds are the sloppiest. They attack the suet with force and vigor, and many small chunks fall to the ground beneath. At times even a big chunk will be dislodged.

The pileated will stop its at-tack, cock its head to look at the chunk, and then, apparently deciding that extracting it is not worth the effort, goes back to work hacking at the main suet and swallowing large beakfuls.

I wish I could follow the brown creeper closely to see how it lives. When I was a kid and had much better legs than I do now I used to follow the winter birds. It was interesting

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Brown creeper.



Downy woodpeckers do use my bluebird houses, and seem to like to look out of the entrance hole for several min-utes before ducking down to spend the night. I’ve never seen a hairy use a birdhouse. The downies sometimes repay me for my hospitality by enlarging the entrance hole so that the house is not useful or attractive to bluebirds or even deer mice.

But where do the brown creepers go to spend a cold winter night? They nest un-der bark crevices, so maybe they have found a few special peeled- off tiny slabs suitable for a long night’s sleep.

At least I know where it spends its days.

Editor’s note: According to birdsoftheworld.com, winter roosting behavior of the brown creeper is not well documented. Reports include two or three creepers squeezing tightly into a crack or scar in the bark of the same tree nightly for sev-eral winters; and two creepers huddling in a crack between a chimney and a roof.

Don Grussing is a freelance writer who lives in Minnetonka, Minnesota. He is author of The Seasons of the Robin, pub-lished by the University of Texas Press. His first story in BWD was published in 1985.

to see them hang together in a loose group as they wandered through the wooded pasture where I spent a lot of time (perhaps too much, according to my parents). The congrega-tion (I hesitate to use the word flock) usually included a few chickadees, at least one downy woodpecker, sometimes a hairy, usually one but sometimes two white-breasted nuthatches, and sometimes one solitary brown creeper. They all headed off in the same direction. I won-der if there was a leader, or if something else was guiding this bunch.

But what did they do at night? Did they stick together? Or just reconvene the next day? I’ve found some places where chickadees sleep. One smart bird spent many nights next to an outdoor light that was on, probably getting some needed heat. Or perhaps this bird was sick, not well enough to go into the metabolism-slowing sleep that reduces chickadees’ need for calories to burn to get through the night.

Others sleep in birdhouses I leave up, especially those under my deck that are better protected. Some roost up in the wooden support beams of the deck where they receive some protection from the wind and precipitation.

Looking for Gifts for the Birder on Your List?

redstartbirding.com


http://birdsoftheworld.com

http://www.redstartbirding.com


Looking for Gifts for the Birder on Your List?

redstartbirding.com




AAt noon, I run down to my car in the office parking lot, pull off my heels, slip on my dressy walking shoes, and hit the sidewalk. It’s 88 degrees of Florida summer, but I’ve dressed in thin clothing and have my ice water clutched to my side, and I’m ready. There are five small retention ponds along this quarter-mile stretch and shade from plenty of big old-growth trees. I hear a cardinal chipping from a tree and blue jays yell-ing at each other. Three sandhill cranes cross the road on foot, majestically, right in front of me. The birds love this place, and I’ve found I can’t do without it.

A few years ago, the stress of my job started getting to me; I began crying in my car or in meetings and becoming more irritable with my coworkers. A search on the internet for “stress

relief” found tips on meditation and exercise. Meditation I tried, but I found deep breathing un-comfortable to the point of pain, and I couldn’t keep it up enough to feel any effects. And exercise, well, I was always the last one picked for teams in P.E., and I often got excused to help teach-ers grade papers instead. I zeroed in on the article that said that even 10 or 15 minutes of walking could make a noticeable differ-ence in one’s stress level. So, I walked down my street—and felt better in a matter of moments.

I started walking 15 minutes each morning, but that wasn’t enough, so I added 15 minutes at lunchtime, and then I in-creased both to 30 minutes. I was delighted to find that my office complex was full of birds, thanks to plenty of food, water,

MY WAY:

Birding as MeditationM A r y G i r A u l o



and shelter between the ponds and the trees and bushes. Even in the heat of the day, I could often tally 15 species. I found solace in the distraction and experience of wonder that they offered and came back to the office a new woman each time, more patient and emotionally balanced. If I didn’t take my walk, I would feel the emotion-al effects later in the afternoon.

It wasn’t until during a conversation with a coworker who is a yoga aficionado that I realized that I hadn’t given up on meditation. “Anything that causes you to focus and dis-tracts you from your thoughts can be meditation,” she said. Listening to the birds, watching the water, sky, and foliage for their movements—these kept me from ruminating on things

that made me sad or upset and gave me unforced moments of joy. Years later, I’m still walking every day, despite heat or cold or even light rain.

More and more research comes out every year on the toll of a sedentary job and the stress and busyness of modern life-styles. Many prescriptions are of-fered, including diet and exercise, and they’re all worth trying if you’re in need of some relief. For me, I’ve found my effective dose: hitting the pavement, watching the birds.

Mary Giraulo is a nonprofit consultant and board member for Flagler Audubon Society. She lives with her husband and toddler (who loves learning bird calls) in Palm Coast, Florida.

ADO

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N

PETE’S TIPS� PETE’S TIPSby Pete Dunne

No matter how accomplished a birder you are, you still want to be better with bird vocaliza-tions. From the planet’s new-est birder to Michael O’Brien (one of North America’s finest birders-by-ear), we all aspire to sharpen our audio ID skills.

Me? I have poor hearing; 40 percent deficient at 4 kilohertz in both ears, so I empathize with those who likewise strug-gle to learn bird sound. But my greatest obstacle has been mental, not auditory. Visually acute, I early on shunned bird sound in favor of bird sighting.

To my youthful mind, it was analogous to television versus radio.

Of course, TV trumped.Too late did I realize that

a grasp of bird vocalizations not only enriched the birding experience but was also key to locating and identifying species.

Case in point: The song of the winter wren is more viscer-ally gratifying than a quick

Learning Vocalizationsglimpse of these furtive brown gremlins.

So, if you, like me, are chal-lenged by bird vocalizations, here are a few tips.

First, nothing beats repeti-tion. Hearing a bird multiple times helps lock the sound in.

Second, do not approach bird vocalizations with an open mind—in essence, hear a song and aspire to memorize it.

Listen critically. Analyze the quality and pattern in your mind and find words to de-scribe it.

Is the song loud or whis-pered? Complex, with multiple elements, or simple, a single note repeated? Is it lazy or hur-ried? Finding the precise words that lock a bird song in your mind can be as gratifying as the song. Absolutely write your de-scriptive keystone words down! If you don’t, you’ll discover that they are as elusive as bird song.

Try to compare your latest



challenge with a similar song banked in memory.

Summer tanager’s song recalls American robin but is more hurried and sweeter.

To my ear, it sounds like a tanager trying to sing like an oriole. But my ears aren’t your ears; you’ll have to work it out for yourself.

Mnemonics? Sure, they work for some species. Take the call of summer tanager, a stuttered pick-a-tuck.

Several years ago, during the World Series of Birding, a rival team and our team stood at a location known to host breed-

ing summer tanager. Near dusk, the birds were not singing but calling incessantly. We got the bird. They, not familiar with the call, did not.

So, by all means expand your horizons and apply yourself to learning bird sounds. The chal-lenge gets easier as you bank more and more vocalizations in memory.

Pete Dunne is the retired di-rector of the Cape May Bird Ob-servatory, founder of the World Series of Birding, and author of dozens of books on birding.

ADO

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Summer tanager, male.



D

The Urban Birder

Despite being from the other side of the pond, in London, England, I have always had quite a strong connection to the birds and birders in the United States. It started when my mother bought me a book on the wildlife of the Americas when I was eight. It was a huge book—or so it seemed in my small hands—that helped in-troduce me to animals including puma, ocelot, and coatimundi. I was mesmerized by those crea-tures, but it was the birds that really captured my imagination.

The hummingbirds were en-chanting, the sage grouse fasci-nating (they had not been split in those heady days), and tufted tit-mouse desirable. The illustrations were created by the late and great American artist Arthur Singer. I was unconsciously captivated by his artwork, and I regularly tried to copy his birds into my school exercise book to pass off as my own.

There was one bird that stood head and shoulders above any other that I yearned to see: the SH

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American Birds on Both Sides of the Atlantic

D A v i D l i n D o

David Lindo.



swallow-tailed kite. How could such a large graceful-looking bird of prey exist and not be on the verge of extinction? The reason for my oddly negative outlook was because I had just learned about the fate of the passenger pigeon and Carolina parakeet, so I expected all beautiful birds to be hunted relentlessly.

As I grew older, I realized that I was beginning to harbor an in-sane jealousy toward an element of America: your incredible bird list that must be approaching 900 species. You have hummingbirds, two species of waxwings, a ton of wood-warblers, and swallow-tailed kites. The situation was made worse when I realized that quite a few of the birds that I thought were exclusive to Britain and Europe had also shown up in the Land of the Free. European thrushes like redwing, fieldfare, and even blackbird have all made appearances; European wigeon, northern lapwing, and even corn-crake have all found their way onto your collective bird list.

By the time I was in my 20s I had begun my short foray into the world of twitching: the act of running after rarities. It soon became apparent that quite a few American species turned up in the UK, especially on the off-shore islands. I managed to catch up with some of these vagrants, including Philadelphia vireo and blackpoll warbler, both of which

I saw on the Isles of Scilly, the most westerly point in the UK, and never since anywhere in the world. The laughing and ring-billed gulls, Baltimore oriole, rose-breasted grosbeak, buff-breasted sandpiper, and others I have seen since in the US.

Of course, I missed the vast majority of the American waifs,

among them including the notable (and so far not repeated) appearances of a red-breasted nuthatch and blue-winged war-bler in the UK. The former spe-cies evaded three of my attempts to see in a pine wood in Norfolk in eastern England, and the latter was the biggest dip (no show) of my life. It was a stunning male discovered innocuously hanging out in bushes at a shopping mall parking lot in a random town in Kent, in southeastern England. Its discovery resulted in the big-gest twitch known to humankind, with an army of 5,000 camo-clad birders attending the general area

The Urban Birder

American Birds on Both Sides of the Atlantic

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Laughing gulls.



after the news broke. I was one of that number standing in the cold waiting for the American beauty to show itself. And did I see it? No, was the resounding answer. My consolation after a six-hour freezing wait was an unexpected great grey shrike and a sole Bo-hemian waxwing. Both were life birds, although, due to missing out on the star bird, my interest in twitching began to wane from then on.

Ten years passed before I began the first of my regular visits to the States. Aside from a couple of previous visits to New York, my first real immersion into American birding was to Los Angeles. Back then I had a very different life before entering the birding world at large under the guise of The Urban Birder. As a personal assistant to a director who made TV commercials and music videos, I was able to occa-sionally traipse around the world

with him, staying in posh hotels and hanging around on sets. One of his regular haunts was Los Angeles. We visited this megacity for 13 years on an annual basis for sometimes up to three months at a time. This fabled land of dreams, silicon, and flashy cars soon began to feel like my second home.

Although life was breezy being based in sun-dappled salubrious West Hollywood, with its vegan cafés filled with chain-coffee-drinking, script-writer wannabes, countless gyms, and expansive hillside properties; there was a far uglier side to the city—a feature that it shares with most other cit-ies on the planet. Not all of LA’s streets are paved with gold, and downtown was downright scary. It was where the underbelly of the city resided. It was also a site for good birding.

I remember being taken there on a twitch to a rough park by RU

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White-rumped sandpiper.



I watched this rare visitor to the West Coast through trembling binoculars, aware of the drug exchanges going on all around us.

What many people don’t real-ize about LA is that it is a coastal city set in a desert. Far from being devoid of natural life, it’s a

a retired casting director. Dick Barth was a man after my own heart. Practically deaf, yet he could hear the faintest cry of a distant yellow-rumped warbler, or be aware of some other barely moving bird that I had no idea was there. A classic example of his urban birding prowess was when he took me to observe a red-naped sapsucker that he had miraculously discovered perched stock-still on a palm tree in the middle of a traffic island on the mega-busy Sunset Boulevard. That man certainly had The Force with him! Anyway, on that fate-ful day in the dodgy downtown park, Dick showed me a winter-ing black-and-white warbler he had previously discovered there.

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Great egret.

Northern lapwing.



looking at the feather details of western and least sandpipers—the world’s smallest wader. I be-came good at separating migrat-ing long-billed dowitchers from the similar-looking short-billed dowitchers. It was a complete joy to be able to walk right up to feeding whimbrels, American golden plovers, western willets, and marbled godwits feeding on the beach. Surfbirds, wandering tattlers, and ruddy and black turnstones were all equally ap-proachable along with the loafing laughing, Heermann’s, mew, California, western, and, dur-ing the winter, glaucous-winged gulls, plus the royal, Caspian, and Forster’s terns. It was an unbelievable experience. I also found a couple of rarities for the site, including an errant hunting short-eared owl on one visit. It was the site’s first in several years. Indeed, it is hard to describe Bal-

migration hotspot, and its many parks and canyons are home to multitudes of birds, from Cali-fornia quail and red-shouldered hawks to Anna’s hummingbirds and band-tailed pigeons. I was drawn to the coast, and in par-ticular to Ballona Wetlands, a 1,087 acre mixture of saltwater, brackish, and freshwater marsh-land situated on the coast very close to LAX, the city’s main airport. Throughout its history it constantly has fought off the threat of development. The most recent of these battles was against Steven Spielberg, who wanted to build a studio on the site.

Aside from the conspicuous pied-billed grebes and snowy and great egrets, Ballona is also a great place to watch waders that sometimes perform at point-blank range, especially around the shores of its brackish and freshwater ponds. I reveled in RU

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Bohemian waxwing.



lona Wetlands without reeling off a mouth-watering bird list.

My most memorable day there was my first ever visit back in the 1990s. After hearing about this legendary site, I finally had a chance to visit it, and I remember being bowled over by the mul-titude of species that presented themselves to me on arrival. It literally took me an hour to walk 100 yards. Soon, I bumped into a local Audubon group being led by my now good friend Bob Shanman. Seeing that I was on my own, and being an incred-ibly friendly guy, he invited me to join the group. I was shocked by how close we could get to the birds despite the noise the group was producing, and the Baywatch scene on the beach that was being played out before my eyes, con-sisting of cavorting joggers and rollerbladers.

I noticed a Caspian tern fly past, so I pointed it out to the group explaining that they were to be found all over the world.

“No they’re not! They’re

American!” exclaimed an elderly lady birder in the group.

“Err, they have a worldwide distribution…,” I tried to explain before being cut off once again.

“No! They are American birds!” she retorted.

Sensing an impending break-down in Anglo/American dip-lomatic relations, plus seeing the other members of the group suppressing smirks, I raised my hands in submission. Bob seemed impressed by the way I handled his patriotic group member, and asked me to lead a tour the following morning in Malibu Creek State Park. Thus began my sub-career in bird guiding. It has been a journey that has taken me across the world several times. I have now finally added swallow-tailed kite to my list in Peru and Colombia. However, I have yet to see one from US soil. Maybe one day.

David Lindo is author of How to Be an Urban Birder, Princeton University Press, 2018. DA

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Caspian tern. Turkey vulture.



LLook up. Higher. Straight up, near the top of that huge old Douglas fir. There, did you see that tiny speck flash through the needles, a speedy black shadow against the dark boughs? You just saw your first hermit warbler!

If a tiny flitting speck 200 feet up in a fir tree seems a disap-pointing way to check hermit warbler off your life list, then consider the merits of good timing: for a week, maybe two, in early summer, from knee level to treetop level, these bedazzling little warblers sing ebulliently and chase one another frantically, the males practically coming to fisticuffs in the Coast and Cas-cade Mountains from Northern California to southern Washing-ton. They’ve arrived from their wintering grounds in Mexico and Guatemala, eager to establish ter-ritories and find mates. During a brief late-May/early-June win-dow, these frenetic lemon-yellow bundles of energy flit and dart and zip about seemingly every-

where in prime locations high in the mountains.

This is prime time for bird-ers to catch more than a fleet-ing glimpse of these Northwest endemics, because thereafter, hermit warblers retreat to the conifer-forest canopy, where they are easy to hear but difficult to see—one of the most frustrating species for enthusiasts eager to see all of the far-West warblers.

Late May through the first half of June also just happens to be the best time to find some of the Pacific Northwest’s other must-see endemics—and you won’t find them on the region’s deservedly famous wetlands wildlife refuges, the bird- watching hotspots, such as Klamath and Malheur national wildlife refuges.

No, to find the Northwest Fab Five—hermit warbler, Townsend’s warbler, white-head-ed woodpecker, chestnut-backed chickadee, and mountain quail—you must immerse yourself a

Fab Five of the Far Northwest

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Hermit warbler.



tion is common. The flashy black-and-yellow Townsend’s warbler is most easily found on the east slope of the Cascades, and particularly from Central Oregon north through Washing-ton. Townsend’s warblers forage at all levels, usually in semi-open conifer woodlots and associated riparian margins.

Townsend’s warblers are increasingly numerous as you head northward along the east slope of the Cascades, and are ubiquitous in the mountains around Leavenworth, Washing-ton, but also fairly easy to find in Oregon, such as in the central Oregon’s Metolius River area. Hermit warblers are surprisingly common in Oregon, less so in Washington; specific high-prob-ability locations include Crater Lake National Park as well as the Santiam Junction area, both in the Oregon Cascades.

White-headed WoodpeckerStrongly tied to ponderosa

pine forest, the aptly named white-headed woodpecker finds abundant habitat along the eastern foot of the Cascades throughout Oregon and Wash-ington. Here, a narrow band of ponderosa-dominated for-est bridges the gap between the mixed-conifer forest of the east slope of the mountains and the juniper woodlands farther east. In prime habitat within this zone,

little deeper, literally and figura-tively, into the Pacific Northwest. Happily for birders, all five can be found in reasonably close proximity in the Cascade Moun-tains, although the chestnut-backed chickadee is more readily seen west of the mountains.

Hermit and Townsend’s Warblers

The treetop-loving hermit warbler is closely akin to the equally showy Townsend’s warbler, so much so that where their breeding ranges overlap along the crest of the Cascades from central Oregon through central Washington, hybridiza-

Hermit warbler.

Hermit warbler, male.

Townsend’s warbler, male.



and in the forested slopes south-west of Ellensburg, Washing-ton—and in many other places.

Mountain QuailIn contrast to the widespread

and gregarious California quail, the mountain quail is both elusive and uncommon. It shuns flying, preferring to escape danger by simply running into dense cover, and prefers steep, brutally rugged mountain slopes. The easiest way to catch sight of mountain quail is to drive or hike gravel forest roads in prime Oregon locations—such as the North Umpqua River canyon or Jackson County’s Pilot Rock area—and hope for the best. They don’t make it easy.

These handsome, chestnut-flanked quail can also be located by their eerie, exotic call, or more accurately their general location can be discerned, but actually following the sound of a call-ing mountain quail to catch a glimpse of the little ventriloquist is usually a fool’s errand. None-theless, during late spring, listen for the ringing eee-ark—even if you can’t find the bird, you’ve identified it by sound.

Chestnut-backed ChickadeePurely a Northwesterner, the

chestnut-backed chickadee is a common denizen of evergreen forest and mixed woodlands, especially west of the Cascades

and at a few places farther east in the Northwest, these piebald woodpeckers are common. Dur-ing spring—May and June—they also tend to be vocal.

Happily for birders, white-headed woodpeckers frequently forage low on tree trunks, making them much easier to observe than some of the other woodpeckers found in the same areas. They are widespread within their ideal habitat and easy to find around aforementioned Metolius River

White-headed woodpecker.

Mountain quail.



summit. More demure than the abundant black-capped chicka-dee, chestnut-backed chickadees are easy to overlook. Nonethe-less, they frequent birdfeeders and thrive around cities and towns with lots of evergreen trees, even in the low-lying valleys of western Oregon and western Washington. Look for them in forested parks along the high-ways leading up into the moun-tains. These little chickadees tend to flutter quickly from point to point; flock members typically fly one at a time across openings. Their calls include a high-pitched and often steady peep-peep-peep-peep, and also a rapid and airy chick-a-dee-dee, less musical than the namesake call of the black-capped chickadee.

On the GroundOregon and Washington’s fa-

mous wildlife refuges are deserv-edly popular among birdwatch-ers, but to find the Fab Five, you need to branch out into parts of

Oregon and Washington less frequently targeted by birders. Resources aplenty can help narrow your search, chief among them ebird (ebird.org), an interactive tool that allows you to search the region by species to find specific locations a bird has been seen frequently and most recently. Local

Audubon chapters offer help both online and in person at meetings, and US Forest Service offices provide excellent maps and other details for locations frequented by these and other species.

If pressed for one single loca-tion among several prime options in the region, I’d offer up Oregon as the best bet in general—hermit warblers and mountain quail are more common in Oregon than in Washington—and I’d suggest the mountains south and southeast of Ashland or the Cascades slope from Sisters west to Santiam Junc-tion. With astute planning, birders can find all or most of the Fab Five in a relatively small geographic area and within the span of two or three days—or perhaps all in one day for what might qualify as a Fab Five grand slam.

Outdoor writer and photog-rapher John Shewey is the lead author of the field guide Birds of the Pacific Northwest.JO

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Chestnut-backed chickadee.


http://ebird.org


HHumans meddle. Apparently, we can’t resist. Consider Eugene Schieffelin, the amiable drug manufacturer who in the 1890s allegedly tried to bring all the birds mentioned by Shakespeare to North America. Although questions remain about his motives and the degree of his in-volvement, there’s no doubt that Schieffelin captured some birds and carried them across the At-lantic to the United States. After

all, as a member of the American Acclimatization Society, it was his duty. The society’s mis-sion was to introduce to North America “such foreign varieties of the animal and vegetable king-dom as may be useful or interest-ing.” These days, of course, we realize what a bad idea that was. It should surprise no one that the American Acclimatization Society went extinct long ago.

Schieffelin is sometimes

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blamed for bringing the English sparrow across the Atlantic—where Americans eventually began calling it the house spar-row—but if he did, he wasn’t the first. According to Ted R. An-derson’s exhaustively researched natural history, Biology of the Ubiquitous House Sparrow, this sparrow, the most widely distrib-uted bird in the world, was first introduced to North America in 1850, when eight pairs were carried to Brooklyn by the staff of the Brooklyn Institute (which later became the Brooklyn Mu-seum). In 1852 or 1853, another 100 individuals were brought on a steamship from Liverpool

to New York City and released. Subsequent releases in New York, Philadelphia, Ohio, Michi-gan, and Wisconsin ensured their survival on this side of the Atlantic.

Schieffelin might not have brought sparrows to the New World, but the evidence is pretty clear that he brought skylarks, nightingales, chaffinches, song thrushes, and bullfinches, none of which survived. Donald Peattie, in his 1941 memoir The Road of a Naturalist, suggests that Schieffelin might have tried to transplant European robins, thrushes, and blackbirds as well, again without success. Then in

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English sparrows, aka house sparrows.



ers, and other native birds that nest in holes and claiming those nesting sites for themselves.

Starlings have been an air-borne hazard as well, in part be-cause they flock in large numbers and because they are individu-ally much denser in body mass than most other birds. In 1960 a flock of an estimated 20,000 starlings flew into the path of a propeller-driven Lockheed Electra shortly after it took off from Boston’s Logan Airport, stalling its engines and causing the plane to crash into Boston Harbor, killing 62 of the 72 pas-sengers and crew on board. It remains the deadliest bird strike in history.

It took a few years for the birds to thrive after Schieffelin released the first of them in

1890 and 1891 Eugene carried cages full of starlings across the Atlantic—40, 60, 80, or 100 of them, depending on the sourc-es—and released them into New York’s Central Park. America’s sky would never be the same.

Nor would America’s cit-ies, forests, or fields. Within a few decades, starlings in flocks of thousands—and sometimes millions—descended on farm-ers’ fields and orchards and devoured crops by the tons. They devoured insects, as well, but most agronomists agree that the birds have been far more harm-ful than beneficial. The U.S. Department of Agriculture esti-mated in 2014 that starlings cost farmers about a billion dollars a year. They’re bullies also, shov-ing aside bluebirds, woodpeck- BR

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European starlings.



resident named E. Brown asked: “Can you inform me what sort of bird it is which frequents this neighborhood, answering closely the description of a starling, viz., brown plumage, penciled, and darker on head than body; beak about one inch long, and rich yellow color; tail rather short, and legs rather long? … It may be found almost any clear morn-ing on a large tree in a yard at the southwest corner of Seventy-fifth Street and the Boulevard. Do you know of any foreign birds having been liberated in this city besides sparrows, and by whom? Research has so far failed to identify these birds.”

The editors responded: “In reply to the above questions, William T. Davis, a Staten Island naturalist, who is familiar with the birds in this vicinity, says: ‘There seems to me to be no doubt that Mr. Brown has been observing the starling… A flock of about forty starlings was lib-erated by Mr. Eugene Schieffelin in Central Park in March, 1890. A pair of these birds built their nest in the roof of the Natural History Museum, at Seventy-seventh Street, in May, 1892, and another pair were seen with their young on the lawn of a residence on Riverside Drive during the same year. At that time their fate as resident birds was far from certain, but now there are

Central Park in 1890 and 1891. Soon after, a pair was found nest-ing in the eaves of the Museum of Natural History near the park, an event noted with interest by a few observant New Yorkers. Half a dozen years later the birds had strayed beyond Manhat-tan and were soon nesting as far south as Florida and as far north as Alaska. They ate just about anything, and they reproduced prodigiously.

Students of invasive spe-cies will recognize the pattern. An animal or plant finds a new ecosystem to its liking, with few natural predators, and suddenly its population explodes and the invader begins destroying habitat and decimating endemic species. Often a domino effect results. Cornell University ecologists have tallied more than 30,000 non-indigenous plant and animal species that have been introduced into the United States. The cost to the nation is estimated at more than $125 billion per year.

The starling infestation is interesting because it became so widespread so quickly and because we can document the changes in public sentiment as the bird established itself. A search through the archives of the New York Times uncovers a chronicle of evolving opinion as the birds spread across North America. On March 2, 1900, in a letter to the editors, a city

European starlings.



they devour insects, they are of use to the farmer. It is said that they will eat potato bugs. Their nests are usually built in the eaves of buildings and in old hollow trees, and their whistling is pleas-ant and cheerful. As the starling has not been found to interfere with other birds, we may be glad that he has come to stay.”

colonies in many places near the city. Many starlings may be seen at times in the tall trees [through-out the New York metropolitan area].’”

Davis proceeded to bestow praise that was probably shared by most people, at first: “They are common in England and over most of Europe, and, as

A starling appears just once in all of Shakespeare. It’s in Henry IV, Part I (Act I, Scene III), in a scene in which the angry Hotspur, wishing to torment Henry, conceives the idea of having a star-ling repeat the name of the king’s brother-in-law over and over.

Hotspur says:

But I will find him when he lies asleep, And in his ear I’ll hol-low “Mortimer!” Nay, I’ll have a star-ling shall be taught to speak Nothing but “Mortimer,” and give

it him To keep his anger still in motion.

Shakespeare knew, of course, that starlings are excellent mimics and that they can sometimes be taught to speak a few words.


The source of starlings in North America




yesterday. The police regard this as a conservative estimate, and believe that [the number is] 100,000 birds at least...”

July 9, 1933: “Like the English sparrow, the European starling is rolling up enemies by the score. Michigan farmers recently reported that thousands of star-lings had settled in every county of the State. The huge flocks not only ravage the orchards, eating tons of fruit, but they commit a more serious offense, driving other birds out of their homes and sanctuaries.”

By 1950 starlings had colo-nized North America from coast to coast and from Mexico to the Hudson Bay, and ornithologists

A decade and a half later starlings were no longer con-sidered “of use to the farmer.” They had become an infestation: “Glen Ridge, N.J., Oct. 14, 1914—The State Game and Fish Commission has given permission to the authorities of this borough to destroy the European starlings which have greatly amazed residents of several streets where the birds congregated in enormous num-bers. Attempts of the residents to drive away the birds have been fruitless and they petitioned the local authori-ties to destroy them.”

By 1928 the birds had reached the Mississippi River. Twenty years later they were in Cali-fornia. The Times continued to document the invasion and our changing attitudes toward it:

December 20, 1931: “Bal-timore has recently waged a defensive war against an army of starlings. Thousands of birds swooped down upon the city without warning...”

Jan 6, 1933: “An army of starlings estimated at 50,000 is making a night sanctuary of the exterior of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was disclosed BR

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A molting juvenile European starling.



Often during baby-bird season, we find nestlings squirm-ing on the lawn, where they’ve fallen from their cubbyhole nests 20 feet above. Many are dead when we find them, but one day we discovered two that were apparently unhurt. They were nearly fledged, about half the size of adults, and were strug-gling vainly to climb the trunk toward home and safety. We didn’t have a ladder high enough to help, so the boys and I placed the terrified nestlings together in a makeshift nest, placed it in a

estimated the population in the United States had exceeded 50 million. (Today there are more than 200 million.)

Every spring the giant sugar maple at the center of our yard becomes a starling hotel, its knothole rooms available by the week or month. Starlings take over the tree so completely that the ordinarily fearless red squir-rels that claim it for their winter quarters hardly dare climb the trunk. The moment they get near the tree a dozen starlings mob them and they wisely retreat.

It’s not clear how many birds Schieffelin and the American Acclimatization Society transported to America, but if they had Shakespeare’s complete aviary in mind, they prob-ably fell short. Scholars have assembled an inventory of at least 64

birds mentioned in the plays and sonnets. The inventory includes black-bird, bunting, cormorant, crow, cuckoo, dove, duck, eagle, falcon, finch, goose, gull, guinea hen hedge sparrow, heron, jay, kestrel, kingfisher, kite, lapwing, lark, loon,

magpie, mallard, night-ingale, osprey, ostrich, and owl. There’s men-tion, too, of “paraquito” (parakeet), parrot, par-tridge, peacock, pelican, pheasant, pigeon, quail, raven, rook, snipe, swal-low, swan, thrush, vulture, woodcock, and wren.


Shakespeare’s other birds

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Osprey. Mute swans.




ing dives. The squirrel, who was no fool, leaped for the walnut tree nearby and was chased half a dozen times around the trunk by a tightly banking starling.

Not long ago I watched a flock of 30 starlings land in the high weeds next to my office and disappear utterly. One moment they were dropping from the sky in a mass of flashing wings, and the next they were gone. I stepped outside for a better look, and the entire flock rose at once. Their combined wing-beats made a rushing sound, like a sudden shower of rain, or like the spray from a garden sprinkler as it comes around. The flock climbed, switched, switched again, then flowed in an undulating stream across the meadow to an oak tree. When they reached the tree, they disap-peared again.

Adapted from A Walk in the Animal Kingdom: Essays on Animals Wild and Tame, by Jerry Dennis, with illustrations by Glenn Wolff. Published July 2015, Big Maple Press. Jerry Dennis is the author of The Living Great Lakes, It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes, The Bird in the Waterfall, and other books. His essays have appeared in numerous publica-tions, including Audubon, Smith-sonian, Wildlife Conservation, Orion, and The New York Times. Visit him at jerrydennis.net.

cardboard box, and carried them inside the house.

Since childhood I had wanted to raise starlings and teach them to mimic a few words or even a few phrases of music, as Mozart was said to have done with his own pet starling. But it quickly became obvious that these two—my sons named them Beavis and Butthead—were not interested in experiments in vocalization. Nor were they interested in the bits of ground beef and other foods we tried to feed them. Finally, we took them back outside, set them in their nest on the lawn beneath the tree, and retreated inside the house to watch through the win-dows. Within minutes an adult starling fluttered to the ground and shoved a cluster of larvae into Beavis’s yawning mouth, then flew off. We have cats in the neighborhood, as well as fox, opossum, raccoon, crow, and other opportunistic eaters of nestlings, so I went outside and placed the nest and the young birds on a bird-feeder platform on a post well above the ground. Again, within minutes, an adult was there, stuffing food down their throats.

A gray squirrel began climb-ing the post with possible criminal intent and was instantly mobbed by three adult starlings. The birds made terrifying alarm calls and swooped in rapid, straf-


http://jerrydennis.net


TThere’s a gull down there.

Well, of course there’s a gull down there. It’s a chilly winter day on Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, and I’m standing near one of the beach entrances, looking down across the beach toward the ocean. There are al-ways gulls “down there” near the water’s edge—ring-billed gulls, herring gulls, great black-backed gulls. But this gull is different. Through my binoculars, I can see it has a green band around one leg. That band has white letters

on it. If I can get a little closer, I should be able to read them through my scope.

I saw my first such banded gull around the end of April 2012. That particular gull, an adult herring gull, let me get within 10 feet before it moved away—close enough that with some help from my camera, I could read both the green band and the metal federal band. I searched the Web and found that banded birds can be reported at the website reportband.gov. So I

See Where They Fly Banded Gulls in the Gulf of Maine

J o n W o o l f

Herring gull T47, the gull that inspired the author

to start reportingbanded gulls.

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http://reportband.gov


herring gull banded in July 2010, age unknown, sex unknown, but a regular nester on Appledore.

Well, that bit of information motivated me to keep an eye out for banded gulls and report any with band numbers that I could read. So far, my total is 33 sight-ings of about 20 different gulls. All but one have been Appledore gulls. Half a dozen or so have been great black-backed gulls; the rest have been herring gulls.

There was E71, an adult her-ring gull in very worn breeding plumage. It was accompanied by R77, a juvenile herring gull that apparently mistook E71 for its parent.

There was the great black-backed gull in Rye Harbor, strutting along the gunwale of a fishing boat and sporting a black band with white lettering, code 7E4.

went there and reported both the federal band number and the colored band with its number. The webserver looked up the federal number in its database and told me where, when, and by whom the bird had been banded. The gull turned out to be a local, banded as an adult on Appledore Island, one of the Isles of Shoals about six miles off the New Hampshire coast.

That was that, I thought—bird sighted, bird reported, end of story. Interesting, but not something I’d likely repeat very often. Most gulls are skittish birds; getting within 50 feet is hard, let alone 10!

A day or two later, I got an email from a gentleman named Bill Clark. He said that he was familiar with the gull I’d re-ported. He’s a member of Dr. Julie Ellis’s Gull Banding Project, which was responsible for band-ing that gull and many other gulls over the past eight years. He thanked me for the report and gave me some more information about the gull, including records of other places and times it had been sighted. He also asked if I could send him my pictures as documentation for the sight-ing. And he told me something I didn’t know: The green band with its white text was enough to identify the individual bird, without the federal band num-ber. My gull was T47, an adult

Close-up of T47’s leg bands.

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show them at known ages and provide a firm reference for what a HEGU looks like in its first cycle, second cycle, etc.

In the spring of 2013, Bill Clark and Dr. Ellis invited me to visit Appledore Island to see the Gull Banding Project team at work. An opportunity to visit Appledore is rare unless you’re a researcher or a student, so I jumped at the chance. So it was that I found myself headed out to Appledore on the morning of May 16. That week was the spring session for the gull-band-ing team. While they do band a few adult gulls, their main goal during the week is to prowl the island, notebooks in hand, searching for banded gulls and

There was M69, another adult herring gull that frequently hangs around Hampton Beach. I man-aged to read its band through my scope, but it wouldn’t let me get close enough for a picture.

There was P02, the gull that first alerted me to one practical result of spotting banded gulls: You know how old the bird is. Every birder who has attempted immature gulls knows how hard they can be to identify. But if you know that a bird was banded as a chick on a specific date, then you know how old it is and you can use it as a fixed reference point: This is what a typical herring gull looks like just after fledging, while that is what a great black-backed gull looks like around its second birthday. A member of Dr. Ellis’s team is currently build-ing a catalog of banded gulls that

Juvenile herring Gull R77, left, and adult E71.

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open. For those nests, the team shoos the incubating gull away for a minute, then places a wire cage over the nest. The cage is designed so that the returning gull can walk in, but then it can’t get out again. When the gull is safely inside the cage, the band-

their nests. Team members re-cord where they re-sight banded gulls and mark every nest where one or both parents are banded. The marked nests will be given extra attention in the summer session, during which the gull chicks are banded.

A gull nest is a relatively simple thing. Most of the time it’s made of grasses gathered into a simple bowl, inside which the female gull lays her two to three eggs.

While the work is interesting and exciting, it’s not always the sort of excitement you want. Banding gulls isn’t like band-ing songbirds. Herring gulls and great black-backed gulls are large, strong, and often aggressive in defense of their nests. Members of the team always wear protective headgear, because the gulls usually strike from above and can deal serious injuries with both their hooked beaks and their clawed feet. Even when they’re attacking from the ground, they’re danger-ous.

The team has several ways of capturing an adult gull. One team member specializes in sim-ply (but carefully!) grabbing the bird off its nest. While effective, this method only works with herring gulls that are nesting in heavy brush. It doesn’t work with great black-backed gulls, or with nests that are in the

Studying banded immature gulls is a great way to learn gull plumages. Gull P02, above, was banded as a chick in 2010. This photo was taken in June 2012, so it’s showing late-second-cycle plumage.

A gull nest with three eggs.

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(2)



Why Study Gulls?Gulls in general are good

subjects for large-scale popula-tion studies. First of all, they’re common. Second, they’re large birds that build large, easily found nests. Third, they are large enough to wear field-readable bands, which makes tracking the birds much easier. Fourth, grown gulls face relatively few threats to individual survival. Eagles are their only significant natural predator. Disease and starva-tion are the other major natural hazards; entanglement in fishing line and being hit by cars are the top human-made dangers. Finally, gulls are keystone spe-cies to coastal ecosystems. The health of the gull population can tell us a lot about the health of the ecosystem in which the gulls live. (For more information plus regular updates on Dr. Ellis’s research, see her blog at gullsofappledore.wordpress.com.)

The gulls of Appledore Is-land are particularly good sub-jects because the island is such a restricted field of study. Ap-pledore is only 95 acres in size, and most of it is easily acces-sible by foot, with a bit of care. The island holds about 1,100 nesting pairs of gulls, which are divided into several smaller, dis-tinct subcolonies by the island’s geography. Here, a biologist can watch gulls acting and interact-ing almost at her doorstep. She

ers return, pick up the cage, and then carefully remove the gull from the cage.

Either way, the end result is a gull in a large cloth bag. The next step is to band the gull. First a USGS-standard metal band is put around one leg. This comes first because the USGS band is the most important step. Even if the gull escapes the next minute, that critical metal band is still in place. Next, the field-readable band is put on the other leg. Then the team takes measurements: wing length, tarsus (leg) length, head length. They take a blood sample for later genetic analysis. When the procedure is complete, the gull is released unhurt.

A great black-backed gull shades its nest

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http://gullsofappledore.wordpress.com


pairs, but falls sharply when they have the larger, more aggres-sive great black-backed gulls for neighbors. For the great black-backed gulls, the reverse is true: Nesting success is higher when they are near herring gull nests, and significantly lower when they are surrounded by others of their own species. It seems that great black-backs make poor neighbors not only for other species but even for their own—a surprising result for a colony-nesting seabird! Colonial nesting is supposed to increase repro-ductive success, but great black-backs have become so aggressive and territorial that their nesting is suffering as a result.

While studies of gull nesting habits continue, the Gull Banding

can compare great black-backed gulls to herring gulls, or the gulls of the rocky edges to those of the grassy interior, all within a half-mile of each other.

What Are the Gulls Telling Us?Study of Appledore’s gull

population has yielded several important insights into the ecol-ogy of gulls and their coastal en-vironment. In the 1990s, Dr. Ellis and her colleague Dr. Thomas Good made a study of nesting results of single- and mixed-species subcolonies on the island. They discovered a complex inter-play between the two species of gulls on their Appledore nesting grounds. For herring gulls, nest-ing success is good when they’re surrounded by other herring gull

This gull gladly would have taken a chunk out of a bander’s arm, but she made sure it only got her clipboard.

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All About the Isles of Shoals

The gull banding team for the 2013 season. Dr. Julie Ellis is second from left; volunteer Bill Clark is right.

Appledore Island is one of the Isles of Shoals, a cluster of small islands about six miles off the New Hampshire coast. There are 14 named islands. Of these, four are par-ticularly significant to birders:

Appledore Island is the largest of the cluster, at 95 acres. It hosts sev-eral structures that date back more than a cen-tury. It’s owned by the Star Island Corporation and run primarily by the Shoals Marine Laboratory as the base for a com-bination of marine and land-based studies. Besides being Dr. Ellis’s focus, Appledore is

home to the Appledore Bird Banding Station, which uses the island’s nature as a migrant trap to net and band hun-dreds of migrating song-birds every year. Access to Appledore is by boat only, and is strictly con-trolled.

White and Seavey islands (they’re con-nected at low tide) are home to a thriving col-ony of terns. The colony includes common, rose-ate, and Arctic terns. It’s one of very few places on the East Coast that you can go and have a reasonable chance of seeing all three species. While it takes special permission to land on

the island, watching the terns from a boat isn’t difficult to do.

Star Island is the only island that is generally open to the public. A hotel here is oper-ated by the Unitarian Universalist Church and rented out for conven-tions and other gather-ings. There are also visits by boats several times a day. Like Appledore a mile away, Star Island is a migrant trap. In springtime, you can see dozens of species of songbirds in the island’s 45 acres, including as many as 18 species of warblers. JO

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Project itself is slowly building a picture of how the gulls disperse from Appledore in the off-season. As you might expect, the large majority of the gulls stay close to Appledore, while a few travel to more distant wintering grounds. Appledore Island gulls have been seen as close as Odiorne Point in New Hampshire, and as far away as Florida and Texas.

Dr. Ellis’s yearly surveys also show a drop in survival rates for adults of both species. Neither herring nor great black-backed is in any danger, but the popu-lations of both species on the island have dropped noticeably, reflecting a trend that is occurring throughout New England. This trend may be connected to a loss of food sources: open landfills, once a rich food source for gulls, are being closed all along the coast, while the slow decay of the near-shore fishing industry in the Gulf of Maine means that gulls can’t scavenge as much from the fishing boats either.

What Can Birders Do to Help?This, at least, is a question

that’s easily answered: We can all help Dr. Ellis, and other gull banders, by reporting banded gulls. Any gull, any species, any time, any place.

All of Dr. Ellis’s gulls are easily identified from the field-readable bands. An Appledore herring gull wears a green band with white

characters, and the characters are always a letter followed by two digits: T47, C30, M72, etc. An Appledore great black-backed gull has a black band with white lettering, and the code pattern is number-letter-number, such as 7E4. Bands on other species of birds, or with other color patterns, are from other banding studies; however, they all can use our help in reporting banded birds.

Any time you see a field-band-ed bird, you should make a note of the following items:• The color of the band• The location of the band

(leg, wing, etc.)• The printed code on the band• The color of the code char-

acters• The location and date of the

sightingIf possible, you should also

take a digital photo, preferably one that clearly shows the band and also shows the bird’s physi-cal condition.

Then go to reportband.gov to report your sighting. Each sight-ing is a new data point for Dr. Ellis’s study. As the data accumu-lates, she builds a more accurate picture of how the Appledore gulls live and behave.

Jon Woolf is a computer pro-grammer, photographer, and long-time birder from New Hampshire. He organizes pelagic-birding trips into the Gulf of Maine.


http://reportband.gov


T“That’s the third murder we’ve witnessed today!” I remarked to Ezra, my seven-year-old son who sits in the front seat of the tandem kayak we’re paddling.

“What?” Ezra asks. “What do you mean?” Of all the character-istics of kids, unbridled curiosity is my favorite. I prey upon it. And now, I was doing exactly that.

“You mean you didn’t see that murder?” I retort, as water drop-lets drip from my paddle and roll down my forearm. “Well, surely you had to hear it? Listen! You can still hear it!” Ezra swivels in his seat and catches my smirk.

“You mean the crows?” he

asks quizzically.“Yeah. Did you know that a

group of crows is called a mur-der?”

“No.” Ezra faces forward again and resumes paddling in a rare moment of thoughtful silence. He’s somewhat rankled. Like most seven-year-olds, he’d rather be teaching me than vice versa. But his curiosity trumps all. I know what’s coming, and a few seconds later Ezra doesn’t let me down.

“Why?” he asks.Despite my anticipation of the

question, I had absolutely no idea about the origin of “a murder.” Much like a crow, I was an invet-

One Short of a ParliamentOne Short of a Parliamente l i J . K n A p p

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erate scavenger. Only I preferred to pick from the carcass of odd-ball natural history trivia. On one such foray, I’d stumbled upon the collective noun. Collective nouns are those that describe groupings of individuals. For people, like “a crew” or “a team,” we’re so used to them that we take them for granted. But for the nonhuman realm, they’re very little used in common parlance despite being so vivid and illustrative. How had I lived so much of my life, I’d wondered on my day of dis-covery, without these nutritious nuggets? Like other collectors, I quickly amassed a precious horde. But in my merriment, I neglected the more laborious work of figuring out why they came to be. And now my son had exposed my ignorance and rankled me. But like most proud fathers, I couldn’t let him know this. So I deftly redirected the conversation.

“Isn’t murder such a cooler word than flock?” I remarked. “And the word for a group of ravens is even cooler. It’s an un-kindness of ravens!”

“Why?” Ezra repeated his prior question. I tried one last time to dodge.

“But some group names are dumb. Do you see those killdeer over there?” I asked, pointing with my paddle.

“Yeah.”“Well, a group of plovers like

them is called a congregation.”“Why don’t you like that word,

Dad?”“Because it’s too hard to say.

Too many syllables.” “I don’t think it’s hard to

say,” Ezra replied, pronouncing congregation aloud. Ezra had a knack for exposing my baseless judgments.

“Yeah, I guess it’s not too bad,” I replied. “I just don’t like it.”

The cawing of the crows was replaced by the gentle sounds of our paddles in the calm water. We both fell silent and entered our own subconscious orbits of thought that kayaking so se-renely ushers in. While Ezra was likely dwelling on the underwater whirlpools he was creating with his paddle, I was dredging the dumpster of the other collective nouns I’d stuck in my mental scrapbook.

A Collection of Collective NounsIt was true. I loved collective

nouns. But some I liked far more than others. The ones I liked best were the ones that seemed so apt, so descriptive of their species. Jays, for example, are strident birds. When their dander is up, they can awaken a sleepy forest, or a man sleeping in a forest, in milliseconds. The Steller’s jay is the worst offender. Steller’s jays have nearly sent me into cardiac arrest on several still mornings I



spent camping under the arms of redwoods in California. So, the collective noun—a scold of jays—is apropos. The same logic applies for several other species.

For anybody who has watched hundreds of starlings suddenly descend upon a lawn and the monotone cacophony they create will have to agree that a murmuration of star-lings is ideal. As for ravens, an unkindness suits their dark and brooding demeanor. More light-ly, however, is the name for a group of ring-necked pheasants. Although it’s only happened once, I’ll never forget the sea of colors that surrounded me when a few pheasants exploded from a field in front of me. It was in-deed a bouquet of pheasants, a term that must have arisen from

an artistically minded naturalist. Or perhaps a love-struck hunter on his way home to a damsel.

Other collective nouns are special for the sheer winsome joy they create. Sure, a flock of goldfinches is fine. But gold-finches, especially when they adorn my coneflowers like Christmas ornaments in late summer, deserve more than that. So yes, I call them a charm. The same goes for larks. When meadowlarks alight from a flowery field, they are far more than a flock. They are an exalta-tion of larks. And if I’m ever so lucky to someday see a lot of godwits amassing on a mudflat, I’m sure I’ll agree I’m watching an omniscience.

Other collective nouns, how-ever, clutter my mind like dusty W

IKI C

OM

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NS

One ring-necked pheasant; two or more would be a bouquet.



EtymologiesAs soon as I had rehung the

kayak to its perch in the garage and the last droplet had evapo-rated from my paddle, I set about researching how the odd bevy of avian collective nouns came to be. The first thing I real-ized is that they’re old. 1486, to be precise. The Dame Juliana Barnes was tossing them about in the Book of St. Albans before Columbus had gotten around to sailing the ocean blue. Wow. Less surprising, however, is the fact that many of the terms were as-sociated with the three important H’s of the day: hunting, her-aldry, and hawking. A bouquet of pheasants probably seemed all the more fragrant when a

tchotchkes. With a sense of ill-found superiority I ignore them because I want to change them. As I mentioned earlier, a congre-gation of plovers needs to go. It should be a panic of plovers. Es-pecially so when a peregrine flies over the beach. Other collective nouns simply need slight modifi-cation. Everybody knows that a descent of woodpeckers should actually be an ascent, for wood-peckers only climb up trees, not down. Descent, while rich and descriptive, should be reserved for the devil downheads—the nuthatches.

Other collectives need to be jettisoned altogether. Bobolinks live in open fields. They migrate thousands of miles between the Americas, and their otherworld-ly song is unfettered and free. A chain of bobolinks doesn’t fit. Chains and imperialism should be reserved for the house spar-rows that have usurped lands from many natives. And while I’m at it, a siege of herons? Get serious. Most herons are down-right stoics, far more content to spectate than lay siege. Yes, they suddenly launch forward like lightning when an unsuspect-ing fish swims by. But this is no siege. It’s a snatch. Wouldn’t a snatch of herons suit them bet-ter? Most herons hunt more like kingfishers, which is why I’m so fond of a concentration of kingfishers. BR

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One green heron is insufficient for a siege.



Among all the birds, owls do this best. So I’d brought my students out to a nameless swamp to find my most reliable owl, a barred owl that had never failed to regale my classes. This particular owl had predictably appeared for five straight years.

Except this year. We had silently entered the woods edg-ing the swamp and were now reclining on the forest floor. My playback machine was loud, the sky was dark, and the trees were still. It was a perfect night for an owl. But my owl—old Mr. Reliable—apparently didn’t think so. So far, it was a perfect night only for mosquitoes. We sat and generously donated blood to the invertebrate world. Twenty minutes elapsed. Thirty. The woods grew so dark I could hardly distinguish one student from another. And knowing their discouragement, I was glad

well-trained hawk was bringing one back for the dinner table. The other colorful collectives got their foothold in mythology and folklore. Owls, for example, were the symbol for the Greek god-dess of wisdom, Athena. Due to their look of lofty erudition, a group of them was thought to resemble a parliament. Crows, on the other hand, evidently held trials to mete out punishments for their fellow corvid transgres-sors. Those found guilty were executed by the flock. In my wooded corner of the Northeast, some mornings I’m awakened by incessant cawing that often crescendos. Irritated, I pull my pillow over my head and visual-ize assassinated crows dropping out of tree limbs. Such is the power of the collective noun.

Fortunately, I have not transgressed my fellow crows; I have, however, come close to transgressing my students. My most recent moment occurred after I dragged my students out for an evening of owling. We had spent the day straining our necks trying to make sense of the confusion of warblers (an-other very appropriate collective noun). With the course set to end in a week, I wanted to leave them with an experience they’d never forget. One they’d tell their friends about. And one that ultimately would keep a flame of outdoor appreciation alit forever. BR

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One barred owl short of a parliament.



up. But I was happier still to see the transformative power of encountering a special creature on its own terms. Even in our cyber world where experiences are increasingly virtualized, these desensitizing layers of abstrac-tion can be instantly peeled away with just one barred owl. Or two, in our case.

One of my former students, Laura, had caught wind of our evening trip and stashed herself in the van. Having had me as a professor before, she’d grown accustomed to my love of the collective noun. Amidst the din, Laura suddenly called out from the back, “Eli, we were just one short of a parliament!”

“Aren’t two owls enough for a parliament?” I retorted. While I agreed with Laura’s idea that a parliament should have at least three owls, I couldn’t resist a chance to play the role of devil’s advocate. Laura smiled but didn’t respond. She had no answer.

Neither did I. And now, even after consulting several sources, I still don’t. According to most dictionaries, a group consists of two or more individuals. Since a parliament refers to a collective group, technically two should suffice. But a parliament, at least the parliament my mind conjures up of bombastic British folk in wigs, needs more. So, I’m with Laura. As mesmerizing as the

I couldn’t. Finally, I got up to leave and the students followed suit. On a lark (an exaltation!), I tried one last call holding my playback device high as if be-seeching the avian gods to send down an ambassador.

Miraculously, the gods acqui-esced. On silent wings, a barred owl barreled across the sky and landed just above us on a broken branch protruding perpendicu-larly from a gnarled white pine. He looked down at us, swiveled his head in the mechanical way that owls do, and then rent the silence with the best who-cooks-for-you rendition I’d ever heard. Despite my earlier admonitions for silence, several students audibly gasped. And then, to top it off, a second owl flew in and called. This excited the first owl who then took up where the second left off. Set off against the sky, the two silhouetted owls worked into a dither. In the midst of their performance I reluctantly motioned for the students to follow me out of the forest. My owl had delivered and even brought a friend. I would return him his swamp. We had intruded long enough.

How Many in a Collective?Back in the van, the students

broke loose with stories of awe and astonishment. I drove back to campus silently smiling. I was relieved my owl had shown



mosquito-infested swamps. Be-cause even if I end up one short of a parliament, I may yet find a charm. Or be given a bouquet. And if I hear a scold or a mur-muration emanating out of the darkest part of the woods, I’ll be extra alert. Because I might expe-rience a sudden unkindness. And who knows when, heaven forbid, I’ll witness another murder.

Eli J. Knapp is a professor of

intercultural studies and biology at Houghton College in Hough-ton, New York, and author of a collection of short stories, in which this is included: The Delightful Horror of Family Birding: Shar-ing Nature with the Next Gen-eration, Torry House Press, 2018.

owls were, we saw a pair, not a parliament.

Several months later I got a package in the mail with Laura’s return address on it. I opened it up and pulled out a book written for teenagers with a forgettable picture on the front. But the egregious title, Owl’s Well That Ends Well, had me grinning ear-to-ear nonetheless. Indeed, all was well. While we may have missed a parliament during our night of owling, I had learned yet again, that the only predict-able part of nature was its unpre-dictability. This attribute—while at times excruciating—I’ve come to relish most. It’s why I’ll keep luring my son along on kayaking trips and marching students into BR

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A parliament of great horned owls.



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ITRUE NATURETRUE NATURE

by Julie Zickefoose

The Naturalist’s Dilemma

An eastern tiger swallowtail on Joe Pye weed.




IIt is the first view I see in the morning when I raise the blind, and I study it like a passage in a book, my eye traveling over its length and breadth to see what has changed, who is passing by. It’s the meadow that, when Bill and I bought it in 1992, was pretty much all grass—little bluestem—and good for noth-ing in our neighbor Carl’s book. “Broom sedge,” he scoffed. “Cows can’t eat it. Cuts their mouths.” He advised us to plow it up, seed it, and start over. That was just the first bit of advice about this meadow that we didn’t take.

When I think about all the advice that’s been offered to me on managing this meadow, it makes me chuckle. I must seem awfully stubborn, because I haven’t fol-lowed any of it. I seem not to be doing anything that every-one else is doing. The hayfields around here are all cut around Memorial Day, at the end of May, which is out of the ques-tion if your first concern is spar-ing nesting birds. Field spar-rows, common yellowthroats, song sparrows, blue-winged and prairie warblers are in mid-cycle then, and we’ve got them all. Okay then, we were told, cut it early, first thing in April. Well, the American woodcocks are

nesting then, and we’ve got those, too. We found that out on an April 6 cut, when I saw a softball-sized projectile shoot out of the last remaining uncut section as the tractor’s mow-ing deck passed by. The blades missed the woodcock’s eggs by eight inches. She was still sitting on them ten days later, and then they were gone without a trace, having been transformed to win-some chicks who toddled into the woods behind their mother. She somehow finished out their incubation in the last tiny island of vegetation left in the mead-

ow. We never cut in early April again.

So we’ll cut it earlier, we decided, in February. Hmmm. The woodcocks get here from their south-ern wintering grounds around February 19. One year, Bill cut it while the

woodcocks were displaying, and they left. Out went February as an option. Beyond that, the meadow in February is satu-rated, and often under snow to boot. February is a lousy option for mowing.

By now, February, March, April, and May were out, and all for good, sound reasons. Box turtles are prospecting nest sites starting in mid-May, and laying their eggs in the last half of June, so there’s no way I’d take a tractor out then. Not only that,


JULI

E ZI

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AUTHORREAD-ALOUD

PLAY IT


https://birdwatchersdigest.net/multimedia/bwd-nd2020/readaloud-nd2020-julie.mp3


but June and July are the height of baby bird season. It’s literal murder to mow then, though it goes on in everybody else’s fields all around us. You see my options disappearing, as my thoughts dart like a cornered rat. February through July are no-fly zones. By late July 2019, I was getting frantic. The meadow was terribly overgrown with large woody plants. Okay, I thought: I’ll wait until the birds are done nesting, then mow. Mid-August ought to do it. That would give the plants time to grow back up before frost, so they’d offer some cover over the winter. I had thought about it until I was tired of thinking. Something had to be done; Bill had done his last

mow two and a half years ago, and the sumac was higher than my head, just at the stage where it was too big to brush-hog. And that is the moment in which it would turn from a meadow to a forest: the point of no return. Time to mow! I called and ar-ranged for someone to come, fire up the Massey that waited in my garage, and deliver us from foresthood.

And then the early goldenrod started to bloom, and the tall ironweed followed, painting the meadow in great swatches of gold and royal purple. Monarchs and swallowtails and skippers danced over the living painting it had become. My daughter, Phoebe, begged me to spare

A mowed field of July.



it, and I had the out-of-body experience of being somehow cast as the villain in this little eco-drama—a villain with a tor-tured conscience. I realized that Phoebe was right. We couldn’t mow it in August, either! It was surely the most beautiful bloom I’d ever seen, and I was thankful every morning when I raised the blind to behold its glory, and when I walked out and turned around to look at the house rising up out of its purple and gold expanse. August is now sacrosanct, too; it’s the height of wildflower bloom and butterfly abundance, and to mow then is, I have come to see, like slashing a Rembrandt painting.

Clearly, my options were

narrowing. There wasn’t much of the year left to play with. In September, the meadow was still rich with goldenrod and abuzz with pollinators. What about October? November? I had to cut it before the Mid-Ohio Valley winter rains and sloppy snow started and con-tinued from November through March. Insect-advocating friends advised me against cut-ting in fall or early winter, to protect butterfly chrysalides, cocoons, and egg masses from insects. It’s always something! I had to make my choice, because if I didn’t, the sumac would be so big it couldn’t be cut, and there would no longer be a meadow to agonize over! It

Curtis Loew takes in a September meadow in full bloom.

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sider every living thing, there re-ally isn’t a perfect time to mow. But mow we must, if we are to have grasses and wildflowers; open space for swallows, blue-birds, orchard orioles, field and song sparrows; prairie and blue-winged warblers and common yellowthroats; edges for white-eyed vireos, yellow-breasted chats, and brown thrashers. Mowing is destructive, but I felt I’d finally settled on a time that was least destructive. And I still have a meadow, woody and weed-grown as it always will be, and all the marvelous things that live there. Without the blade, there is no meadow.

Though manning the big Massey is something I won’t

was now or never. I watched the weather and picked a dry week in early November for the mow. The man I engaged to mow showed up, tinkered with the tractor, found a bunch of repairs that needed to be done, started it up, and mowed anyway. I’d deal with the repairs afterward. I felt an enormous sense of relief as the big sumac, taller than me, came tumbling down under the brush hog. I breathed an apol-ogy to the insects and figured that most egg masses, cocoons, and chrysalides would likely survive, but just lie closer to the ground now.

The moral of the story is that, for a naturalist who tries to con-

“The moral of the story is that, for a naturalist who tries to consider every living thing, there really isn’t a perfect time to mow.”

Tall ironweed.



of purple coneflower and liatris and butterflyweed blooming in a living tribute on his grave. It’s up to me to keep it in meadow, mowed at the right time so it’ll stay beautiful and blooming. It feels good to be done think-ing about the best time to do it. Buying land, I think, is the easy part. It’s the stewardship that’ll get you every time.

Julie Zickefoose is a natural-ist, artist, and author of five books, the latest of which, Saving Jemima: Life and Love with a Hard-luck Jay, was published in September 2019.

take on, I bought myself a good battery-powered weed-eater and learned how to whack weeds. I put heavy-duty tires on my John Deere rider mower, and all spring and summer long, I mow the paths and perimeter, to keep the sumac, multiflora rose, and honeysuckle at bay. It takes hours, but I greatly enjoy the mown paths that allow me to amble silently through my prop-erty. In fact, the place is far bet-ter kept up now that I don’t have to wait for anyone else to get around to it all. It seems a great irony that Bill had to leave this beautiful place and now rests in the meadow, a miniature forest

Bill’s resting place.

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98 birdwatchersdigest.com • septemBer/octoBer ’20 • Bird Watcher’s digest

The Ethics of Bird PhotographyTrue Nature

Birders Question Mark

Bird PhotographyBIRDTOGRAPHYby Bruce Wunderlich

II had wanted to photograph a snowy owl for years. So, in 2017, when snowy owls irrupted into Ohio and many other states, I hoped I might have a chance to photograph this beautiful bird. I heard reports of a snowy on a farm in northern Ohio that was giving photographers a lot of great shots. One Satur-day morning, I headed north to see if I could get my snowy owl shot. When I arrived at the location, the farmer welcomed me and pointed me in the owl’s direction. I went where he told me and found a fence lined with photographers.

The owl was resting on the top of a barn, and I quickly snapped my shutter. I was not that impressed with the images; they weren’t the awesome photos I had seen of this bird on the internet. A few moments later, the farmer came out of the barn carrying a mouse he had caught. All the photographers jumped to attention. The farmer walked out into the field; the owl watched the farmer intently, bobbing its

head up and down, focusing on the mouse. The farmer tossed the mouse into the field, and the owl took flight and was on the mouse in a flash. The air was filled with the sound of cam-era shutters as we all aimed to capture a dream shot of a snowy owl in flight, hunting a mouse.

So that’s how everyone was getting those spectacular images of the owl!

I wondered: Is this baiting? I tried to justify it by telling myself that the owl still had to hunt down the mouse after the farmer tossed it, so it was okay, right? But that didn’t sit right with me. Because of this experience, I became concerned about my own standards for ethical bird photography. I think of myself as an ethical photographer. I deeply want to be an ethical photogra-pher. But am I? Sometimes as photographers we can get so caught up in the moment that we forget the most important rule of bird photography: Re-spect the birds. Do no harm.


99Bird Watcher’s digest • septemBer/octoBer ’20 • birdwatchersdigest.com

I recently had a chance to interview award-winning wildlife photographer Melissa Groo on the subject of ethics in photog-raphy, a topic Melissa is passion-ate about. She advised Na-tional Audubon on photography content and ethics and helped create its Guide to Ethical Bird Photography. She has served as an International League of Con-servation Photographers fellow and has had photos featured in Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic, National Wildlife, and many other publications.

Below is our conversation:

What can happen to birds that are being baited for photography?

Melissa: Predatory birds that are baited with live animals for photography very quickly become habituated to humans. They begin to approach humans (and sometimes cars, knowing they produce food-bearing hu-

mans), begging for food. This has been observed and filmed, with snowy owls for instance. Owls and other raptors are often fed by roads, because people don’t want to walk a distance, or through deep snow, to feed them away from the car. They are often hit by cars, because they fly so low. Many owls die this way.

Snowy owls can be hunted in Alaska for their meat and their feathers for seven months of the year with no bag limits.* Do we really want to teach them to trust people and approach them for handouts?

*Editor’s note: Snowy owls may be hunted for subsistence (food and clothing) only; only by Alaska residents; and only in five specific locations.

In short, baiting raptors sucks the wild right out of them and simply introduces too many risks. What photo is that important?

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A snowy owl flies to catch a mouse a farmer

has tossed for it.



What are some signs that you may be stressing the birds?

Melissa: Staring at you. If a bird keeps looking at you, it’s probably not comfortable with your presence.• Bobbing its head. When ducks see a predator, they quickly jerk their head up repeatedly, alerting other ducks to the danger. This move often precedes them flying away.• Straightening up from a relaxed pose and trying to make itself look thinner (particularly true for owls).• Raising wings and holding them away from the body. This means it’s trying to make itself look bigger to pose a threat to you (particularly true for owls). • Flicking wings or tail. This can

be a sign to other birds that there is a predator (in this case, you!) nearby.• Making alarm calls. Usually these calls are very loud and quick, not melodious like a song.• Clacking their bill. Raptors and owls especially will make sounds with their bills that indi-cate stress.• Making mobbing calls. Even louder and faster than alarm calls, these are often done in a large group that’s banding together to drive off a predator. (Again, this is you.)• Diving on you. Birds that are alarmed by your presence and trying to protect their nests and young will directly dive you.• Circling you. This can be done from high above, or by BR

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Killdeer.



impacts whenever we use flash. We can think about it on three different levels: physical (startle response and temporary loss of visual ability), behavioral (change in immediate and long-term behavior), and mental (namely, fear response).

For me, as with so much of ethics, it comes down to empa-thy. How do we act with com-passion? If we were a nocturnal animal, like a screech-owl, flying back with prey to our nest full of chicks, what would it feel like if a flash went off in our eyes while in flight? Wouldn’t it cause a momentary loss of vision? What if we were to fly into something and injure ourselves?

Just walking through the woods or by a lake can cause birds to flush. But sometimes it’s wrong to disturb birds. How do you draw a line between when it’s okay to disturb birds, and when it’s wrong?

Melissa: There’s no question that every single time we are out there in bird habitat, we are disturbing birds on some level. Their senses are so much keener than ours, and they can flee from us before we even see them. Does that mean we should never venture outside? Of course not. More than ever we need to cele-brate the natural world, be out in it, treasure it. Only by valuing it will we seek to preserve it. At the same time, we must also seek the

moving around you from branch to branch.• Moving away from you. Even if a bird flies only a few yards in the opposite direction, this may indicate that it’s not very pleased that you are there. • Distraction displays, especially common in ground-nesting spe-cies like killdeer and other plo-vers, some birds that are incubat-ing eggs or protecting nestlings might feign injury to draw you away from their nest or babies. They’ll often drag a wing or hop along the ground. If you see this, it’s time to move away.

I think it’s also good to recog-nize some signs that show a bird is relaxed in your presence. I’m always relieved when I see a bird preening, as I think a bird doing that is typically pretty relaxed. Another is when a bird is sleep-ing, either remaining sleeping or going to sleep while you are there. To me, that’s a compliment.

What is your opinion on the use of flash with bird photography?

Melissa: I don’t use flash, in part because I don’t want to add anything to what I’m already doing that might alarm my sub-ject. My presence and the click of my shutter are enough. But I know plenty of careful photog-raphers who use it judiciously and to good effect.

I think we do have to con-sider and be attuned to potential



verters. There are some great, relatively affordable choices out there, such as zoom lenses made by Tamron and Sigma.

Build compassion and em-pathy into your fieldcraft. Put yourself in the place of the bird. How would you feel if a giant predator with a lens that looks like a giant eye suddenly put all their attention on you?

If while you’re taking pho-tos you do something that you wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing in a description of how you got the shot, maybe that’s a signal to you that you shouldn’t do that. That’s always a good self-check.

When is it appropriate to use

best way to be minimally disrup-tive. It’s definitely a fine balance, and every situation is different, but we can start by realizing that every moment for a bird is about survival. Try to be aware of to what extent your presence might be interfering with a natural pro-cess critical to that bird’s survival. If we’re changing behavior so that a bird stops feeding or hunt-ing or caring for its young for more than a few minutes, that’s a good sign that we should back up or leave altogether.

What is the most important thing we can do to become more ethical bird photographers?

Melissa: Keep your distance. Buy a longer lens and telecon- BR

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A great blue heron preens.



call playback? Can this be done respectfully?

Melissa: I think photographers can use it in a careful, limited way, playing a call a few times, but I don’t think it should be used on threatened or endangered birds, or during breeding season, as it can call a bird away from the nest or the vicinity of the nest, where it is protecting young. I know how quickly predators can go in and snatch an egg or nestling. I also think we have to consider the cumulative impact here, too. Are different people calling the same bird repeatedly because it’s a spe-cial bird that everyone wants to photograph? I think that could be pretty stressful on an individual. We also need to abide by local, state, and national laws. Audio playback is not allowed in state and national parks or national wildlife refuges.

How is providing a seed pile or even bird feeders different from baiting birds?

Melissa: First, let me say I use the term “baiting” to refer to the practice of providing live or dead meat to predatory birds. The ef-fects of feeding/baiting birds must be considered on an individual basis, that is, according to the spe-cies. We just can’t paint everything with one broad brush. Comparing the ecology of a tufted titmouse with that of a great gray owl just doesn’t make sense. We can’t say

if we do this for this species, we should be able to do it for that one. Birds have widely variable needs and dispositions. A couple years ago, I came up with three questions in an article for Audu-bon that I thought could be used in any situation to help provide guidance around feeding birds:

Is the food appropriate and safely provided?

Is the bird threatened or en-dangered?

Could feeding this bird change its behavior in a way that might be harmful to it?

Here’s the article: audubon.org/news/when-its-okay-or-not-feed-birds.

We know enough about bird-


https://www.audubon.org/news/when-its-okay-or-not-feed-birds



http://www.visitdarien.com


feeding best practices at this point. Place feeders at certain distances from windows, clean them regularly, stock them with appropriate food, and keep cats indoors. Studies show backyard bird feeding can enhance survival in songbirds during harsh winters.

Baiting predatory birds can introduce a whole host of risks to their survival. It’s often not provided safely, it changes their behavior, and some of the owl species that it’s used on are in trouble, such as snowy owls, which have been uplisted to Vulnerable status on the IUCN Red List.

What is the most ethical way to photograph nests?

Melissa: Just as every bird is different, every nest is different. We must give careful thought to

each nest situation we encounter. Nesting is the most critical part of a bird’s life cycle. It’s how they continue their line. If we really care about birds and want to continue photographing them, we need to be aware of how to help them best succeed at reproducing.

Learn about the species in advance of shooting. Having a basic understanding of behavior and ecology will help both your photography and your approach to the bird.

Stay back at a good distance and observe the behavior of the parent(s). Then, as you get closer, observe how behavior changes. Does that behavior return to nor-mal within a few minutes? If not, move back or leave.

Never cut leaves or branches away for a better view. The adults BR

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Worm-eating warbler, adult.



may have located that nest there expressly for that reason—be-cause that vegetation provided the perfect amount of camou-flage or of protection from the sun or the wind.

If it’s quite cold or hot, don’t do anything that sends the adult off the nest. The exposure of the chick to extremes in tempera-ture could kill it in a matter of minutes.

Try to avoid spending too much time at a nest. If the parents are away, your presence may be inhibiting them from returning.

Work from a blind if pos-sible. Sometimes this will be the only way you can photograph a nest, especially with particularly sensitive species like raptors. But whatever bird you’re dealing with, concealing yourself in a blind of some sort will just about always put them more at ease.

Avoid walking up to the nest. You will create a virtual trail as well as a scent trail, that predators can later use to find the nest.

Melissa has a new bird photog-raphy course available at academy.allaboutbirds.org/product/bird-photography-with-melissa-groo, and you can also find her on social media: @melissagroo and Facebook.com/melissa.groo.

When it comes to bird pho-tography, remember three things: Take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints, kill nothing but time. The well-being of the birds should be every photographer’s goal. Ethical bird photography continually focuses on what is best for the birds, but you will also find that it helps you create more powerful images of birds in their natural behavior.

Bruce Wunderlich is the production director and a con-tributing photographer for Bird Watcher’s Digest and Watching Backyard Birds. His award-win-ning photography has appeared in numerous publications. Follow Bruce on Instagram @Bruce_Wunderlich.


https://academy.allaboutbirds.org/product/bird-photography-with-melissa-groo/



http://Facebook.com/melissa.groo

http://www.rgvbf.org


AAs I sit here at my computer in my office staring out into my backyard, I see nothing but a breathtaking forest of Douglas firs, some standing more than 180 feet tall. Then suddenly among the gray trunks and green fir needles, an almost impercep-tible movement catches my eye. And I smile.

Perhaps no other bird in North America flies under the radar as much as the brown creeper. Here is a bird that spends virtually all of its forag-ing time working its way to the top only to drop down to the bottom and start all over again!

An Appreciation of CreepersThis tiny bird with its cryptic

coloration of browns and whites and its high-pitched call is eas-ily overlooked when one walks through a mature forest domi-nated by coniferous trees. While it is not a bird that commonly frequents backyards in most places in North America, it is not beyond the realm of possibil-ity to see a brown creeper visit

one’s feeder or forage for insects in various large trees in a green space in a suburban neighbor-hood. They certainly can surprise one with their sudden presence! I will never forget a Christmas bird count on Mount Royal in downtown Montreal when we were finding it a challenge to tally 30 species due to extremely cold, snowy weather. We were standing in a parking lot getting ready to eat lunch when suddenly one of our sharp-eyed students pointed out two brown creepers hitching themselves up a single isolated tree right beside the parking lot. Had I not seen them with my own eyes, I would never have believed it possible to see them in that kind of scenario.

The range of the brown creep-er stretches from coast to coast, as far north as Alaska, and south down into Mexico. It is the only representative of the creeper family on our continent, and it is very closely related to its Euro-pean counterpart, the Eurasian treecreeper. Only differences in vocalizations separate them.

by David M. Bird

Brown Creepers and Reader Observations



by David M. Bird

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The brown creeper is a year-round resident in most of its range, but the northern and eastern populations do engage in some migratory behavior. Some do it latitudinally, e.g., north to south in fall and back again in the spring, while others migrate altitudinally. For such a small bird, the brown creeper is certainly capable of motoring along; one leg-banded individual covered 280 miles in just ten days of migration!

Think of the brown creeper as a cross between a woodpecker and a nuthatch, but without all of the fanfare of drumming vig-orously on a trunk or climbing down a tree headfirst, respec-tively. Creepers have slender, decurved beaks that serve them well to probe and peck furrows and crevices in the bark of both coniferous and deciduous trees. Like the woodpeckers, brown creepers also have short legs, a fairly long, stiff tail relative to their body size, and exten-sively curved toes and claws, all designed to allow them to hang onto bark and shuffle themselves upward on the trunk. They usu-ally start from the bottom of the tree and with occasional spirals around the trunk, work their way right to the top, only to fly to the nearest tree and start all over again at the bottom.

While brown creepers oc-casionally dine on seeds and

occasional vegetable matter, they mostly love to forage for a wide variety of insects and their lar-vae, spiders and their eggs, and pseudoscorpions on the trunks of live trees. As mentioned ear-lier, they will come to both seed and suet feeders in the winter months when food is scarce. They also have been observed to eat snow.

Like the feeding habits of most birds, brown creepers also prove the exception from time to time, choosing to eat unusual foods or hunt in an atypical man-ner. For example, corn and mast (acorns and the fruit of beech or other trees) have been observed in the diets of some creepers. And one brown creeper was observed to fly about a foot off the trunk to catch an insect flying nearby. They are not generally known for caching food items, but one bird was seen hiding small pieces of sunflower seed in the bark of red pines.

Speaking of hiding, brown creepers engage in some very odd sleeping arrangements. One family group of fledglings was seen gathered in a tight circle on a protected tree trunk with their bills pointing inward and their wings and shoulders all fluffed out. Sometimes they will rest on a trunk for up to an hour and a half. In winter, two or three adults will roost together for the night by squeezing together into



a crack or scar in the bark or even beside a chimney on a roof.

One is most likely to hear a brown creeper while on its breed-ing territory, but in any case, the song and call are easily missed, especially by the more senior birdwatchers whose ability to per-ceive high-pitched sounds—like those of kinglets, waxwings, and blackpolls—is the first to dete-riorate. Composed of mostly tsee notes, the song is referred to as being “high and thin, but surpris-ingly rich and delicate.” Another old description has it sounding like the tinkle of a small chain being dropped into a heap. If you have not heard that sound lately, the call is also reminiscent of that of a golden-crowned kinglet, i.e., a high-pitched, rolling treet or a clear, high tsit note.

When the breeding season arrives, territorial brown creep-ers sing their hearts out while frequently changing perches high among the trees. Even in winter, despite their penchant for roost-ing in small groups of two or three, one can see fairly aggressive behavior between these little birds when foraging for food.

We know little about the pair bonding behavior in brown creep-ers, but courtship displays appear obvious as early as February or March in the form of a silent chase between members of a pair, round and round adjacent tree trunks. Once in a while, the male

places a tidbit of food into the throat of a begging female. Both sexes investigate various poten-tial sites for nest construction, invariably between the trunk and a loose piece of bark on a dead or dying tree. Some interesting exceptions include behind win-dow shutters, under loose roof shingles, and in a stack of bricks. While the male will bring in some material and offer an encouraging song or two, the female generally builds the nest alone. She actually creates a sort of hammock out of twigs, bark, insect cocoons, hair, feathers, lichens, moss, and spider-egg cases. One Michigan nest contained no less than 872 different items! They apparently

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Brown creeper.



will nest in artificial houses, but a friend and I have installed them in our respective yards with no success to date.

About five to six white eggs, sometimes with pink or reddish speckles at the fat end, are laid, one per day. Only the female in-cubates, although the male brings her food, and the eggs hatch in 15 to 17 days. Both parents bring food to the nestlings, but only the female broods them for warmth and protection. They depart from the nest anywhere from 14 to 20 days.

It is not easy to comment on the status of brown creepers in North America, if only because they are hard to detect during counts. Nevertheless, we know enough to conclude that their populations are declining overall and throughout the continent, mainly due to the loss of mature and old-growth forests. De-spite their occasional aggressive behavior toward nest predators, they still lose their nest contents to various kinds of squirrels, rats, and corvids, including crows and jays. Like many other small birds, brown creepers have been known to collide with various human-made structures, such as buildings and radio and television towers.

Fortunately, some wildlife managers consider the brown creeper to be an excellent envi-ronmental indicator of habitat

loss due to timber harvesting, so maybe this species will encour-age better forest management practices. It is one thing not to notice these unobtrusive small brown birds, but it would be quite another to not even have the op-portunity to see one at all.

Readers’ ObservationsHenry Monroe is an octoge-

narian birder who has been ob-serving birds since his mid-teens or earlier. Here are two behaviors that he observed in his yard in Gainesville, Georgia, just north-east of Atlanta, in early 2020, followed by my comments.

Observation One: I have a sun-flower seed feeder hanging over quince shrubbery about 20 feet from my elevated sunroom, which has many west-facing windows including a corner with windows on both sides. In addition to sunflower seeds in the feeder, I fre-quently scatter mixed seed under the feeder for ground- feeding birds such as white-throated sparrows and eastern towhees. One morning in late February or early March, I noticed three tufted titmice near the feeder. Then I heard a thump on the window around the corner from the feeder. We occasionally have birds that bump the windows in trying to cut through the corner, so I looked out the window but couldn’t see the ground just below the window. I didn’t go outside to look, but I



noticed two titmice rather excit-edly leaving the feeder and flutter-ing around the ground under the window for a while. Later that day, I went outside and discovered the dead body of a titmouse under the window. Is this normal for birds to notice and investigate a dead or dying bird of their own species (group)?

Comment: It would be tempt-ing to think that the birds are somehow mourning the loss of their flock member, as some people think about crows, one of the most intelligent birds on the planet. But you would be wrong. In the case of the latter, corvid experts say that crows investigate a dead member of their group in an effort to determine what might have killed it so that they might avoid that particular location in the future. The titmice might have been doing the same, but more likely, they were just curious.

I recall seeing an eastern mead-owlark singing earnestly over the fresh body of its mate on a road-side after the latter was struck by a car. That was five decades ago, and I have never gotten the image out of my mind. I recall thinking emotionally that it was mourn-ing the loss of its mate, but based on what I know now about avian behavior, I am more inclined to think that it was merely trying to stimulate its mate to revive itself.

And here is an even more macabre observation related to

yours. I have in my possession a dozen photographs of several male northern rough-winged swallows copulating with a male of the same species struck by a car. While I cannot explain the behavior, I refer to it as a form of homosexual necrophilia, but it is scientifically called “Davian” behavior, named after an old limerick that is much too obscene to include here.

Observation Two: Near my brick patio, I have a cage suet feeder hanging over shrubbery about 16 feet from my south-facing kitchen windows. Because of nocturnal attacks by raccoons or other “varmints,” I always take it down at night and hang it again the next morning. Since BR

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Eastern meadowlark.



February or maybe even earlier this year, I’ve noticed one or more white-throated sparrows on the ground or in the shrubbery if the suet feeder is hanging. When the feeder is unoccupied by a downy woodpecker, northern cardinal, Carolina wren, etc., a sparrow will often fly at the feeder, flut-ter mightily to hang onto the cage, and peck at the seeds in the suet for 15 seconds or more. If the sparrow manages to land on top of the feeder, it can remain longer without much fluttering. Of course, when a woodpecker or other bird lands on the feeder, the sparrow will immediately drop back down. The feet of a white-throated sparrow don’t seem well adapted to cling to the feeder cage. Do you know if these sparrows are likely to feed on hanging feeders? As of this point,

I have not seen a white-throated sparrow fly at or land on my hanging sunflower seed feeder (feeding slots close if a squirrel lands on the bottom feeding rung), but I have seen a spar-row perch in the top of the shrubbery under-neath the feeder.

Comment: The feet of sparrows in general are not well adapted for clinging onto plant ma-terial or feeders the way that titmice, chickadees,

nuthatches, and woodpeckers do. Their feet are more adapted for perching on branches, fence wire, etc. Having said that, if a bird is hungry enough to target a certain food item, they might make the effort. However, it probably costs them a fair bit of energy to try to balance themselves by all that wing fluttering, which would not be a very efficient form of foraging.

Heron IntelligenceFinally, Robert Brown of New-

ark, Delaware, witnessed a great blue heron catching a good-sized fish “close to the maximum size the bird could swallow.” The bird was on a lake about 100 yards from shore. Instead of consum-ing it on site, the heron waded to shore and stood about 15 feet on land where it flipped and swal-lowed the fish. BR

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A great blue heron prepares to dine.



Comment: Normally, what happens immediately after grab-bing or spearing a fish is that the heron rotates the prey in its bill to force it down its gullet or esophagus head-first so that it fits nicely in its elongated pouch stomach to minimize damage to the lining from sharp fins. As Robert himself suggested, since this fish was about as large as a heron could handle and pos-sibly quite slippery and wiggly, the clever bird decided to wade ashore to consume it in its usual way. In that manner, if the fish did manage to wriggle free, the heron would have the option of seizing it again and again until it swallowed it. This behavior did

not surprise me. While apparent-ly not as intelligent as corvids or parrots, herons are right up there in terms of innovative behavior among all the birds. A number of them are clever enough to lay down bait in the form of insects or leaves on the water’s surface to attract fish into range of their bills, while others will spread their wings to create shade for the same purpose.

Send your bird behavior ques-tions and observations to David M. Bird, c/o BWD, P.O. Box 110, Marietta, OH 45750 or email your questions to bwd@ birdwatchersdigest.com. Visit his website, askprofessorbird.com.

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T

by Jerry UhlmanFar Afield

The rolling foothills of the Ouachita (pronounced WAH-she-taw) Mountains in eastern Oklahoma are a paradise for outdoor enthusiasts, particularly birders and anglers. The foothills are crisscrossed by the Illinois, Ar-kansas, and Neosho Rivers where bottomland lakes and reservoirs attract songbirds in the spring and waterfowl and waders during win-tertime. The undulating landscape is both scenic and verdant.

Nestled in the hills just 40 miles west of Ft. Smith, Arkansas, you’ll find Sequoyah National Wildlife Refuge at the western tip of the 20,800-acre Robert S. Kerr Reservoir, and 5 miles south of the town of Vian, Oklahoma. Just 10 miles north of Vian you’ll find Lake Tenkiller, a 13,000-acre ob-

long body that is a popular fishing destination throughout the year. Both Ouachita foothill sites draw a great variety of winter birdlife for visitors to enjoy.

Sequoyah NWRThe refuge is named after a

Cherokee who invented a sys-tem of writing to transmit mes-sages and information over long distances. Although several early ethnic groups moved throughout the foothills region, there are few traces of their homelands.

The Sequoyah refuge bird checklist of 225 boasts 13 duck species you’re apt to easily see, and you’ll have a good chance of spotting less-numerous red-heads, ruddy ducks, white-winged scoters, and both hooded and AD

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Birding Oklahoma’s Ouachita Mountain Foothills and Tenkiller Lake

J e r r y u h l M A n



red-breasted mergansers as well. Surely you’ll find many pied-billed grebes and, if lucky, a horned or eared grebe.

For many years, Sequoyah has been the site of a program to reintroduce bald eagles to the area, and the success of the program will be obvious by the number you’ll see as you explore the refuge. As you drive the refuge roads, you are certain to find eagles perched in the cottonwoods or flying over Kerr Reservoir, but you’re just as likely to see a pair atop a roadside deer carcass with several black vultures impatiently waiting nearby.

When visiting a wildlife refuge, it’s always a plus to find a wild-life loop to leisurely meander through—probably several times

during morning and evening hours. Fortunately, Sequoyah has a six-mile gravel loop through its heartland, with several short spurs that lead to the waters of Kerr Reservoir and elongated Sally Jones Lake on the eastern and northern portion of the refuge.

You’ll also find two trails along the wildlife loop that are both level and paved. These trails, Horton Slough and Sandtown Woods, will give you an opportu-nity to search for landbirds along the bottomland shorelines.

The wildlife loop begins at the refuge headquarters, just beyond a large information kiosk. Direct-ly behind the kiosk is the trailhead of the Horton Slough Trail, a one-mile easy trek to the edge of Sally Jones Lake. The trail follows

Snow geese.



the rim of the slough to the lake, crosses via a boardwalk bridge, and leads back to the kiosk and parking lot. The crossover bridge is a favorite perching site for bald eagles, so watch and listen for them overhead. On one of my visits, four perched together on bare limbs while a juvenile called to them as it glided over the lake.

The wildlife loop is essentially a

square with several short drivable spurs at the corners, leading to waterfront overlooks. The spurs usually are lined with trees or brushy hedges, great stretches to explore on foot to look for water-fowl and landbirds.

If you enter the wildlife loop in the early morning hours, watch the treeline on both sides of the gravel road for hawks and owls.

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Red-shouldered hawk.

Northern pintails.



One morning I found a red- shouldered hawk and a great horned owl perched on opposite sides of the same tree, poised for a hunting soirée.

As the treeline ends, you’ll find a line of shallow, grassy ponds that shelter waterfowl from brisk winds. Among the grasses you’ll easily see mallards, gadwalls, wi-geons, pintails, and shovelers. But you’ll need to be patient and thor-ough to find teals, canvasbacks, and redheads. As you slowly fol-low the loop, each new pond can yield another unexpected species.

Beyond the duck-filled ponds, the roadsides, crop fields, and brushy meadows also deserve your attention. Here, you’re likely to spot eastern meadowlarks, American pipits, and horned larks. Twice I’ve been surprised by small coveys of northern bob-whites scurrying along the gravel road, quickly ducking into the tall grass for cover.

Refuge fields and ponds also host flocks of geese, mainly snow, white-fronted, and Canada. While they are uncommon, you may spot a Ross’s goose among the flocks if you’re patient and persevering.

While tall deciduous trees ring grassy fields, you’ll often see groups of small saplings dot open fields, perfect habitat for logger-head shrikes. Shrikes are a declin-ing grassland species in North America, often difficult to spot

and often only seen from afar. In Sequoyah’s grasslands, you may have a fair chance of spotting one. On a recent February visit, I found a pair hunting together near Sandtown Bottoms along the western edge of the wildlife loop. The wary birds made only one ap-proach to nearby saplings before moving out of eyesight.

The nearby Sandtown Woods Trail will give you another per-spective of the Sequoyah refuge. At the Sandtown Bottoms park-ing lot, look for markers for the designated National Recreation Trail. The paved pathway skirts the shoreline where the Arkansas and Canadian rivers merge and then heads into the bottomland forest.

This is probably your best chance to find winter passerines on the refuge. You’ll have a good chance of finding white-breasted nuthatches, both kinglets, several of seven species of woodpeckers, perhaps a winter or Bewick’s wren as well as Carolina wrens, and BR

UCE

WUN

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Horned lark.



maybe even a Brewer’s blackbird near the parking lot. As you walk the Sandtown Woods Trail, keep an eye out for American wood-cock and Wilson’s snipe around the boggy patches covered with leaf-litter.

Tenkiller LakeWhen you’ve finished explor-

ing the refuge, head north from the refuge to Tenkiller Lake State Park, an easy 15-mile drive on scenic backroads. Tenkiller Lake has 130 miles of shoreline dotted with vacation cabins and punctu-ated with several rocky bluffs. The lake has numerous access points to the water, mainly through private marinas, state parks, and campgrounds built by the US Army Corps of Engineers. Most Corps of Engineers’ sites have inviting waterfront stretches, but unfortunately most tend to be closed during the winter.

Your first destination for optimal birding is Tenkiller State

Park, at the southern tip of the lake near the village of Blackgum. The state park, dubbed “Heaven in the Hills,” has lengthy stretches of lake-front, giving many vantage points and perspectives of open waters and distant coves. Stop at the park office and pick up a copy of the visitor’s guide to Lake Ten-killer, which has a handy map showing highlights along the entire shoreline.

While you may spot pairs or small rafts of ducks, your target bird here is a common loon. You’re apt to find several as you scan, and often the loons and ducks are strikingly close to the rocky shores for good photo ops. Walking through the park will give you another chance to find winter passerines.

Besides the state park, Burnt Cabin, on the southwest side of Tenkiller Lake, can be an excel-lent spot to scan and scope. From Tenkiller State Park, follow route 100 and 10A west to Paradise Hill, and then head north on Indian Road to Burnt Cabin signage. After a short drive to the marina, you’re apt to find not only ducks and loons but also a large number of white pelicans.

If you choose to circle Ten-killer Lake, head north on Indian Road from Burnt Cabin and return south on State Routes 82 and 100 on a circuit of ap- AR

THUR

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Common loon with chick.



Air travel to north-central Oklahoma is through Tulsa, and more conveniently, Ft. Smith, Arkansas (FSM), at the border between the two states.

The town of Gore, Oklahoma, is a conve-nient home base, 50 miles west of Ft. Smith and just 14 miles to Sequoyah NWR and 9 miles to Tenkiller SP. Along Gore’s main street, Suite 16 Motel is unas-

suming, clean, and com-fortable ((918) 489-2100, suite16motel.com/en-us), with an Italian restaurant next door and a small, well-stocked market across the street.

The towns of Sallisaw and Vian are also suit-able and convenient with basic motel chains, restaurants, and grocery stores available.

Sequoyah NWRA printable refuge

map is found at fws.gov/uploadedFiles/Sequoyah_Hunt_2018.pdf. Also see fws.gov/refuge/Sequoyah, or phone (918) 773-5251.

Tenkiller State ParkTenkiller Lake com-

mercial website is lake-tenkiller.com, where a handy hardcopy lake guide may be ordered. Also see travelok.com/state-parks/7706, or phone (918) 489-5641.

proximately 40 miles. While most Corps of Engineer sites you’ll encounter are closed, Cherokee Landing State Park at the north-ern end of the lake deserves a brief birding stop. If you’re near the park at lunchtime, Princess Restaurant, two miles south of the park in Tahlequah, is a good choice for fish or ribs.

If you’ve missed pelicans and loons or want more, a reli-able spot nearby to find them is Greenleaf State Park, less than 15 miles west of Tenkiller State Park on route 10A. Just past the park entrance on route 10, a wide arm of Little Greenleaf Creek seems to attract both foraging species. On both sides of the road you

can find loons and large flocks of pelicans swimming together with huge numbers of double-crested cormorants.

When you finish exploring the northern foothills of the Ouachita Mountains, you’ll have a great trip bird list and many fond memories of the Oklahoma’s scenic landscape.

Jerry Uhlman is an inveterate traveler and birder. He has written two Virginia bird-finding guides and numerous magazine articles, including frequent contributions to Bird Watcher’s Digest. He writes “Flyways and Byways,” a nature column in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

If you go...


http://suite16motel.com/en-us

http://fws.gov/uploadedFiles/Sequoyah_Hunt_2018.pdf




http://fws.gov/refuge/Sequoyah

http://fws.gov/refuge/Sequoyah

http://laketenkiller.com

http://laketenkiller.com

http://travelok.com/state-parks/7706

http://travelok.com/state-parks/7706


LLas Vegas may be the limit of most people’s knowledge of the Silver State. Its nickname recog-nizes the important role of that metal ore in the state’s history and economy. Spanish explor-ers named Nevada (Spanish for “snowy”) for its mountains in winter. Nevada is tops in the Lower 48 in number of moun-tains, most of which run north/south, and 30 of which exceed 11,000 feet in elevation. Three-quarters of the state’s population live in the southern tip—the Las Vegas area. Southern Nevada is within the Mojave Desert, and much of the northern part of the state is within the Great Basin. The Humboldt River lies entirely within the state, its headwaters in the northeast, flowing east to

west, and terminating north of Fallon in the Humboldt Sink. Many watersheds in Nevada are endorheic—terminating in a lake and not connecting to a larger river. Nevada is the driest state in the country; average an-nual rainfall is just 9.5 inches per year. Many bird listers visit the Ruby Mountains to tick a spe-cies found nowhere else in the United States: the Himalayan snowcock, a species introduced in the 1960s.

Birding Festivals • Eagles & Agriculture, late

January, Carson Valley, visitcarsonvalley.org/events/eagles-ag

• Spring Wings Bird Festival, early May, Fallon, spring-wingsbirdfestival.org

Spotlight on Nevada

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https://visitcarsonvalley.org/events/eagles-ag/

https://visitcarsonvalley.org/events/eagles-ag/

http://springwingsbirdfestival.org/

http://springwingsbirdfestival.org/


Resources• Great Basin Bird Observa-

tory: gbbo.org/birding• Statewide email list: tinyurl.

com/NV-birding-email-list• State checklist: gbbo.org/

nevada-state-checklist• Birding Nevada Facebook

group: facebook.com/groups/BirdingNevada

• Lahontan Audubon Society: nevadaaudubon.org

Birding Hotspots1. Desert Creek Field Station2. Henderson area, including Henderson Bird Viewing Preserve and Lake Mead3. Las Vegas area, including Floyd Lamb Park, Clark County Wetlands Park, Sunset Park, Las Vegas Wash, Rancho

San Rafael Park4. Pahranagat National Wildlife Refuge5. Overton Wildlife Manage- ment Area6. Dyer-Arlemont Ranch (restricted access)7. Pyramid Lake8. Spring Mountain Ranch9. Ash Meadows NWR10. Carson Lake11. Miller’s Rest Stop12. Ruby Lake NWR and Ruby Mountains13. Stillwater NWR14. Washoe Lake15. South Fork SRA

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http://gbbo.org/birding

http://tinyurl.com/NV-birding-email-list

http://tinyurl.com/NV-birding-email-list

https://www.gbbo.org/nevada-state-checklist

https://www.gbbo.org/nevada-state-checklist

https://www.facebook.com/groups/BirdingNevada/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/BirdingNevada/

http://nevadaaudubon.org

122 birdwatchersdigest.com • NovemBer/decemBer ’20 • Bird Watcher’s digest birdwatchersdigest.com • JaNuary/FeBruary ’18 • Bird Watcher’s digest122

Mountain bluebird.

Black phoebe.

Black-billed magpie.

Red-naped sapsucker. Himalayan snowcocks.




Must-see Birds ❏ Quail: California, Gambel’s ❏ Chukar ❏ Himalayan snowcock ❏ Dusky grouse ❏ Greater sage-grouse ❏ Grebes: western, Clark’s ❏ Hawk: Swainson’s, ferruginous ❏ Golden eagle ❏ Long-billed curlew ❏ Marbled godwit ❏ Phalaropes: Wilson’s, red-

necked ❏ Inca dove ❏ Greater roadrunner ❏ Nightjars: lesser nighthawk,

common poorwill ❏ Swifts: Vaux’s, white-throated ❏ Hummingbirds: Anna’s,

Costa’s, broad-tailed, rufous, calliope

❏ Woodpeckers: Lewis’s, ladder- backed, and white-headed; Williamson’s, red-naped, and red-breasted sapsuckers

❏ Prairie falcon ❏ Flycatchers: Hammond’s,

gray, dusky, Pacific-slope, cordilleran, vermilion, ash-throated, brown-crested; black and Say’s phoebes;

Cassin’s kingbird ❏ Vireos: Bell’s, gray, Cassin’s,

plumbeous ❏ Corvids: Pinyon and Steller’s

jays; California and Wood- house’s scrub-jays; black- billed magpie, Clark’s nutcracker

❏ Mountain chickadee ❏ Juniper titmouse ❏ Verdin ❏ Bushtit ❏ Pygmy nuthatch ❏ Wrens: cactus, canyon, rock ❏ Black-tailed gnatcatcher ❏ Thrushes: varied; Townsend’s

solitaire; mountain and western bluebirds

❏ Thrashers: sage, crissal ❏ Phainopepla ❏ Warblers: Lucy’s, Virginia’s,

black-throated gray, Townsend’s

❏ Sparrows: black-chinned, black-throated, lark, golden- crowned, sagebrush

❏ Towhees: Abert’s, green-tailed ❏ Orioles: hooded, Scott’s ❏ Rosy-finches: gray-crowned,

black

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Golden eagle.


124 birdwatchersdigest.com • November/December ’20 • birD Watcher’s Digest

IBirder on Berry Lane: Three Acres, Twelve Months, Thou-

sands of BirdsRobert Tougias, Imagine,

2020, 6.25 x. 9 x 9.2 inches, 244 pages, hardcover, $19.99.

In these times of pandemic bird watching, when the bulk of our favorite pastime is performed close to home, you’d think that reading one birder’s commentary on doing just that over the span of three acres and 12 months would be overly mundane and perhaps even trite. Not so, fair reader. Tougias’s richly detailed de-

scriptions of his Massachusetts home patch and its birds put you in his shoes as he reasons that a red-shouldered hawk is stalking his feeder for mice rather than songbirds, appreci-ates how eastern phoebes return to the same nest after migrating hundreds of miles, and acciden-tally albeit explosively flushes a ruffed grouse in a neighbor-hood woodlot. Lately, it’s nice to get out of one’s head and into someone else’s, and the birding episodes in this book border on luxurious.

The book’s physical look and feel are akin to a children’s sto-rybook, with its smooth hard-cover, thick textured paper, and black-and-white illustrations accompanying every chapter. And I’m ashamed to admit that, as I began skimming passages for this review, my initial thought was, Why, these chapters read like little blog posts. It’s been a tough stretch of months beyond Berry Lane. But this volume is comforting and easy to digest, exactly what some of us need right now. —Sarah Clark


What It’s Like to Be a Bird: From Flying to Nesting, Eating to

Singing—What Birds Are Doing, and Why

David Allen Sibley, Alfred A. Knopf, 2020, 8.75 x 1 x 11.3 inches, 240 pages, hardcover, $35.

It’s probably fair to say that most serious birders have a Sibley field guide on their bookshelf, or in their satchel, car, or smartphone—or all of the above (like me). We trust Sibley and his precise illus-trations, and rely on his help to find and identify birds. In this book, Sibley’s art—fewer portraits, lots of birds in ac-tion—figures prominently, but it’s the text and Sibley’s ency-clopedic knowledge of bird behavior, anatomy, and social

systems that contribute most to the heft and value of this book. Like a field guide, What It’s Like to Be a Bird is not intended to be read from cover to cover, but a book most birders will crack open, flip through, and study ad infinitum.

The introduction to this book is a fascinating and lengthy col-lection of topically ordered facts about birds—information that will wow even longtime bird-ers—with links to related topics elsewhere in the book. Then comes the heart of the book: a focus on 96 species or groups of birds with essays on their special adaptations, accompanied by Sibley illustrations the likes of which you haven’t seen before. For example, an essay on how waterfowl keep warm in frigid water includes a drawing of a segment of arteries and veins in a duck’s leg, and how they intertwine to warm the extrem-ity, with a measure of the blood temperature in both types of vessels at various distances from the body. It’s called countercur-rent circulation. Who knew? In the cormorant section, a dia-gram of the anatomy of a diving bird’s eyeball accompanies an explanation of how they see clearly—while we see so poor-ly—underwater. What It’s Like to Be a Bird is required reading for bird-nerds and bird-nerd wannabes. —Dawn Hewitt

126 birdwatchersdigest.com • November/December ’20 • birD Watcher’s Digest

my copy arrived. Yes, the book is brimming with Baal’s charac-teristically vibrant art, infused

with personality and detail that my eyes want to linger over, and I can only imag-ine the hours she spent illustrating each of the 30 species included.

But it is the ac-companying text that I quickly re-alized must have been the central

labor of love for this project. In true field guide tradition, it offers physical and behav-ioral descriptions along with information on habitat, range, and life history—but these are fantastical birds, some still liv-ing, some alive only in legend. Through extensive research and a deep connection to mythol-ogy and nature, Baal brings them all to life before our eyes in words and pictures. In short, this ain’t your parents’ field guide. It’s a journey across time and distance that sheds light on our earliest appreciation of birds and the significant roles humans have assigned them since the beginning of time. Most importantly, Once Upon a Feather inspires us to seek all these birds, or glimpses of them, in the world around us today. —Jessica Melfi

Once Upon a Feather: A Field Guide to Fantastic Birds

Christina Baal, author and illustrator, 2020, paperback, 8 x 10 inches, 103 pages, $29.99.

When Christina Baal (artist of this issue’s cover) launched a Kickstarter campaign ear-lier this year to raise funds to self-publish Once Upon a Feather, she exceeded her goal in thirty minutes—and went on to raise several times her goal amount for initial publication. This is surely a testament to how much her fanbase adores her artwork and how eager we were to see this project combining ornithology and mythology come to life. Still, I was not prepared for what I found on the pages inside when

Out There with the Birdsfeatures casual conversations focusing on birding trends, anecdotes about wild birds, in-depth interviews with leaders from the birding world, and more. Our rotating crew of hosts includes BWD editor Dawn Hewitt, sales director Kelly Ball, and publisher Wendy Clark.

BirdSense

birdwatchersdigest.com/bwdsite/podcasts

Podcast Central on BWDPodcasts for Bird Watchers!

BirdSenseA podcast for common-sense bird watchers seeking an uncommon experience. BirdSense spotlights birding optics, destinations, products, gear, clothing, books, festivals, conservation efforts, and any-thing birders want or need that enhances their birding lifestyle.

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https://www.birdwatchersdigest.com/bwdsite/podcasts.php


Out There with the Birdsfeatures casual conversations focusing on birding trends, anecdotes about wild birds, in-depth interviews with leaders from the birding world, and more. Our rotating crew of hosts includes BWD editor Dawn Hewitt, sales director Kelly Ball, and publisher Wendy Clark.

BirdSense

birdwatchersdigest.com/bwdsite/podcasts

Podcast Central on BWDPodcasts for Bird Watchers!

BirdSenseA podcast for common-sense bird watchers seeking an uncommon experience. BirdSense spotlights birding optics, destinations, products, gear, clothing, books, festivals, conservation efforts, and any-thing birders want or need that enhances their birding lifestyle.

BWD_podcasts_v2.indd 1BWD_podcasts_v2.indd 1 10/1/20 9:03 AM10/1/20 9:03 AM


birdwatchersdigest.com • NovemBer/decemBer ’20 • Bird Watcher’s digest106128

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9-18-20

Nov/Dec 2020

PUBLISHER’S STATEMENT

ALPACA FLEECE-FILLED BIRD NESTING BALLS® –Backyard birds will love building their nests from it! $13.50 plus shipping. Also available, alpaca apparel, the Malpaca® pillow (ideal for birding excursions), 100% alpaca yarn. (859) 781-7741 allthingsalpacaonline.com


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Bird Watcher’s digest • NovemBer/decemBer ’20 • birdwatchersdigest.com

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LOWER RIO GRANDE VALLEY—ALAMO INN B&B—Famous among birders for comfortable, affordable lodging, central location, outdoor store, optics, guiding. alamoinnbnb.com, or (956) 782-9912.

NEW ZEALAND—WRYBILL BIRDING TOURS, NZ—The birding specialists. Amazing seabirds & endemics. Unforgettable birding with the team that rediscovered the “extinct” NZ storm-petrel. Web: www.wrybill-tours.com; Email: [email protected]

talkinbirds.com

Are You Listening?

TOURS, TRAVEL & LODGING

LONDON & UK BIRDING–Vacation, business trip or airport layover? Great-value expert guid-ing with Dominic Mitchell, founder of Birdwatch magazine and author of Where to Watch Birds in the London Area. Regional specialties (Smew, Bearded Reedling and many more) and your tar-get birds. “An absolutely fabulous day – thanks!” MD, Florida. Details: [email protected].

watchingbackyardbirds.com

ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK AND OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK – Book a trip for birding, nature tours, hiking or backpacking with fun, local, knowledgeable guides. Bird-ing and wildlife viewing tours in Colorado, New Mexico, and Washington. Check us out: www.KaiyoteTours.com, [email protected], Call Kaiyote at 970-556-6103!

COME BIRDING WITH US! Join the staff of Bird Watcher’s Digest for great birding adventures. Visit readerrendezvous.com for 2021 Reader Rendezvous!



https://www.birdwatchersdigest.com/bwdsite/podcasts/out-there-with-the-birds.php

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You’ll find your favorite birding products at RedstartBirding.com.

Steiner HXFor a rugged birding binocular that stands up to the elements while offering excellent specs for bird watchers, the Steiner HX will gets you detailed looks of all the birds you want to see. Steiner’s Nano Protection coatings on the HX binocular’s exterior glass deters dirt, dust, water, and oil to ensure the lenses are consistently clear and easy to clean. NBR rub-ber armoring covers the Makrolon polycarbonate chassis, which means this model is resistant to impact, corrosion, slippery grips in wet weather conditions, and temperature fluctuations that can shift the optical tubes out of alignment and create focusing problems. Starting at $819.99

Zeiss 8x32 Victory SFThe best just got better! The new Zeiss Victory SF 8x32 binocular gives you the unparalleled performance of the Victory SF line with a lighter, more travel-friendly design. Expect outstanding ergonomics, lightning-fast focusing, bright and brilliant optics, and an exceptional field of view. The comfort-focused exterior combined with top-shelf glass make the German-engineered Victory SF 8x32 the birding binocular you’ll want to take on any long field session. $2,249.99

Swarovski Optik NL PureMeet the Swarovski Optik NL Pure. This ultra-premium binocular for bird watching gives you the widest field of view available in the birding market today. Swarovski’s SWAROVISION technol-ogy further enhances your birding by providing the richest color fidelity to make the most of every single detail you see. Other exciting updates to this high-end birding binocular include an ergonomically grooved right-hand barrel for improved holding and carrying as well as a new focusing mechanism positioned within the housing. The Swarovski NL Pure binocular comes with a carrying strap, a strap loop connector, eyepiece and objective lens covers, a functional side bag, and a cleaning kit. For added comfort while bird watching, consider including the FRP forehead rest attachment in your order. Starting at $2,969.00


http://RedstartBirding.com

See more great products online at RedstartBirding.com Or call 833-262-1568

Ohio residents add 7.25% sales tax.131

The Vortex Diamondback HD spotting scopeThe Vortex Diamondback HD spotting scope packs all the power you need for birding in harsh weather, rough terrains, and low-light settings. This newly redesigned take on a Vortex favorite gives you a larger objective lens, and updated high-definition optical system, and a streamlined, snag-free body. Expect outstanding image resolution, amazing clarity, and lightning-fast focusing. As with all Vortex models, the Diamondback spotting scope is protected by a lifetime, unlimited, transferable warranty. Available in straight and angled option. Starting at $399.99

Kowa BD II XD Skip the frustration of missing a good bird! The new Kowa BD II XD wide-angle binocular for bird watching lets you find subjects with rapid precision thanks to its outstanding field of view and responsive focus wheel. High-resolution XD objective lenses con-taining high levels of mineral fluorite crystal provide outstanding light transmission and virtually zero chromatic aberration. This means you can expect exceptional image resolution, true-to-life colors, great contrast, and incredible detail, even in low-light conditions. The rugged exterior, ergonomic design, and refresh-ing affordability seal the deal on this high-performing birding binocular. Starting at $399.00

Charley Harper Is in the House!Make 2021 your most wonderful year yet with a Charley Harper calendar. Geometric shapes, intricate patterns, and bold colors combine to create the beautifully detailed birds, insects, animals, and trees for which Harper (1922–2007) is so famous. Grosbeaks, kingbirds, a tundra swan, and other creatures grace the pages of the mini (6½ x 14 in. open) wall calendar. Dazzling depictions of of heron, pelican, quetzal, nuthatches, cardinals, and so much more more are among the 12 images in this large (12 x 26 in. open) wall calendar. And if you prefer to keep your life organized in an analog planner, the 2021 engage-ment calendar features 32 illustrations, calendar grids, and seven-day spreads for keeping notes. Charley Harper Wall Calendar $14.99Charley Harper Mini Wall Calendar $7.99Charley Harper Engagement Calendar $16.99

http://redstartbirding.com

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The RYO Ultra-Light Bino HarnessThe RYO Ultra-Light Bino Harness’s convertible design lets you wear it like a traditional harness, as a neck strap, like a bandolier, around one arm while the binocular hangs from the opposite side, or wrapped so that your binocular is held snug against your chest.Available colors: black, orange, and olive $19.99

RYO XL Ultra-Light Bino HarnessFits wearers with 48” to 60” chest sizes.Available colors: black, orange, and olive $24.99

The Benro S4Pro fluid video headThe Benro S4Pro fluid video head is versatile, compact, and capable of supporting spottings scopes and cameras weighing up to 8.8 lbs. It’s got a 60mm flat base with a 3/8”-16 threaded hole. The Benro S4Pro is designed as a one-step counterbalance, but a button at the side of the head allows you to toggle between one- and two-step setups. The fixed pan drag has a full, 360° range, while the tilt range is +90/-75°. This fluid video head is constructed from lightweight magnesium and aluminum metals. $149.95

“What really strikes me about magpies is the amazing amount of color in their feathers. When I took my first painting class in college, one of our assignments was to look for ‘hidden colors’ in shadows, and I think that members of the Corvidae family are a wonderful way to practice this exercise. I love how, when the California sun hits magpies just right, their entire bod-ies seem to glimmer with iridescent hidden blues, greens, and purples. My favorite experience with magpies occurred in the fall, so I created a setting for this painting that captured a western field with the golds and yellows of that time of year.”

Christina Baal is a bird artist, writer, and naturalist whose dream is to meet and paint 10,000 species of birds. After graduating from Bard College in 2014, she started her art busi-ness, Drawing 10,000 Birds, and has since traveled nonstop looking for birds. Most recently she lived in a small Alaskan village where she got to watch brown bears in her backyard! Christina loves going to bird festivals to show her artwork, lead trips, teach art, and spend time with the birding community. She has designed artwork for the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival, the Biggest Week in American Birding, the New River Birding and Nature Festival, and New Jersey Audubon’s World Series of Birding. During the rest of the year, she works as an environmental educator, and has recently started illustrating books including Once Upon a Feather: A Field Guide to Fantastic Birds, and Lucy’s Life List. Christina lives with her partner and adorable golden retriever. See more of Christina’s artwork at drawingtenthousandbirds.com.

ABOUT OUR COVER ARTIST— CHRISTINA BAALTitle: Hidden Colors: Yellow-billed Magpie

http://drawingtenthousandbirds.com

vortex-2020-new-dbk-spotters-ad-8.5x11-.125bleed.indd 1vortex-2020-new-dbk-spotters-ad-8.5x11-.125bleed.indd 1 6/1/20 1:54 PM6/1/20 1:54 PM

http://www.vortexoptics.com

Since 1865 the name Leica has meant the relentless pursuit of optical perfection, and for 110 years Leica’s “Legendary Lenses” have been the optical foundation for our high-performance, field-proven binoculars. The Leica Noctivid family. With their unparalleled optical performance, Leica again leads the way by establishing new benchmarks to which all others are compared – simply the brightest, sharpest, highest contrast and purest color images available in a binocular today! A perfect balance of ruggedness and performance combined to achieve a previously unimagined and extraordinary almost 3D viewing experience. Leica Noctivids are available in 8x42 or 10x42.

@LeicaNature

Leica Noctivid.More intensity, contrast and brightness.

SPORT OPTICS


@LeicaNature


SPORT OPTICS


@LeicaNature


SPORT OPTICS


Yellow-billed Magpie - Bird Watcher's Digest

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