Cliff Swallows on Actual Cliffs

One of the lifer sightings for me during the Montana portion of our trip west, was the sight of cliff swallows nesting on actual cliffs. Where I'm from the cliff swallows nest on buildings, bridges, culverts, and dams, but I'd never seen them nesting on the natural features for which they are named.

These shots were taken in and around Virgelle, Montana, where we embarked upon our three-day canoe down the Missouri River.

The truly amazing thing about cliff swallows is that they build their nests one bill-full of mud at a time. It can take them up to two weeks to build the nest?depending upon how far it is to a reliable source of mud. A pair will bring more than 1,000 small batches of mud to the nest site during construction of the nest.

Cliff swallows are colonial nesters, preferring to nest with other cliff swallows.

The colony near Virgelle had a mud source just a few hundred feet away.

The finished nests are jug-shaped and provide a perfect spot for raising up a brood of baby cliff swallows. Some of the colonies we found along the Missouri had as many as 200 nests. Larger colonies of as many as 2,000 nests can be found.

As we floated past these birds along the river, I wondered what Lewis and Clark thought about them, when they saw the first cliff swallows chattering along the muddy banks,cutting through the blue skies, and swooping up to their odd-looking nesting colonies. It must have been a remarkable thing to see.

I know it was for me.

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Don't Tread on Me!

About a week ago, Phoebe greeted me upon my return home from work with the news that she'd spotted the first copperhead of the summer. This is big, if expected, news. The copperhead was near the garage door, heading into a chipmunk hole. We waited and watched it for the next two hours. It was waiting for nightfall. We were waiting for it to come out so we could catch and relocate it.

Eventually it came out, while I was standing near it talking on the phone. I'm not sure who was on the other end of the phone, but they heard me scream out "The snake's outta the hole!" as I was hanging up.
We caught the copperhead and placed it in the bucket (shown above). It now lives in another place, far from our high-traffic garage.

I don't mind snakes, but I HATE being surprised by them. Where I am staying right now in Trinidad there are three deadly poisonous snakes in the jungle around us. Fer-de-lance, bushmaster, and coral snake are my three neighbors. They belong here?I am just a visitor. I hope to see one or more of these creatures, preferably before they see me, and, from a safe distance. So I'm being extra careful as I walk the forest trails around Asa Wright Nature Centre. No sightings thus far.

This place is amazing, even with the snakes. You can read more about AWNC here. And I'll be posting more from and about Asa in the days and weeks to come.

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Fall Migration: It's Starting!

I walked into Julie's studio yesterday afternoon to ask her something and a flash of zippy-swoopy movement in the birches just outside the windows caught my eye. I knew right away it was a warbler and not one of the 27 goldfinches, dozen titmice, or half-dozen chickadees that were flitting from trees to feeders to bird bath.

But how did I know it was a warbler?

I'm not completely sure. There are clues that the human brain can gather, sort, and decipher in a matter of milliseconds. All I saw was one quick swoop from one birch to another and my brain instantly said "Warbler!" If I had to 'splain it, I'd say it was something about the size, color, and style of movement?all things that I'd seen before, deduced, and confirmed. But I'm only grasping for an explanation here. All I know is that I instantly knew what family that feathered thing belonged to, and I was determined to see it better.

The warbler, in a show of fair play, hopped from the back of the bird tree to our side, which sent us scampering for binoculars and cameras. It was a female yellow-throated warbler! And this surely signalled the start of fall migration?in late July!

For the next 10 minutes we watched her glean insects and tiny caterpillars from the birch leaves. Man, our gray birches ALWAYS deliver the warblers. This might be the single most bird-friendly tree species on our farm, even though they do not do well in our clay soil and hot, dry summers.


Each late summer through mid-fall we get our annual influx of yellow-throated warblers. They nest down along the creek on Goss' Fork and after the breeding season is over, they come a-hill-toppin' up to our ridge top farm, looking for food or perhaps just exploring before the start of migration.

One of our first falls here at Indigo Hill, as we were out on the deck enjoying a fine morning of birding, a male yellow-throated warbler dropped out of the sky and landed on our stone chimney just two feet from us. It then flew to the deck railing a foot from us. Then it landed on the tripod leg two inches from my knee. It cocked its head as if to make certain we noticed his fine fall plumage, newly molted in for migration. Then he swooped over to our newly planted sycamore. This last act was almost too much for me?I grew up calling this warbler by its original name sycamore warbler.
My final view of Lady Sycamore, just before she slipped away. I dig her golden slippers!

After I left Julie's studio, heading back downstairs to do some podcast recording and editing, a young male American redstart and a female cerulean warbler also came through the birches. I missed them, but I certainly didn't miss the start of fall migration!

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20 Seconds of Rarity: McCown's Longspur

Here, as promised, is one of the three short videos I digiscoped of the McCown's longspur in Montana. The other two involve lots more grass and the annoying noise of my hand fumbling for the zoom button.

This short clip of a male McCown's is pretty sweet. It'll be a nice thing to look at when I'm old and gray and only able to go birding vicariously?from my Lay-Z-Boy recliner. In a few years.

I hope you like this short clip, too. I can certainly see how, if you had the right equipment, you could get heavily addicted to shooting video of birds. It's harder to do than taking still images, but the pay-off is so much greater.

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Mystery Duck in North Dakota

Along North Dakota's State Route 36, headed west from Pingree, ND, the slightly rolling landscape gently lifts itself onto the coteau, where glaciers dropped their heavy load of ice, rock, and sand millions of years ago. The landscape in every direction is dotted with water. This water is in ponds, lakes, prairie potholes, sloughs, wet meadows, streams, and roadside ditches. And in every place where water collects there are ducks. Some of these ducks are nesting, some are still courting. Some are resting and foraging, and some are just passing through.

A bird watcher can scan his or her optics across a small prairie slough and see eight or more different duck species in the time it takes a western meadowlark to sing a single phrase. Gadwall, wigeon (American), teal (blue and green), scaup (lessers), ring-necks, redheads, canvasbacks, mallards, shovelers, pintails, ruddies, hoodies, all are there... The possibilities make it worth checking out any chunk of water you encounter.

While scouting west along Rt. 36 for our upcoming field trips at the Potholes & Prairie Birding Festival, Zick and I (and the kids, somewhat less willingly) stopped by a large lake on the south side of the east-west heading road. There were lots and lots of ducks: on the water, along the shore, in the reeds, flying overhead...

As I scanned with my binocs, checking off the familiar forms of the species we expected to see, I came upon a bird I did not recognize.

Mystery bird on the right.

"Holy CARP!" I said?or something to that effect!

"What is THIS? It's got an bright orange bill!"

Julie got on it and we began to speculate (read: taking wild guesses at what this bird was).

Mystery bird on the right, clearly showing a red-orange bill.

We spent the next hour studying the bird, taking regular digital and digiscoped digital photos and video. What WAS this creature?

At least one of us was sure it was some rare Asian stray, blown off course by the season's final Alberta Clipper and deposited in our laps for this, our seventh P&PBF in North Dakota.

To be continued tomorrow.....

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You're the Gull for Me!

Some interesting courtship behavior by ring-billed gulls which I videotaped (actually digi-video) at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge in late January 2010. I've seen ring-billeds do a lot of things, but I'd never seen this courtship display, which I believe is known as "the long call."

Clearly he is saying "You're the gull for me."

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Long Days, Great Light

Morning sun on barn and meadows near Belt, MT.

We've recently returned from a week apiece in North Dakota and Montana. In addition to adjusting to the different landscape, different birds, and earlier time zones (Central and Mountain Time) of the western Great Plains, I've found notable differences in the light. It's more buttery or lemony early and late in the day, but also brighter during the mid-day hours. American white pelicans that at dawn look pinkish or creamy yellowish-white, are blindingly white at noon.

One other major difference is the length of the day at these more northerly latitudes. It starts getting light shortly after 4:30 am and you can still read a book or ID a bird through your binocs at 10:15 pm! I found this especially noticeable during the two nights we were camping along the Missouri River. The poor-wills were still calling when the western kingbirds and western meadowlarks began their morning vocal crescendi.

End of the day Slaughter River, MT.

Not that I minded that. It is fear that motivates me to get up early when on vacation: fear that I will miss out on something cool or amazing or beautiful. And I want to squeeze every last drop of juice out of the plum that is my "vacation" (even when it is a mostly working vacation trip as this one was). So I always stay up late and get up early, camping or not, when traveling.

Pheasant under grass, early morning near Pingree, ND.

Here are a few of the scenic views that caught my eye and camera during the first two weeks of June when I was way out west.

Sunset behind our cabin at Lakeview Meadow Resort, near Jamestown, ND.

Sun sparkles over sage, Little Sandy Creek, MT.

More sun sparkles over sage, Little Sandy Creek, MT.

Dusk settling in at Stonewall Canyon along the Missouri River.

How many sunsets have these stone walls seen?

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Speechless, but Hungry

While navigating the busy streets of a fair midwestern town earlier this month, we drove past this sign outside a fast-food restaurant. I had no idea what a biscuit hole might be?there are all sorts of things that occur to one's mind?but two strange urges came over me after reading this sign's message:

1. I felt a pang of hunger.

2. I really wanted to roll up to the drive through and mumble, in my best Sling Blade voice: Gimme a sack o' them biskit holes and swipe on sum o' that yeller musterd, please. And gimme sum o' them french fried pataters, too...Hmmmmm.

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Dude Looks Like a Lady

Is this a he or a she?

For many bird species, females get the short end of the stick when it comes to bright plumage, singing ability, and, in some cases, offspring rearing duties. Think for a moment about the life of a male ruby-throated hummingbird: He sets up a territory, courts a female (or several), fertilizes as many eggs as he can, then his job is done. He goes and hangs around the feeder, spending the day drinking and fighting, like an unemployed bully. The female whose eggs he fertilized? He can't even remember what she looked like.

No so with the phalaropes. Or, exactly so with phalaropes, but with the sexes reversed.

Consider, if you will, the Wilson's phalarope.

We get to see Wilson's phalaropes each June when we're in North Dakota. This year's wet spring in the Dakotas seemed to provide more nesting and foraging habitat for the phals, so they were almost everywhere. While out doing some casual bird watching with my OWN offspring, Phoebe and Liam, we happened upon the pair of Wilson's phalaropes depicted in my photos, in a flooded cornfield.

After both kids got a good look at the pair, I asked them which one they thought was the male. Both kids chose the more brightly colored of the two, until Phoebe deduced that this was probably a trick question.

Female Wilson's phalarope.

In phalaropes, the sexual dimorphism is flipped from what we see in most other birds. It is the female that is both larger and more colorful in appearance. Males are duller colored to blend in better when incubating eggs on the nest. But as that annoying huckster Billy Mays often says "But wait! There's MORE!"

Females (sometimes several at once) court a male for the right to mate. After Ms. W. Phal is chosen by a Mr. W. Phal, he fertilizes her eggs (she still gets THAT duty) and she lays them in a nest scrape. Then her work is mostly done. She skips away as free as a male hummingbird, to do whatever she wishes: forage, loaf, find other males to court and spark with...

Female (left) and male(right) Wilson's phalaropes.

Meanwhile, back at the nest, Mr. Phal get to incubate the eggs and, once the precocial chicks emerge, he and some of his fellow single dads get the kids together to learn the intricacies of life as a phalarope.

Now I am sure that some of my fellow humans out there think this just ain't right. That this particular gender roll reversal is not only evil, it threatens the very fabric of our society, if not our freedom. I just think it's one of the million of cool things that we as bird watchers are privileged to know, once we take the time to learn them.

This photo shows the size difference between the sexes. She is bigger than he.

By the way, when you were a beginning birder, did you know how to pronounce PHAL-a-rope? I've heard all kinds of versions: fall-AIR-oh-pee, fal-ar-ROPE-ee, PHIL-an-thrope, Sha-SHEV-skee.

For an excellent (but not overly scientific) explanation of the breeding cycle and natural history of the Wilson's phalarope, read Dave Iron's post about this subject on BirdFellow.com.

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Phoebe's First Manatee

Phoebe's lifer West Indian manatee at Blue Springs State Park.

As soon as we got off the plane at the Orlando airport and secured our rental car, Phoebe and I took off after her most-wanted Florida experience: seeing a manatee. I knew from previous experience that Blue Springs State Park was one of the best places to find these gentle aquatic mammals, so that's where we headed (after a quick nosh at Steak & Shake!).

Sure enough, as soon as we parked the car and walked down to the edge of spring-fed Blue Springs Run where it meets the St. John's River, Phoebe added West Indian manatee to her mammal life list.

The park is a designated manatee refuge and the park's name (Blue Springs) is the reason the manatees are here in the winter. Warm water from the springs heats the river and manatees need warm water to survive. The very cold weather of early January had been hard on the manatees in this part of Florida.

We walked the boardwalk for the next two hours, looking at manatees, spotting birds, marveling at live oaks draped in Spanish moss, and drinking in the warm Florida sunshine.

That morning when we left Ohio, it was snowing hard with three inches of snow on the ground, temperatures dropping. So, though Floridians on the boardwalk were bundled up and decrying the cold snap, 68ºF felt like beach weather to us.


Me: "We're not in Ohio anymore, Phoebster!"
Phoebe: "Yeah and if we were, I'd be in algebra class right now!"

The happy manatee spotter, Phoebe Linnea.

Many of our birding pals at the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival made the pilgrimage to Blue Springs to see the manatees. We had a total of more than 20 manatees during our visit. It was as satisfying as it was awesome.

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I'm Gonna Git You Sapsucka!

My crummy image of a beautiful adult male yellow-bellied sapsucker.

It's been a great fall for yellow-bellied sapsucker sightings around the farm. Some years we get one or two sappies that stick around through the fall. This year, given the number of migrant sapsuckers we've seen, I'm hoping we'll have a handful of wintering birds. I'm not sure our trees are happy about this, though they have nothing, really, to worry about.

On several occasions I've seen three individual YBSAs at once, swooping from tree to tree in that unique sapsucker way. Nearly all of the birds we've seen have been youngsters (birds born last spring/summer) and we can tell this by their splotchy, ill-defined plumage. On Saturday morning of Thanksgiving weekend a beautiful adult male yellow-bellied sapsucker showed up. I had stepped out onto the back deck to check the temperature and heard a light tapping coming from the nearby weeping willow tree. When the male peeked around from the trunk, the morning sun caught his red crown and throat (adult females have a white throat) and I bolted back inside the house for my camera.

This guy had a set of wells going on each trunk of the willow.

In my experience, yellow-bellied sapsuckers are very quiet birds. They seem to lack the red-bellied woodpecker's zest for life, the downy and hairy's constant activity, and the flicker's flashy flight style. Sapsuckers can be easily overlooked, which is why it's so helpful to know the audible clues to their presence.

This young female looks like a bump on a birch trunk, doesn't she?

The tapping noise they make when excavating sap wells sounds like someone absent-mindedly tapping a pencil on a desk: tap-tap-tap ?pause?tap-tap ?pause?tap-tap-tap-tap. It is irregular in its rhythm and soft enough to go unnoticed.

Sapsuckers do vocalize quite regularly, making a soft, wheezy, descending meearr that sounds somewhat catlike. Our birds have been mewing a lot?perhaps scolding each other, trying to figure out whose territory this is going to be for the winter.

The long vertical white wing stripe is an excellent field mark for all of our sapsucker species.

We've watched the sapsuckers make their rounds, visiting their sap wells like trappers checking their trap lines. On Saturday I noticed three other woodpecker species visiting the newly drilled sap wells in the willow: a downy, a hairy, and a red-bellied woodpecker. The male sapsucker actually tried to drive off the hairy, when it was caught poaching a drink at a ring of wells.

A few neat factoids about sapsuckers:

• They drill lines of small holes in trees, causing the tree to emit some sap to protect itself. The sapsuckers then revisit these wells on a regular basis to consume the sap and any insects attracted to it. The holes are visible scars in the tree bark, permanent evidence that a sapsucker was here at least once!
  
• It is thought that sapsuckers do not do much harm to healthy trees. In fact some ornithologists believe that sapsuckers prefer to drill holes in trees that are already under stress because they produce sap that is higher in certain nutrients. Still many sapsuckers are persecuted, especially by orchard owners.
• Sapsuckers don't actually "suck" sap?they lap it up with their tongues, which have short feather-like projections on the end. Sapsucker tongues function more like a brush than a straw.
  
• Dozens of other birds and many animals and insects will visit sapsucker wells to drink the slightly sweet sap.
• In spring, early arriving hummingbirds rely on sapsucker wells when plant nectar and insects are unavailable.
• Sapsuckers are avid migrants, with some birds reaching Central America and the islands in the Caribbean.

A very young female?no red at all yet.

I've also seen our sapsuckers perch nearby our feeding stations, which are always stocked with sunflower seed, peanuts, suet, and suet dough. I'm hoping they will "tap into" this additional source of food so we can enjoy them all winter long.

Only rarely have we had a sapsucker as a regular feeder visitor. This is an adult female.

Here's a very informative page about the yellow-bellied sapsucker.

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Mystery Duck in ND: Part 2

A clear side view of the mystery duck, showing the red-orange spot on the bill.

And now back to our mystery duck in North Dakota....

We watched the mystery red-billed duck for 20 minutes and during that time it became increasingly wary, it seemed?moving to the far end of the small lake and swimming into the thin vegetation there, as if to hide. We noticed that a female lesser scaup was with this apparently male bird, but we had no explanation for the weird color on his bill.

This female was hanging close to the odd-looking male.

The pair on the lake, swimming away from us and the other scaup present.

Through my spotting scope, despite the wind and distance, we could see that the red-orange on the bill did not appear to be blood from an injury. The color was wrong.

When you are in the field (and far from your reference library of field guides) looking at an odd bird, it can be difficult to remain calm and rational. Your heart starts pounding, your eyes get big, and your brain, which has been running on 1/3 power for most of the day, suddenly finds the energy and enough working synapses to leap to some spectacular (and usually wrong) conclusions. Surely this is something fantastic?a first North American record! Or at least a first for the continental U.S. You'd even settle for a first state record for North Dakota...it's GOT to be at least that good.

Soon the bird was too far away for reliable views, so we headed down highway 36, headed west into the coteau. But we kept debating our ideas and impressions about this bird. We felt reasonably sure that this bird was a scaup or a scaup relative. I had a feeling this was a regular lesser scaup with some sort of physical anomaly or, perhaps, some sort of bill marker placed there by a researcher. Julie was not giving up on the fact that this could be either an escaped bird from an exotic waterfowl facility or zoo, or a true vagrant that ended up far from its normal range. Secretly, I wanted her to be right because it would be so much cooler if the bird turned out to be something from far away.

A few things bothered us about my assumption that this was just an odd scaup. First of all the bird looked duller in color than the other male lesser scaup around it. Secondly, its head shape was flatter and less pointed than other males we could see. This made the head/bill shape look more canvasback-like than scaup-like. Thirdly, it behaved weirdly (swimming with its body and head low to the water, as if in a submissive pose) when several other male scaup approached it and what we assumed was its/his mate.


It was all too much to let go unresolved. We made a point to return to the same pond on our way back to Jamestown after our route-scouting trip was done. Five hours later, about 4 pm, we pulled over alongside the road to scan the pond that, earlier in the day, had held the weird duck. There were scaup there, but none with an orange-red bill. Where was it? Had we let the discovery of a lifetime slip away? Had we let a species new to science (Thompson's scaup or maybe Zickefoose's pochard) flap away on the cool prairie wind?

Tune in tomorrow for the rest of the story...

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