Mystery Duck in ND: The Final Chapter

Our mystery duck preening.

We finally re-found the weird-looking scaup on an adjoining part of the lake where we'd originally spotted it. And this time the light was a bit better, so we took good long looks in between getting more still and video images. Blowing up one of the digiscoped stills on my camera screen, I noticed something odd. The scaup was preening and this gave me a unique angle on the bill and the bight orange-red color patch.

So I blew it up more...


and more still.

"Hey! That's some sort of colored tag attached to the bird's bill! It's NOT a natural part of the duck."

This view showed a clear gap between the bill and the colored patch, leading us to suspect this was something artificial.

From a normal angle, with the scaup swimming in profile, the colored patch looked more like a part of the bill.
But there were still things that bothered us about this bird. It looked and acted differently than its fellow male lesser scaup nearby. This made us wonder if the bill marker/tag was affecting the bird in some way. Was it affecting his social status among the other scaup? I've seen albino birds attacked and driven off by members of their own species. Was it physically painful or did it affect the bird in some physical way? He certainly looked duller and less round-headed and acted shyer than his peers most of the time we watched him.

Here's a video I shot through my scope that shows the marked scaup's behavior while apparently trying to defend a female (his mate?) from other potential suitors. NOTE: You might want to turn down your speaker volume: the wind noise on this video is loud.

That evening at the social hour, I cornered Ron Martin, one of North Dakota's top birders, to ask about the bird.

"Oh yeah, we've seen a few scaup like that over the years. There's some guy doing research on them. You can probably find him on the Internet."

Well, Ron was right. Searching "ducks with bill tags" I got a posting from MOU-net. It gave a number for the Minnesota DNR where, back in 2005, birders and hunters were encouraged to report sightings of tagged birds. The kind souls at MN DNR were no longer collecting the sightings, but they pointed me to a professor at Louisiana State University who, apparently, had lead the research projects that were tagging scaup. I sent off an e-mail asking if he wanted my report but have heard nothing yet.

Scaup are experiencing a fairly rapid decline in population and waterfowl researchers are trying to discover why. Lesser scaup migrating up the Mississippi River were being bill tagged back in 2004 and 2005. If I hear anything from the researchers, I'll let you all know.

I was disappointed that this was not some weird vagrant duck, though I knew the chances of that were slimmer than a male pintail's tail. I was, however, glad to have solved the mystery. I feel a bit of pity for the poor duck, which has had to live with that crazy thing attached to its bill. If nothing else, I hope the researchers eventually discover what's behind the scaup population decline.

Thanks for bearing with me as I told this story. It was too much for a single post. Thanks to everyone who commented, especially Paul Roisen from Iowa, who sent me this photograph of a strikingly similar species from South America, the rosy-billed pochard:

Rosy-billed pochards from South America.

Artificially-rosy-billed lesser scaup from North Dakota.

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Giant Things of North Dakota

The massive bovine form of New Salem Sue can be seen from a long distance away.

She's called Salem Sue and she lives in?towers over, really?the town of New Salem, North Dakota on the south side of I-94, west of Bismarck. We saw a sign for her shortly before we saw her looming presence, standing tall on top of a hill. She is the world's largest Holstein cow statue. There was no way we were simply going to drive past her without stopping for a hi-dee-ho and a closer gander.

Sue's is cared for by the local Lions Club.

She did not disappoint. We stopped at the small entrance kiosk and happily donated our $3 per car full. Then we fish-tailed our way up the muddy road to Sue.

The donation receptacle was a modified milk can.

Three things struck us as we stepped out of our vehicle.

One, it was cold?probably about 45 degrees, not bad for a June afternoon.

Two, the wind hit us like a freight train. We needed to hold onto each other to keep from being blown off Sue's hill. Wind chill estimate: -73 degrees F. I could feel my skin turning blue, under my three coats. My exposed skin had lost all sensation.

She's a proud one, that Sue.

Liam was full of curiosity and questions.

Three: Sue was not only huge, she was anatomically correct. And she was in desperate need of a robust milking. It occurred to me that, had Sue's udders been leaking milk, the entire southeastern quarter of Morton County would have been covered in frothy dairy goodness.

Sue is incredibly life-like.

That is one big Holstein.

The wind was so strong, it was hard to stand up straight.

We stood there, shivering in our amazement. Took some photos. Then each of us tracked a pound of mud into our Toyota Sasquatch (or whatever it was we were driving) and we headed west, toward the Montana border, our giant holstein jones having been satisfied.

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Caspian Tern: A Good Omen

Caspian tern by Arthur Morris/Birds As Art.

Yesterday about 15 of us were sitting around a set of tables in the Hotel Lakeside, discussing details for the upcoming Midwest Birding Symposium, when a Caspian tern flew past the windows along the Lake Eire shore. Of course I couldn't help myself. I grabbed my friend Judy's binoculars and checked out this big, beautiful tern. And I shouted out the ID of the bird, completely stopping the meeting in its tracks.

The bird watchers in the meeting with me swiveled in their chairs for a look. The non-birders sort of sat there smiling in a mixture of amazement and amusement.

No matter, I took this sighting as a good omen. The Caspian tern is the bird we chose for the event's logo, designed by Claire Mullen, production director at Bird Watcher's Digest. The fact that this "awesome beast" (if I may quote Jim McCormac) chose to fly past to say hello bodes well for this birding event, which will be held at Lakeside, Ohio from September 17 to 20, 2009.

I hope you'll consider joining us at the MBS. We've got fabulous speakers, awesome birds, a sold-out Birder's Marketplace full of everything for birders, and a weekend full of mucho, mucho fun. Details are available here.

Among our speakers is the man who took the Caspian tern photo above, Arthur Morris. Artie will be speaking and leading a workshop on digital bird photography.

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Mystery Bird

OK Bird IDheads, here's another mystery bird for you. This photo was taken in early June in Great Falls, Montana. Not that there's anything wrong with that....

Some help: No the bird is not eyeless and headless. It's preening.

Sorry no prize this time (it's an easy one after all). Just the glory of knowing that you know what this mystery bird is and that we know that you know. You know?

Party on. More meat on the sandwich tomorrow, I promise.

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Leaving Town for Mr. McCown

The view from the special birding spot.

The second half of my family's recent trip out West was spent in Montana, a lifer state for me. Julie spent a summer in northernmost Montana when she was a teenager, living with her sister Barb and family. The other three of us only knew about Montana what we'd heard from friends and absorbed from books and pop culture. We spent three amazing days canoeing down the Missouri river and camping?and there are sure to be more posts about that in the future. Today's post is about a few hours devoted to our attempt at finding a target species in a very specialized habitat.

Julie and I had been invited by Bob Niebuhr to speak at the Mountain Bluebird Trails 35th anniversary meeting in Great Falls, Montana. For more than three decades this organization has been putting up houses for mountain bluebirds all across Montana, and their success is evident by the widespread presence of this lovely all-blue thrush.

Our first night (Friday) at the MBT event we played music as the opening act to birding funny man Al Batt, the world's tallest Lutheran with a sense of humor. If you've never heard Al Batt speak, you really should. You'll have an excellent chance to hear Al at the Midwest Birding Symposium where he is one of the evening keynote speakers. But back to our story...

The following morning I was slated to co-lead a bird walk along the Missouri River in Great Falls. Though it was only a few hours in duration, the birding at Giant Springs Park was very good, with wonderful looks at cliff swallow, common merganser, black-headed grosbeak, and a nesting pair of Bullock's orioles.

The rest of the morning and early afternoon were filled with a series of talks and presentations, which covered some interesting topics. But there was a problem. We'd met Liz Larcom on the field trip and she mentioned in the course of our conversation, a place about an hour away that was a reliable location for a very special bird?one that would be a lifer for Julie: The McCown's longspur.

In North Dakota each year we try to get our fill of the stunningly beautiful chestnut-collared longspur, which prefers dense grass?especially native prairie. To see the McCown's you have to go farther west, to the more barren and dry grasslands of the western Great Plains. I'd seen this species once, years before, in the Pawnee Grasslands of Colorado, but never since. So I was eager to go and Julie was eager at the chance for a life bird. So we swallowed our sense of guilt at missing some of the day's speakers, and we loaded up the truck and headed north. Liz and another Montana birder came along voluntarily as our guides. Phoebe and Liam came along less willingly, but got more into it as the snow-capped mountains hove into view.

After passing through a small town, we turned off the main road onto a gravel road that pointed us west. The mountains, perhaps 20 or more miles away, seemed close enough to reach in an hour's walk or so, the clear, thin air and sunlight reducing the distance in what was literally a trick of the light. Less than a mile along the road we saw chestnut-collared longspurs doing their song flights above the grass. Vesper sparrows and horned larks eyeballed our vehicle from the barbed wire fence.

Then we was a paler gray bird hovering in the sky, singing. It swooped to the ground and was lost, but not before we knew what it was. We'd found a small set of McCown's longspurs?probably pairs with adjoining territories. So we got out and waited for the song flight to begin again.

Deploying birders seeking longspurs.

Here is what we saw.

Male McCown's on his fave perch.

The male McCown's flew to perch on a fencepost along the road and sang several times. Then he took to the air once more. Of the 200+ images I took of him in flight, only a couple are worth saving and here is perhaps the best of those:

In flight, the McCown's tail shows a black T on white feathers.

Each time he finished his display flights he flew to a different spot in the grass, and then walked to what we imagine was the nest site, near this large rock (below). Once or twice he flew directly to the rock, sang, preened, and then disappeared into the grass.

Dropping in near the nest.

The meadow where he was nesting was loosely covered in dry grass. There we cattle grazing in part of it, near to some ranch buildings. The setting was not remote but it did feel a bit lonely.

We moved farther down the road to be in a better position to take pictures when the longspur returned to his favorite fencepost. He obliged us just twice.
He gave us a striking side view, then turned to show us his chest and his cap.

I wonder if the patterning on the head and breast are disruptive coloration, meant to break up the bird's outline.

This species could, perhaps, have been called blackpoll longspur.

The female McCown's was less striking, but still showed the species' obvious chestnut shoulder patches and obvious white outer tail feathers. If you get a good look at the tail on a flying McCown's longspur, you can see the tail is bisected by a dark line and tipped in black, forming a T.

A female McCown's.

The white face really stands out above the male's black chest.

We spent about 45 minutes with the longspurs, drinking in the sights, listening to their thin, tinkling songs, and marveling at how alive with birdsong this place was so late in the morning. Then we hot-footed it back to Great Falls in time to catch some lunch and to reconnect with the event.

Tomorrow I'll share a video clip of the longspurs.

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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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Midwest Birding Symposium: Now with 100% More Sibley!

Breaking news from The Midwest Birding Symposium! Field guide author/illustrator David Sibley has been added as a speaker on Friday night, September 18. The MBS is being held September 17 to 20, 2009 in beautiful Lakeside, Ohio.

David Sibley's newest book is The Sibley Guide to Trees, covering more than 600 North American tree species. His MBS presentation will discuss the creation of the new Trees guide and the connections between trees, birds, and bird watchers.

He will be signing copies of his new Trees guide on Friday afternoon and also after his talk on Friday evening.

I know this feels a bit like piling on, adding David Sibley to a line-up of talented speakers that already includes Kenn Kaufman, Scott Weidensaul, Al Batt, Julie Zickefoose, Jim McCormac, Jane Alexander, Jeff Bouton, Alvaro Jaramillo, Lang Elliott, Arthur Morris, Paul Baicich, Wayne Petersen, Diane Porter, Ben Lizdas, Chris Wood, Andy Jones, Jim Berry, Amanda Rodewald, Sharon Stiteler, and Mike Bergin.

But isn't more almost always better?

If you're not already registered for the Midwest Birding Symposium, there's still time to get the Early Bird Discount! (And who doesn't want to save $20?)

I look forward to seeing you there!

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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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Here's Looking at You!

Every so often, when taking photographs, you get a head-on shot of a bird. Most of these images are fairly weird-looking, and often, they are unusable for publishing because they do not show the key field marks necessary for visual recognition.

Some of them are usable, however. I use this one (of a Carib grackle from Trinidad) to intimidate my kids into cleaning their rooms. I know, brilliant, right?

Here's how: Simply hang a poster-sized version of this image (shown below) on the wall, and pipe in the audio track from "The Birds."

Like Billy Dee Williams used to say about Colt 45 Malt Liquor: "Works every time!"

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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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