PEEPS

Red-footed Booby - Florida

A Red-footed Booby (Sula sula), an ABA Code-4 species, was released from a rehabilitation center in Pelican Harbor, Dade County, about three weeks ago. This bird can sometimes be seen at the end of the day when it returns to the rehab center to roost with Brown Pelicans and Black Vultures (fide Chris Newton). The booby spends much of the day away from this roost site.  It is still given one fish per day to supplement its natural foraging catches.

Photo is courtesy of Angel Abreu.

 

Red-footed Boobies are polymorphic with a white, black-tailed white, "golden" white, brown, white-tailed brown, white-headed brown, and white-tailed brown morphs.  It is one of two booby species that nest in trees where they will also roost.

Red-footed Booby is pantropical in distribution and long foraging flights make plotting this species' movements difficult.  Juveniles are notorious for their long flights with some birds recorded over 100 miles from the nearest land. They often leave on foraging journeys at first light, returning after dark (HBW, Volume 1). Red-footed Booby is one of the most abundant and widespread of the boobies, yet it is casual in the ABA Area except at the Dry Tortugas where it it has been seen in 10 of the last 15 years (ABA Checklist, Seventh Edition, Pranty et al.).  Its food preference is flying-fish and squid, both food types caught by plunge-diving, although flying-fish are also caught in flight.  During moonlit nights, when squid are attracted to surface waters, Red-footed Boobies take advantage of the abundance of surface foods. 

Cuban Kite Discovered - Eastern Cuba

Only a few hundred miles south of Key West, Cuba's most endangered bird of prey, the critically endangered subspecies of Hook-billed Kite (Chondroierax uncinatus wilsonii) was discovered in the Humbolt Park area of Guantanamo Province in eastern Cuba.

Photograph, one of the few of this taxon, is courtesy of Nils Navarro Pacheco.

ABA's Birders' Exchange program supplied the camera and lens that enabled Nils Navarro Pacheco and Ernesto Reyes to document their sighting.  From Field Guide to the Birds of Cuba, Garrido and Kirkconnell, Clements Checklist of the Birds of World, Sixth Edition, and Handbook of the Birds of the World, Volume 2, we learn how little is known about this taxon. Some authors believe "Cuban Kite" is a valid species, separate from Hook-billed Kite, although the A.O.U. Check-list of North American Birds, Seventh Edition, treats it as a subspecies of Hook-billed Kite.  Almost no information is known about "Cuban Kite" natural history, and it's range is thought to now only include eastern Cuba, with only about 250 pairs in existence.  In a 30-year period before the year, 2000, only three sightings of "Cuban Kite" had been confirmed.

Ivory Gull - New Jersey

On 27 November Jim Dowdell found a 1st-cycle Ivory Gull (Pagophila eburnea), ABA Code-3, flying about Cape May Harbor, New Jersey, the bird showing some interest in the Lobster House.

Ivory Gull photograph is courtesy of Tony Leukering.

Ivory Gull, the only member of the genus Pagophila, is a two-cycle gull that may skip a prealternate molt.  Instead, juveniles molt directly into adult plumage during their second cycle (Gulls of the Americas, Howell and Dunn).  This is a holarctic breeding species found mostly above the Arctic Circle and in winter they primarily remain at the edge of the pack ice.  For these reasons, this species was given the name, Pagophila, from the Greek and meaning frost-lover.  Eburnea is a Latin reference to ivory (Dictionary of the Birds of the United States, Holloway).

If you own the ABA Checklist, Seventh Edition, Pranty, et. al., you may have noticed the skull-and-crossbones symbol, indicating Ivory Gull is a Species of Conservation Concern.  Mallory et. al, documented local declines in local arctic populations of Ivory Gulls in 2003 in a paper titled "Local Ecological Knowledge of Ivory Gull Declines in Arctic Canada."

Common Shelduck - Newfoundland

For good reason, most Common Shelducks (Tadorna tadorna) are written off as exotics, escapes from captivity, that is, unless they are seen in Newfoundland waters. On the early morning of 17 November, Bruce Mactavish found a female Common Shelduck at Quidi Vidi Lake.  Of unknown provenance, the bird flew off by 0830,  but based on the observer's description of the wind direction when he found the bird, the bird's plumage and its behavior, Bruce believes it is a wild bird.  There are currently no accepted records of this species in the ABA Area.

HBW, Volume 1 states that Common Shelduck is the least typical of the shelducks and it is often considered as a link between the other members of the Tadora genus and the Alopochen ducks. It breeds from northwest coastal Europe, scattered Mediterranean sites, and east across central Asia to northeastern China, and south to Iran and Afghanistan, preferring coastal tidal mudflats, but frequently flies to fresh water to drink.  During migration, northern and interior populations move south.  Some parts of the population are mostly sedentary but others are thought to fly extensive distances to molting areas.

Changes to the ABA Checklist

From the November 2009 issue of Birding, four new species were added to the ABA Checklist and one species was deleted, for a new total of 960 species recorded in the ABA Area.  The newest additons are: Swinhoe's Storm-Petrel (Oceanodroma monorhis), White-crested Elaenia (Elaenia albiceps), Crowned Slaty-Flycatcher (Empidonomus auarantioatrocristatus), and Sinaloa Wren (Thryothorus sinaloa). Caribbean Elaenia (Elaenia martinica) was removed from the List.

A detailed analysis of each new ABA species, plus the reasons from removing Caribbean Eleania from the ABA Checklist, is discussed in detail in the newest issue of Birding.  Of note, the South American Checklist Committee (SACC) recently voted to delete the hyphen in Crowned Slaty-Flycatcher and from a few other South American species. The SACC members felt hyphens were "part of the ongoing debate generated by Gill & Wright (Birds of the World: Recommended English Names) on when to use hyphens in bird names" especially if hyphens "(a) unite groups of... close relatives, or (b) involve "Bird-Bird" last names, e.g., "Hawk-Eagle".

http://www.museum.lsu.edu/~Remsen/SACCprop401.html.

If your fall birding is slow, try saying Empidonomus aurantioatrocristatus five times rapidly, the word translates as orange-colored black crest (A Dictionary of Scientific Bird Names, Jobling).

American Flamingo - Texas Coast

On a 20 October coastal Texas waterfowl survey that included Aransas NWR, biologist Patrick Walther reported seeing a pair of flamingos in the Whitmire Unit (Calhoun County).  From second hand information, one is described as being an escaped "Greater" Flamingo from the Wichita Zoo from June 2006 while the other was described as being a bird from the Yucatan, MX, which makes it an American Flamingo, ABA Code-3.

American Flamingo (Phoenicoterus ruber) was recently split from the Old World Greater Flamingo (P. roseus) in the 49th Supplement to the AOU Chek-list of North American Birds. American Flamingo is the only flamingo species currently on the ABA Checklist.

Flamingos are in their own family, Phoenicopteridae.  They all possess lamellae as bill structures which enable them to feed in a manner similar to the baleen whales.  Between two mandibles, a tongue functions as a piston, pumping water through the lamellae. Backward-facing bristles move food items backwards to the throat, while the tongue expels water back out of the birds' mouths.

Adult flamingo of all species are pink in color.  The pink coloration comes from carotenoid pigments synthesized by algae or by the organisms which feed on algae.  These carotenoids are converted by enzymes into usable pigments called canthaxanthins which are found in the feathers and in the bare skin regions of flamingos (HBW, Vol. 1).

Brown-chested Martin - Massachusetts

On 12 October a Brown-chested Martin (Progne tapera fusca), an ABA Code-5 species, was found by Marshall Illiff, Jeremiah Trimble, and Matt Garvey at Cumberland Farms, Massachusetts.  This subspecies is an austral migrant, breeding exclusively in South America, but spending the austral winter as far North as Panama (has also been recorded in Costa Rica).  There are only a handful of records of this species from the ABA Area (currently five accepted), the most recent was one photographed at Patagonia Lake State Park, AZ, on 3 February 2006 (NAB 60: 270, ABA Checklist, Seventh Edition, Pranty et. al.).

The fusca subspecies of Brown-chested Martin forms post-breeding flocks of hundreds or thousands of birds, often associated with other swallow and martin species, regularly moving north to northern South America and Panama where they remain from March to October/November (HBW Vol. 9).

Hank Levesque's excellent photos of this Brown-chested Martin can be seen at http://picasaweb.google.com/hooplion/2009_10_12?feat=email#

Blue Bunting - Texas

On 11 October Brad McKinney and his son, Will, found a female Blue Bunting (Cyanocompsa parellina), ABA Code-4 species, at Laugna Atascosa NWR in coastal South Texas.  The bird was photographed and heard calling.

Most of the accepted records of this species come from the Texas Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV) with only three accepted records outside the Valley, two winter birds from Freeport, TX, and one bird from Louisiana in December 1979 (ABA Checklist, Seventh Edition, Pranty et. al.).  Undocumented reports occur every winter from the LRGV.  All accepted records come from mid-October to early April.

Unlike our familiar Passerina buntings, which Blue Bunting superficially resembles, Blue Bunting has a deep, stout bill with a strongly curved culmen. It is most closely related to Blue-black, Ultramarine, and Glaucous-blue Grosbeaks.  Of the three recognized Blue Bunting subspecies, C. p. beneplacitais a resident from northeast Mexico, including Tamaulipas, and it is therefore the expected subspecies in South Texas.

Brambling - California

On the evening of 7 October Mark Brown found a Brambling (Fringilla montifringilla), an ABA Code- 3 species, in Preisker Park in Santa Maria, CA.  The bird, in female /1st winter male plumage, was reported to be eating fruits of beach trees and it was photographed.

Bramblings breed in the Palearctic region of northern Eurasia and winter primarily in the Mediterranean region and in scattered locations in southern Asia.  During breeding, this species is found in birch woodland, mixed deciduous woods, and at the edges of conifers.   At the northern edges of its range, its is found in dwarf birch and willow scrub.  It is known for eating beech mast and in years when the beech nut crop is abundant, as many as 80 million birds have been estimated to congregate (Finches & Sparrows, An Identification Guide,  Clement, et. al.).

Pink-footed Goose - Maine

ollowing the passage of a weather system that dropped birds into the Yarmouth, Maine area, Derek Lovitch decided to check the fields on 1 October where last winter at least one Barnacle Goose was found.  This fall's highlight was even better with a first Maine record of Pink-footed Goose (Anser brachyrhynchus),  an ABA Code-4 species with about 25 reports, almost all within the past 25 years (ABA Checklist, Seventh Edition), Pranty et. al.).  The species is now increasing in Greenland and Iceland with an estimated 10,000 pairs in 1989, compared to a whopping 270,000 pair estimate in 2005.

Photograph is courtesy of Derek Lovitch.