Blog Birding #128

Think you know how to identify yellowlegs by voice? Earbirding's Nathan Pieplow says not so fast:

A recent thread on the Xeno-Canto forum started me asking questions about how to identify yellowlegs by voice.  Conventional wisdom says the two species can often be separated by their calls, at least with some experience.  But as I was comparing the many online recordings, I came to an uncomfortable conclusion.  Either an awfully high percentage of the recordings were misidentified, or my own identification criteria were wrong.

A guest post by the enigmatically named Cassowary at Bourbon, Bastard, and Birds sings the praises of sparrow genus Zonotrichia:

Zonotrichia...to some, the word may conjure up images of B-movie super villains, otherworldly castlescapes, or irruptive genital flora. But to birders in North America, it manifests in our minds as a different type of horror. Four massive sparrows, each endowed with a phantasmagorical voice that can, by turns, charm, disorient and haunt. Four winged horsemen, intoxicating in their song and beauty, all harbingers of the apocalypse awaiting each of us at the end of days.

Winter is quickly passing from North America, but Drew Weber of The Nemesis Bird still manages to pick up a three redpoll taxa day:

In Pennsylvania, we are farther south and the odds of seeing all four taxa are greatly diminished. I am not aware of any Hornemann’s Redpolls ever in Pennsylvania, and there is one previous photo that I could find of a bird that looked like a Greater Redpoll (Dauphin County, 2008). My advisor has reported a growing number of redpolls coming to her feeder, starting with ~20-40 a couple weeks ago and growing to 100+ this week. I was excited about the chance to look through this flock because I still need Hoary Redpoll for my life list, and I haven’t ever had a chance to really sit down and study redpolls.

We've heard about the impact that tar sands drilling can have on the virgin boreal forests, but who better to share that impact that someone in the middle of it. At Bird Canada, Sharon McInnes shares the ugly truth:

Let's be clear: tar sands are not oil. They are a mixture of approximately 10% bitumen mixed with sand, silt, and water. Bitumen is "what a desperate civilization mines after it's depleated its cheap oil" (Tar Sands, Andrew Nikuforak, 2010). Getting it from its raw state to a state in which it will flow through a pipeline takes a mind-boggling amount of fresh water, a complex network of roads, pipelines, well pads, compressor stations, energy generation facilities, and tailing ponds. 

Laurence Butler, writing at Birding is Fun, offers some thoughts, and his process, on a difficult Empid he found:

There are several genera of birds that are notoriously hard to identify. Here in North America, beginning and experienced bird-watchers alike (ok, mostly beginner) scratch their collective heads over Sparrows, and Gulls, Shorebirds and Flycatchers. Similar plumages and overlapping ranges make it hard to pick apart certain species from some of these groups, and the field guides never seem to quite cover all the bases. For my money, the empidonax flycatchers are some of the most difficult, and I love them for it.

Comments

[Rick Wright]

Nathan Pieplow (nomen, omen) gets my convinced vote for cage-rattler of the year. Not only is his blog unfailingly well written and fun to read, but he is one of the best unseaters of settled opinion out there, continually forcing us to think about the things we think we "know." I haven't r e a l l y paid attention to yellowlegs vocalizations for years (they're easy, right? I learned them as a kid, right?), but Nathan's given me something else to pay attention to and to enjoy this spring. Great work.