ABA Blog

Avian Interlopers

I hope that you enjoyed Noah Strycker's latest ABA Blog entry about camera trapping as much as I did.  Like Noah, I'm really enjoying the addition of motion-activated trail cameras to my bag of tricks. One of Forrest Gump's trademark quotes may well apply to camera trapping: "Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get."  Just substitute "checking a trail camera memory card" for "Life" and I think the comparison is apt.

Anyway, in my last ABA Blog installment I mentioned that I was experimenting with a couple of Bushnell TrophyCam HD units, with a primary appeal being their ability to shoot motion-activated infrared movies at night.  One is still pointed at my Barn Owl box, and I repositioned the other to face down a log downed by beavers along Boulder Creek in Weld County, Colorado.  One issue I've noticed with the TrophyCam is that close subjects get overexposed by the IR illumination, even when it is set to low power.  Commentator Mike Patterson responded my post by suggesting I use copy paper as a diffuser, a technique he successfully used to build a virtual pitfall trap.  I liked the idea and it worked well in a short test but I was worried about the effect of wet weather on the paper over long unsupervised deployments.  Following the similar advice of the Camera Trap Codger I tried a homemade IR diffuser made of a thin sheet of closed-cell packing foam, which I taped to the inside of the metal security housing in front of the IR array.  I like the results- the bright levels I experienced center frame in earlier trials seem toned down and didn't require post-production adjustments to moderate the exposure.

I was expecting mainly mammals at this set, particularly the beavers that chewed the tree down, but in a week of camera trapping I had many birds join the mix.  I edited some highlights of the week into the video below to show the surprising diversity of mammals and birds that triggered the camera.  

This time I have a challenge for my faithful readers. In the comments section, list the bird & mammal species as they appear in the video (heard-only detections count, too!)  I know the audio isn't the greatest, but it does add an interesting aspect to each clip and I know you'll recognize several species making noise.  The first person to list them correctly will win a copy of Brian Kimberling's new novel, Snapper.  There is a birding theme in the story- here's the publisher's synopsis: 

A disastrous love affair between a man and a place, Snapper relates the brief career of a professional bird researcher in Southern Indiana. While conducting surveys and censuses of the same songbirds John James Aubudon painted in Indiana two hundred years ago – now in catastrophic decline – Nathan Lochmueller traverses a deeply dysfunctional society. He encounters an enormous concrete Santa Claus statue at a remote highway diner, white supremacists, the nation’s oldest Dial-A-Prayer service, Vietnam vets, and a discarded human thigh bone. And, of course, a woman who won’t stay true and a pick-up truck that won’t run.

Both a short story cycle, and a fully-formed novel, Snapper is a lyrical portrait of a rural wilderness and its very dark, very human, heart.

So good luck to any challengers for the prize!  Remember to list all of the mammals and birds in the movie including heard-only detections- first correct list in the comments gets the book.  Even if you don't want to play along, I hope you enjoy the little vignettes of streamside life captured by the trail cam (you might want to embiggen it by clicking the full screen icon in the lower left of the video frame.)

  

Do You See What I See? A New Visual Search Tool from Google

 

Here are two truths:
1.Some people are always looking for easier ways to do hard things.
2.Technology can be amazing.

There are a lot of people anxiously waiting for WeBIRD, the promised birdsong equivalent to Shazam and MusicID, but they may have to wait a little bit longer. Music databases can make a match to a digitally produced song, but they can’t match you singing exactly the same song. The variations in the human voice make that kind of analysis a less than exact science. A person can recognize that you are singing Happy Birthday; Shazam can’t. Similarly, there is enough variation in birdsong that it’s very difficult to get a computer to recognize the nuances. You can teach one to recognize some of the songs some of the time, but a reliable tool is not available yet.

But can we use technology to recognize visual cues and help us to ID birds? New birders are being encouraged by some to post their birding photos to the Internet in order to get an ID, instead of using field guides or birding mentors. Crowd-sourcing identification is certainly one way to handle it, but it would  be much “cleaner” if we could somehow get the computer to do the work for us, wouldn't it? Enter Google Search by Image. Seriously! You can upload an image or provide a URL to images.google.com, and Google will search for similar images. How cool is that! Just click on the little camera at the right of the search field and follow the instructions.

When I learned of this, I knew an experiment was in order! I uploaded a picture of a Hermit Thrush, clicked “Search” and waited to see how Google would handle the difficult Catharus species challenge. My uploaded image shows at the top of the screenshot below:

Can you say “Epic Fail”? None of these pictures is even close, except for the background colour tones. None were even of birds, let alone thrushes. I guess I should have expected that. Maybe it was much too challenging. How about something simpler, like a Barred Owl? The Internet is crawling with owl pictures. This should be easy!

Sigh… Not even a little bit better. More diversity in the selection of “matches”, but still no birds and certainly no owls. Maybe the whole bird has to be visible. Here’s a Burrowing Owl, Google. What can you do with this?

Um, no. But it’s interesting to see how many celebrities resemble Burrowing Owls. Brangelina? The algorithm seemed to be focussing on color-matching. What about a bird with a distinctive color and shape? Easy--Great Blue Heron!

Eureka! It matched one! Admittedly it’s the fifth image the program chose, and it somehow thought that a better match for my heron was a staged suicide scene ( in the top row), but at least it got a bird, and the right bird at that!

I was prepared to completely dismiss this function as useless, but then an interesting thing happened. A birder from Ontario sent me a picture he took while visiting Vancouver to see the Red-flanked Bluetail. It was a great photo of a bird that he (and those I showed it to) identified as a Veery, an almost unimaginable bird to be in Vancouver this time of year. But with a Brambling and a Bluetail around, never say never, right?

People send me pictures all the time, but there was something about this report that made me suspicious. Spidey-sense, some people call it. I asked for more information, which did not come. I did a little online detective work and didn’t find anything reassuring. So I posted the report--along with my reservations--on the Vancouver birding bulletin boards, mindful of those who think that all rare birds should be reported and not wanting anyone to miss out on this potential rarity. Then I remembered the Google Search by Image tool. I uploaded my suspect image--another Catharus--and guess what? Here are the results:

Epic win! The person reporting this bird was a prankster (very funny-not!), my spidey-sense was on the mark, and within seconds, Google found the image in an almost-two-year-old blog post from Massachusetts. I don’t know what motivated the hoax, but I’m delighted that the perpetrator was found out before an onslaught of inevitably frustrated birders wasted their time.

For bird ID, Google Search by Image has a very long way to go. There are some things that humans can still do better than our current technology. But today, I, and all my lookalikes below,  are giving a big alula up to Google!

A New Standard for the 'Stans

A review by Steve Rooke

Birds of Central Asia

by Raffael Ayé, Manuel Schweizer, and Tobias Roth

Princeton University Press, 2012

336 pages, $39.50—softcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 13583

 

Almost a quarter of a century after the breakup of the Soviet Union, tourists are flocking to the manmade and natural wonders of the Silk Road. Birders were especially quick to recognize Central Asia’s potential, and Kazakhstan has become a very popular destination in recent years. Up until now, though, we have been hampered by the lack of a good, up-to-date field guide. While V. E. Flint’s 1984 Birds of the USSR was thorough in its coverage, that book had its limitations, and so we made do with bits and pieces of other guides covering the periphery of the Central Asian region. The new Birds of Central Asia has been long anticipated, and its arrival in the Helm/Princeton series is much welcomed.

Covering the six “stans”—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan—Birds of Central Asia features 618 species in a relatively slim volume. Constructed on what is now the almost standard field guide format, the book includes the usual introductory chapters, including a brief but useful introduction to the region’s geography and biogeography, illustrated with photos that, if nothing more, serve to demonstrate how incredibly varied and stunningly scenic Central Asia is. A short section on taxonomy and nomenclature details the authors’ departures from their primary authority in such matters, the third, 2003 edition of The Howard and Moore Complete Checklist. 

In the body of the book, the text for each species faces the relevant plate, which is as it should be. Almost every species has a small distribution map giving the reader a reasonably good idea of the bird’s range.

The appendices include a list of old, undocumented, or doubtful records; I am not sure why the Oriental Plover, well photographed in the north of Kazakhstan in 1990, is not included here or described in the main text. There is also a brief discussion of gull identification and of the molts and aging of large raptors.

Overall, Birds of Central Asia is a well-produced, compact guide that lives up to the standard set by Helm and Princeton field guides.

The plates are the first thing anyone looks at in a new field guide. A mix of painters and styles—13 artists are represented here—can compromise the visual unity of a field guide, but Birds of Central Asia maintains a reasonable uniformity across its 143 plates. The quality of the plates is generally very good; a significant number are taken over from other guides, and some readers will recognize them. 

There are a few shortcomings. Some species appear to be very washed out. The illustrations of the Saxaul Sparrow, for example, look very bleached, and do not really convey the smart, snappy appearance of that species, which is much more accurately depicted in the cover illustration. The Wryneck and some of the doves are also unusually pale. In other instances, some of the colors are too strong; look at the very bright red on the grebes, for instance.  

I was disappointed to see one of the region’s truly special endemics, the Pander's Ground Jay, represented by just a small (and out of scale) illustration, almost as if an afterthought. Dwarfed by a huge magpie on the same plate, this species, I suspect, was painted especially for the book and then added to a plate from another source. The text’s account of the ground jay is also disappointingly brief.  Although it does mention the very isolated and hard-to-see Kazakh race ilensis, nothing is said of the plumage differences between the nominate race and the darker, larger ilensis with its more extensive breast mark.  

On the first of the sparrow plates, the House Sparrow is much too bright, especially on the cheeks, which are actually quite gray. The female Zarudny’s Sparrow is, to my eye, also much too strongly marked; although the female of this species is patterned basically like the male (unlike her plain North African counterpart), she is much paler and more washed out than shown here. These are small points, though, in what is generally an excellent collection of illustrations.

These days, after the illustrations, it is the taxonomy of any new guide that is subjected to the greatest scrutiny. In an age of rapid and often radical change, this branch of our hobby inevitably poses challenges for authors—and for us mere birdwatchers as we try to keep up.

Birds of Central Asia follows Howard and Moore (2003), with some deviation where the authors found it appropriate. As has long been urged by Central Asian ornithologists, the migratory taxa once assigned to the House Sparrow have now been split as the Indian Sparrow. It is also pleasing to see the Central Asian counterpart of the Desert Sparrow finally accorded full species status and named in honor of the great Ukrainian ornithologist Nikolai Zarudny. This population, which occupies a very restricted range, is in desperate need of the further study that its elevation to species status should encourage.

The Asian Desert Warbler is split from its North African cousins, and the guide includes the recently rediscovered Large-billed Reed Warbler; that species’ breeding range has been placed in the southern portions of Central Asia, but it could be more widespread than currently believed, a good reason for birders to pay closer attention to all those Blyth’s Reed Warblers. The Booted, Sykes's, and Eastern Olivaceous Warblers are moved from Hippolais to Iduna, an innovation (following Howard and Moore) that may be harder for some of us to come to terms with. The Indian Golden Oriole, perhaps overlooked by some visitors in the past, is also listed as a full species. Sadly, there is no suggestion of a split for the regional population of the Crimson-winged Finch.

There are some "losses." Birders who have visited Central Asia in the past will discover that they have “lost” both the Turkestan Tit, placed within the Great Tit complex, and the delightful Yellow-breasted Tit, to be found among the Azure Tits. 

Anyone who has birded the semi-steppe deserts has seen many Lesser Short-toed Larks—or so we thought. Because Howard and Moore assigns the Central Asian taxa heinei and leucophaea not to that species but to the Asian Short-toed Lark, the Lesser does not appear in the book at all, a bit of a shock to those of us who have been entering it on our checklists for the past 20 years. At the same time, the guide’s taxonomic introduction tells us that (frustratingly) unpublished data suggest that heinei and leucophaea are in fact distinct from the Asian Short-toed Lark, either belonging to the Lesser Short-taoed Lark after all—or forming a separate species of their own. In their Birds of Kazakhstan (2007), Arend Wassink and Gerald Oreel call “the status of Asian Short-toed Lark in Kazakhstan…uncertain” and note that “recent trips to the supposed breeding range in Kazakhstan did not result in finding any”; until this complicated situation becomes clearer, it might have been better simply to leave us with the plain Lesser Short-toed Lark. 

Birds of Central Asia treats two populations of the Isabelline Shrike as separate species, the Turkestan and the Daurian Shrikes. Over the years, I have seen a bewildering array of Isabelline Shrike plumages in the region, some of which are sometimes referred to as karelini. This guide tells us that such birds are probably the products of hybridization between Turkestan and Red-backed Shrikes, an explanation that I feel oversimplifies the situation: I am not sure that anyone knows for sure the origins of karelini.  Similarly, the treatment of the large gray shrikes will raise a few eyebrows; here too, the book could be accused of simplifying the true picture.  

But simplification may, of course, be exactly what is needed in the complex and often confusing world of taxonomy, and perhaps this book is to be applauded for coming down off the fence on some issues—even if it does not happen to land on the side you are on. If nothing else, it will prompt debate.

Whatever your taxonomic views, there is no doubt that this is a valuable and much-needed book, one that very neatly fills a hole in the bibliography of Palearctic birding and has instantly become the standard guide to the region.

- Steve Rooke is the Managing Director of Sunbird, and leads tours for that company and for WINGS to Vietnam, Georgia, Cyprus, Central Asia, South Africa, and Ethiopia. Rooke has a wide range of interests outside of birding, not the least of which is cooking.

Recommended citation:

Rooke, S. 2013. A New Standard for the 'Stans [a review of Birds of Central Asia, by Raffael Ayé, Manuel Schweizer, and Tobias Roth]. Birding 45(2):65.

Let's zoom in, shall we?

I think that most readers of this blog are aware of the potential power of digiscoping, but I'd like to illustrate another example of the technique's utility from the Boulder Christmas Bird Count (which I compile) last 16 Dec.  In the weeks leading up to the count, a group of Tundra Swans had been seen in the count circle, frequenting a few area lakes.  This is a rare species on the count, only recorded 6 times on 70 prior counts.  A few of my trusty scouts tried to pin the birds down in the count-week days leading up to the event but dipped- the birds seemed to have moved on.  But on the morning of the count I got a text from Bill Kaempfer reporting them on Valmont Reservoir.  Nice!!  

By mid-afternoon I had finished my territory and had time to swing over to the mighty Valmont to have a gander for myself.  While this power plant-heated triple reservoir complex is a winter waterbird haven, the views from public overlooks range from far at best to recedingly distant most of the time.  The count territory team had permission to enter the complex for better viewing but I was going to settle for some long scope looks.  Still, the swans were great to see in the day's last sloping sunlight, cruising in the windy waters.  I put my Panasonic DMC-G5 rig (with a digiscoping-friendly Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 II R Lens) to my Nikon EDG 64mm scope and shot this video:

 

Notice anything different about one of the birds?  Indeed, one of them is sporting a neck collar.  Now, in full disclosure, I didn't make this discovery.  The neck collared-bird had been well documented in the weeks leading up to the count, and my buddy Christian Nunes had previously submitted the collar number to the USGS Patuxent Bird Banding Lab.  Still, it was my first encounter with the banded bird so I thought I'd try to read the collar at this new location and date.  Frustratingly, I was having trouble confirming the digits on the distant bird (eye fatigue from a long day's birding and wind shake didn't help either), so I snapped a series of digiscoped stills to see if I could pull out the code.

At this level, I think we can confirm the ID as Tundra Swans through traits such as the variable yellow lores and document the rarity well for our state's Christmas Bird Count reviewer.  But I still don't think I can read the neck collar.

By cranking both the scope and camera lens zoom up to nearly maximum levels, cropping the image, and applying some sharpening, the code reveals itself: U856, yellow horizontal numerals on blue (click to enlarge the pic if you can't read the collar.)

While I wasn't the first to crack the bird's code, it was gratifying to confirm that it was the same bird found weeks earlier and to contribute another data point in the bird's known history.  The USGS has gotten very streamlined in their responses to band reports, and I was emailed this certificate within a few days of submitting the collar code:

Pretty cool to know the bird was banded as an adult on the marshy flats east of Kotzebue Sound near the Bering Strait in NW Alaksa in the summer of 2010.  The banding site is about 2800 straight-line miles away from Valmont Reservoir!

Kaufman and Kaufman: Field Guide to Nature of New England

I used to dream of a field guide that would let me identify everything I saw, a childish fantasy I gave up long ago: no book, no library can ever come close, not even for so relatively circumscribed and so relatively uniform a landscape as New England. Those six states are a big place, and "nature" is even bigger.

Certainty, Experts, and Confirmation

A couple of friends and I were birding around Jamaica Bay in New York a few years ago. We came upon a couple of people, a man and a woman, looking out over the water and discussing a bird perched in plain view, but a bit distantly, out in the marsh. They didn't seem to be birders (judging by their lack of optics), but one of them suggested it could be an Osprey. I took a look with my binoculars, easily saw the relevant field marks due to the benefit of magnification, and assured them that yes, it's an Osprey. The woman replied "Could be" as they were walking away.

Could be?! How could she doubt someone with expensive binoculars and birding experience? I had confirmed that it was in fact an Osprey, there was no doubt necessary, we now knew it was an Osprey, didn't we? In this post, I want to discuss how we confirm identifications, what we mean by expert, and how we ever know we are right. It is a treacherous subject, as birding reputations are built on accuracy and perceived infallibility, but I think it is a necessary discussion that may reveal a lot about the community of birders and our interpretations of other people's birding abilities.

What kind of hawk is this? Larger pictures available here. Read more about this bird below.

More recently, I found a hawk on our property. We haven't had a lot of raptors on our farm, not even migrants. I've been hoping for more buteos, and as soon as I saw this bird I knew it was a new species for us. However, I also knew it was going to be a tough ID. It seemed to be a young hawk, smaller than a Red-tail, perched on a dead branch in the morning fog. I immediately had it down to two species: Red-shouldered or Broad-winged. But which one? I quickly digibinned a few pictures, taking breaks to look more carefully with my binocular. I really wanted to see the top of the wings, so I decided to walk around the row of pine trees beside me and have a better angle on the bird's back. I quickly but quietly moved around the pines, and of course the bird was gone. Fortunately I had the pictures, and headed indoors to clinch an ID.

I started with reference books, but didn't find a definitive answer. I only saw the bird from the front, and young Red- shoulders and Broad-wings can be really similar from that angle. I was leaning toward Broad-wing (it was around the peak of their migration through the east), but I certainly wasn't leaning very strongly. I decided to seek outside help, get some other views on the matter. I emailed pictures to some of my birding friends and to the Ohio-Birds email list. One of my first responses was from the list, someone I didn't know. His name was John Blakeman, and he introduced himself: "Blake, I'm a master falconer and raptor biologist. The bird is a red-tailed hawk, clearly. But I'm not so sure it's an immature. Did you see the brown tail? The tail here looks too short for an immature. Immie RTs have tails about an inch longer than adults. But no doubt, a red-tail. --John Blakeman."

I panicked for a second. Wait, was this a Red-tail? Did I just jeopardize my birding reputation by asking for ID help on the most commonly seen hawk in the country? I went back to the pictures, and quickly assured myself that it indeed wasn't a Red-tail. How did I know? Well...it didn't look like one to me. I started to receive other replies; Haans Petruschke said, "...Looks like a Red-Shouldered Hawk. Others may say something else based upon plumage, but the eye structure and shape is pure Red-shouldered." Then another reply, "Immature Red Shouldered Hawk. (For what it's worth, raptors are my specialty.)" This last was another reply trying to convey the idea of knowledge and experience. Not confirmation necessarily, but just trying to indicate that they weren't some random person who started birding yesterday; they had time and experience and background with this subject. A couple of my birding friends agreed with Red-shouldered, but then a couple said Broad-wing, and then a couple more from the email list also said Broad-wing, so I was faced with a split vote. I really wanted to add this bird to our property list, so what to do?

I joined the ID-Frontiers email list to post a message about this bird. I included a link to the pictures, hoping to gain some insight from those on the 'frontiers of identification.' I knew that there were a few people on the Ohio-Birds email list who also subscribed to ID-Frontiers, but I hadn't heard an opinion from them. Based on the split vote, I thought that moving it up to a higher court was acceptable. But what do I mean by acceptable? Aren't birders available to help others, would anyone judge you for asking a stupid question? I mentioned to my wife I was thinking about emailing Sibley to get his opinion. She was incredulous: can you just email Sibley? I felt like it was an identification question that was worthy of expert advice; I'm not a new birder sending out a fuzzy picture of an obvious Brown Pelican. I have some idea what I'm talking about and didn't know what this hawk was, and other people couldn't agree, so I didn't think I'd be wasting anyone's time. I knew many respected birders were on ID-Frontiers, and I would get some good feedback. I received three responses; the one I weighted highest came from Bill Clark, co-author of the Peterson Field Guide to Hawks of North America. He said it was a Broad-winged, and I took that as the final answer.

I emailed the Ohio-Birds list, saying I'd accepted the expert testimony from ID-Frontiers (all in favor of Broad-wing). Case closed. John Blakemen replied, "Blake, You are certainly welcome to assign the ID of the hawk photo to a Broadwinged. But all of the Broadwings I've ever dealt with have distinct but subtle horizontal patterns on the breast, not the vertical ones on your provided photo...Redtails (except in the vary rare melanistic specimens) always have the central, upper breast lighter than the belly band or flanks of the upper breast (chest area), exactly as on your photo of your bird. Red-shouldereds and Broadwings have evenly hued coloration and evenly-patterned upper breasts. But the lack of horizontal patterning on the upper or middle breast negates a Broadwing for me, and the presence of a less-patterned, slightly lighter central area on the upper breast marks the bird as a Red-tail for me. I've trapped, banded, and rehabbed many dozens of Buteos in 40 yrs of working with these birds. John A. Blakeman".

I quickly did an internet search for John Blakeman. Who is this guy? Does he really have the credentials that he claims? I quickly found that yes, indeed he does. He has many years of hands-on experience with these birds. How do I decide which expert to believe, which claims to consider valid, how do I confirm an identification when it isn't clear-cut? The bird is gone, there is no way to get it back. We can't collect further evidence to make a final determination. What if everyone I consulted said it was a Broad-wing? What if they all said it was a Red-tail? Would I listen to the majority, or choose voices here and there? Maybe this bird was a hybrid, or a ghost (I mean a literal ghost, not one of the two species we sometimes call 'gray ghosts')?

My point is, we often have no way to be certain of our identifications. We see a bird, we put a name on it, and it flies away. We don't know whether we were right or wrong. Even if we move it to a higher authority, we can't know for sure if they were right or wrong. One of the people who corresponded with me suggested I try whatbird.com; the site includes a forum where people will help you identify birds. Many people post pictures, hoping to find someone knowledgeable to determine the bird's identity. Many times the responses say something like, "Chipping Sparrow. Confirmed." That is supposed to mean that the person doing the confirming knows what the species is, and they know that they are right. But how do any of us ever know that for sure?

When I decided to write this post, I emailed all of the participants in the discussion and asked whether it would be okay to use their names and responses. A couple were reticent at first, they wanted to check what they had said to me before having it thrust upon a larger birding audience. Why is that?

It is partly because birding credibility is fragile; there are people who think they are good at identifying birds, very willing to share their expertise, but who in fact lack those skills. People who are well-known in birding circles or make their living from birding-related enterprises are justifiably concerned about being lumped in with these other 'bad birders.' Unfortunately, this often keeps them quiet when a difficult identification arises. Sometimes the best identification is 'I Don't Know', but we don't usually want to admit that fact. Even worse is proposing an incorrect identification. This has the obvious side effect of stifling discourse and preventing knowledge from being shared. I was impressed when Birding began running photo quizzes where different birders explained their identification and how they got there. This prevented a consensus view from clouding perception and coloring judgment. Sometimes the experts differed, and I don't think there is anything wrong with that. Maybe there was no right answer (hybrids...or ghosts).

My point with this post is not to decide what kind of hawk is in the pictures, or decide which birders are better than others. I wanted to point out that we perceive different levels of birding expertise, and there are people and organizations we are more likely to believe. It isn't always clear why we choose to believe some people over others, or how we pick which 'experts' to consult. The next time you are out birding and run across someone grossly misinformed about the identification of a bird, feel free to do your best to correct their obvious error. Just remember, they may be trying to do the same thing for you.

Been Banding Lately?

Last weekend I had the pleasure of visiting an educational bird banding station run by the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory at Barr Lake State Park, just northeast of Denver.  Meredith McBurney and her team of volunteers do a fantastic job of engaging school groups, bird club trips, individual birders, and passers-by (the banding table is along a popular hiking trail.)  Meredith is amazing at explaining what's going on with each bird to anyone from pre-schoolers to folks with decades of serious birding under their belts.  Birds in hand catalyze discussions ranging from the esoteric to expressions of delight and amazement.  During my visit I compared and contrasted subtle Dusky vs. Hammond's Flycatcher features and pondered why silent fall "Western" Flycatchers in Colorado should be left at that instead of putting Cordilleran or Pacific-slope tags on them.  But equally cool topics included shared retinal wonderment at the vivid azure hues on a Blue Jay or amazement at the impossibly tiny bundle of migratory energy wrapped up in a MacGillivray's Warbler.

Birders of all ages & experience levels have much to learn at a bird banding station.

I've been to many banding stations throughout my birding life and always come away knowing more than I did before the visit.  My last trip also reminded me that bird banding is also a potentially good hook for beginners.  As a follow-up to the outstanding Pledge 2 Fledge initiative, perhaps you'd consider bringing a new birder to a banding station near you!  

Seeing what Peter Pyle says about determinging age & sex of Townsend's Warblers.

One last detailed look at a Townsend's Warbler before it continues on its way towards warmer climes for the winter.

Kids who mind their P's and Q's might even get to help release a bird like this MacGillivray's Warbler.

Studying in-hand nuances of birds like this Cassin's Vireo can help birders get a grip on tricky field IDs such as separating species within the Solitary Vireo complex.

 

Why Is Sound So Hard?

One of the skills most birders use is the ability to recognize birds by the sounds they make. In most bird groups (seabirds being an obvious exception), each species (and sometimes subspecies or regional variations or even individuals) can be recognized by the sounds that it makes. If you've spent much time around serious birders, you've probably heard names mentioned, people who are extraordinarily good at recognizing the sounds birds make. If you've ever spent a fall migration morning on top of Cape May's Higbee Dike, you have probably witnessed some of these amazing events of bird ID, as experienced birders are able to pick out a flight call to identify a bird that most people didn't even realize was around. I used to work with someone who could identify birds in her sleep...she would use certain species as an alarm clock to know when to wake up in the morning. Let me make it clear right now, I am not one of those people.

I find identifying birds by sound to be extremely difficult. I don't know why, maybe it is because I am more of a visual learner. Regardless of the reason, keeping a bird song in my head is often almost impossible. It was probably after about 5 years of birding that I started being able to recognize anything other than the most common bird songs. Northern Cardinals were my default answer: no matter which species was singing, there was about a 75% chance that I would think it was a cardinal. There were times that I felt like I was doing better, but then I would hear a Carolina Wren and say to myself "Oh, a cardinal." That happened often enough that I knew not to trust my sound IDs, that they were always suspect. I'm starting to get better now (after about 12 years of pretty serious birding, including field work on birds in multiple states and countries), but it still falls apart sometimes. I'll be happily birding along, and then I'll hear a song. I'll recognize it, but not quite know to whom it belongs. In fact, it happened this morning. As background, about 10 years ago my friend Tom and I were birding in Ohio near Lake Erie. We were both still learning at the time, and there was a bird sitting up in a tree singing. It just kept singing, over and over again. We were having a tough time getting a look at it, and listened to the song, without knowing its identity, for nearly half an hour. It finally moved enough for us to get a good look at it, and we realized it was a Warbling Vireo. As we walked away, Tom said "Well, at least we'll never forget that song." I had no recollection of the song. This morning, I was tracking down migrants at one of my usual birding spots. There was a song I kept hearing, a real sing-songy song, repeated many times. I looked and followed and looked and finally got my binocular on it. Warbling Vireo. After all of these years, a relatively common bird with a distinct song continues to confuse me.

The reason I've mentioned these things is to encourage those birders who have a tough time with bird song. It is not easy for everyone, and most of us will never be as good as the experts. However, the more you work at it (spending time in the field listening, reviewing CDs, or perhaps using some of the new song-teaching software), the better you'll be. Don't expect to recognize every bird song every time, and try not to be frustrated when you get one wrong. There are a lot of us who have troubles. Stick with it, it will get better.

Dutson: Birds of Melanesia

Few even are the birders who, on hearing a mention of Melanesia, can confidently put their fingers on the map. Fewer still are the birders who will actually get to visit this vast stretch of tropical islands, extending from New Guinea to Fiji off the northern and eastern coast of Australia.

Whether we know where they are or not, however, those islands have been the site of monumental research into avian distribution and speciation, conducted over more than a century by some of the world's most important biologists and evolutionary theorists; at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we cannot think about birds without thinking--at whatever remove--about the work done by such scholars as Ernst Mayr and Jared Diamond, whose 2001 book The Birds of Northern Melanesia was called by David Bishop "the single most important publication on evolutionary biology since Darwin's." 

The results of all that island evolution are on handsome display in this splendid new guide from Princeton University Press. I'm fairly sure that I'll never get to Melanesia, but after reading Guy Dutson's work--and relishing the fine illustrations by Richard Allen, Adam Bowley, John Cox, and Tony Disley--I'm inspired to try.

The guide covers the birds of fourteen island groups belonging to four nations. Given the high rates of endemism and the pronounced geographic variation shown by many species, this could have been a nightmare of book design; but the challenge is elegantly met here. A careful reading of the front matter's explanation and a little practice was all it took to unlock the clever system of color-coded distribution bars, which not only show which island groups are inhabited by a given species but also reveal its status as an endemic, a resident, a regular migrant or vagrant, an introduced species, or extinct. All this information is provided both on the caption pages of the plates and in a convenient tabular checklist, making it easy for the lucky birder to prepare for a trip to one or the other of the islands.

The guide comprises two sections, one containing 86 beautiful plates with their facing-page captions and distribution charts, the other the species accounts. The texts are headed with the species' English, French, and scientific names, often with notes indicating different taxonomic approaches, and include a description, an often extensive treatment of similar species, voice descriptions, accounts of habit and habitat often including flight style, a statement of each bird's conservation status, and a detailed (often island-by-island) summary of geographic distribution. 

Melanesia as defined here covers some 42,000 square miles. To minimize page flipping, the guide's passerine plates are broken into seven color-coded sections, one for each of the major island groups included. Thus, the birder visiting New Caledonia and confronted with an unfamiliar songbird has to consult only five plates, the visitor to the Bismarcks 11, and so on; the non-passerines, many of which, especially the water birds, are widely distributed among the islands, occupy the first 49 plates. There is necessarily some repetition in the case of species occurring across several island groups, but the artists and the designer have taken this as an opportunity to display regional variation in several species; have a look, for example, at the various Island Thrushes or the Cardinal Myzomelas, some of which differ strikingly from their counterparts on other islands.

In addition to the usual habitat descriptions, regional maps, and conservation discussion, the guide's introductory material includes a dozen pages on birding Melanesia, with practical tips for finding birds on 20 islands and island groups; one gets an unvarnished sense of just how difficult, even dangerous many of these sites are to visit.

The book is refreshingly well edited and proofread, the only major goof the English names given Tachybaptus novaehollandiae at the top of Plate I. (It should be Australasian Grebe.) It's a pleasure to leaf through this guide, which serves very well indeed the author's and artists' intention to "stimulate the study and conservation" of the beautiful birds of a remote and alluring part of the globe.

Lovitch: How to Be a Better Birder

And that's really what it's all about, isn't it? The goal of birding, of any hobby, is expertise gratia sua, and the only reason we do it is to do it better. This slender new volume by Derek Lovitch will help almost any birder do just that.

Relatively new birders who take this book in hand may be surprised to find out just what "better" means. This is not a difficult species guide. Instead, in nine short, casually written chapters, the author introduces us to some of the tools and resources 21st-century birders have available, and shows us how to bring them to bear as we look for that next "good" bird.

After an introductory chapter advocating "whole bird and more birding," Lovitch devotes the next two to how birders can use--and acquire--a knowledge of habitat and geography. Here and throughout, he offers very helpful recommendations for books and online resources in the ancillary sciences; no excuse now not to be able to tell a syacmore from a maple. There is a whiff of an eastern bias in the habitat discussions; the extended example of wintering Empidonax flycatchers in southeastern Arizona doesn't really "work" for me. But the reminder to seek out islands of habitat, especially treed islands in seas of open country, is a salutary one wherever you are. Literal islands, peninsulas, and other geographic edges are the subject of the next chapter. 

Lovitch is at his very best in the book's central chapters, where he offers detailed instruction in reading weather forecasts for finding birds. I've "bookmarked" several meteorological websites I hadn't used before, and am eager to see whether they help me this spring. Just to show that theory begets practice, the author narrates a "case study" of a few autumn days in New Jersey, when Lovitch and his friends used the techniques described here to great advantage, birding from Garrett Mountain to Cape May. 

The book ends with a postscript about "patch birding," frequent visits to the same birding site over a long period. This is how birding used to be done, by most of us at least, and Lovitch's call to return to the practice is a welcome one. And the skills we're taught in this book will make it even more fun--and make us all better birders.