ABA Blog

Bird of the Year Multimedia Art Contest Reminder

 

 

Official Contest Page

BOY Multimedia Art Contest - Don't Forget!

Hey birders, we're currently accepting submissions for the ABA's Bird of the Year multimedia art contest!

We want your photographs, videos, poetry, prose, paintings, music, anything having to do with the 2012 Bird of the Year Evening Grosbeak.  We've got some phenomenal prizes lined up for the winners from our fantastic sponsors including Eagle Optics binoculars, a 10 book set from Houghton-Mifflin, a autographed copy of the Stokes Field Guide, and much more.  Check them all out, as well as get more details about what we're looking for, at the ABA's BOY contest page. 

Remember, you can't win if you don't enter.  So send up your grosbeak stuff today!  The contest deadline is October 31st. 

ABA Bird of the Year: Multimedia Art Contest Announced!

To celebrate the ABA 2012 Bird of the Year, the Evening Grosbeak we present an all out, no holds barred, multimedia art contest for ABA members. Entries should focus on the Evening Grosbeak and may include original photography, artwork, video (3 minutes or less), music, poetry …pretty much anything that can be emailed and posted on websites. Let your creativity and imagination run wild!

There are some fantastic prizes donated by wonderful supporters of the American Birding Association. We can't wait to see what you come up with!

The entries will be displayed and judged online, with additional judging at the ABA booth at the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival.

For details on the contest rules and prizes, please visit:

The Official ABA Bird of the Year: Multimedia Contest Website

Evening Grosbeak Blog Carnival

What an exciting week it has been online at the ABA! This blog and the ABA Facebook page have been hoppin'. The roll-out of Birding News is thrilling. This past week we've also been sharing on the social networks several blog posts from ABA members featuring the ABA Bird of the Year for 2012, the Evening Grosbeak. In true blog carnival style, here's a round-up from participating bloggers. Special thanks to those joining in on the celebration!

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The Welcome Presence of the Evening Grosbeak and Evening Grosbeak - 2nd Brood? by Chris Petrak at Tails of Birding.

 

 

Evening Grosbeak's Irrupt at the American Birding Association at Larry Jordan's personal blog The Birders Report and a second post The American Birding Association Celebrates the Evening Grosbeak at 10,000 Birds.

 

 

Evening Grosbeaks, how cool are they! by Lillian Stokes at the Stokes Birding Blog.

 

 

 

 

 

Who Belongs in the Evening Grosbeak Family Tree by David Ringer at 10,000 Birds.

 

 

Evening Grosbeak, ABA's Bird of the Year 2012 by Greg Gillson at Pacific NW Birder.

 

 

 

Grosbeaks: A Remembrance by the official ABA Bird of the Year 2012 artist, Julie Zickefoose.

 

 

 

What is happening to Evening Grosbeaks? by Laura Erickson, posted previously here on the ABA Blog.

 

 

 

Stay tuned for information about the ABA Bird of the Year Multimedia Art Contest coming soon!

eThoughts on eGrosbeaks

Mid-March, and Ted Floyd writes to ask whether I’d be interested in putting together a historical piece on Evening Grosbeaks for Birding. Before saying yes—writers always say yes—I looked at my calendar for the next several weeks: a Nebraska tour to conduct, a visitor from Germany to show around, a house closing and move to attend to, a lecture to give, three day-trips to lead for local birding groups, a new birding course to teach, a multi-day trip to run for Tucson Audubon, a long-awaited Hungarian vacation to enjoy...

Sure, why not?

Not that long ago, Ted’s request would have sent me into a dismayed panic: How on earth could I fit the library time in with everything else going on? Ah, but that’s precisely the trick. Nowadays, there’s almost no such thing as library time when you’re writing about birds. No dusty stacks, no unexplained gaps on the shelves, no towers of crumbling journal volumes studded with dollar bills and yesterday’s mail as bookmarks. Just a keyboard and a screen, and it’s all at hand.

Most birders know SORA, the University of New Mexico’s Searchable Ornithological Research Archive. A “keyword search”—how inscrutable a phrase like that would have been just a couple of decades ago!—for “Evening Grosbeak” will lead you to nearly 200 articles in more than a dozen of North America’s most important scientific journals of ornithology, from the earliest numbers of the Auk and Wilson Bulletin right into this century. Lots of the material there is technical, and I tune out as soon as I see a statistics formula (sorry, Ted); but especially in the earlier issues of the older publications, say up to the 1930s, these journals are chock-full of what would now be dismissed as “anecdote”—much of it in an elevated, even literary style that makes these stories of surprise sightings and bizarre experiences a blast to read.

Take Arthur H. Norton’s 1918 “Remarks” on the Evening Grosbeak in Maine and New England, a sort of spiritual forebear of my own essay but written in a prose the elegance of which is far beyond my reach:

Gifted with a striking richness of plumage, a phlegmatic disposition in which fear is but poorly developed, having a written history in which mystery, and romance have been involved, and having invaded a wide territory within a relatively short time, the Evening Grosbeak has received much attention wherever it has appeared.

A very rich source for this sort of thing, of course, is the series of Life Histories written, edited, or compiled by Arthur Cleveland Bent and his successors. Only a selection of these texts is online, so far as I know, and so it pays to have the paper copies on the shelf, too—happily, the Dover reprints of the whole series are widely available and cheap. The Evening Grosbeak account is one of the entries available in digital format, and reading it this time I was struck by the hands-on familiarity so evident in the author’s approach to the subject. In the old days, I might have jotted the author’s name down and forgotten about it, but thanks to Google, I was able to look her up immediately. Doris Huestis Speirs (1894–1989) turns out to be a fascinating personage, even if she doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry (yet). Her contributions to ornithology are commemorated in the Speirs Award, the most prestigious award granted by the Society of Canadian Ornithologists–Société des ornithologistes du Canada. She was a friend and champion of Margaret Morse Nice, and a minor artist with major connections to the so-called Group of Seven. Her interest in Evening Grosbeaks started while she was living in Ontario in the 1930s, and ornithology displaced painting for her when she and her husband moved to Urbana, where he took his Ph.D.

It’s always a good day when you get to know someone interesting, even someone from another century.

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No matter how extensive the e-resources out there, they always leave some questions unanswered. The materials I collected from the 1960s contain several mentions of DDT and its effects on the Evening Grosbeak, especially in eastern Canada; have a look, for example, at this article or at this one. The species account in Birds of North American Online simply notes “no apparent direct effect,” but I would be very much interested in learning more about what birders and ornithologists thought at the time and what, if anything, was done to stop spraying in areas frequented by grosbeaks; we tell the story of DDT largely in terms of raptors, but here’s a chapter waiting to be added.

When I set out to write this essay, I decided to start at the beginning: with the first scientific description of the species. Locating formal descriptions used to be fraught with difficulties: Few were the libraries that housed all of the incredibly disparate sources in which the older descriptions were published, and even then many were held in closed collections, with access limited to inconvenient hours of the day. No longer. Welcome, Biodiversity Heritage Library! This spectacular resource is my first port of call when I suspect that I have a difficult citation. In this case, the AOU Check-list told me that I was looking for something possibly quite obscure: The citation there reads “Fringilla  vespertina W. Cooper, 1825, Ann. Lyc. Nat. Hist. N.Y.  1: 220. (Sault Ste. Marie, near Lake Superior [Michigan].)” Challenging—especially since I wasn’t sure what language the journal title was in, each element being susceptible of resolution in English or Latin or French or, what do I know, Romanian. Because the type locality was given in English, though, I guessed that the journal must be something like the “Annals of the Lyceum of Natural History of New York.” Good guess. An easy thing, then, to click on the cited page and read Cooper’s very words from nearly two centuries away.

The original descriptions of North American—and other—birds offer hours of interesting, sometimes amusing reading. Grazing one’s way through them used to be simply impossible, but today, there’s nothing easier than having a checklist open in one “tab” and BHL in another.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is also great for finding old illustrations. BHL has a flickr page with some tens of thousands of bird images, and of course the books themselves are full of pictures. The Internet Archive, though not as extensive or as well arranged as BHL, also hides treasures. Take a look at Lesson’s “Bonaparte Grosbeak”

from his riotously miscellaneous Illustrations de zoologie.

I’d wanted to include that image in the Birding article, but we opted instead for an Audubon plate. The one we chose, number 424 in the original double elephant edition, is interesting for a number of reasons.

Not only does it illustrate the contemporary tendency to see the Evening Grosbeak as a decidedly western bird, but this plate also purports to show for the first time the juvenile male of that species. In fact, though, as Benjamin Shaub pointed out in The Wilson Bulletin in 1964, Audubon’s label is “among the great errors to be found in Audubon’s superb paintings. It is, indeed, quite evident that he had never seen a juvenile male Evening Grosbeak, and probably none were described prior to the account by Magee” published in 1934. Another splendid example of how long it has taken ornithology to figure this mysterious bird out.

The Audubon plate harbors other mysteries. As our caption laconically put it, “The identities of the other birds are not as clear.” How many did you figure out? The other species depicted here on number 424 are 1. Lazuli Bunting, “Lazuli Finch”; 2. House Finch, “Crimson-necked Bull-finch”; 3. Gray-crowned Rosy-Finch, “Gray-crowned Linnet”; 4. Brown-headed Cowbird, “Cow-pen Bird”; and 7. Sooty Fox Sparrow, “Brown Longspur.”

Three of the images from this plate were used in the construction of the “Composite Plates” with which Audubon supplemented the original edition of his Birds of America. The female Lazuli Bunting was added to the original Plate 398 to accompany the male, and both Evening Grosbeaks were added to the original Plate 373, which had been drafted with only a single male bird.

The painting by Allan Brooks that accompanies my essay breaks the Evening Grosbeak out of its exclusively western context to make it one of a decidedly miscellaneous group. The White-collared Seedeater is a tropical south Texas specialty, and the “gaudy” Painted Bunting is nearly as resolutely southern in distribution; few are the birders who have seen either of those species in the company of an Evening Grosbeak, and I’d be willing to wager that no one has ever seen all three in the same day. The Dickcissel—here labeled the “masquerader,” I suppose for its distant resemblance to a meadowlark—is a more interesting companion for the grosbeaks: Just as the Evening Grosbeak had moved east, to “ramble in winter over all northern States,” the Dickcissel had retreated west, forsaking “the eastern seabird for interior States some 65 years ago.” The mind dwells on imagined flocks of grosbeaks and Dickcissels, crossing paths somewhere in eastern Ohio as the one flees the East and the other conquers it.

Even more piquant is the fact that 20 years before Brooks’s painting was published, Joseph Grinnell had described a new subspecies of the Evening Grosbeak. He gave the bird the English name “British Columbia Evening Grosbeak,” and assigned it the subspecific epithet—get this—brooksi, “in recognition of Allan Brooks’s contributions to northwestern ornithology.”

It all makes me happy I said yes.

ABA Bird of the Year: Where's your Grosbeak?

It's been about a quarter of a year since ABA announced the Evening Grosbeak as 2012's Bird of the Year, and back, way back, when we made the boreal seedcrusher our spokesbird I asked for ABA members and birders to send me photos showing how, and where, they're displaying the little stickers. 

Unfortunately, that request sort of corresponded with a big e-mail server switcheroo at ABA headquarters so it's entirely, and probably very, likely that some of those e-mails slipped away into the great internet ether never to be heard from again.  For that I apologize. 

So I'm asking again, with the promise to not allow the same sort of e-mail snafu to derail what should be a fun exercise in community bonding.  Snap a photo or relate whether you have any stories as to where you've seen the ABA 2012 logo in the field so far (my personal fav is ABA Board member Jane Alexander flashing the grosbeak in Audubon), and send to me at blog@aba.org. I'll share them on the blog. 

Your Turn: Evening Grosbeaks

Have you seen the Photo Salon in the May issue of Birding yet? What fantastic images from wonderfully talented bird photographers and what a great showcase for the ABA's 2012 Bird of the Year.

At the end of the article, Birding editor Ted Floyd invites us all to share by asking "What's your Evening Grosbeak story?"

My personal eBird records show that I've seen Evening Grosbeaks on only five separate occasions. I remember each experience distinctly. My first sighting was certainly one of those "Wow!" moments. I was with my son and father-in-law at a Father & Sons camp-out near Garden Valley, Idaho. I tend to rise early while camping to enjoy the morning birds while everyone else still slumbers. The hot spring resort there had a well-stocked bird feeder and I started seeing this flock of birds with striking yellow unibrows feeding en masse. I didn't have a field guide on me so I sat there watching until my birding mentor father-in-law joined me and told me what they were. What a thrill!

My favorite Evening Grosbeak experience happened on top of a mountain above Boise, Idaho. It was late November and we were scouting for elk without any luck. A light snow had fallen and the sun was just poking through the clouds. I sat there on my four-wheeler enjoying the idealistic morning setting. Suddenly an enormous flock of Evening Grosbeaks came whirling around me, similar to a murmuration of starlings. The in-flight kinetic sculpture dazzled me for several minutes before the grosbeaks settled into a pine tree for breakfast. Breathtaking.

I hope you'll join me in adding to our collective Evening Grosbeak repertoire this weekend with The Evenging Grosbeak Weekend-Out.

That's my story. What's yours?! Tell us about it here in the comments.

Upcoming Bird of the Year Event!

Friday May 25th through Monday May 28th is the Evening Grosbeak Weekend Out, one of the celebration events tied to the ABA Bird of the Year program this year. It's an opportunity for birders everywhere to get outside and look for Evening Grosbeaks and all other feathered beings too. More importantly it's an opportunity to introduce others to the wonderful world of birding. Please consider inviting a non-birder to go out birding with you for a couple of hours during that weekend. Show them all the beautiful birds they've been missing out on. Perhaps provide a friend or family member a gift package of a bird feeder, a starter bag of wild bird seed, and a field guide. Help them learn to identify their feeder birds and keep an eye out for Evening Grosbeaks.

Takes lots of pictures and share them with us. Please write to us and tell us of your experience on the Evening Grosbeak Weekend Out.

Where are Evening Grosbeaks being seen right now nearest you?  Check out this eBird map of May sightings from fellow birders like you and me. There are a couple of different apps like Birdseye and Aububon Birds that can help you find the nearest sightings. If no Evening Grosbeaks are within a reasonable distance, no worries. Just go birding anyway! Migration is still underway and there are lots of birds waiting to be seen.

Where's your Grosbeak?

By now most ABA members should have received their March 2011 issue of Birding (if not, rest assured it's in the mail!), in which you can find two Bird of the Year 2012 Evening Grosbeak stickers on an insert within.  ABA President Jeff Gordon has already introduced the newest Bird of the Year here at the blog, and the hope is that with this small symbol of active membership, ABA members will not only be able to recognize each other in the field, but non-members will see in it an organization that represents enthusiasm, expertise, and community among North American birders.

As you can see above, I've placed the stickers on my own rainguard along with last year's sticker, which is still going strong.  The second is affixed to my cell phone and I've got a third stuck to my laptop.  But I want to know where you've placed your Grosbeak, particularly if you've got a creative or novel spot for it. 

Snap a photo or relate whether you have any stories as to where you've seen the ABA 2012 logo in the field so far, and send to me at blog@aba.org.  I'll compile them for a future post.  I did it last year and it was a lot of fun. 

I'm really curious to know how ABA members are using these things, so send it along!

Evening Grosbeaks by Zickefoose

This month's cover of Birding magazine, with a trio of Evening Grosbeaks as depicted by noted artist Julie Zickefoose, is a real stunner. More though, one of the highlights of having Julie as this year's artist is that, because she's such an avid and open writer on her own blog, we fans are given a peek into the development of a piece of art such as this. 

She's done just that in a recent post, offering some insight into how 20 years of Evening Grosbeak experiences and sketches contributed to this one magazine cover. 

(c) Julie Zickefoose

It's only the first of a series on the process behind the piece, I encourage you to check back, or subscribe, awaiting the rest. 

Thanks for your work for the ABA, Julie, and thanks for making the artistic process so accessible. 

Go check it out!