ABA Blog

Trust and Obey

 

Steve N. G. Howell and Sophie Webb’s Guide to the Birds of Mexico and Northern Central America was groundbreaking on multiple fronts. Nearly 20 years since the book’s publication (can you believe it’s been that long?), the book remains highly useful. I frequently refer to it for basic field ID & S&D info.

Howell and Webb’s greatest legacy, arguably, is not all the great info packed into its 851 pages. Rather, its greatest—if somewhat problematic—legacy is what might be termed “Howell taxonomy.” In species account after species account, Howell and Webb depart from the “official” taxonomy of the day, i.e., that of the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU). For example, Howell and Webb place the Swainson’s Warbler in the genus Helmitheros, contra the AOU’s Limnothlypis for that species.

I think it’s fair to say that Steve Howell has been at it ever since.

In an influential 2009 essay in Birding, Howell and coauthors make their case for a stable “field guide” taxonomy that diverges from the taxonomy of the AOU. Writing for The ABA Blog, Howell has cautioned us about “official” taxonomies based on molecular genetics and certain species concepts. And I’m pretty sure he’s had published in Birding more letters to the editor this past decade than anybody.

Howell’s letter in the May/June 2013 Birding—about the scientific name of the Swainson’s Warbler, among other things—offers a succinct synopsis a particular worldview:

“We all make errors. Hopefully, we can learn from them. We should also feel free to speak up when decisions appear to have been made without due consideration or prudence, in the wider field of life as well as in birding.”

Small-b birding has its rules. (Capital-B Birding has its rules.) Ornithology has its rules.

 

Which rules do you like? Which rules would you change? And the real question: Which rules do you disobey?

1. I’ll start off with a rule, or rather a class of rules, that I obey. I obey the AOU’s “linear sequence.” Ducks first, then grouse...hawks, in due course...then a big jump to falcons, then parrots, and then passerines. Within the passerines: flycatchers followed by vireos, shrikes, and crows; longspurs after a while, then Olive Warbler, then “normal” warblers, then whatever the heck tanagers are these days; then finally House Sparrow, Orange Bishop, and Nutmeg Mannikin. (I’ll come back to the bishop and manikin, I promise.)
    I like this “rule,” because it represents the scientific community’s best effort to portray evolutionary relationships among birds. I further believe that the appreciation and identification of birds is best achieved by a biological worldview. And I’m with the great 20th-century scientist Theodosius Dobzhansky, who famously said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." Falcons with parrots, longspurs in front of the Olive Warbler—those things help me make sense of the birds I see and enjoy in the field.
    Steve Howell disagrees with me, and that’s fine.

2. Another rule I obey, although grudgingly, is AOU nomenclature. I agree with Steve Howell and others that splitting the Winter Wren into the Winter Wren and the Pacific Wren didn’t make a lot of sense. But in my own writings, and in my handling of other people’s writing, I always obey AOU nomenclature, even down to the orthographic details of hyphenation and capitalization. It’s just too confusing to have multiple names out there. Sure, any sane person can see that boreal wren (yes, lower case) is better than Winter Wren, but that’s an argument based on logic. And logic often gets in the way of clarity and good diction. So Winter Wren it is.
    Meanwhile, I’m doing my part, behind the scenes, to move us all—all of us—toward boreal wren and Bewick-with-no-apostrophe lower-case-wren.

3. You already know that I’m fine with—more than that, I heartily affirm—the business of separating the hawks and falcons. But what about much closer relationships, for example, species limits within the Red-tailed Hawk complex? Do I obey the AOU (one species), or do I disobey and recognize the Harlan’s Hawk as a species distinct from the Red-tailed Hawk (which, if there were a split, would require a new name, I say)?
    It’s complicated.
    At Birding magazine, we write Harlan’s [Red-tailed] Hawk, with no quotation marks around Harlan’s. So we obey the AOU, but we also emphasize the “worth,” if you will, of taxa currently demoted to subspecies rank. Eliminating the scare-quotes around the name of the subspecies is our not-so-subtle orthographic signal that we take subspecies seriously.
    In my personal life, the bird is the Harlan’s Hawk. If I go out and see a Harlan’s Hawk and a Western Redtail, it’s two “species” (scare-quotes, because I don’t believe in, er, “species”), and I enter them in my field notebook just like that: 1. Harlan’s Hawk; 2. Western Redtail. Check that. I write: 1. Harlan hawk; 2. Western redtail.

4. A quite different matter involves such birds as the Orange Bishop and Nutmeg Mannikin. The “problem” with these birds isn’t their status as full species (although, admittedly, species limits in both are problematic). Rather, the problem is that they’re not on the ABA Checklist. So they don’t count.
    If you say so.
    But I count them, and so do many others. Check out this screen-capture from eBird:

 

eBird gives us 1,059 species in the ABA Area, but the latest and greatest ABA Checklist shows only 977 species. And check out the most recent to Bruce Neville’s eBird-compliant ABA Area life list. Yes, it’s an Orange Bishop.

Is eBird’s 1,059 “right”? Is the ABA’s 977 “right”? What’s right, in you ask me, is that we have multiple authorities, multiple narratives, multiple realities out there. That’s how I like my postmodern utopia, thank you very much—just so long as we all agree on spelling and orthography for the Orange Bishop. Hey, it’s my utopia, and you don’t have to join me there if you don’t want to... :-)

5. Finally, I have to get a word in, please, about the heard-only rule. It’s been repealed, of course. But here’s a thought. About a year ago, I was with a small group in Peru, and our outstanding local guide stopped us, and said, “Do you smell that? It’s a Hoatzin!”
    That was so cool. Light reaching the photoreceptors in our eyes, air moving around the cochleae in our ears, aromatic compounds interacting with our olfactory neurons—those are all different signals that get to our brains and tell us something about reality. None is objectively “better” than another. They’re equally valid. A “smelled-only” bird isn’t inferior to one that’s “heard-only.” A “seen-only” tick isn’t worthier than one that’s “heard-only.”
    I hope one day to ID a Crested Auklet by smell.
    The most wondrous bird ID experience I’ve ever had: On a still, hot afternoon a few years ago, I lay on the ground, eyes closed, on a bluff by a lakeshore and felt—felt, yes, felt—the rush of air as an immense and glorious American White Pelican zoomed over my body.

 

What about the rest of you?

If Steve Howell gets his way with a birder’s taxonomy, are you buying it? Do you keep an ABA life list, an eBird life list, or something else? Would you count a smelled-only auklet or a felt-only pelican?

 

 

 

The Bare-Naked Big Walk

 

I can think of several essential ingredients for any successful birding “Big Day”—an effort to identify as many bird species as possible during a single midnight-to-midnight period. Here goes:

1. A good team.
2. A good route.
3. A good plan.

And I can think of two other Big Day essentials we tend to take for granted:

4. Good wheels.
5. Good optics.

Robert Mortensen probably saw the following a mile away: I recently completed a Boulder County, Colorado, Big Day that broke all the “rules.” Specifically:

1. I didn’t have a good team. It’s not that my team was bad. Rather, I had no team at all.
2. My route bypassed many, probably most, of the must-visit birding destinations in the county.
3. My plan, to the extent that I had one, was to head in a circuitously westward direction. Oh,
    and I wasn’t going to miss lunch with my family.

As to transportation and optics:

4. I didn’t drive. I didn’t board a bus. I didn’t ride a bike. I walked. The whole way.
5. I left my binoculars and telescope at home. As Ted Eubanks might say, I went bare-naked.

This was some sort of gimmick, right? Or a fundraiser perhaps? Gimmickry is not beneath me, and I admire fundraisers, but, no, that’s not it. This was an honest-to-goodness, plain-old Big Day of the sort that Amar Ayyash and Greg Neise excel in.

I hope to convince you that not using a car or bike contributed to what was an enjoyable and successful Big Day. And now for the real heresy: I truly believe that not using binoculars helped my cause.

I’ll get under way with the recap in just a moment, but, first, let’s do the numbers:

• Date: June 13, 2013.
• Time: 4 a.m.–8 p.m.
• Distance: About 25¼ miles, according to Google. But Google’s Distance Calculator doesn’t compute a vertical vector, which point we’ll return to.
• Species Total: 125. I think it’s fair to say that 125 species is a “good” total—perhaps a great total—even for a traditional (car or bike, bins and scope, good teammates, etc.) Boulder County Big Day in the third week of June.

My “Bare-Naked Big Day” route. Click here for a zoomable version of the map with stickpins showing the locations of notable birds seen or heard along the way.

 

There wasn’t a cloud in the sky at 4 a.m., but starlight was notably dimmed by heavy smoke from the Black Forest fire to the south. At a little pond to the north, western chorus frogs a few Woodhouse’s toads were going off. What would be first bird, I wondered? I soon got the answer: a sputtering Western Kingbird [04:07:59], one of the most expected and characteristic sounds of astronomical dawn in early summer in Boulder County. The next bird was delectably unexpected, but not at all implausible: an Eastern Screech-Owl [04:10:48], an uncommon permanent resident in the county. Those two birds, it occurred to me, wonderfully emblematize the East-meets-West quality of birding in Boulder County.

I started walking. Due east. So much for my “plan” to head west.

A Pied-billed Grebe [04:14:49] went berserk in a cattail marsh, a Mallard [04:17:01] quacked, and a Yellow-headed Blackbird [04:19:13] “sang” a “song” that only Mark Peterson could love. The anurans were still going at it, Capella and Fomalhaut were rising in the northeast and southeast, respectively, and an Eastern Kingbird [04:23:52] started calling. Next up were a female Great Horned Owl [04:27:53], a Killdeer [04:32:03], and an impressively bright meteor.

I passed South Teller Lake. A Blue Grosbeak [04:32:42] burst into song, and, a few minutes later, the Red-winged Blackbirds [04:35:44] were going at it. Next up were my first and only Common Nighthawks [04:36:35] of the day, followed by the first of the great throng of American Robins [04:37:47] that would keep me company all day long. A Western Meadowlark [04:38:24] followed, and then a Spotted Sandpiper [04:41:58]. I passed a few houses, where some House Sparrows [04:43:54] were stirring.

An instant later, I heard one of the greatest of avian “voices”: the spooky winnowing of a Wilson’s Snipe [04:43:55]; this non-vocal sound is given as air rushes through the tail feathers of a male in aerial display. It was still nearly an hour to sunrise, but a Grasshopper Sparrow [04:47:35] was singing steadily. This species often sings right through the nighttime hours.

The dawn chorus was going at full tilt now: Mourning Dove [04:53:40], Vesper Sparrow [04:54:16], Bullock’s Oriole [04:58:32], Barn Swallow [05:05:22], Yellow Warbler [05:06:03], Common Grackle [05:08:41], and House Finch [05:09:51].

I was getting into taller and wetter grass now, and I heard the strange, pulsing song of a Dickcissel [05:10:22]. A Big Day is no time to indulge my penchant for counting birds, but I couldn’t help myself: I would encounter a minimum of eight along this stretch of the trail. Until a few years ago, the species was uncommon, perhaps merely casual, in Boulder County. In recent years, though, the bird has been reliable here at Teller and elsewhere.

I nearly missed the next bird: a Savannah Sparrow [05:15:37]—two or three of them, actually. If I’d had a better plan (see Big Day essential #3, above), I’d have had a checklist with me. Glancing at a checklist every four or five minutes is an excellent way of pacing yourself, and of reminding yourself what to focus on—right now. I guess so. But I also don’t much care for routine and predictability, at least not while I’m birding. (Oh, but if you’re a contributor to Birding magazine, don’t you dare miss a deadline or mess up a possessive gerund.)

The next bird, my twenty-seventh of the morning, was the first I detected initially by sight. It wasn’t yet sunrise, but the shape of a flying European Starling [05:16:36] is distinctive. A moment later, I would hear its burry flight call, and that reminds me of something: Very, very few of the species on my list were seen-only. That’s not to say the silent birds weren’t special. I’ll talk about that later. Back to the dawn chorus: Western Wood-Pewee [05:21:00], House Wren [05:21:35], and Red Junglefowl [05:26:58].

What? A rooster? Are you crazy? Tell me this: What sound is more evocative of daybreak in the countryside? The idea that the species somehow doesn’t belong, that it doesn’t “count,” is patently absurd. The crowing of a rooster, the sweet smell of hay, a tractor rumbling to life, the first rays of sunshine—those things are the very essence of the new day.

More birds: Black-capped Chickadee [05:28:00], Black-billed Magpie [05:29:48], American Goldfinch [05:31:21], and, just east of Teller Lake No. 5, my only Bobolink [05:33:47] of the day.

Sunrise!—and time for some feedlot birding: American Crow [05:36:32], Brown-headed Cowbird [05:37:15], and Rock Pigeon [05:38:57] with the cows and horses at Teller Farm.

I crossed Valmont Road and continued in a generally northward direction, picking up Cliff Swallow [05:46:04], Red-shafted Flicker [05:47:01], Eurasian Collared-Dove [05:50:58], Blue Jay [05:52:03], Downy Woodpecker [05:52:33], Belted Kingfisher [05:55:34], White-breasted Nuthatch [05:56:01], Great Blue Heron [05:56:10], Red-tailed Hawk [05:56:11], and Common Yellowthroat [06:00:25].

Breakfast time, and what better place to pause than the typically productive southern floodplain of Boulder Creek. An Eastern Warbling-Vireo [06:02:50] sang directly overhead, and I audio-recorded its song. (No binoculars for me, but, yes, I brought along the VN-8100PC.) This was the first of a whopping eight of its kind I would find during the next several hours. I heard a Song Sparrow [06:04:26], I saw an American White Pelican [06:08:00], and I saw and heard—how could I not have?—a flock of Canada Geese [06:13:32].

Next up were two decent birds for Boulder County. First was a Willow Flycatcher [06:16:10] singing from a perch along Boulder Creek; the species (indeed, the same individual?) has been present here for several summers, and it may represent an unusual subspecies for Colorado. Second was a first-spring male Orchard Oriole [06:23:58] singing exuberantly from a tangle just north of the creek; this species reaches the extreme limit of its range in eastern Boulder County.

I wrapped up breakfast with a Yellow-breasted Chat [06:30:03] singing by the creek and a flyby Double-crested Cormorant [06:32:03], and then continued north across the floodplain. A few Bank Swallows [06:42:12] cruised about an irrigation ditch, and it was time for the long slog across Gun Barrel Hill. The Gun Barrel terrain is high, dry, and hilly, and the avifauna is relatively sparse. But you can find some good birds here.

Like the singing, skylarking Cassin’s Sparrow [06:42:58] that greeted me at the very beginning of the ascent. Until a few years ago, the species was unheard of in the county. But a few summered in 2009, a few more in 2010, a whole bunch in 2011, then almost none in 2012. What about 2013? An obvious migrant was discovered in May, and now there’s this bird. So they’re on a five-year run.
(Left: Photo by © Tony Leukering.) 

Continuing across Gun Barrel Hill, I added Say’s Phoebe [06:59:37] and Lark Sparrow [07:03:24]. Then a long stretch with no birds, and then a dandy: a Cassin’s Kingbird [07:40:08]. The bird wasn’t unexpected, I have to say: I’d seen one there earlier in the month, and multiples were seen back in May. In this vicinity, Gun Barrel Hill borders a residential stretch with decent plantings of piñon pines and junipers—great for birds with affinities with Colorado’s canyonlands.

I rounded a sharp bend and headed straight west. To my right, a few Horned Larks [07:47:30] were singing; to my left, a female American Kestrel [07:49:19] peered from a nest box. More piñon–juniper lay ahead—good for a singing Chipping Sparrow [07:51:44] and a Spotted Towhee [08:01:42].

Note to self: Bird here more often. This southwest corner of Gun Barrel Hill is the perfect refuge for birds straying from the canyon country of southeastern Colorado.

From Gun Barrel Hill, I meandered through the sprawling Heather Wood subdivision, and then south to the Boulder Creek crossing at 75th Street. Here I enjoyed another one of those bewitching East-meets-West episodes: American Dippers [08:21:05] bringing food to a nest and a watchful Eastern Phoebe [08:23:52].

As I crossed 75th Street, so as to get over to the always productive Walden–Sawhill Ponds complex, I noted a who-needs-binoculars adult Bald Eagle [08:30:59] and a screaming and circling Swainson’s Hawk [08:31:01]. The birding at Walden–Sawhill was slow but steady, yielding American Avocet [08:55:26], Snowy Egret [09:03:43], Wood Duck [09:07:14], Northern Rough-winged Swallow [09:13:11], Tree Swallow [09:14:19], Osprey [09:14:43], Hairy Woodpecker [09:16:59], Black-headed Grosbeak [09:20:36], Cedar Waxwing [09:22:49], Lesser Goldfinch [09:23:53], and Indian Peafowl [09:37:17]. (Click here if you need to be persuaded of the “countability” of the last species in the preceding enumeration.)

Walden–Sawhill is always good for non-avian spectacles, of which I saw several. For example: an adorable baby raccoon making some impressively loud whistling and warbling sounds. Also: several dozen birders out looking for a county mega found a few days earlier by Boulder County super-birder Christian Nunes. I delighted in the birders’ fine company, but assiduously avoided their optics and neurotically changed the subject at the first hint of conversation about finding birds.

I wound down my time at Walden–Sawhill with a careful inspection of Cottonwood Marsh. It took some patience, and I had to squint and crane my neck, but even without binoculars I was able to see Cinnamon Teal [09:56:06], Gadwall [09:57:58], White-faced Ibis [09:59:36], Great-tailed Grackle [10:11:00], and Western Grebe [10:11:33].

For a whole hour, I added nothing to the day’s list as I walked a long, barren stretch north along 75th Street and then west, west, west along winding Valmont Road. But things picked up near the intersection with 63rd Street. A house had feeders, and the feeder had a male Black-chinned Hummingbird [11:18:22].

I hooked up with the Boulder Creek Trail, and, over the course of several miles, added several more birds to my list: Lazuli Bunting [11:25:05], Cooper’s Hawk [11:58:04], Cordilleran Flycatcher [12:21:11], Violet-green Swallow [12:54:20], and Turkey Vulture [13:07:13]. I had an Alison Kondler sighting, too, along the trail. And as nice as it was to cross paths with Alison, I sighted something even more glorious: a water fountain, and not only that, but a working water fountain with cold water.

As I entered downtown Boulder, I channeled my inner John Vanderpoel. I was in Full Chase Mode now, and I detoured into the center of the city for a Chimney Swift [13:25:54].

Speaking of detours, I next made a big one: a sit-down, indoors lunch with Kei, Hannah, and Andrew. Somewhere out there, Jack Solomon saying, “I told you so.” The food was good, but better still was a change of footwear. Kei and the kids brought me my bionic boots, essential for the next leg of my journey, and check this out: They brought me clean, chilled socks. I can’t begin to tell you how good they felt. (Back to the boots for a moment: Yes, Joe Roller, the same pair that delighted you so when we birded together in Bolivia.)

Eventually, I resumed my Big Day. Walking straight south up 9th Avenue, I practically stepped on a lovely adult male Yellow-shafted x Red-shafted Flicker [14:55:45].

Eh? You’re counting a hybrid?—between two subspecies, no less?? Relax. It’s my list. Not yours. But I’m not spoiling for a fight: I’ve elected not to count the bird. The things I do for the cause of birderly comity... :-)
(Right: Photo by © Bill Schmoker.) 

At the summit (seriously!) of 9th Street, I ticked an unproblematic Broad-tailed Hummingbird [15:07:41], soon followed by a flyover Pine Siskin [15:08:48]. I next found my way to Ski Jump Trail, where I spotted a promising raptor that obligingly sailed right over, resolving itself into a Golden Eagle [15:21:21]. As I proceeded into the ponderosa pines, I found a couple of inevitable birds: Western Tanager [15:25:20] and Virginia’s Warbler [15:33:45]. And finally—finally!—I got the day’s first Common Raven [15:37:19]. How I missed that species back in Boulder proper is beyond me. (And I had a Vulcan mind meld with John Dillon: How come dog owners in Boulder County carefully and lovingly drape plastic bags full of dog doo from branches along the trail?)

From Ski Jump Trail I worked my way down to Gregory Canyon, which, in mid-June, is Boulder County’s version of The Magic Hedge. First up were a couple of birds that I think many of us associate with eastern North America: Rose-breasted Grosbeak [15:43:09] and Gray Catbird [15:45:00]. Then a light rain shower and a couple of inarguably western birds: Western Warbling-Vireo [15:51:51] and White-throated Swift [15:55:18]. (Don’t like the warbling-vireo? A little birdie tells me a forthcoming scientific paper may change your mind.) Then another “eastern” bird: Red-eyed Vireo [16:01:49]. Then a slew of westerners: Mountain Chickadee [16:01:59], Plumbeous Vireo [16:10:25], Bushtit [16:12:19], and Steller’s Jay [16:15:05]. And the most cosmopolitan bird of all: a wailing Peregrine Falcon [16:31:53] pulling up for a landing on a rock outcropping.

Gregory Canyon’s non-avian life forms were diversionary. I paused for a garter snake (Thamnophis, sp.) and a fence lizard (Scleoporus, sp.); where’s Joey Kellner when you need him? I delighted in all the two-tailed swallowtails and Weidemeyer’s admirals, I was transfixed by a plague of Putnam’s cicadas, and I was vexed by a beautiful green hairstreak in the genus Callophrys; where’s Dave Leatherman when you need him? Finally, the wildflowers were enchanting; where’s John Tumasonis when you need him?

Back to birding. An Olive-sided Flycatcher [16:47:08] cried out, a reminder that Gregory Canyon quickly ascends into the boreal zone. As if to emphasize the point, a calling Hammond’s Flycatcher [16:56:06] flew in close. Other birds followed in a steady procession: Pygmy Nuthatch [16:57:08], Rock Wren [17:02:04], Green-tailed Towhee [17:08:32], Canyon Wren [17:21:02], Red-breasted Nuthatch [17:21:24], MacGillivray’s Warbler [17:21:46], Gray-headed Junco [17:41:13], Wild Turkey [17:46:06], and a strikingly black-backed adult male Arkansas Goldfinch [17:47:05].

About a horizontal mile—and a substantial fraction of a vertical mile—from the trailhead, Gregory Canyon Trail becomes Long Canyon Trail. Along this stretch, the birdlife begins to take on characteristics of the spruce–aspen zone, and, accordingly, I found Brown Creeper [17:51:06], Audubon’s Warbler [18:00:40], Lincoln’s Sparrow [18:21:16], and Ruby-crowned Kinglet [18:22:08].

Long Canyon Trail ends at Flagstaff Road—which keeps going and going. And so did I, picking up a flushing Townsend’s Solitaire [19:04:14], a chorus of Hermit Thrushes [19:09:23], and a pair of Type 2 Red Crossbills [19:16:33] chippering their way across a clearing.

 

Kei and the kids pulled up beside me at 8 p.m. It would have been impolitic of me to ask that they just hang out there for two hours, you know, so that I could get up into better habitat for bluebirds (I thought I heard one) and sapsuckers (I saw drillings), and then Common Poorwill and the three species of small mountain owls.

Besides, it wouldn’t have been in the spirit of my break-all-the-rules Big Day. There was something fitting about walking—no, riding, finally riding—away from an easy five, probably closer to ten, additions to my list.

And there’s always next year.

In the meantime, I have a few questions, and you probably do too:

1. Let’s start with an obvious one. What birds did you miss?
Answer: Cottonwood Marsh and the various other ponds surely harbored a few silent birds that were too far away to ID without binoculars. Blue-winged Teal, anyone? Green-winged? American Coot? A night-heron or even a bittern roosting in the cattails across the way? And there was a decidedly interesting hawk at the base of Gregory Canyon; binoculars would have resolved it into an uncommon Broad-winged, or not.

2. Those are the birds you missed by going “bare-naked.” What birds did you miss by going “green”?
Answer: Along this particular route, nothing. On the contrary, I saw many, many more birds than I would have seen by birding this route in a car, or even a bike. I’ll take it a step further: This route would have been impossible and illegal except by foot.

3. That suggests another question: Did you gain any birds by going “bare-naked”?
Answer: It’s hard to prove, but I think so. Speaking for myself (but also, I suspect, for a great many of you), I find that binoculars are a crutch. Without binoculars, I enjoy a heightened sense of awareness. I’m always looking around. I’m always paying attention. I suspect I would have missed one or two species, maybe four or five, during all that time I would have been peering through binoculars at only a tiny fraction of the airspace visible to the naked eye.

4. Did you misidentify any birds?
Answer: Ouch. Let me back up a step here: I misidentify plenty of birds with binoculars. During the course of my Big Day, I endeavored to see birds at least as well as I would have with binoculars. That means I had to wait on some birds (cf. Golden Eagle), and let others go (cf. possible Broad-winged Hawk). But let’s take the broader view: Even if I missed a few (e.g., ducks at Cottonwood Marsh) and messed up a few (could the White-faced Ibises have been rare Glossy Ibises?), practically everything out there was slam-dunk. I’m increasingly impressed by just how unimportant binoculars and telescopes are. Optics are The Great Lie of birding.

5. Okay, but don’t binoculars enhance the birding experience?
Answer: That’s the conventional wisdom, but I’m seriously starting to question it. Ask me the next question.

6. What were your favorite birds of the day?
Answer: You think I’m going to mention a handful of “heard-only” birds, don’t you?—the winnowing Wilson’s Snipes, the dulcet Canyon Wren, the heavenly chorus of Hermit Thrushes. Actually, no. I can think of three sightings that surpassed any of those heard-only detections.
    First was a Cedar Waxwing so close I could see the mid-morning sun reflected in its eyes. I just stood there, and the curious bird sidled down the branch to practically within arm’s reach. Is any bird more exquisite than the Cedar Waxwing? That question is definitively—and affirmatively—resolved, I believe, by beholding a waxwing with your own eyes, and nothing else.
    Second was a Western Kingbird doing something I’d read about but never seen: landing, actually landing, on a Red-tailed Hawk it was driving off. The panoramic view, without binoculars, heightened the drama. And with binoculars, would I even have bothered to look? I mean, it was just a “boring” Red-tail...
    Third, and best of all, were all the American White Pelicans at the Walden–Sawhill complex. Is there anything more glorious than pelicans soaring and spiraling against a clear blue sky? Conversely, is there anything uglier than a pelican’s ugly mug? We all know about not seeing the forest for the trees. Do birders have the same problem? Can we not see the bird for the feathers?
(Left: Photo by © Bill Schmoker.)

7. You don’t plan ahead (except when you’re terrorizing contributors to Birding), but, come on: What’s your plan for next year?
Answer: I guarantee you, I won’t do this again. What I mean is, I won’t do the same route again. Here’s another guarantee: I’m hooked, and I’m doing it again. Somehow, I’m going to get from the marshes around Boulder Reservoir to the steep foothills of the Mesa Trail complex...

8. Are you finally going to submit to Listing Central?
Answer: First things first. Kudos to my colleagues Greg Neise and David Hartley for their hard work in providing this brilliant resource to the birding community. To answer your question: Yes, in due course. Especially if Neise gets around to creating an entry for bare-naked Big Walks.

9. Has anyone else ever done a Bare-naked Big Walk?
Answer: I wonder. I doubt it. Sixteen hours, twenty-five miles, no bins. But maybe Kenn Kaufman will inform me that, more than a century ago, Lynds Jones (1865–1951) was all over the bare-naked Big Walk.

10. Can your record be broken?
Answer: Easily. For Boulder County, my money’s on Joel Such and Marcel Such. Here’s a thought that’s personally gratifying: For once, the big coastal counties are at a relative disadvantage. Remember, no optics. Seabirds and such present challenges for the bare-naked birder.
    I’ll take this a step further. I suspect my record will be demolished. I can’t say where, or when, or by whom. Of this I’m certain: 125 species—okay, “only” 120 if you don’t like my taxonomy and if you’re a peacock-hater—will be surpassed, by a very wide margin.

 

I have a final question, for you. What are your stories and strategies for bare-naked Big Walks? I’d love to learn more. Who knows—next year, I may even get a few of you to accompany me! Mark, Frank, and Chuck: Let’s do the Pittsburgh CBC bare-naked and on foot. And Noah: Next time, don’t sweat it when you lose your binoculars.

 

My Big “Year”

 

Annie Dillard, in her magisterial Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, conducts a thought experiment:

“I wonder how long it would take you to notice the regular recurrence of the seasons if you were the first man on earth. What would it be like to live in open-ended time broken only by days and nights? You could say, ‘it’s cold again; it was cold before,’ but you couldn’t make the key connection and say, ‘it was cold this time last year,’ because the notion of ‘year’ is precisely the one you lack.”

For all of us in the higher latitudes, the four seasons are one of the most obvious and intuitive aspects of life on Earth. Not a one of us can remember a time when we didn’t know the endless cycling of spring, summer, fall, and winter.

Yet not a one of us figured it out on our own. The four seasons are abstract and, when you think about it, arbitrary. Why not two seasons, or five? The four seasons are received wisdom, a human construct.

So it is with so much of what we know. Think for a moment about such phenomena as gravity, evolution, the round earth, and the heliocentric solar system. None of us discovered any of that. We learned it—from books, teachers, parents, and other sources. And let’s be honest: The vast majority of us never really learned it. We were told it. We believe.

 

The idea of seasonality depends, as Dillard notes, on another idea: the idea of the year. We all know how long a year is: the amount of time—about 365¼ days—for the Earth to get around the Sun.

That’s easy for us to say.

Pretend again that you are Dillard’s first man on Earth. You haven’t yet noticed the seasons. One thing you do start to notice, though, is the position of the sun: It gets higher in the sky for a while, then lower, then higher again, then lower, and so forth. Finally, after hundreds or thousands of years of accumulated human thought, some brilliant thinker achieves the key breakthrough: Each solar cycle is almost exactly the same amount of time. Call it a year.

Alright, we’ve finally discovered what a year is, and how long it is. (Do you know, by the way, how long a year is? Did you know that the amount of time from one summer solstice to the next is not fixed? And I’m not talking about the very slow effect of precession of the equinoxes. I’m talking about non-trivial anomalies from one year, er, “year,” to the next.) Now we need to agree when to start each year.

I know!

January 1st, at the stroke of midnight. With a stroke of inarguable tautology, we declare January 1st to be New Year’s Day, and that, as they say, is that.

 

Like many birders, I keep a year list. Check that: I keep year lists, plural. I’ve been doing it since I was thirteen years old. I can’t help myself.

After three-plus decades in the business, I’m an old pro at this. Oh, each year is a variation on a theme, but it’s the overall theme, the overall sameness of it all, that I’m struck by. The following is oversimplified, but I think it’s basically right: For birders in the higher latitudes of North America, there’s a steady build-up in excitement for the first five months of the year, and then a long—and frankly demoralizing—slowdown for the rest of the year. Don’t take my word for it; talk to Big Year guru Lynn Barber about it.

Why? Why does it have to be that way? Why does a Big Year have to start on January 1st? We all know the answer, of course: Because that’s the rule. Fine. But that’s missing my point.

I’ll cut to the chase. I just started a Big Year. Two of ’em, actually: a Colorado Big Year, and a Boulder County Big Year. My two Big Years started simultaneously at 20:23:09 GMT (2:24 p.m. local time) on Saturday, June 8th. I’ll continue for approximately one sidereal year, i.e., until around 8:11 p.m. local time on Sunday, June 8, 2014.

Already, the experience is shaping up to be wonderfully different from any other Big Year I’ve ever embarked on. My first year bird was a Red-eyed Vireo, singing its head off. How many of you have started an ABA Area Big Year with a Red-eyed Vireo?
(Left: Photo by © Bill Schmoker.) 

 

My birding pals in Boulder County, Colorado, are engaged in a friendly competition for the biggest bird list in the Julian year that began at midnight on January 1, 2013. Good for them. I wish them well.

But I’m glad I’m doing it my way. With no effort at all, I’ll be over 150 species by the end of the first month of the “year.” I’ll still be adding stuff at a brisk pace in July and August. Come September and October, I’ll be getting all sorts of “FOY” (first-of-year) birds. November–March will be leisurely—and productive. Then the end of the “year”: more year birds in April, then a bunch more in May, then a final rarity or three, I suspect, in the first week of June. I’ll wrap up my Big Year at the absolute zenith of avian activity in Colorado.

My objective—and this may sound weird—is not to see as many species as possible. Instead, I’m in it for the experience, for the novelty. I’m going for quality, not quantity. So rest easy, Colorado listers: I pose no threat to you.

Or maybe I do. White-winged Juncos, Yellow-shafted Flickers, and Myrtle Warblers count for me. So do Indian Peafowl, Mandarin Ducks, and Front Range Chukars. And if the Rufous-collared Sparrow comes back to Clear Creek County, I’m definitely counting it. There’s more: All the great birds around Cheyenne, Laramie County, Wyoming, count for my Colorado list. If I see a bird in a mist net, that’s fine by me; if I identify a bird after the fact by sound spectrogram, I’m counting it; and—oh, yes—dead birds count.

O tempora! O mores!

Hang on a second.

Yes, I’m breaking all the rules. Are you sure, though, that you’re as compliant as you think you are? As Ken Hollinga, Michael Retter, the late Craig Roberts, and others have pointed out to me, the “rules” aren’t necessarily what we think they are.

Then again, I’m not really breaking the rules, er, “rules,” so much as I’m cheerfully ignoring them. I’m not in this for the game, or sport, or competition. Um, that’s okay. I’m in this to learn about birds, and the world they—and we—inhabit. The rules don’t serve that purpose, not for me anyhow.

In my world, Boulder County pheasants and Chukars are equally countable. For me, a White-winged Junco is as distinctive—as “countable”—as a Cassin’s Vireo or Thayer’s Gull. As far as I’m concerned, birds in nets and even dead birds are interesting, worthwhile, and properly ticked. And—what the heck—Cheyenne is close enough, and good enough, for me.

Here’s the bottom line: Two days into my two new Big Years, I’m having more fun than ever before. Isn’t that what it’s all about?

Secret Handshake

I recently watched a CBS News segment about birding, that for the first time really seemed to “get it” ... as far as mainstream news coverage goes. There were no real big errors, no cringe-worthy moments and no real flubs. It portrayed fairly accurately what we’re all about.

Which got me thinking about what we’re all about. Each of us got into birding through a different avenue, maybe a friend or family member is a birder. My situation was kind of unique. Birding was a way for me to be out and away from a broken household and abusive parents.

Maybe that’s why when I think of birding, I think of community. I think of the people who—when I was a 9-year-old tromping around in Lincoln Park all by myself, looking for birds—became my friends. My family.

Birders have a secret language. Case-in-point: not long ago I was taking a walk around a city park in Chicago. This park is situated between a very bad neighborhood, and a rather nice and wealthy one. On a walk around Columbus Park you may see someone shooting up heroin on a park bench. Or a young family out enjoying the day. Or someone birding.

So, I’m walking the 3-mile loop around the park, when I come across an elderly lady with binoculars minding her own business. I’m a big guy, with a beard, and I was wearing a dark hoodie-type sweatshirt and a Chicago Bears cap. No binoculars. I don’t take them on my exercise walks, because I get too distracted and wind up standing around looking at birds, rather than putting in some miles. But I do notice the birds as I go by, and I’ll stop to try to get a better look if I see something interesting. Bare-naked Birding as Ted Floyd would call it.

Anyway, back to the lady in the park. I’m walking toward her, and I notice her binoculars, so I smile and walk right up to her. She takes an involuntary step back, and quick look around. I said, “Hi! Seeing anything good?”

Now, I can’t tell you how many times this has happened to me while I’m out birding. Someone stops to ask what we’re looking at ... and when we say “birds”, what follows is inevitably a detailed story and instructions as to where we can see eagles nearby. You try to be friendly, but really, you just want them to go on their way, so you can get on with your birding. So there’s that. But this is in a bad neighborhood, and people who approach you in this park are usually looking for money or something.

She said, “No ... not really. Just a few sparrows.”

“I just had a Cerulean Warbler about 50 yards back on this path, in the oaks there”, I replied.

Instantly, her perception of me had changed, and the involuntary step back was replaced by an eager step forward as she asked what else I’d seen. “Cerulean Warbler” was the secret handshake. I was now a friendly, and could be trusted. We chatted for ten minutes, and continued happily on our way(s).

Birding is a great equalizer. Age doesn’t matter. Cultural differences don’t matter. It’s like being in kindergarten all over again. We’re all the same, and all that matters is the birds.

Speaking of cultural differences, I’ll wrap this up with a little story.

My friend Amar Ayyash invited me to drive with him to Toronto and Niagara Falls from Chicago this past winter. The goal was to photograph gulls, particularly Iceland Gulls. I’ve described myself above. Amar is scholarly-appearing, young-middle-aged, somewhat dark-skinned man of Middle Eastern descent. Born and raised in Cicero, Illinois.

So it was that this unlikely duo—because of our mutual love of gulls—was crossing the border into Canada at Port Huron/Sarnia, in a blizzard, at night, on December 26th. The lanes were empty, and as we pulled in, Amar remarked, “You wanna bet we get ‘randomly’ pulled over for a security check?” He’s used to being singled out by TSA and other authorities because of his name ... I couldn’t even imagine it.

The border patrol agent asks what we’re doing in Canada. “Looking for birds”. That caused her to lean over and take a good look at me. She looked at Amar again and asked, “So how do you know each other?”

“Through bird watching.”

“Pull over to the first check-point area on the right, please.”

They made us stand outside the car while they questioned us, asking us the same questions over and over. It was freezing cold, and when I put my hands in my pockets the agent loudly told me to keep my hands where he could see them. Really? They went through the car, remarking at all of the optical equipment—cameras, binoculars, telescopes—in the back seat. Then they opened the trunk. The one agent motioned the other over to have a look, and they both stood up and looked at us, puzzled.

So, how exactly, does one explain 150 loaves of Wonder bread, and 60 pounds of pork fat in the trunk?

The Best Christmas Count

Sunday, December 18, 1977. The week had started out dreadfully cold in the Chicago area. It was -12° during count week, and there was a good amount of snow on the ground. In the days running up to the count, a warm front pushed in, bringing some more snow with it, and temperatures that climbed into the 40s.

I was 14, and this was my second Christmas Count, ever. My friend Alan picked me up in the black hours of early morning, and we made the hour-long drive to the Morton Arboretum without incident ... well, with one incident, actually.

The day before had been well above freezing, but with all that snow still on the ground, it got quite cold at night. As we came down a gentle hill on Route 53 at some unheard-of hour of the morning, Alan's trusty Datsun B210 hatchback decided to do some figure skating. He completely lost control of the car, and we wound up sailing through a red light at a big intersection, backwards. Luckily, even the cops were safely snugged in their beds that early on the Sunday morning before Christmas.

Okay, so except for that, it was a pretty sleepy ride. We did some owling, and then just after dawn, met the rest of the counters at the visitor's center parking lot to get handed our assignments for the day. The Lisle Arboretum Count, started in 1937, is one of the oldest, and some of the people participating have done so for decades. They get the best areas assigned to them. Places with intriguing names like "Hemlock Hill" or "Thornhill"—two spots locally famous for winter finches and other good birds. And December of 1977 was shaping up to be a good finch year.

I got assigned to the far east side, which is almost completely monotonous deciduous forest. My day would be relegated to counting Chickadees, Nuthatches, Blue Jays, and maybe a Brown Creeper. So be it. I was out birding.

The 1,700-acre arboretum has a 9 mile driving loop through the grounds. I was to be dropped off on one side of the loop, where I would make my way cross-country to a parking lot on the other side. I was assured that someone would then pick me up, and take me to my next assignment.

I've mentioned in other posts that I didn't come from a family of means ... so, well, let me take a moment to describe my winter gear that day.

On my feet were heavy cotton duck "snow boots", with 3 pairs of cotton socks inside. Layer one was cotton "waffle-knit" long underwear. My pants were heavy brown corduroy (this was the 70s, after all). Up top I had a heavy polyester sweater, and a reversible "snorkel" parka (navy and blaze orange) ... topped off with a polyester knit cap. The entire ensemble cost $22 at Wieboldt's.

The Chicago area had seen some record cold and heavy snowfall during the week prior, but the morning of the count, temperatures were headed well into the 40s. My route took me through knee-to-waist-high snow, and I think I made 50 yards before I was soaked to the skin. But I was 14. 14-year-olds are indestructible. Unstoppable, even.

Trudge trudge trudge. Stop. Look. Listen. Trudge trudge trudge. Stop. Mark down a chickadee. Trudge trudge trudge.

I had made it to the midway point and was faced with an open area and a hill. I was approaching the hill from the south, and the snow drifts were up to my pubescent chest. I plowed into the first one, determined to go straight up the hill, and I was stopped dead. The snow was so full of water, so heavy, that when I compressed it, it turned into a wall.

I stood thinking for a moment and catching my breath...

...when a bird call that I had never heard before came tinkling out of the heavens. Sweet, soft little notes. I looked up, and out of the blue sky a flock of birds appeared and landed in the trees crowning the hill.

I put my binoculars on them and, even though I had never seen one before, I knew instantly what they were: Pine Grosbeaks!

I counted. 53 of them!!

The trees at the top of the hill were a collection of Ash, and they happily settled in and began stuffing their cute little rosy and gray faces on the millions of dangling seeds.

I knew this was a good bird, but I didn't really know just how good. I continued on my route, and eventually made my way back to the loop road where I found no one waiting for me. So, I began walking back toward the visitor's center. Soon Alan came along and picked me up, and on the short drive to lunch I told him about my birds.

The little cafe at the visitor's center was full of bird-counters, and I was telling everyone there about my 53 Pine Grosbeaks. Some smiled. Some asked where. Some couldn't be bothered with the rantings of a kid who found a flock of Purple Finches (in the 1970s, House Finches would have been even more rare than Pine Grosbeaks).

A couple people decided that it was worth checking on, so after lunch I took them out to show them. We followed the trail I had plowed, and when we got to the hill discovered that the flock had grown to 80 birds.

And pandemonium ensued.

Within an hour or so, everyone had forsaken their assignments and was making it over to "Ash Hill". They needn't have worried. The flock stayed for nearly a month, and remains to this day the largest gathering of Pine Grosbeaks ever recorded in Illinois. It was also the last flock of any size of this species ever recorded in the state. There have been 15 records—28 individual birds—in the 35 years since the winter of 1977.

The countdown dinner was held that evening in a banquet hall (now a landmark) called The Sabre Room. Everyone was there ... and for one night, I was a hero. It was the best Christmas Count, and maybe the best Christmas, ever.

###

What's your favorite Christmas count memory? Please share in the comments below!

Location, location, location… what's in a name?

Editor's Note: The ABA Blog welcomes Jeff Bouton as a regular contributor.  Jeff is Marketing Manager for Leica Sports Optics and lives in Port Charlotte, Florida. 

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Note the blurred tail in this early AM shot, caused by the Palm Warbler's incessant and characteristic tail-wagging behavior

I photographed the Palm Warbler above in a palm tree the other day and thought, "Ah, as it should be". 

If only birding were this simple though. For beginning birders this image may not seem odd at all, but those who've been around the block a bit longer realize Palm Warblers are rarely found in palms and, despite the name, one wouldn't really look for them here first. They are only in "palm country" in the winter months and even then, seem to prefer to feed on or near the ground in weedy patches and are much more likely on a low shrub or similar. 

Warblers who feed by gleaning are much more commonly found in palm trees, searching the nooks and crannies for spiders and other morsels. The Yellow-throated Warbler would have been a much more appropriate "Palm Warbler" as they occur year round here in Florida - and other subtropical to tropical locales - and love feeding in palms.

Cape May Warbler... in Florida

Despite being digiscoped in a Coconut Palm, the bird above is NOT a Palm Warbler either. It's a Cape May Warbler and as you may have guessed from the habitat, this individual is a long way from Cape May, NJ. I digiscoped this one in the parking lot of The Florida Keys Hawkwatch in Marathon, FL in October '1).

As an early birder, I expected I'd see my first Cape May Warbler on my first trip to Cape May. Imagine my surprise when I checked the range map and realized this species neither breeds nor winters anywhere near Cape May and is only expected here during the migration months. Oh yeah, and Virginia's Warbler is named for a lady not the states sharing the same name!

Confused?!?... well if not it's only because you've birded long enough to come to the realization that bird names should always be taken with a grain of salt. However, when you stop and reconsider it you can see how these inaccuracies make birding a lot more challenging than it perhaps should be. 

Ring-necked Duck pair digiscoped in Port Aransas, TX, Feb 2007

While not related to geographic anomoly, the Ring-necked Duck has always topped my "poorly-named birds" list!

How about you, anyone want to rant about the WORST bird names in American birding? How about some of the best?

Phenomena

 

Early last week, we had our coldest weather thus far this fall in the Denver metro region. Monday morning, Nov. 12th, was bright and brilliant—and frigid. I stepped outside around sunup, I looked up, I listened, and there they were: Cackling Geese, skein upon skein of them, hurrying south, saying hink and heenk, but not honk, as they went.

All morning long, it continued like that. This was full-on vismig, as the Brits say. Vismig is Britspeak for “visible migration”—birds actually on the move, caught in the act of migrating. These weren’t just birds on stopover, feeding or loafing. These were birds doing something, going somewhere. This was a full-on phenomenon.
(Left: Photo by Bill Schmoker.) 

I love avian phenomena. I love it when I get to see and hear birds doing stuff. The thrill of witnessing natural phenomena is what keeps me going. I’ll be honest with you: I prefer phenomena to rarities. Finding a rarity is, for me, something of an out-of-body experience. The rarity pops into view, a visitor from another dimension, not quite real, more a symbol or cipher than a flesh-and-feathers bird. It gets ticked. In an instant, it is transmogrified. The act of putting a name on a rarity is analogous to the act of detecting a subatomic particle; we see it, and it is altered, forever. The rarity, the actual bird itself, is transformed into a name, a reified name. In the blink of an eye, it is over, it is all over. The bird, the name, has been rendered frozen, lifeless, yet immortal, an entry on a checklist, like an immense probability field of waves and particles suddenly collapsed into a single point in space and time.

Not so with avian phenomena. Avian phenomena keep on going, keep on giving; avian phenomena live on. Indeed, the excitement builds as the phenomenon progresses. With a rarity, however, the whole thing is over, in that instant in which the bird’s name is spoken aloud.

 

Mixed in with all those Cackling Geese were three Ross’s Geese. Ross’s Geese aren’t hugely rare where I live, but they’re uncommon. Ross’s Goose is a nice bird, something to tell your friends about. Somebody might need it for his county list or her year list. As the geese flew over, I checked for the relevant field marks: small size and short neck; short, stubby bill; no grinning patch. It all added up: Ross’s Goose. Check. Tick. The probability cloud had collapsed. It was over.

But the Cacklers kept on going, streaming south, wonderfully alive, the whole morning. As each skein passed, something inside me intensified. This is it! This is for real! This is happening, right here, right now!

The birds were alive, and so was I, that brilliant morning.

 

Avian phenomena can be detected anywhere, anytime. Some phenomena are brief, lasting just a few hours. Others run on for several days. Still others extend throughout an entire season of the year—or even longer. An avian phenomenon, it seems to me, has to involve multiple birds. It has to involve birds doing something. And here’s the key: For some phenomenon X, bird x_n+1 is even more exciting than bird x_n. (Conversely, for some checklist entry Y, bird y₁, i.e., the bird, is infinitely more satisfying than birds y₂, y₃, y₄, etc. In fact: y_n=∅ for all values of n>1.)

Sorry about that. Geek mode off. Here, without further ado, are a dozen way-cool avian phenomena from my home county of Boulder County, Colorado:

12. Cackling Geese.
See above.

11. Ring-billed Gulls.
At some point this coming winter, it will get really, really cold. A lot colder than early last week. The temperature will drop well below zero; the next day, the temperature will struggle to reach the teens. The same thing will happen the next day, and the day after that. As a result, all standing water in the northern metro region will freeze over. Except for one place: The water at Valmont Reservoir, heated by Xcel Energy’s Valmont Station plant, will remain open. And when that happens, all the gulls in the region will come to Valmont. Thousands upon thousands of them.
    We birders gather at the bluff overlooking Valmont Reservoir, and we watch in wonder as the gulls fly in late in the afternoon, a dozen here, a hundred there, scores here, hundreds more there. The gulls settle on the ice shelf, and then an eagle soars by, and they all put up: thousands of them now, in some winters more than ten thousand of them. There are rarities in the immense gathering, but the most thrilling thing is just the sheer number of Ring-billed Gulls. They wheel about in the still sky, a great snow globe of gulls, as Boulder County guller Bill Schmoker has memorably put it.

10. Violet-green Swallows.
Spring is cruel in Colorado. One day it’s sunny and sixty; the next morning, it’s snowing. That’s not a big deal if you’re a seed-crunching grosbeak, a berry-plucking solitaire, or a fish-devouring merganser. But what if you’re an obligate insectivore, a Violet-green Swallow, say? You still have to eat, so you go where the bugs are: immediately above, and even right on, the surface of large lakes and reservoirs.
    I have seen tremendous swarms of Violet-green Swallows, all together and all at once, in the twenty feet of airspace above the larger reservoirs in Boulder County. I well remember a morning that quickly went from cloudy to misty to snowy. Mere minutes ahead of the squall, the Violet-greens arrived, more than a thousand of them. For the whole time I was there, they fed frenetically, constantly dipping down onto the water’s surface to glean bugs.
    I came back a few hours later, after the sun had come out. There wasn’t a single Violet-green Swallow in sight. The event, the phenomenon, was over, as fleeting as when the morning fog burns off without anybody even noticing.

9. Clay-colored Sparrows.
I’d never heard the term until I moved here: upslope system. Basically, it’s cold, wet weather out of the east, backing up into the foothills. If there’s an upslope system in May, you don’t go to school; you don’t go to work; you don’t do the dishes or feed the kids. You go birding.
(Left: Photo by Bill Schmoker.)
    For me, the Clay-colored Sparrow, more than any other species, is the heart and soul of an upslope fallout. On most days in May in Boulder County, your chances of seeing a Clay-colored are about one in ten. During upslope fallouts, however, they’re everywhere. A few years ago, I walked outside the house during an upslope system, and heard Clay-colored Sparrows all over the place. By the time I had walked to the end of the street, I had seen at least twenty. Five hundred feet later, the tally was up to eighty-five.
    You don’t plan for an upslope fallout. It just happens. And when it does, you revel in the smart-looking, buzzy-voiced Clay-colored Sparrows, ordinarily uncommon, but so common during upslope systems that you practically have to kick them out of the way.

8. Chipping Sparrows.
I’ve blogged about this earlier, so I’ll be brief. By early July, just a couple of weeks past the summer solstice, Chipping Sparrows are migrating by night to their recently discovered molting grounds in eastern Colorado and western Kansas. It is thrilling to go out on hot nights in July and hear the sparrows’ tiny voices calling out in the darkness. My favorite venue is Greenlee Preserve, the postage-stamp preserve down the street from my house. No matter how often I witness the phenomenon, I still find myself saying, “Wow. Chipping Sparrows migrating over by night in the middle of the summer? Who knew!”

7. American Tree Sparrows.
Birders mark the passing of time by FOS’s—first-of-season sightings. It occurs to me that the last FOS each year in Boulder County is the American Tree Sparrow. They’re here at the beginning of the year, so there is no spring-migration FOS occurrence for them. Thus, the FOS tree sparrow isn’t until the autumn. The first sightings for me aren’t until well into October, maybe not even until early November—after I’ve scored all other FOS’s for the year.
    American Tree Sparrows, like Chipping Sparrows, migrate by night, audibly so. I remember a chilly, misty November night seven years ago. A handful of us were gathered on the north shore of Boulder Reservoir, and we were enthralled by the calls of tree sparrows migrating over in the dark. On their final approach to the big, flat, shimmering surface of the lake, the birds became confused or concerned, and calling intensity increased. We couldn’t see the birds, of course; we could barely see our nearest surroundings, what with the thickening fog. The conditions intensified the experience of being there, the pure experience of being immersed in pure phenomenon.

6. Cassin’s Sparrows.
I’m on a sparrow kick, eh? At least, this one isn’t a Spizella, like the previous three entries. Anyhow. A scant four years ago, the Cassin’s Sparrow would have been a full-on mega in Boulder County. Then, in the summer of 2009, a biological survey turned up a few at the base of the foothills. A few days later, I found a little colony of singing males a few miles to the north. In 2010, county birders found more of them. Then in 2011, they were everywhere. Boulder County super-birder Christian Nunes discovered more than thirty of them, including breeders, that summer. But this past summer, there were just a handful—despite an awful lot of searching.
    What’s the deal? Was this just a one-shot incursion, starting in 2009, building in 2010, peaking sharply in 2011, then just as quickly extinguishing in 2012? What will happen in 2013? Will numbers recover to 2010 or maybe even 2011 levels? Or will we back to the old days? I have no idea. Time will tell. That’s the great thing about phenomena. They keep you guessing.

5. Black-chinned Hummingbirds.
Check the Colorado Breeding Bird Atlas, and you will see that there are no records—none at all—of Black-chinned Hummingbirds in eastern Colorado in the Platte River drainage. Black-chins in eastern Colorado, everyone knew a scant few years ago, were birds of the hot, arid Arkansas River drainage. Then something happened. A switch went off. Black-chins suddenly started showing up northeastern Colorado in the summer months.
(Right: Photo by Bill Schmoker.)
    Almost immediately, they were found to be nesting. The first Black-chinned Hummingbird I ever saw in Boulder County—in the summer of 2008—was at a nest. Other birders have reported the same thing. In a hummingbird heartbeat, the species has gone from not-on-my-county-list to oh-there’s-another-nest.
    Cassin’s Sparrows are notorious for population fluctuations. As I said, I have no idea if they’ll be back in 2013. But I’m counting on ever more Black-chinned Hummingbirds. They seem to be well established and increasing. Which raises the obvious question: Why? What flipped that switch?

4. Broad-tailed Hummingbirds.
Birders love the phenomenon of sheer plenitude, of great throngs of gulls or shearwaters. Even a big flock of blackbirds or starlings, you have to admit, is pretty impressive. How about hummingbirds?
    I’m serious. The flock—there is no other word—of Broad-tailed Hummingbirds at Boulder County’s Fawn Brook Inn is awesome. You hear them well before the car eases into the lot across the street. As you walk toward the flowers and feeders, the birds are buzzing all about you. And when you’re actually on the premises, there are so many that you get disoriented. I mean it. You can get vertigo there. I’ve never gone scuba diving and been surrounded by thousands of hyperactive and beautiful little fish, but I think it must be something like the hummingbirds at the Fawn Brook Inn.

3. Redheads.
Quick! Name some great-sounding birds: Winter Wren, Hermit Thrush, Northern Mockingbird. For sure, they’re all great. Here’s another: the Redhead. The Redhead? Come again? Be with honest with me: How many of you knew the Redhead has anything to say at all?
    The call of any particular Redhead isn’t all that impressive. What’s cool, what’s very cool, is when hundreds of males all get together, and all start hooting and whistling. There is something wonderfully forlorn, poignant, and capital-R Romantic about their wailing. I swear, they do it only on cold, raw, still days in early spring. They sound anguished. The effect is overwhelming.
    If you’ve never heard the chorusing of male Redheads, go out and listen next spring. Just be sure to bring a hanky.

2. American Robins.
If you wan to be a better birder, a better observer of nature—heck, just a better human being—then go out and watch robins. Robins are always doing stuff. A single robin is fascinating to observe, but I go for the big flocks. With a flock of robins, there’s never a dull millisecond. Listen to this recording, which I realize a few of you may recall from an earlier post by Yours Truly:

Robins are exciting!

I feel that way every time I see a flock of robins. Robins are, in word, phenomenal.

 

1. Sandhill Cranes.
Each year, there is an avian phenomenon that is, without a doubt, the birding event of the year for folks in Boulder County and everywhere else in the Front Range metro corridor. That’s an understatement. The phenomenon is avian, but the experience transcends mere birding. I refer to the southbound passage—vismig, recall—of Lesser Sandhill Cranes.
(Left: Photo by Bill Schmoker.)
    I think it’s fair to say that, 99% of the time in Boulder County, you have at best about a 1% chance of seeing or hearing Sandhill Cranes. They’re rare here. Except for when they’re abundant, filling the skies, for an hour or more at a time, with their stentorian bugling. What I love about it is how we have absolutely, utterly no say in how the phenomenon plays out.
    Typically, the phenomenon starts around during the lunch hour on a workaday weekday. By mid-afternoon, COBirds is lighting up with reports. I remember the time somebody texted that she was seeing them while driving in rush-hour traffic on I-25 in Denver. I’m not saying I approve of driving, birding, and texting at the same time, but I get it. We stop what we’re doing (or, in the case of our COBirds corresondent, we don't stop!) to watch the cranes. It’s in our genes. We can’t help ourselves. We run inside to tell our non-birding friends to come outside and see and hear these glorious birds.
    The phenomenon played out according to script—that is to say, without input from me or any other birder—this past autumn. It happened on a busy Friday afternoon, when I really needed to be doing other things. Like the cranes cared about that.
    My favorite experience with cranes was in 2011. That year, they declined to migrate over the Front Range urban corridor. Oh, I’m a sure a few did. But there was no massive overflight involving tens of thousands of cranes, and, oh yes, tens of thousands of admiring humans. I figured I’d missed them for the year. Then something bewitching, and totally unexpected, happened.
    My kids and I and several dozen other humans were sledding on a snowy afternoon. It was a noisy, raucous affair, full of laughter and shouting. And then I heard it: the unmistakable bugling of cranes. They came in closer, and the other sledders started to notice. In a moment, everybody was silent, motionless, just watching as the cranes circled above, getting ready to land. All the raucousness, all the laughter and shouting—it was all muted. We just stood there and watched and listened without saying a word. It was a marvelous, a magical, a transcendental moment.
    If only for a brief minute, we were all birders.

 

Patched

My birding is patched. I have patches in my backyard, patches where I work, and patches where I travel. Patches are large and small, rural and urban, green and not-so-green, wet and dry.

I like patch birding. I can get my arms around a patch. I can slip a patch into my pocket. In my patch I learn every note, every chip, and every flash of color. In a patch, I can know every bird, or I have fooled myself into thinking so. I am king of my patch.

I have a favorite patch in Philadelphia. When in the city I usually stay in the Embassy Suites across from Logan Square (which is now a circle). For the past few years I have worked in Philadelphia with the Philadelphia Parks and Recreation Department (PPRD.) My walk to their offices near Love Park is only a few blocks.

On the way I pass a tiny patch that I have adopted. This patch has a few trees and shrubs, with mulched grounds separated by a few blades of grass. A statue dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust dominates one end; for that reason I call this Holocaust Park.

This is not the only tiny patch of green along Ben Franklin Parkway. The Sister’s City Park across from Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church nurtures a scattering of green as well. In general, however, the central city of America’s first great city is varying shades of concrete gray.

Birds use my Holocaust Park. There is always a small flock of house sparrows chattering in the crowns of the few trees. American robins are ever present as well; I have seen them digging through the snow in search of food they overlooked. Add European starling and rock pigeons and you have accounted for the resident bird population.

The brilliance of patch birding is that you learn the common quickly. You learn the common intimately. Any interloper is instantly noticed. Resident birds are a background against which the new and unexpected are highlighted.

In the past I have seen an eclectic selection of birds in my Philly patch. American woodcock, prairie warbler, ovenbird, and slate-colored junco are examples of the birds that have dropped in and attracted my notice. My only limitation in birding this patch is that my visits to Philadelphia are rare. If I lived there, I would search my patch daily.

I wonder how these birds even find this patch. I assume that birds displaced in the city search out any miniscule scrap of green. While in college I birded the trees around the city hall in Houston every morning on the way to class. Migrants, attracted by the lights and disoriented by the tall buildings, would crowd into these live oaks each morning. I guess that the birds in my Philadelphia patch are doing the same.

However, I am convinced that some of the patch birds have selected this site. For example, for the past few winters I have noticed a small group of white-throated sparrows scattered among the trees. They stay the winter. Are these lost birds, or have they found a place where they can survive the winter and therefore return each year.

I suspect both. I imagine that young birds find the patch, survive their first winter, and therefore repeat the pattern the remainder of their lives. Wandering individuals join these acclimated birds each year. The result is that my patch has a wintering group of white-throated sparrows that I can count on seeing.

If I banded these birds I suspect that I would see many of the same individual birds each year. They nest far to the north (although a few breed in the mountains of northern Pennsylvania); I know that they are not local nesters. But winter site fidelity is strong in many birds, and I know, from personal experience, that this is true for white-throated sparrows.

For many years I banded in High Island's Scout’s Woods, and every year I would recapture white-throated sparrows that I had netted in previous years. These sparrows would arrive each fall, somehow find their way to this postage stamp of woods on the Texas coast, and remain through the spring. If these birds can find High Island, surely they can find my Holocaust Park.

Banding also allows you to get to know birds personally. As birders we count species. As a bander you notice individuals. For example, I once color-banded shorebirds along the Texas coast. One greater yellowlegs that I banded returned to the same part of the flats at San Luis Pass (the western tip of Galveston Island) for seven consecutive years.

I came to know this yellowlegs as an individual, a bird faced with its own unique set of challenges. I believe that each bird approaches life in a singular fashion. While they are constrained by specific genes, they still make choices that are so fine-tuned they escape our notice.

Learning a patch gives me a closer look at the life of birds collectively as well as individually. Perhaps I imagine knowing each bird. Perhaps my need to get closer, to become more familiar, masks a more pedestrian reality.

Yet there are times when there is evidence that bolsters my conjectures. Each fall I would watch the flats at San Luis Pass in hopes of seeing the arrival of “my” yellowlegs. And every visit to Philadelphia I shuffle past Holocaust Park in expectation of being greeted by “my” white-throated sparrows.

What happens when Holocaust Park is developed? There are plans for a museum at this site. Will my birds find other sites or other parks? What if there are no other sites, or that the other sites have their own white-throated sparrows?

Perhaps there are green spaces where my sparrows can resettle. I hope so. But what about my greater yellowlegs? What happens when San Luis Pass is inundated by sea level rise? What happens to the tens of thousands of shorebirds that migrate through or winter there? What about the black skimmers, least terns, Wilson's plovers, and Texas horned larks that nest there? Forget moving; the neighboring flats will be inundated as well.

Yet tonight I am not worrying about climate change. I am in Philadelphia to celebrate my grandson Han's birthday. This afternoon I walked over to my park to see my sparrows. I am hoping that the recent election will allow the world to begin to patch together a solution for climate change. But tonight I am enjoying my own.

Tell Us Your Sandy Stories

 

A week ago today, I was riding with Ryan Tomazin to Pittsburgh International Airport. We’d just been at the Brooks Bird Club’s 80th birthday bash. Despite the dreary weather, a good time was had by all. I mean, what’s not to like about a Chan Robbins keynote, all-you-can-eat buffets, and even a vintage Ms. Pac-Man machine. (Inside joke; some of you will get it. The rest of you, just laugh along.)

On the ride back to the airport, though, I was just a tad apprehensive. The storm of the century was on its way. It had been raining steadily for a few hours now, and the temperature was down into the low 40s. There were already reports of cancelled flights, and I wondered if I would be impacted.

“We’re coming up on Cheat Lake,” Ryan announced.

Cheat Lake is a huge reservoir just south of the Pennsylvania line. It’s one of the best places in West Virginia for water birds.

Ryan asked, “Do you see anything?”

In fact, there were birds down there.

“Canada Geese...I guess.”

Ryan kept on driving.

At the airport, the flight board was lighting up with that dreaded sequence of letters: C-A-N-C-E-L-L-E-D. My flight was westbound, however, and I was back in Denver that night. Whew.

 

When I checked my email the next morning, Ryan was in full-on I-told-you-so mode. An epic fallout was under way at Cheat Lake, and the action had started just an hour or so before Ryan and I had driven over the I-68 causeway late Sunday afternoon. My “Canada Geese,” it turns out, were probably Atlantic Brant. Morgantown birder John Boback had found 20+ on the lake, and John and others were reporting lots of scoters, loons, and whatnot. Those are fine birds for inland West Virginia. Ryan, if you’re out there, please forgive me for the blown call.

This was only the beginning.

The next day, I got an email from Mike Fialkovich, a birding pal from my late teen years. He described what has to be one of the most astonishing birding phenomena I’ve ever heard of.

First, a bit of context. It was Tuesday, October 30th, “The Day After” for folks along the New Jersey and New York coastlines. In southwestern Pennsylvania, where Mike lives, Tuesday was the day they’ll never forget.

Spurred on a report by not just one, but two, rare Pomarine Jaegers at Green Run Lake, Fayette County, Pennsylvania, Mike stopped by after work on Tuesday. Nearing the lake, he noticed a decent flock of “gulls.”

Except they weren’t gulls.

They were jaegers, some twenty-nine (29) of them, mostly or maybe entirely Pomarines. Seeing just one (1) jaeger of any species is a thrill for me. Seeing one way inland in Fayette County would be especially impressive. But 29?! I’ve never seen that many jaegers in a flock at sea. I’ve never seen that many on the nesting grounds. I really can’t wrap my brain around the idea of 29 jaegers all in one spot. Yet there were, out on the lake, then all picking up, then landing again, then rising again, and so forth.
Left: Pomarine Jaeger. Photo by Nate Swick.

Other birders had arrived, and they and Mike watched in awe. After a while, the birds rose up again in the swirling snow, kettled like hawks, and flew off into the snowstorm.

I can’t think of a more potent symbol of Sandy’s might than Mike Fialkovich’s 29 jaegers swirling in the snow at Green Run Lake. Strong hurricanes blow powerful seabirds inland; Sandy was notably strong, and Poms are inarguably powerful. Yes, Sandy was strong, but Sandy was no mere hurricane. That’s a lesson that was affirmed for Pittsburgh birder Jack Solomon and me two nights before Sandy’s landfall.

 

It was the last night of the Brooks Bird Club meeting, and it was getting on toward midnight. Jack had been teasing me—he’s been doing that for 30 years—about the folly of standing in cold rain listening for nocturnal flight calls.

“Let’s take it outside, Jack.”

The instant we walked out of the lodge at Blackwater Falls State Park, we heard buzzy flight calls, loud and clear. Jack was genuinely impressed, but bedtime or the bar—I’m not sure which—beckoned, and he went back in. Me, too, to get my VN-8100PC. When I got back outside, the birds were still going at it, still going over.

The experience was mesmerizing. I thought I heard a few Common Yellowthroats, and maybe a Palm Warbler. But what were all those other calls? Well, I was recording them, and I’d find out after I got back to Denver.

To cut to the chase, they were almost all Blackpoll Warblers. They were up there, calling constantly, pretty much the whole time I was there. Bill Evans has cautioned that I may have been hearing a lot of repeats—birds circling around the relatively bright lights of the lodge. I suspect he’s right; however, for reasons that I won’t bother you with, I also think there was a steady passage of birds that night.

     
Blackpoll Warblers recorded on nocturnal migration over Blackwater Falls State Park, near Davis, Tucker County,
West Virginia, 11:15-11:20 p.m., Saturday, October 27, 2010. Recordings by Ted Floyd.

The whole time I was out there, winds were light but steady out of the north; it was foggy, and a very light rain—more of a mist, really—was falling. This was the other half of what would become Superstorm Sandy; this was the cold front. The birds—the Blackpolls, a few other warblers, a Hermit Thrush, a White-throated Sparrow—were getting out ahead of the storm. Forty-eight hours later, Blackwater Falls would be under a blizzard warning.

I just thought of something: My Sandy story starts even earlier in the week.

 

On Wednesday evening, Oct. 24th, I was getting ready for my travel the next day to Pennsylvania and West Virginia. I had a zillion and one things to deal with, but my kids would have none of it.

“It’s snowing! It’s snowing!”

It was indeed snowing—a lot harder than I had thought it would. A quick check of the Denver Post’s website informed me that forecasters had “beefed up” their forecast; at least half a foot would fall on Denver, and then there would be another shot Thursday night into Friday. It was all part of the same system that would eventually make its way east to combine with Hurricane Sandy, and then transmogrify into Superstorm Sandy.

The reach of Sandy was long indeed. Fortunately, I was spared the worst of it. I got out of West Virginia before the blizzard. My Sunday night flight from Pittsburgh took me west, not east. Nevertheless, I experienced Sandy at three different, if somewhat peripheral, levels: With Ryan Tomazin, I witnessed the beginning of the historic Pennsylvania–West Virginia fallout; with Jack Solomon, I listened to the anxious flight calls of warblers leaving ahead of the storm; and with my kids, I got to see what I now know to be the precursor of it all.

I said three levels, but, you know, there’s a fourth level.

 

I wasn’t there with Mike Fialkovich, but his story is nevertheless spellbinding for me. What can I say?—I enjoy vicarious birding. I love hearing other birders’ stories.

On that note, perhaps my favorite Sandy story involves ABA President Jeff Gordon. Jeff had been at the Cape May Autumn Weekend, and he couldn’t make it out on time. After a few days stranded in the Philadelphia area, Jeff finally booked a flight through Chicago. Now despite what Winging It Editor and native Midwesterner Michael Retter may say, Chicago’s airports are cursed. And Jeff’s experience there proves it. His flight out of Midway was greatly delayed because of—wait for it—a busted toilet. In fact, the lavatory was so crippled, they gave the passengers a whole new airplane.

Enough. If I haven’t lost count, that’s five Sandy stories now. Some of them involve no birds. Some of them don’t involve me. Some of them involve neither birds nor me. But all of them involve birders, in some way or another.

Sandy affected so many of us.

Let’s hear your Sandy story or stories. One request: Please include the human dimension of your story. Whom were you with? How did you and your companions cope? Yes, tell us about jaeger fallouts and Blackpoll night-flights; but we also want to hear about Ms. Pac-Man machines and busted airplane toilets.

And, on a serious note, I’m sure I’m speaking on behalf of all my colleagues at the ABA when I say that I’m well aware of Sandy’s terrible toll. Jeff Gordon and I and others on staff are blessed to have gotten through it safely, but we know that other ABA members weren’t as fortunate. (For those birders interested in helping those who have seen the worst of this storm, the American Red Cross disaster relief fund is a worthy outlet.)

If there’s a silver lining in the cloud of Sandy, it’s the indelible reminder that we’re all in this thing together. Please use the “comments” section below to tell us how you and your birding friends were affected by Sandy.

 

How to Use the Intertubes, Part 1: Links

Keep 'em short and sweet

I would like to introduce myself. When you click over to ABA Birding News and send a comment or a question, I'm the guy who gets it. Since mid-August I've received nearly 1,000 messages from people reporting glitches, making suggestions (thank you!), or offering praise (double thank you!). So—having now introduced myself—I would like to share some of what I've learned, and offer some suggestions as to how you can get the most out of using the internet to enhance your birding.

USING LINKS
By far, the number one problem being reported at the moment is broken links—URLs that are copied and pasted into the body of an email message. Here's what happens:

Let's take the very worst offender, Google Maps, as an example. If you place a pin on a Google map of a rare bird sighting, for example, the link that you end up pasting in your email message will come out looking like this:

https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=204602211350579994736.000485cd5106b9960e764&ie=UTF8&t=h&ll=38.597654,-88.172836&spn=0.013416,0.025706&z=15&iwloc=0004cc6f1ef18c9f5ae77&source=embed

Note what happened here. The web application we use to run this blog (TypePad) considers the question mark used in the URL to be punctuation that ends a sentence, therefore a line-break is allowed. Many email programs do the same, and the result is that the link is broken when you send it.

But there is a very simple way to ensure that this never happens. On the Google Maps page, instead of copying the link from the address bar in your browser, click the link icon in the Google Maps tools.

In the screen shot above, the red arrow labeled #1 points to the link tool in Google Maps. Clicking it will open the dialog box seen to the right of the icon. Note the "Short URL" check-box (red arrow #2). Click it! The result will be a very short and friendly URL you can safely use anywhere.

Flickr presents us with the same challenge as Google Maps, but just for fun throws in a twist. In addition to having unwieldy-long URL strings, Flickr uses the "@" symbol as well. This poses a problem for us when we make list archives available to the public. We want to keep spammers from harvesting email addresses in the emails posted at Birding News, and we do this by replacing the "@" symbol with " AT " to keep robot phishing attempts from recognizing email addresses.

Because Flickr also uses this symbol in their URLs, we wind up breaking the address string. We also use our own link shortening scheme, but if the link is broken, it only recognizes the first half (this, by the way, is something we are working on handling at the moment). But Flickr too, offers a short link:

When sharing a link to a Flickr photo in an email, always click the "Share" button in the tool bar and use the shortened link. It's easy, and everyone will love you for it.

Link shortening should be simply "what you do" when you share links via email. There's no reason not to, and every reason to use shortened URLs. Some might call this "best practices", but I tend to shy away from corporate mumbo-jumbo-speak ... it's just what you should do.

But what about links to sites that don't offer link shortening? Google offers a link shortener at http://goo.gl/, as does TinyURL, but the best is Bitly.

In addition to shortening URLs as the others above, with a Bitly account (free), you can install a plugin for your browser that allows you to shorten any URL, just as easy as using Flickr or Google Maps. It places a little Bitly button next to your address bar, which when clicked (#1)...

... gives you all kinds of options, in a very simple pop-up dialog. Clicking the Bitly button will shorten the URL of whatever page you are looking at. Simply click the short URL (#2), and it automatically copies the link. Now you can paste it in your email. That's it!

Bitly offers other options, such as saving the shortened URL, sharing it on Facebook and more that we'll get to in another installment of How to Use the Intertubes.