birdingblogs

Another Nightingale, but this time in a more `exposed` perch. This time I am including a couple of little video clips to give a taster of the birds song. As I said previously, these birds do sing in the day, but the true virtuoso performances are given at night. Enjoy! The above clips were taken by using my Canon A640 Powershot shooting through my scope, `videoscoped`, if you will!

Q. The feathers of my Hairy and Downy Woodpeckers that are typically white look brownish and stained and kind of roughed up. What's happening to them? Click on image to see light brown staining of eyebrow stripe and light staining...

Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher - From 4.12

My struggle to get out and bird whilst working and trying to get our house ready for sale in preparation for our move to VT continues. I have on my rare outing seen many first of year birds this last week, which has been wonderful. Sad to say the leaves now hide the Cooper's and Red-Tail hawk nests so no chance of spying chicks but hoepfully they are there and doing well. The parents continue to tend to the nest.

Red-Tail Hawk casting a warning glance at me - From 4.12

Eastern Towhee "Drinking his Tea"  - From 4.12

Eastern Bluebird male - From 4.12

Yellow Warbler - From 4.12

Warbling Vireo - From 4.12

Eastern Bluebird couple at their nest box - From 4.12

Common Yellowthroat male - From 4.12

Baltimore Oriole - From 4.12

I've gotten way behind in my blogging – too much fun, too much real experience, and not enough time online. I'm not complaining. I'll just start where I left off with my month-long vacation visiting friends in Europe, though I'm now home and putting the last touches on my shopping list and recipe book for the Gambell cooking job I'm doing week after next. After visiting Marco and Frank in Oldenburg, I made my way to Brussels to visit fellow birding tour guide Stephen Boddington. The train took me across the entire nation of The Netherlands, where I had to change trains in Groningen, Utrecht, and Rotterdam. The latter has a particularly striking, and not very bird-friendly, skyline from the main train station. Stephen and I birded two different sites in Belgium, did some touring of the city center, had a drink with a friend of his at a pub that had a listing of maybe a hundred beers, and walked through the rare opening of the royal greenhouses. We started with a local hotspot in a Brussels suburb called Mechelen, taking the train and walking to the Mechels Broek from there. A lake, wet fields, hedgerows, and scattered trees make this a very good local patch for birders with only a couple hours to spare. Our highlight here today was a group of migrant Black Terns over the main lake, but a nice assortment of shorebirds – Common Sandpiper, Common Redshank, Greenshank, Wood Sandpiper, and Green Sandpiper – was also a treat. A new phenomenon for me was the mating swarms of this unusual moth, the Green Longhgorn, Adela reaumurella. I had never seen a moth with such long antennae, making me think at first that they were trichopterans. Our non-birding interlude in Brussels included the city's most famous tourist attraction, the tiny statue known as Manneken Pis, the "Little Man Pee." There is apparently crowd of tourists around it at all times, though I had never even heard of it before. We did include some birding, such as the pair of Stock Doves that Stephen had found in the main park as well as the breeding pair of peregrines in this church tower. We saw the female come in and land briefly above the nest, and the chicks are visible with the cam that is broadcast on tv screens in a trailer parked on the street below. Two interpreters are employed full time to talk about the birds with curious passers-by. We also took advantage of the brief annual opening of the royal greenhouses in the N part of the city. Lots of palms, ferns, and fuchsias. The King apparently likes pink. Finally, we got in a good, full day of birding on the coast near Brugge and hit it just right with conditions for a superbly visible landbird migration. Stephen wrote about it already on his Belgian Birding Blog. We started off on the top of the dike with town and farm fields to the southeast and the North Sea (near where it meets the English Channel) to the northwest. Here we saw flocks of swallows, swifts, pipits, and wagtails winging their way north (forced to head northeast by the coastline), with top highlights going to a Common Redstart, an Osprey, and a Ring Ouzel. Two Eurasian Jays flying very high were behaving like migrants, though local birds are probably resident. We then covered the green, wet, and plowed fields behind the town of Blankenberge, a wildlife area called the Uitkerkse Polder. Breeding Black-tailed Godwits sang while Meadow Pipits foraged quietly – apparently already feeding young. The plowed fields were full of three kinds of Western Yellow Wagtails, Northern Wheaters, and a few Whinchats. I always enjoy watching Jackdaws, a very cute corvid that most Europeans take for granted. We just don't have anything like it in North America, though I once heard a distinctive single call note from the middle of a huge flock of American Crows going to a roost at Sauvie Island, Oregon. I could have just shrugged it off as a hallucination if it hadn't been also heard by my friend Hendrik who also picked the sound out of the more raucous crows. But we never saw anything and I will always only wonder if we actually heard a Jackdaw. Other shorebirds in the wet fields included several Eurasian Oystercatchers and this lingering European Golden-Plover. In just a day and a half of birding, we had managed to get to 99 species for my first trip ever to this country. I'll have to return.

I've been a fan of the BirdNote podcast for a few months now. They have just updated their website and I thought it was worth sharing. Click on the screenshot below to go there. Enjoy!

I have five birdbaths out this spring for the birds! Here's just some of the activity I've had at them. Couples bath Hey, no arguing in the bath!! Gettin' clean Black-capped Chickadee Rose-breasted Grosbeak Migrating White-throated Sparrow Looks like water...

A Spotted Flycatcher (Muscicapa striata – Grauschnäpper) made a surprising visit in front of the kitchen window today. This is an Old World Flycatcher. (Please click on the photo to enlarge). It reminded me, that I haven’t put up the Flycatchers we saw in Panama – which are all Tyrant Flycatchers. (And for those who [...]

Ash-throated Flycatcher (Myiarchus cinerascens) photos by Larry Jordan

Ash-throated Flycatchers (Myiarchus cinerascens) migrate to Northern California from Mexico and Central America every Spring to nest. They are cavity nesting birds and I one of the species that nest in my birdhouses every year. Every May I look forward to waking up in the morning hearing that sweet gurgling call.

The gathering of nest material and actual nest construction is done probably entirely or mostly by the female Ash-throated Flycatcher  seen here (click on photos for full sized images).

How do I know that the bird pictured above is the female? Because I watched her for quite some time as she flew back and forth to a nearby farm and brought back nesting material while the male gave his encouragement from a nearby perch. Here she is at the cavity entrance.

Nearly every time she brought in nesting material (as you will see in the video below) she would hesitate on coming out of the cavity and look around for a bit before taking off for more material.

In one instance a juvenile female Acorn Woodpecker inadvertently perched briefly on the same snag while the female Ash-throated Flycatcher was inside the cavity and the male was perched above in the same snag.

The Ash-throated Flycatcher pair immediately and aggressively attacked the woodpecker, chasing her off in quick order.

They then went back to the business of building their nest. The male Ash-throated Flycatcher following the female around during this nest building activity, apparently guarding his mate and singing to her.

In this short video you will hear the male singing to his mate around the 53 second mark as she flies by him on the way to gathering more nesting material. And she brings back a huge load on the next trip, looking as if she is exhausted.

If you love birds and you want to experience more great bird photos, you have to check out World Bird Wednesday!

Howdee all,

Our last night in Ohio we were invited for cocktails and dinner at friends Hugh and Judy's home.

Hugh and Judy have a lovely garden and pond.

I thought my Sickstas would enjoy these photos and maybe Craigy might get a few ideas on how to make a waterfall.

The waterfall

A rock that water flows from..

A water spouting critter

Just one of the cool pieces of garden art

Hugh and Judy have nest boxes and feeders all over their property..

What a great home for birds!

No I didn’t forget about the title of my post ..and it wasn’t just a catchy title to get you here..

We really did have Cocktails..

 

And while we did we did have quite the show..

Ms. Tree Swallow waits for more..

He came back another six or seven times

I lost count..you would think they would take the whole thing indoors..

After dinner we took a walk around the park

Spotted Sandpiper all spotty..

Greylag Goose with Canada Goose

Wow..I think they adopted a few

  geese 'creches' - where the offspring of different parents get mixed up - are fairly common

Check out this article to see a pair with 40 goslings~~Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1280370/Canada-geese-left-charge-40-goslings.html#ixzz1uwtY89vE

 

Kildeer…It was acting as though there might be a nest nearby.

I just thought this looked cool…

Judy said this is part of an old trailer.

Thanks Hugh and Judy for a lovely evening.

Until we meet again.

A bird that is surrounded by folklore and was made famous by a 1940`s song, the Nightingale is perhaps one of Britains most well known birds. Known to be a bird with a tremendous song, but this bird is notoriously difficult to see well as it tends to sit deep inside a bramble bush and belt out its tune. The bird is quite plain in the plumage department, being a warm brown with a reddish-brown rump and tail, grey-brown underparts and a paler throat. We are lucky in the Peterborough area in the fact that we have a number of breeding sites of these summer visitors, one of which I visited at the weekend, where I encountered the above bird, perched inside a bramble bush, but easy to see. Contrary to common belief, they do sing in the day, as the above digiscoped shots show.

This week I’ll discuss another five bird species endemic to Jamaica, the first half of the oscine passerines.

Also called songbirds, these more “advanced” passerines don’t all actually have nice songs, though when analyzed, their voices are usually quite a bit more complex than those of subsocines. On Jamaica, however, some of these have wonderfully evocative and enchanting songs, creating an unmistakable soundscape that brings to my senses the smells of allspice, a moist tropical breeze, and the lilting Jamaican accent.

Jamaica has two endemic and very distinctive vireos. The Jamaican Vireo, known locally as “White-eyed Vireo” is one of the most common and adaptable of endemics, occurring at every elevation and habitat type, as long as some native plants are around. (The most destroyed region of south-central Jamaica, around the city of Christina, is perhaps the only place on the island where I imagine there are none.) The song is not particularly pretty but it is fascinatingly variable. Each phrase is a simple, typically vireo-scratchy phrase repeated 3 or 4 times almost endlessly. But after a few repetitions, a bird will switch to a very different phrase and repeat that for a while. A single bird can sing dozens of different phrases, and there seems to be endless variations found around the island. If I ever hear a song I don’t recognize in on Jamaica, it has to be a Jamaican Vireo. Photo © Maggie, aka bitemesucker2000 on Flickr.

The Blue Mountain Vireo is very different. It stands out among vireos in having neither facial markings (no eye ring or eye line) nor wing bars. It’s also one of very few members of the genus that bears pink rather than blue feet. Its song is also very atypical – a smooth, purring trill that lacks the burry quality, repetition, and complexity that most other vireos possess. It’s one of the few endemics on the island that doesn’t seem to have any close mainland relatives, either having been on the island so long to have evolved far from its ancestors, or perhaps indicating that its most recent mainland ancestor has become extinct without trace. This bird is so different from any mainland species that I’d not be surprised to see it placed in its own genus.

There’s not much that can be said about the Jamaican Crow other than that its babbling voice always elicits a smile from birders. Probably closely related to the similarly babbling Cuban Crow, the local name for it is the “Jabbering Crow,” and while formerly quite restricted to areas of good forest, the species has been spreading to more altered habitats and can be found in the outskirts of Montego Bay and Mandeville. This digiscoped video just barely managed to capture the sound.

The two thrushes on Jamaica have the best songs of all.The White-eyed Thrush brings to mind the Song Thrush of Europe, endlessly repeating melodic phrases, but it also has a curious secondary song consisting of two pure whistles a full tone apart, repeated back and forth. This species requires good forest, forages in the canopy, and is very shy, flitting off every time it sees binoculars being raised. I’ve found that Marshall’s Pen is the best place for seeing this bird. It doesn’t seem to be very much like any mainland thrush, but I suspect the White–necked and White-throated Thrushes are close. Photo © Víðir Óskarsson, aka Vidiro on Flickr.

The song of White-chinned Thrush is rather similar to the White-eyed’s (and equally charming) but is bit more variable, isn’t so strict about repeating each phrase, and has more high-pitched twittery sounds mixed in. It also behaves very differently from the White-eyed, often hopping on the ground (hence one of its local names, Hopping Dick). This is a very familiar bird to Jamaicans island-wide, and is probably most closely related to the Red-legged Thrush on other islands, not having any obvious mainland relatives.

Next blog I’ll talk about the final six endemics, all belonging to the nine-primaried oscine assemblage.

Photo at top: The White-chinned Thrush is a common and easy-to-see bird on Jamaica, its dawn song being a particularly beautiful island sound.

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• Jamaica’s Endemic Birds Part 3
• Jamaica’s Endemic Birds Part 2
• Jamaica’s Endemic Birds – The First Six
• The 50 best birds in Africa (part 1)
• San Cristobal Mockingbird – A Single Island Endemic.

I’d like to get better at drawing birds, for better field sketches among other reasons. So I’ve been sketching some practice drawings, like the ones below.

My first sketch of a Black-capped Chickadee, I’m not sure if I will finish it,

A drawing of a male Purple Finch I haven’t finished yet,

I decided I needed some help, and started looking online for some book and blog suggestions, because we live about three hours away from the nearest city where I could find a class. I found some very good blog posts by John Muir Law – including “Drawing Birds” — and then learned that Mr. Law has a book coming out in September, The Laws Guide to Drawing Birds to be published by Heyday Books, with a foreword by David Allen Sibley (whose bird drawings I like so much I have several of his posters in my room). It sounds wonderful and I can’t wait for it to be published.

Since that book won’t be out for several months, some other books about drawing birds I’ve been looking at are Drawing Birds with Colored Pencils by Kaaren Poole, and Drawing Birds by John Busby. I’m going to see if I can find them at the library so I can decide whether they would be worth buying. Mostly, I think, I need to practice and stop being afraid of drawing a bird even if the picture isn’t perfect. But I think a good book or two would be very helpful.

Do you have any suggestions for drawing birds, field sketching, or books or blog posts that could help me? Thank you!

On a rainy day like today, we can really appreciate some of the lesser known benefits of our new WBU High-Perch Hummingbird Feeder. We make nectar with a sugar and water mix that most closely approximates the nectar in flowers....

Black-Headed Grosbeak checking things out before diving into the seeds

 The good folks at Yard Envy asked me to try out their Wingdale Hanging Bird Feeder and to share with you my experience. It's on sale now, so check it out! First of all, its a a beautiful bird feeder. I love the design, especially the shingled roof. I'm sure my neighbors are also pleased to see something a little more aesthetic. The Wingdale feeder is simple to assemble and easy to refill as the roof slides up the cord and reconnects on two small wooden dowels. I've had the feeder up now for over a month. It did take a couple weeks for the birds to "find" it...or rather get used to it. Lesser Goldfinch and House Finches are now its most regular customers. House Sparrows occasionally pop in. I was delighted this last Sunday afternoon to be sitting in the shade of my backyard trees when a couple of Black-headed Grosbeaks showed preference for the Wingdale feeder and posed for some photos. I'm already looking forward to photography Lazuli Buntings at this feeder. They should show up any day now!

House Finch - a regular customer at the Wingdale Hanging Bird Feeder

American Crow

Large, black, ubiquitous, and noisy - the crow does not make many people’s list of favorite birds. Maybe that’s because the crow is also intelligent. Forbush wrote that the crow “knows too much; his judgment of the range of a gun is too nearly correct. If Crows could be shot oftener they would be more popular.” Birdwatcher’s Companion says: “Some taxonomists believe the crows to be the most highly evolved of all bird families, based on the charming (if self-serving) notion that mental development is proof of evolutionary ‘excellence.’” Henry Ward Beecher, the prominent nineteenth century Congregationalist minister, is reported to have said that if men wore feathers and wings a very few of them would be clever enough to be crows. There’s the problem. Crows are intelligent. They threaten our position as the most intelligent creatures on the planet. If intelligence is judged by the ability to ruin environment and destroy the planet, I guess we are the most intelligent.

Blue Jay - member of the Corvid family

Crows belong to the family, Corvidae, familiarly called “corvids” (crows, jays, magpies), and the genus, Corvus. Worldwide there are about 43 species of the genus Corvus, including jackdaws, rooks, and ravens, as well as crows. In North America there are six species. The Fish Crow is fairly common in the southeast along the coast, rivers and swamps. The Northwestern Crow lives along the Pacific coast from southern Alaska to Washington State. The Chihuahuan Raven in found in the deserts of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona and southward. Rarest in North America is the Tamaulipas Crow which occasionally visits South Texas, particularly the Brownsville landfill.

Common Raven

In our neighborhood, we have two species of Corvus. The Common Raven is still scarce, but  continues to recover in our eastern mountains. It is quite common in the northern forests of Canada and in the mountains, forests, and deserts of the West. And of course, there is the widespread and common American Crow. All of these are big, black birds. They range is size from the diminutive Tamaulipas Crow (15 inches) to the hawk-sized raven (25 inches). They belong to the Order, Passeriformes (perching birds) and the sub-Order, Passeri (songbirds). Yes, crows are songbirds. Now before you begin to grumble that the raucous cawing of the crows hardly qualifies as a song and bears not the slightest comparison to the other-worldly beauty of the thrushes, remember that the Grammy Music Awards include categories for “rap” and “heavy metal.” Perhaps the corvids lost their musical ability as they evolved their intelligence, which as an evolutionary principle, seems contrary to what has occurred  in our species; modern music genres suggest that musical ability and intelligence are both evolving downward.

American Crows

Crows are remarkable creatures. They are omnivorous. They will consume just about anything except green plants, which the youngster trying to choke down his spinach would undoubtedly see as a sign of their intelligence. Their diet includes insects, crustaceans, shellfish, small vertebrates (including nestling birds), garbage, fruit, and fast-food French fries. Corn is a favorite, which is what has made them anathema to generations of farmers. Fall and winter, crows gather in large communal roosts which can number in the hundreds, and even thousands. During the day they disperse over a wide area. Then as dusk approaches, they reassemble in staging areas before retiring to the roost for the night. The roosts are sometimes viewed as nuisances, leading officials to try all sorts of bizarre things in order to relocate or eliminate the “problem.” Among those efforts are the occasional sanctioned murder of crows in which guns blaze away at the gathered birds. Like all efforts, it has little lasting effect. The crows fly away - for a while. One problem for the crows in these large communal roosts, is that the birds perching on the lower branches often get struck by the dropping from those higher up. By morning, their backs may be speckled white. Maybe this is reflective of the cultures of more “intelligent” creatures, since it is certainly analogous to what happens to those at the bottom of the human society tree by those at the top of the tree. Little is known about these roosts, but one thought is that the roosting crows may be younger, unmated birds that have yet to establish their own territory. The roost serves a social function, allowing the younger birds to find mates, challenge one another, and communicate their experiences. Bernd Heinrich has demonstrated this theory in relation to ravens.

American Crow

What is evident is that crows have a complex social structure and language, although very little is understood about either. Crow vocalizations go far beyond the familiar caws that we usually attribute to them. They can imitate sounds of other species, including elements of human speech. They have a wide variety of low volume vocalizations for communicating among one another. They have alarm calls, assembly calls, distress calls, and many others. And there is evidence to suggest that they may have different languages, i.e., different groups of crows, belonging to the same species but in different geographical areas, may not use or understand all of the same calls. The March full moon is the “Crow Moon.” The cawing of the crows tells of the waning of winter. The roosts break up and by the end of March, crows begin nesting in their crow’s nests in the tops of tall trees.

American Crow

Henry David Thoreau wrote of the crow: “This bird sees the white man come and the Indian withdraw, but it withdraws not. Its untamed voice is still heard above the tinkling of the forge. It sees a race pass away but it passes not away. It remains to remind us of aboriginal nature.” Good birding! Quotations are from Forbush, “American Birds,” Leahy, “Birdwatcher’s Companion,” and crows.net. Posted by Chris Petrak, Tails of Birding

At 7:45 yesterday morning I went out for some birding, hoping to find some warblers and shorebirds.

I walked to the alkaline lake behind our house, only a five-minute walk away. On the way there I saw 10+ Tree Swallows, one pair of Barn Swallows, eight Savannah Sparrows, two Clay-colored Sparrows, four Black-billed Magpies, two Western Meadowlarks, a flock of Brown-headed Cowbirds, and one Yellow rumped Warbler.

When I got to the lake I saw two Green-winged Teals, four Northern Shovelers, two Lesser Yellowlegs and two Mallards. On one of the sandbars was a Semipalmated Plover, a life bird for me. It flew away to another sandbar and where there were two other Semipalmated Plovers. I tried to take a photo of them but my camera batteries were dead. I quickly ran to the house to grab new ones and ran back. I was very lucky that there were still there! Also with the plovers were three  Semipalmated Sandpipers, two Spotted Sandpipers, four American Avocets, one Solitary Sandpiper, and one Killdeer. When I got back to the house I looked at the feeders and saw a female American Goldfinch.

I had a very productive morning with lots of shorebirds, but a little low on warblers, so I hope to find some new warblers soon.

A Semipalmated Plover,

The Semipalmated Plover and Semipalmated Sandpiper,

Can you see the plovers and sandpiper?

Two species of plovers,

While in North Carolina, I saw lots of White Ibis. Being from the intermountain west, this is a cool bird to see, so don't knock my excitement about it.

Not an amazing photo, except that I captured the Ibis on the left in mid-number two. If you love bird poop as much as I do, you've got to check out Mia McPherson's post "Oh...poop!" Birding is Fun contributor Heidi Ware also keeps a "poop list". Doesn't everybody?!

Howdee all,

Jeff and I had a wonderful ten days birding and socializing at

The Biggest Week in American Birding

Because internet was very spotty with our mifi device I was not able to blog at the end of the day. In all honesty..I was too darn tired to try.

Jeff and I are on the road again…We will arrive in Connecticut in a few days where I will go through all the photos I took at the Biggest Week.

I have one photo I want to share with you now…

This is the second Kirtland's Warbler we saw this week!

Life bird for Jeff and me! I did the Kirtland's Warbler jig several times during the day..sorry no one got it on film..ha ha.

This was the lovely female that showed up a few days after we saw a male Kirtland's

Isn't she a beauty?

I also wanted to share where I spent a few days selling raffle tickets to Benefit the  Ohio Young Birders Club

I used an app on my ipod touch called DMD to take this panorama of the area where I was selling raffle tickets.

Use your curser to move around the room..…Its pretty darn cool!

I might use more of this in future blog posts.

 

Hope you all are doing well!

Its going to take me ten years to catch up with you all and with all I missed on Facebook and Twitter.

Not to mention all my favorite shows on TV that I missed. ..any other Once Upon a Time fans out there?