One of the cool things about big flocks of gulls, like the one I can across this past weekend, is the opportunity to see a wide variety of behaviors. Gulls, being gregarious and intelligent, are nearly always good for something interesting. It may have something to do with the arrogant way in which they seem to believe that any even marginally edible item is their’s for the taking. Take, for instance, this incident I had with an ambitious Ring-billed Gull this past weekend who had managed to snatch the one thing that a gull’s swiss army knife bill is probably unable to crack, a sweetgum ball.
Scene 1: The gull proudly marches into the flock, displaying its find. I wonder, then, if a part of it wondered why none of his colleagues seemed excited at this find. The arrival of anything with the appearance of food would likely instigate a storm of feathers and fury, but this? Nothing. How odd…
Scene 2: Initial attempts to get to the goodness within have proven fruitless. The gull then walks to the edge of the lake to dunk the gumball in an apparent attempt to soften it, thus making the insides more easily accessible.
Scene 3: This dunking technique does not appear to be successful. The Sweetgum ball continues to vex our intrepid hero. The other gulls could not be less interested.
Scene 4: The finale. After several minutes of failed dunking, the gull finally admits defeat. How can something that looks so tempting fail to give up its secrets? This gull cannot understand, and the Sweetgum ball is left on the beach, effectively ignored by all.
Gulls are certainly full of surprises.
Jun 22, 2005 – West Lafayette, In - In 2004, the woman who would soon become my wife was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and with little reason to stay in the Midwest, I headed to North Carolina. It wasn’t long after that we had made things official with our intention to marry and planned an epic road-trip to our respective childhood homes to visit friends and family in advance of the official nuptials. For Danielle, this meant a stop in West Lafayette, Indiana, where her parents lived at the time.
Danielle mentioned in her post a few weeks ago that her mom was an avid birdfeeder and watcher, and although at this point I could scarcely call myself anything close to that, I felt I had an obligation to take my future mother-in-law out to see something, even if she was far more knowledgeable than I about what was even likely. One evening, we ended up heading out to a favorite haunt of her’s, a marshy area known as the Celery Bog. We had one pair of binoculars between us, hers; and we traded back and forth looking at Wood Ducks and Indigo Buntings. It was fun, and I enjoyed the feeling of having this knowledge at my fingertips again even if I was more than a little rusty with my birdsongs.
Years later, when I was retroactively marking the lifers I picked up during the dark years, I realized that the Chickadees I saw that evening, as well as the ones that I watched at their busy bird feeding station, were likely Black-capped Chickadees rather than Carolinas, as West Lafayette lies just north of the range of overlap. For my soon to be wife it may well be the beginning of the end, priming the pump for the next bird that I often consider to be, not my spark bird, but my re-spark bird. The Chickadee, however, remains my one Indiana life bird, and a memory of how seemingly unconnected events, like meeting and dating Danielle, can lead to truly serendipitous moments.
photo from wikipedia
Spring arrives in North Carolina all at once. One week you’re bundling up against a nor-easter that shuts down the entire triangle with a quarter inch of snow and the next you’re pulling on shorts and thinking about firing up the air conditioner. It’s something I’ve never quite gotten the hang of in the time I’ve been down here. But the birds seem to see it coming. Once the Pine Warblers start tuning up in the last week of February it’s only a matter of time before things start bursting out all over, so if you’ve got some winter birds to see, you’d better get to it.
Often times we birders tend to think spring really gets here with the arrival of the first neotrops. Purple Martins and Ruby-throated Hummingbirds may be the shock troops, aggressively pushing winter north not long after the last frost subsides, but weeks before they even arrive, migration is in full swing. Regular wintering birds increase in numbers as the birds that spent the winter in your backyard are temporarily augmented by those further south moving slowly towards their nesting grounds. There’s a burst of numbers and activity should you notice it, and I was front and center this past weekend at Jordan Lake as the lake was practically swarming with gulls at every point. My familiar Ebeneezer Point beach loafer group had nearly tripled in size since the last time I saw them mid-winter.
The birds in my neck of the woods are nearly exclusively Ring-billed Gulls, the ubiquitous parking lot Larus across most of the continent. A little careful scanning can turn up something different though, which in my case is almost always the odd American Herring Gull (and yes, I’ll keep calling them American Herring Gull as my own little protest against the AOU who really needs to get with the times and make that split from the Euro Herring Gulls already. They’re not even that closely related!).
I typically find one American Herring Gull in groups like this. Two if I’m lucky. While American Herring Gulls may be dirt common near salt water, they’re generally only present in small numbers this far inland. They’re almost exclusively young birds, no older than second year, that tend to wander widely and turn up here to bully the smaller Ring-bills and generally live large in a way that’s probably more difficult on the coast where they can be bullied by adult American Herrings and the even bigger and meaner Great Black-backs. Here the gull hierarchy is still in their favor.
But it was a good day for American Herrings, because I ended up finding six more first year birds in this flock where before I’ve never found more than two. And then, a sharp adult bird made its presence known in the middle of the flock, king of all it surveys. A good day for smithsonianus! (Take that AOU!)
In addition to the big gull bonanza, I was taken by the clean plumage of many of the Ring-bills, a handsome distinction not lost on the Ring-bills themselves. In addition to the raucous calls of the standard winter gull flock, many of the Ring-bills were actively displaying, prancing around the edges of the flock, pointing their bills at the sky and emitting what is known as the “long call”, the primary display vocalization, effectively a song, for gulls. Typically it’s a variation on the squealing all gulls do, but coupled with some visual cues like throwing their heads back and spreading their wings. It’s quite a sight. As I was trying to get a photograph of this behavior, a lady and dog walked right in front of me and scared my gulls into the water. So be it, but if there’s any doubt that spring is in the air, the gulls will set you right.
This last photo is not particularly related to anything special, other than I totally digiscoped a Golden-crowned Kinglet and I’m pretty proud of that.
Golden-crowned Kinglet. Yeah!
New I and the Bird #120 at Sand Creek Almanac
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How long has it been since I did one of these trivia things? A year? And before that another year? Man, I’m slacking folks. No excuses. Hopefully, you’ll forgive me when you see the multi-layered monster I have for you this time. This one is literally years in the making.
I don’t know about you, but I’m partial to using codes to list my birds when I’m out in the field. Typically I use the four letter codes created by Pyle for use by bird-banders. You basically take the first two letters of each word and combine them to create an abbreviation. There are a few overlapping species, Barn Owl and Barred Owl are both BAOW for instance, but for a day in the field it’s fairly useful for cutting down note-taking and how often are you going to see both Barn and Barred Owl anyway? Though that would be a pretty awesome day.
Some birders prefer to use a six letter code which cuts down on overlapping species even more. For two word species, you take the first three letters in each word and splice them together. For instance, American Robin becomes AMEROB. For three word species you take the first two letters of the three words and combine those, as White-throated Sparrow becomes WHTHSP. Do you follow?
This six letter code was my preferred way of note-taking in Guatemala as there are many species with elaborate names and shortening allowed me to spend more time on the birds and less on my notes. However, it did not go unnoticed that the occasional code spelled a funny word of its own and thus, a quiz was born*.
So, finally, the rules.
- You will be given a clue, the answer to which is a six letter word (Edit: I should be more clear, there are six total letters, but it might be more than one word).
- That six letter word is an abbreviation of a common North American bird species, derived using the method described above
- The answer to the question is not the abbreviation, but the bird species.
An example!
Clue: A resident of Benning or Bragg.
Step 2: FORTER
Answer: Forster’s Tern
Got it? Put your answers in the comments, I’ll mark them off as they come in.
And away we go….
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UPDATE: Some answers are in the comments. If you want to continue figuring out the clues, don’t look!
Those marked in italic have been solved.
- A list of team members.
- Any of the Bush Administration’s positions on Iraq
- That gross stuff on the lid when you open the soup
- A selling point for a half-ton pickup
- An outsider’s view of the stock market
- An extremely unlikely porcine event
- What that excellent chinese mechanic seems to posess
- How to turn your team of doves towards you
- The battle between push and safety
- The painter’s medium of choice
- Rest and relaxation for a Rhode Island Red
- What that redneck calls your raw fish meal
Have fun!
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*to be read in thunderous echoing voice
In southern Guatemala there is a large lake of volcanic origin. Though it’s surrounded on all sides by massive cylinder shaped mountains that look as if they could be engulfed in smoke and flame at any moment, the water fills the ancient caldera of an even more massive volcano that erupted and collapsed in on itself about 84,000 years ago. As a result, this lake is deep. So deep even, that the bottom hasn’t been completed mapped and it’s estimated that in some places it could reach up to 600 meters into the earth, an appropriate counterpoint to those 3,000 meter volcanoes that surround it. This is a lake that has held an important place in the culture of those who have lived on its shores for as long as people have lived in Guatemala, from the Mayan civilizations of the pre-Columbian era to the Spanish invaders to the descendants of both, the modern Guatemalans who grow coffee and corn and call the lake Atitlán.
More than that, though, the lake itself has been the site of some remarkable natural selective pressures. Not only is it smack in the middle of a region of high endemism, a process that reaches its bizarre peak with the fantastic and bizarre Horned Guan, but the lake itself hosted its very own endemic species, a sort of bulked up Pied-billed Grebe the natives called Poc, but has alternately been known as Giant Grebe, Giant Pied-billed Grebe, and the preferred name that best illustrates how important this lake was to the bird, Atitlán Grebe (Podilymbus gigas).
Painting by Peter Schouten from his book, A Gap in Nature
The story of the rise and fall of the Atitlán Grebe is as fascinating as the species itself, not only because it was witnessed in real time by those who studied it, but because even though it took place on the huge continental land-mass it most closely mirrors the issues facing island species more than any continental extinction. This is because the Atitlán Grebe was reportedly flightless, though that seems to be unclear and they may have been able to fly short distances. Not that they needed to, however, as the lake supported substantial populations of crabs and small fish enough to feed many pairs of the grebes. What is certain is that they were certainly unable to disperse far beyond Lake Atitlán, essentially stranding them in a way no different from an island species surrounded by miles of ocean. The lake’s fate was there’s too.
As seems to be inevitable with beautiful places, folks with dollar sign eyes looked to make a buck off of Lake Atitlán. This time it was Pan-American Airways encouraging the Guatemalan government to stock the lake with gamefish, specifically North American species like Large and Smallmouth Bass, in the hopes that sportsmen and their money would be drawn to the lake. But bass, as anyone with experience fishing for them knows, are voracious predators, and in short order they’d stripped the lake, vacuuming up its native crabs, two-thirds of its native fish and the occasional grebe chick. When the bass were introduced to Atitlán in 1960 the population of Atitlán Grebes sat at 200. Five years later there were only 80.
Struck by the situation of the endemic Grebe, American scientist Anne LaBastille got to work, raising enough awareness and money to found a refuge for the birds on the shore of their lake, protected by the generous addition of a fish toxicant to the surrounding water to prevent encroachment of the predatory game fish. It appeared to work. By 1973, the grebes had rebounded, reaching their numbers prior to the introduction of the bass. But when things seemed to finally be progressing in a positive direction for once, disaster struck again.
Occasionally, the same processes that set a species down its evolutionary path can be the impetus for its extinction, and in an ironic bookend to the volcanic eruption that created the lake that selected for a bizarre mostly flightless grebe, an earthquake, a 7.5 richter monster, stuck Guatemala in 1976. The quake was so substantial that it fractured the bed of Lake Atitlán such that water from the lake drained into the earth, dropping the water’s surface two whole meters in one month. That may not sound like a lot, but it left LaBastille’s refuge, along with the Grebe’s primary foraging areas and the reedy banks where they made their nests, high and dry. They never really recovered. By 1983 there were only 32 individuals, and most of them hybrids of the extremely similar, but flighted and flexible, Pied-billed Grebe. Their co-gener had not only swamped their habitat, but apparently their gene pool as well. The last two unequivocal Atitlán Grebes were seen in 1989 and none since.
The prevailing wisdom now states that the Grebes were never a full species, but merely a subspecies of the wide-ranging Pied-billed Grebe. Does that make their loss any easier for us to take? Does Lake Atitlán suffer their extinction any less when conventional Pied-billed Grebes nest in the reeds on the banks instead of their larger sibling?
Regardless of their genetic pedigree, the Atitlán Grebe was a distinct form, well suited to its lake island in the mountains of southern Guatemala. Its loss is obvious from the perspective of those who wish to preserve biodiversity in all its forms, but less obvious is the attraction to potential bird tourists of an avian attraction in a country that has no other national endemics. Whatever the case, it’s hard to be at Lake Atitlán without at least considering the Grebe’s story.
Because even if it passes into the mists of history, the lake still remembers.
December 20, 2003 – Greene Co, Mo - In 2003 I was a recent college graduate, living at home for the first time in five years and cobbling together a full-time job from two part-time jobs. I wasn’t birding, but during the time I not so fondly consider my birding “dark ages”, my dad was still pretty active in the local and state birding community. During the fall when I was home, I started slowly inching back into the birding world, even coming along to meetings of the local Audubon Society. I’d see the same people that were so influential in my early years, happy to see me back and somewhat active even though I’d scarcely picked up a pair of binoculars for the better part of a decade. But it was comfortable in the meeting hall of the Springfield Nature Center, the slide shows of places visited familiar, the cookies and coffee flowing freely.
So it was perhaps expected that I’d once again take on the Springfield Christmas Bird Count, and luckily I was once again welcomed back into the fold of the group that counted around the Fellow’s Lake area north of town. Not only a great area by virtue of the birds, but covered by some of the finest birders in southwest Missouri, which this year included someone who’s no stranger to any nature blog connoisseur, David Ringer, then pre-Search and Serendipity.
I remember my first interaction with David, a botched Yellow-bellied Sapsucker that proved then that he was an extremely sharp birder and I was extremely out of practice. I won’t even embarrass myself by suggesting what I remember thinking that bird was, but let’s just say David had me by a mile. So I was without a doubt a little rusty, so it was perhaps appropriate that the one life bird I picked up on my first Christmas Bird Count back in Springfield was a Rusty Blackbird feeding near a horse barn with a flock of other blackbirds, the lone lifer of 2003 and now something of a hard bird to find in Missouri.
But at a certain point, CBCs aren’t really about lifers anyway. It’s about getting out and doing good work for citizen science initiatives and most of all, about having fun with your fellow birders for a good cause. Something I’m reminded every time I find myself in a warm room with a table full of casseroles at the close of a Christmas bird Count as at the end of 2003. I was slowly finding my way back to birding.
photo from wikipedia
We’re all too aware of the overwhelming scale of human suffering in the wake of the earthquake that struck Haiti nearly two months ago. It was merely the latest in what seems to be a never-ending series of devastating natural disasters to afflict the nation in recent memory, a litany of mudslides and hurricanes and flooding that cripple the ability of Haitians, among the poorest population in the world, to build an infrastructure or an economy. Haiti’s problems are legion, and their causes nearly so, but central to the situation the country finds itself in is the incredible destruction of its forests. Since 1925, 98% percent of Haiti’s forests have been destroyed, largely for cookstove fuel, and the near complete lack of forest cover has led to incredible erosion issues of what was, in the fairly recent past, rich volcanic soil. The mudslides and flooding that have killed thousands are a direct result, and desertification has lefts hundreds of thousands more without access to arable land to plant even subsistence crops.
The 2% of forest that remains is protected in two national parks, Parc La Visite and Pic Macaya, both located in the southern part of the nation. Contained within their boundaries are the remnants of the vast forests of Haiti’s past, high-elevation pine forest with massive trees and sheer limestone cliffs; the last stronghold of many plants and animals on the island of Hispaniola. For decades they’ve been largely spared from the deforestation evident elsewhere in the country, but in the wake of this most recent earthquake they’re under threat anew, and its worse than it has been at any point in the past. From the Environmental News Service:
The number of people leaving Haiti’s earthquake-ravaged cities for rural areas could reach one million, putting pressure on already vulnerable communities in those areas, the UN Food and Agricultural Organization warned Monday. The NGO Trees for the Future says these internally displaced people need help to keep them from cutting Haiti’s few remaining trees for fuel and shelter.
“Given the earthquake’s devastation, there is now a mass exodus of people to rural areas, but these areas cannot even support the current population much less the hundreds of thousands of people migrating there,” said Ethan Budiansky, Africa and Caribbean programs officer for Trees for the Future, who regularly travels to Haiti to work on agroforestry initiatives. “Land will become even more impoverished and the few remaining trees will be cut down unless strict measures are put into place.”
That is, of course, bad enough. But not only are the parks of Haiti home to Caribbean specialties, but they host crucial breeding grounds for one species in particular that finds it’s way into our coastal waters, the Black-capped Petrel.
Black-capped Petrels are the only member of the spectacular Pterodroma genus to occur regularly in American waters, and the species is one of the target birds for any off-shore birder traveling to North Carolina. Once considered extremely rare, they’re virtually assured on any trip to the continental shelf from April to October and are the only species of bird found year-round in the Gulf Stream. But in an unusual turn for birds in the northern hemisphere, those individuals usually seen on pelagics out of Hatteras and elsewhere on the eastern seaboard are not feeding nestlings but post-breeding dispersals, spending the summer non-breeding season foraging along the Gulf Stream on long sickle-shaped wings.
Black-capped Petrels instead nest during our winter, in a burrow dug into the cliff face that they visit only at night. This nocturnal behavior, common among Pterodromas, has made determining the true status of the population difficult and it was only in the 70s that their primary foraging grounds were discovered off the southeastern shore of the United States, having even been considered extinct until a few years before.
It is known that, historically, their colonies could be found on nearly every island in the Greater Antilles. This is no longer true. The Black-capped Petrel is limited now to only three known breeding sites, all on the island of Hispaniola. A small colony is relatively safe in the Dominican Republic, but the other two are in Haiti’s national parks, including a colony of nearly 2,000 pairs in Parc La Visite, the species’ only significant breeding population. The same national parks currently under serious threat from displaced refugees migrating out of the city of Port-au-prince.
The threats to nesting Black-capped Petrels in light of the earthquake are simply an escalation of the problems that have brought their population so low to this point. The park’s trees, crucial for holding soil to prevent mudslides that bury nest burrows, are chopped down and burned for charcoal. Young birds in the nest are fatty and good-tasting, predated by both humans and introduced predators such as mongoose that follow humans. Generally, the parks that have offered some modicum of protection from a drastically over-utilized and deteriorating landscape, can no longer provide that protection. Even the sheer cliffs where the last remaining breeding colonies of Black-capped Petrels hid from researchers for nearly 150 years are no match for an increasingly desperate population.
I wish there was something positive to take home here, but there’s hardly a silver lining to be found. Conventional relief efforts, while crucial in the immediate aftermath, have contributed somewhat to environmental stress in Haiti. Providing food does little to stem the need for means to cook that food, and when fuel is in short supply trees are destroyed. But there’s little that can be done because people obviously need to eat. Worse still, efforts to increase environmental awareness that have proven successful, such as Birdlife International’s Formon School, have been compromised in the wake of the earthquake and swamped by displaced people.
The question of what can be, or could have been, done in a situation like this is a difficult one. We can hardly blame people who have been through so much suffering for doing what it takes to survive, and in many ways the Black-capped Petrels have always existed in an incredibly precarious situation that few birders who have watched them arc over the waves realize. In truth, that the difference between survival and extinction rests on the continued protection of a small plot of green in one of the poorest nations in the world makes the fact that they are so easily found in the waters of North Carolina nothing short of miraculous, and that all of it can be lost in the wake of a single, if terrible, natural disaster is nothing short of devastating.
It remains to be seen how everything plays out, of course, but with the cards stacked against it, the Black-capped Petrel could very well be heading down the path cleared by another Caribbean Pterodroma. The Jamaican Petrel, felled by habitat loss and over-harvesting, was a cautionary tale. While the nocturnal nesting habits of these birds make it difficult to be sure, most believe it went extinct sometime in the late 19th century. We can unfortunately only hope against hope that the Black-capped Petrel doesn’t follow, but it doesn’t look good.
