Salt in a Big Year wound (or, a story I nearly forgot)
I didn’t write much specifically about the end of my Triangle Big Year when the calender flipped over to January a couple weeks ago. That was a little intentional, in that I almost hate to delve into the mind-numbing minutia of Big Year stat checking and would I haves-should I haves that rehashing a Big year can be. I’ve said before that the biggest insight I’ve picked up from my two attempts at Big Yearing (this Triangle one and my state-wide run in 2008), and one I think Big Year accounts fail to emphasize, is that these things are as much about the birds you miss as the birds you get. Particularly towards the last quarter of the year, the run is less about finding unexpected birds and more about making sure you don’t miss expected ones. Or maybe I’m just a terrible Big Year birder, I don’t know, but the frustration of missing Eastern Screech-Owl is one I don’t care to relive, nor the multiple failed attempts to nail down Wood Stork late in the summer into November, nor the inconceivable lack of Black-belled Plovers in the area, nor the dipped Nashville Warbler, Sooty Tern, Red-necked Grebe, etc etc etc.
Once the year is over, the mania can subside and you can find yourself birding just to bird again. And like the cliche about love, the birds seem to find you when you’re least expecting them.
I started the year 2012 birding. I had drawn a choice spot for the Jordan Lake CBC, with long-time Triangle birder Tom Krakauer as my companion for the morning. The first bird of the day was Ring-billed Gull, calling out on the water, and as the light slowly opened up the lake, thousands upon thousands of roosting gulls slowly emerged from the fog in clouds of white wings. Now that the new Wake County (Raleigh) landfill has opened not more than a few miles (as the gull flies) from the largest lake in the region, this is where they come every night. And with the increasing light, they began passing over us in flocks hundreds at a time. Ring-bills mostly, but impressive numbers of Herring Gulls, nearly one for every 50 of the smaller birds. We estimated a conservative 50,000 gulls, which made for about 1,000 Herrings. Lots of birds. Literal tons of them.
I had sort of joked at the possibility of a Lesser Black-backed Gull in that mass, noting that I wouldn’t be able to tell it on the wing even if it was in there and resigning myself to a cursory study of the Herring Gulls just in case something obvious jumped out at me. Nothing doing. After all, I had spent an inordinate amount of time exactly one year hence looking through this flock of gulls for that Lesserback for my official Big Year with absolutely no luck. I didn’t expect anything different.
After 90% of the birds had headed for breakfast, there was still a large flock of gulls that hadn’t headed towards the dump, now loafing on the swimming beach of the nearby park. Expecting nothing in the much smaller flock of merely 500 gulls, I pulled out my scope and did my CBC duty, trying to estimate the numbers of Herrings in this group when a dark-mantled bird practically jumped out at me. Even tucked into its wing, there’s no denying that slate gray mantle and that smudgy eye. My Lesser Black-backed Gull, and an adult too. Turns out I didn’t even have to work too hard at it.
I considered, for a second, the irony of the situation. I’d spent nearly every weekend from January 1 to December 31 looking for birds just like this one. Even the night before this CBC, the eve of 2012, I spent a couple hours driving the backroads of Orange and Durham Counties trying to whistled up that infuriating missing Screech Owl with no luck. And yet, not nine hours after the official end of my Big Year, I was staring into the smudgy yellow eye of one of my primary targets for last year. The birding gods certainly have a sense of humor.
But that’s the way it goes. Regardless of whether the Lesserback counts on some arbitrarily dated list, it’s still a great bird. A county bird, yes. An auspicious start to this year of normal birding, of course. A sign that we shouldn’t take these little games we play too seriously? Absolutely. One I, at least, would probably do well to remember.
The Black Hole of Birding
Inspired by a recent message from the folks at eBird encouraging birders to get out and do some mid-winter birding in some counties where there are some gaps in the data, I decided to throw caution to the wind and head to the eBird frontier. My destinations were the twin counties of Caswell and Person, north of the triangle only 30 miles or so, but the point at which eBird data collection drops off a cliff. There were possibilities there. Possibilities of good birds, unknown hotspots, eBird top 100 championships and the fame and fortune that comes along with that. Or there might be a dearth of data for these counties for a good reason. Neither of the counties had any eBird hotspots, though a little searching produced a couple locales that birders have visited before, if not in the very recent past. Besides, the birding around here is pretty slow this time of year, even the regular birds would be new. What did I have to lose?
It's the white one in the middle north
Nothing but time, apparently. The first stop was Caswell Game Land in Caswell County where I found the 25 or so species you’d expect to find just about anywhere in the southeast United States in the winter. The so-called “Wildlife Road” was mostly quiet pine-hardwood forest with a couple logged over grassy areas where I found sparrows, including a Fox, which was a nice surprise. Despite the fact that I was less than an hour from home, I quickly found myself out of cell phone range so my plan to follow my iPhone’s map function to find little ponds and marshes was a bust. So out came the DeLorme map which led me, well, back to the highway, but not before a stop at a fishing pond netted me a Pied-billed Grebe and a Swamp Sparrow for my burgeoning county list.
I was intrigued, the whole time I was up this way, by a massive swath of blue over by the Person County line. We all know that open water in the winter is the key to a good day list, and I had hoped that a little lake action was just what I needed to pull in some serious numbers. You know, like 35. It was labeled Hyco Lake, and I saw no reason why it wouldn’t be the centerpiece of this impressively average day in the field. The back parts of the lake, however, were surprisingly bereft of life. A single Pied-billed Grebe at the first, a couple crows at the second. No gulls, no herons, no ducks of any kind. There was no apparent reason for this until I got closer to the main part of the lake and saw, towering over me, the largest power plant I had ever seen.
Not my photo, but this is what the Roxboro Plant looks like
It was truly massive, with twoenormous (and I later learned, 800 foot tall) smokestacks belching the effluent of West Virginia’s finest into the cold, blue winter sky. It turned out, once I’d returned home and done a little research, that this plant, officially called the Progress Energy Roxboro Steam Electric Plant, is the 10th largest coal-fired power plant in the United States, and one of the dirtiest, with a laundry list of broken regulations and a Wilt Chamberlain sized carbon footprint. In fact, the entire lake was created specifically to be a cooling reservoir for this power plant. Whether or not that had anything to do with the absence of birdlife, I don’t know, but I’d be surprised if didn’t.
I ended with a total of 27 species for Caswell County, and a whopping 16 for Person, and a total of 8 eBird checklists between them. As I said before, it was amazingly average. However, one of the nice little side effects of birding an under covered county is that, even among those 16 species, I had 5 “county firsts”, including such hard to find species as House Finch, Ring-billed Gull, and Red-tailed Hawk. Truly, I’ve contributed crucial data to the scientific community.
Thank you, eBird.
The Single-issue Voter: A birder’s guide to Newt Gingrich (R)
It’s that time again. As civic-minded individuals do, I’m oft interested in how the platforms of those running for president affect my life, that’s as a birder naturally. With so many candidates and elections still more than a year off I decided to do the work so you, dear reader(s), don’t have to. So here’s what I hope will be a regular look as those who would be birder-in-chief. Starting with the long-shots and working my way up so that you all will be prepared when the time comes to cast your ballot. This is the fifth of The Drinking Bird’s however many parts it takes series.
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I’ve been trying to do these Single-issue Voter things in some semblance of an order from least likely candidate to most, but the whims of the GOP electorate have made this increasingly difficult. Take, for instance, the fact that I wrote a primer on Rick Santorum back in November when he was running at about 5% nationally. Now? He’s the flavor of the month for those poor souls who have not yet resigned themselves to the fact that professional jar of marshmallow creme and 2008 also-ran Mitt Romney will be, without a shred of doubt from this bystander, the republican nominee for president this year. Republicans are, if nothing else, slaves to a party hierarchy and Romney, by virtue of his 2008 loss (just like 2000 loser McCain before him) will win because it’s his turn.
That doesn’t mean we ignore the others. At least we try not to. I mean, I didn’t even get to jump on that shooting star that was the Herman Cain campaign (and good thing too, because the man had not discernible platform for anything, let along environmental issues). No sir/ma’am, we’ll press ourselves to the front of the crowd and damn well applaud as the clown parade comes down the street. They may jostle, but we all know the fat man in the sleigh at the end is going to be Romney
Speaking of girthy gentlemen, Newt Gingrich is running for president, having already ridden the crest of not-Romney sentiment and experiencing his steady and inevitable decline into total irrelevance. This look at Gingrich’s credentials likely comes a bit too late, but I’m happy to provide whatever bump The Drinking Bird can provide, because honestly, Gingrich, by virtue of his very very long political career has taken a variety of stances on issues that are of interest to bird people. Some of which are rather reasonable. Take, for instance, his past co-sponsorship of the Endangered Species Act.
Yes, that Endangered Species Act.
He also co-sponsored the Clean Air Act and the Alaska Land Act, which proposed setting aside nearly 80 million acres as a wilderness area. His critiques of the aforementioned Endangered Species Act, having to do with adequate compensation for private property appropriated under the act, are entirely reasonable and concerns I actually share (compensate the hell out of ‘em, I say. How else will they consider protecting that land?). Note, though, that these are positions that Gingrich took more than 30 years ago. His transition from principled conservative to bomb-throwing reactionary says as much about the direction of the Republican Party as it does about Gingrich. Politicians are inherently concerned first and foremost about their own political future. This isn’t necessarily a vice in that it can indicate a politician with his constituents’ interests in the forefront of his/her mind, but with the massive influx of money involved in modern political campaigns, it means now that politicians are courting an ever smaller group of more and more influential (read: rich) individuals. Individuals with interests in extraction industries, individuals with environmental regulations to dodge, and individuals that are not, generally, you and me.
What you get now is the sort of things you see on Gingrich’s own campaign website, presumably the policies Gingrich holds now with regard to environmental and energy policy (there’s that pet peeve again…), which can be summarized as “let extraction industries do what they want and limit peoples’ opportunities for recompense if they’ve been wronged”. I mean, that really is it. He jumps, with both feet, on the train to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, this from the same man who, as a congressman, fought for the inclusion of 15 additional toxins to the list of those regulated by the EPA as per the Safe Drinking Water Act. The man wrote a book called A Contract with the Earth, for pete’s sake. It’s full of business-fluffing BS and so-called “free-market” conservation (whatever the hell that is), of course, but no less a scientific luminary than E.O. Wilson wrote the forward. Really, it well boggles the mind.
So I’m hesitant to go too deep into his record because it’s so completely incoherent. Even by the impressively low standards set by this current field of GOP candidates, it’s a complete muddle, mostly because every single position he’s taken that could conceivably be seen as a net positive for birds and wildlife has been walked back in dramatic, one might even say violent, fashion. He’s playing to a different crowd here, one smaller, wealthier, and uninterested in environmental issues, be they energy or land-use related.
So Newt isn’t either, but he’d sure like it if you bought his book though. So long as you don’t show it to any Republican primary voters, of course.
In defense of county listing
Go South to get West
I can’t decide whether I’m a serious state lister or not. I mean, there are a not inconsequential number of birds present in North Carolina every single year in predictable locations that have not, yet, seen within the borders of the Tarheel State. I tend to call them “nemesis birds”, but they’re not really. The dirty truth is they only require an effort, the budgeting of time and a little, but not a lot, of money, whenever I decide to get off my keister and make it. But still, when a report of a Western Tanager, a legitimate state vagrant slides down the old bird line, sneaking onto my cell phone minutes before taunting me from the listserv, I can’t help but feel that itch, that twitch.
And if I had to make the trip myself, I might not. But I have found myself thrown in with a group of hard-nosed and enthusiastic birders – mostly younger than me – who see state listing as a contact sport and bring out those impulses in me even though they have long since left my meager state tally in the dust with their eager gallivanting across the state and any attempt to keep up with them is liable to leave me wrecked. That enthusiasm is addicting, though, and when the e-mails and texts start flying setting up the logistics of making the just over an hour trip to Pinehurst. Alone I might not do it, but with someone else in the car, how could I not?
I ended up making the trip with Mark Kosiewski, Pittsboro area birder and Chatham County eBird arch nemesis. We arrived at the private residence, right off the fairway for Pinehurst Course #1, where the Western Tanager had been spending the last couple weeks gorging on shelled peanuts and suet. Marjorie, the keeper of the bird and quite possible the nicest bird host I’d ever had the pleasure to meet, noted that the bird was generally pretty skittish but regular, coming to the feeder every 45 minutes or so in a mixed species flock. The yard was exceptionally birdy when we got there so we took a seat behind Marjorie’s impressive floor to ceiling windows and waited in the hopes that the tanager would be along shortly.
It was about that time that the Cooper’s Hawk arrived.
Accipiter cooperi, scourge of the stakeout. The little male sent every single bird in the vicinity scattering to kingdom come as it spent what felt like an eternity, but what was actually about five minutes, passing back and forth in front of the house menacingly. It was nearly 45 minutes before birds started sneaking back into the feeding station, but it wasn’t a anxious wait. Marjorie had prepared coffee, and a banana bread, and several other birders had arrived such that the stakeout was sort of filled with that subdued joviality you get when several people who share the same passion that is more or less ignored by the general public find each other. There was lots of shop talk, and all of a sudden, there were birds.
The feeders, apparently free from the grip of winged death had picked up. Nuthatches and finches and doves and sparrow jostled for position. And then, someone spotted the target up in a pine, looking down on the feeder anxiously, daring not to come any closer than necessary. Close enough to get excellent views, but too far for anything resembling a good photo.
I snapped off a few record shots, all the while expecting to get something better when it would, at long last, alight on the feeder. But it never did. It cruised by a couple time, looking nevous and not willing to take on the cadre of doves that had commandeered its favorite peanut spot. By that time, we didn’t have much time to wait for it, the Cooper’s Hawk siege having taking a good portion of the time budgeted. But the bird was still ticked, the twitch successful. And so I have another state bird.
I may not have Ruffed Grouse, or Red Crossbill, or Cerulean Warbler. All nesting species that I’ve failed to run across, but this time I have Western Tanager. I’m not sure what it means for me as a state lister, but I’m happy to have it anyway.
Hooded Cranes and burden of proof
Unless you’re a birder who spends much of their time birding under rocks, by which I mean you look at the birds around you instead of speculating wildly about the origins of rare birds in the fast paced, high stakes game of ABA-Area vagrants, you’ve no doubt heard the hullaballoo regarding the continental mega Hooded Crane currently blowing both minds and socks off at a wildlife refuge in eastern Tennessee. The bird has been present, in the company of thousands of wintering Sandhill Cranes, for just over three weeks now, and birders and chasers from all over the continent have made the pilgrimage to find what is apparently an easy continental mega rarity to tick, in so far as continental mega rarities go.
And for a way off-line bird, this one in particular is something of a novelty among novelties. Hooded Crane is an east Asian bird, migrating between southern Siberia in the warmer months and southern Japan in the colder ones. The many machinations that are required for this bird to find its way a third of the way around the world, across a massive ocean and three quarters of a continent are convoluted at best and impossible at worst. It is simply not supposed to be here, which, amazingly, in the birding game is neither completely out of the ordinary or particularly unexpected. Vagrants are the prizes at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box. The $20 dollar bill stashed in the pocket of the old pair of jeans. Exciting sure, but still sort of expected; the reward for putting in hours upon hours of looking at normal, every day birds. For that reason, it’s not hard for we birders to find ways for the wildly unexpected to be reasonable. Fortunately, birds are all too willing to help us out. They have long migrations, impressive stamina, and a penchant, every week of every year, for showing up somewhere where they’re not supposed to be.
A Hooded Crane in Japan, where it's supposed to be
It’s not my intention here to make an argument for the natural occurrence of this Hooded Crane. I don’t think it requires much of a stretch, though. North American birders have accepted the provenance of Common Cranes, another east Asian species, in flocks of North American Sandhills for decades. One does not even have to accept that this bird is a recent arrival to North America, as it would be all to easy for a single crane, however different, to get incorporated into a migrating flock in eastern Siberia and cruise the continent among many millions of Sandhills for years, particularly given the family’s famous longevity. The logistics are daunting to be sure, but no more daunting than Siberian nesting Long-billed Murrelets showing up on the east coast, or a Fork-tailed Flycatcher heading the wrong way at Panama in ending up in Nunavut. Birds have wings, after all, and they use them. No, my ire was raised with the initial disregard of the record by many high-profile birders, at least in my state, as “obviously an escapee” and therefore, not a bird with chasing or seeing.
Let me be clear up front. It is absolutely reasonable to expect that the bird in question, and a similar record of a Hooded Crane in Nebraska in 2010, are of escaped birds. I trust that the bird record committees in Nebraska and Tennessee are taking the record seriously and doing their due diligence to get to the bottom of the complicated, and fascinating, story that surrounds this species in North America (Key question: Were the escaped birds really pinioned? If so, how far could they really go?). And from everything I’ve seen, notably this statement from a Nebraska BRC member and this blog post from a Tennessee BRC member, they absolutely are. I await their decisions eagerly. No, my concern is with the attitudes and processes of bird record committees more generally.
Vagrant species, particularly those held regularly in captivity, are singularly difficult species for BRCs, perhaps even the most difficult species for which they come to a decision. Identification to species is rarely difficult in these cases, but the rub is that without an obvious indicator of captive origin, such as pinioning, bands on legs or neck, or obviously and unnaturally distressed feathers, it’s impossible to differentiate a well taken care of bird of captive origin from a wild bird. So, what to do?
Many BRCs, for fear of allowing these questionable records to mar an otherwise pristine list of birds, take the conservative route. They choose to not accept any record that has even a hint of question about the origin of the bird, claiming that the burden of proof lies on the observer to make the claim that a bird is not of a captive origin. But this is a completely unattainable standard for the reason specified above, the impossibility of differentiating a wild bird form an unmarked captive bird. It reaches its illogical conclusion when you’re faced with a bird like this Hooded Crane and the only explanation one can come up with to deny the record is, “it’s unlikely”, or worse, “it can’t be proven to be natural”. This, taken together with the occasionally insular nature of BRCs, leads to an increasingly parochial view on these records, and a perpetuation of a mindset that prevents any hope of a legitimate record ending up as anything other than “origin unknown”. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, a parody of how a BRC is supposed to operate.
But this, to me, is completely backwards. Unless there is solid, iron-clad, evidence that a bird is of domestic stock – not only obvious things like pinioning and bands, but behavior and history of vagrancy, weather patterns, etc – there’s no reason why a species shouldn’t be accepted as wild. The burden of proof should instead lie on those making the argument that an apparently wild acting bird is somehow of questionable providence, because there’s no way, short of being present when the egg hatches, to prove a bird – any bird, even the Cardinal out your back door – is wild.
Bill Pulliam, linked above, says it best.
My initial knee-jerk reaction on hearing of the bird was “that’s gotta be an escapee.” But as I have learned more, I have shifted from this starting point. There are two critical questions:
1. Is it there a reasonable scenario under which a wild Hooded Crane would arrive in Tennessee without human assistance?
2. Is there a plausible source for an escapee?
And frankly, these questions can be applied to every potentially troubling vagrant you find. Bill keyed in on the two most important questions here, questions that are too often ignored to preserve a completely arbitrary status quo. It is not simply enough to claim a bird is an escapee, there has to be evidence. And until that evidence arrives, anyone is justified in thinking anything, this Hooded Crane, a North Carolina White-tailed Pintail, an Arizona Brown-backed Solitaire, is a wild bird. I would, almost certainly, vote yes on every one of them.
And when the day comes that I’m passed over for the 10th time for a spot on a Bird Record Committee, I’m sure they’ll point at this essay as the reason why.
Just another Harris’s Sparrow
It’s a big sparrow. Massive and bulky with a head like a buffalo. Truly the king of the Zonotrichias, even if it doesn’t officially wear a crown, and it was one of my target species for my trip back to the midwest over the holidays. I’d seen exactly one before, on a November afternoon in 1994 around the French’s mustard plant in Springfield, Missouri. I remember it distinctly: the unremarkable hedge that held the bird, the faint odor of condiments in the air, my stomach rumbling for an accompanying industrial sized hot dog. Harris’s is an impressive sparrow, after all, and not easily forgotten.
Even since I left for the east coast, my dad has done very well in the way of Harris’s, attracting them to his feeding station on especially cold and snowy winter days. But they’re more easily found off the Ozarks plateau on the edge of the plains. He was very confident as we headed west, pulling over to stop at the old homesteads buffered by lines of trees and bramble thickets. these are the places where Harris’s Sparrow can be found. At the first stop, a first year bird popped out in response to some pishing.
I was excited, obviously. The bird, associating with juncos and White-crowned Sparrows, was puffed out against the cold wind, making the already imposing sparrow seem even more so. The White-crowns that hung around in the same area were lithe in comparison, with slender necks and flat-topped heads, nothing like this bird, who, even lacking the black mask of the adult, was every bit as impressive in stature.
I wondered whether I’d get more, and better, looks at the species. I shouldn’t have. We drove the long way around a conservation area managed primarily for Greater Prairie-Chicken, as it is the quixotic quest of the Missouri Department of Conservation to continue to pour resources into protection of this all-but-extirpated species*, and aside from a short and thrilling experience with a dark-phase Red-tailed Hawk, practically all the birds we saw were Harris’s Sparrows, a grand total of 15 of the birds roosting around a tool shed. Not just the washed out juvis, but the black-marked adults, with that amazing face and soft brown cheek. This is a jaw-dropping sparrow.
*See, the chickens prefer far more extensive grasslands than the MDC is able to provide in the small patches the state owns in the area. They need to be able to have grass, with zero trees, to the horizon, and in this land of windbreaks and barbed fence hedgerows, that’s just not happening. All attempts to continue to introduce farm raised birds have ended poorly, with most of the introduced birds heading off by whatever means they can to Kansas and Oklahoma, which are both nearby and have robust populations of Greater Prairie-Chicken. It’s sad Missouri can’t support Prairie-Chickens anymore, but it’s just not tenable. Now, back to the sparrows…
There are lots of Harris’s Sparrows in these parts, and they are not hard to find. They have a call note that sounds like a cartoon spring and a deeply haunting single-note song that they belt out year round like the rest of their genus. That species name, querula, means plaintive, and a better description of the song, more thin and tenuous than even White-throated Sparrows, isn’t possible. They’re wonderful birds.
I love living in North Carolina, so close to both mountains and sea and with an impressive list of birds to find, but it’s experiences like this that make me miss the midwest I grew up in. The wide open plains and pock-marked karst of the Ozarks. The ropes of Snow and White-fronted Geese in the fall. The shorebird expressway running through Kansas in late summer. The occasional Harris’s Sparrow at your feeder. There’s a lot to like.
But the grass is always greener. And the minute I hear that Brown-headed Nuthatch out my back door, I’m back in the present.
