Archive for July, 2006
Purple Gallinule
Posted by: | CommentsSharp-eyed San Diego birders pulled an adult Purple Gallinule out of the dense cattails at Tucson’s Sweetwater Wetlands yesterday, and it was still there this morning, when I joined Rog and Janine for a good twenty minutes of great views of the bird as it perched, preened, and fed just a few feet away from us.
This is a rare bird in the southwest, regularly occurring no closer to us than, say, northern Sinaloa. But rails of many species are notorious for their wanderings: a Spotted Rail here, a Paint-billed Crake there….
Though there is no doubt about the correct identification of the Sweetwater bird, “purplish” gallinules should always be checked carefully: given the vagrancy patterns of rails, any species is equally unlikely anywhere, and until I saw the first photos last night, I’d been hoping that perhaps this was an off-course Allen’s, or a Takahe, or one of the other blue rails of the world. But, I hasten to add, no complaints: it’s a great bird!
David Beadle and J.D. Rising: Tanagers, Cardinals, and Finches
Posted by: | CommentsI was quite prepared to wax enthusiastic about this new photographic guide to this assembly of nine-primaried oscines: they’re pretty birds, many of them, and the authors have already done the birding community a great favor with their works on emberizid sparrows. But it turns out, surprisingly, that there is little to recommend this new book, and birders who already own a good field guide to North American birds will likely find that they don’t need or use this one.
This is another in Princeton University Press’s Photographic Guide series, which thus far includes volumes on hummingbirds, emberizid sparrows, and shorebirds. Where the earlier volumes featured generally excellent photos of their subject birds, most of the images here are neither attractive nor informative. There are exceptions (Laura Erickson’s wonderfully instructive Hoary Redpolls, for example, and a number of Brian Small’s photos), but far too many of these photos are small, poorly composed, and fuzzy, far below the standards routinely attained in photographic guides (or in magazines, for that matter). Even the images of birds in hand and of captive birds are of shockingly low quality; the Carpodacus finches in 31.4, for instance, are distant, out of focus, poorly lit, and awkwardly posed against a dark and ‘busy’ background. I sputtered for hours over the single shot of a Blue-gray Tanager, which is not only horribly blurred, but does not even depict the same subspecies described in the text.
The concise texts that accompany the images are much better, but in general add little to the information already available in modern field guides. Each begins with a set of mensural data. As birders have known since the appearance of the Sibley guide half a decade ago, weight information is extremely helpful in gauging the “size” of an unknown bird; all the same, it is surprising to find the average mass of Yellow Grosbeak calculated here from specimens of a different species. “Wing” length is never defined, leaving the reader unsure whether the figure here is the wing chord, flattened wing, or even wingspan; such figures are of little use in the field in any event.
The texts continue with information about each species’ habitat, behavior, vocalizations, distributions, and geographic variation; oddly, the descriptions of the birds’ appearance do not come until the end of each account, just before the very helpful discussion of any known hybrid combinations and a short list of references. This is, after all, an identification guide, and it would have made far better sense to move the descriptions, molt discussions, and “similar species” sections to the head of each entry.
Perhaps the most useful component in this book are the distribution paragraphs, which provide extremely detailed, state-by-state and province-by-province descriptions of the breeding, winter, and vagrant ranges and abundance of each species. A fairly extensive spot check reveals that these sections are quite up to date and complete, making them a very handy resource for birders interested in range expansions and retractions. The same sampling also finds, however, that the maps were not invariably prepared using the same data as the written descriptions: the map for Northern Cardinal, for example, omits the bird’s occurrence in California, Colorado, and Manitoba, all areas correctly included in the authors’ prose.
The main text and photos are preceded by an Introduction of the usual sort, offering cursory advice on identification techniques. The long paragraph (p.3) on taxonomic polysemy and polylexy should have been very carefully edited for clarity; unwilling to believe that William St. could let writing like this out the door, I showed it to a well-educated high-intermediate birder with better than average reading skills, who also found it badly jumbled. The two or three sentences introducing each genus are generally fine, though the merger of Guiraca into Passerina seems to have tripped the authors up in their species counts (five of seven Passerina breed north of Mexico).  Â
None of this is to suggest that the authors don’t “know their stuff”: they most certainly do. I only wish that they had communicated that stuff more clearly and more attractively than this volume manages to do.
Aztec Thrushes Continue
Posted by: | CommentsLooking for a birder in southeast Arizona? Head to Madera Canyon, where everybody, local and exotic alike, is spellbound by the spectacle of multiple Aztec Thrushes, still feeding in the cherry trees even on this rainy morning.
This morning Denis and I got to watch two individuals, both of them sitting stolid in the foliage at first, then eventually moving out to give us the best views I’ve had yet during this invasion. Both of today’s birds had full dark hoods and well-defined wing patterns. One was apparently a male, with a clear sooty tone to the upperparts and well-defined partial bar across the vent; the other was most likely a female, paler and with more obvious spotting and streaking on the sides of the neck and a more diffuse vent bar (or flank patch). There are no juveniles known to be involved in the incursion (so far!).
That said, my only source for age and sex information is Dale Zimmerman’s excellent article in Birding 23.6; I’m eager to hear comments and clarifications from readers who know more about this species (or have ready access to Peter Clement’s identification monograph).
Many of us are also beginning to wonder just how many individuals are accounted for so far. It seems quite possible that we are seeing not the attrition of the original flock of 9 birds, but rather its replacement by smaller flocks and pairs; who knows, there may be dozens of Aztec Thrushes in Arizona’s Sky Islands right now!
Treasures from the Sierra Madre
Posted by: | CommentsA day off, doubly nice because I spent it in leisurely birding with Michael and John. And even better, it was cool and cloudy all day, a circumstance that let us visit not just the high elevations of Madera Canyon, but also the upper portions of Sycamore Canyon, usually oven-like this time of year but bearable today even at high noon.
Knowing that we would need to save some time if we were to hit Sycamore later, we decided to split up in Madera: Michael wanted to see an Aztec Thrush, while John and I opted for the Flame-colored Tanager at the Kubo. Success on both counts! Various beaming birders saw as many as 4 thrushes today, and the tanager sang loud and clear, eventually giving good views high in the dead sycamore branches it shared with the equally exciting Sulphur-bellied Flycatchers, Dusky-capped Flycatchers, and other denizens of the sky island canyons.
We paused on the way down just long enough to admire such beauties as Varied Bunting, Botteri’s and Casssin’s Sparrows, and a fantastic intermediate-morph Swainson’s Hawk (my “bird of the day,” I think). And then it was across Ruby Road to Sycamore Canyon, where the mosquitoes weren’t bad, the air was cool, and the birds were surprisingly active for the late hour.
Most of the avian chatter was, as expected, Blue Grosbeaks and Bewick’s Wrens, but we were barely down the trail when the Rufous-capped Warbler sang twice. I was sure we’d see it, but in the next three hours, we heard it half a dozen times and never once caught so much as a glimpse: the little skunk. At least we know he’s still in there!
Scott’s, Hooded, and Bullock’s Orioles, and Summer and Hepatic Tanagers were colorful compensation, and Yellow-billed Cuckoos put on a good show, both visually and aurally; probable migrants included a few Western Tanagers and an early Warbling Vireo. Montezuma Quail were singing loud on the hillsides, but declined to show themselves there or on the road back to Arivaca.
All the same, a great day with some great birds!
Whiteshirted
Posted by: | CommentsBirders tend to look alike, but not in the way non-birders raised on Don Knotts and Miss Jane Hathaway expect: though we may on occasion find ourselves tennis-shod, most of us do without jodhpurs and safari helmets, opting instead for the typical outdoorsperson’s mix, equally evocative (whatever its true source) of LL Bean and Goodwill.
I suppose, though, that our very lack of fashion-sense is a fashion-sense of its own, and birders’ habits and choices are as susceptible to trends as anyone else’s. Take the white shirt. Not all that long ago, jeans and a worn oxford were perfectly acceptable in the field; but a new superstition has taken hold: to wit, that white shirts drive off birds.
We know who started this, and the list of those who now subscribe to the idea is a surprisingly long one. The theory is that white “in nature” is the color of warning, a sign to the dear creatures of forest and field that danger is nigh; wear white, says the party line, and birds will flee you as far as they can see you.
I doubt it.
In birds and diurnal mammals, white integument serves a wide variety of signaling purposes; even where it is undeniably used in warning (the flag of a white-tailed deer, the tail-sides of a junco), it is not the color per se but its rapid deployment and equally abrupt concealment that startles conspecifics into flight.
I am convinced that it is the same with white-clad humans: birds, most of which are more visually aware than we can even imagine, are almost always aware of us, and their reactions depend not on what we’re wearing but on how we move while we’re wearing it. Shout, jump up and down, stand right under that fruiting cherry tree, and you’re going to move the objects of your desire up the canyon and away, however correct your camouflage. So just sit down, be quiet, and try not to fidget; the birds will still know you’re there, but they will eventually go about their business, giving you–white shirt or not–a chance to melt into their lives for a moment or two.
