Archive for 2006
Southeast Arizona Winter
Posted by: | CommentsCriminy, thunder! It sounds like the winter rains are about to begin in earnest: gentle, lasting drizzles very unlike the violence of the late-summer monsoon, but no less welcome.
Elizabeth and I had a sense of the change in the weather this afternoon, with humidity and dust heavy in the air at Willcox. The sudden wind kept bird activity down, but we still enjoyed 32 Common Mergansers and 9 Canada Geese (a local rarity, you know) on the big sewage pond, and a Cassin’s Sparrow holding on for dear life to a fence was a nice find for winter.
Before that, we’d visited Whitewater Draw and the Sulphur Springs Valley, especially impressed by no fewer than 5 Ferruginous Hawks in the space of just a couple of miles. Loggerhead Shrikes and American Kestrels were in good numbers of the wires, no doubt casting longing, hungry looks at the Lark Buntings on the fields.
On the way to Whitewater, we couldn’t resist a stop in St. David for the bluebird show. We pulled up to the schoolhouse to find the wires literally lined with Mountain Bluebirds, 290 of them in view at once and no doubt more than that temporarily invisible on the ground behind. They perched quite readily on all sorts of structures, including swingsets that next week will be occupied by bipedal mammals.
The first stop of our morning had been Benson, where the tricky Tundra Swan continues to play hard to get. But we had great looks there at Canvasback, Eared Grebe, and 3 Snow Geese, so all was not lost. Never is, in fact, when you’re birding.
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“Quick, Before It … !”
Posted by: | CommentsSometimes the “funny captions” game just isn’t much of a challenge.
Elliott, The Songs of Wild Birds
Posted by: | CommentsLang Elliott is among the best and best-known recordists of birdsong in North America. His new book, The Songs of Wild Birds, is a combination of words, images, and often spectacular sounds that will delight and intrigue birders and non-birders alike.
Elliott’s selection of 50 species reveals a distinct eastern bias (could a western volume be in the works?). The handsomely designed book presents each in a dazzling full-page portrait, most by the author, some by other well-known photographers; in a few cases, small but well-reproduced inset images allow visual comparison with similar species.
The short texts facing the photographs provide a general description of the bird’s appearance or habits and a brief analysis of one or the other of its vocalizations, accompanied by large-format sonograms (here spelled uniformly “sonagram”). The most effective and appealing of these essays are the most anecdotal, where Elliott enthusiastically describes his own experiences and impressions gathered in recording the vocalizations. Unfortunately, at least one of the essays (p. 52) appears to have been ghostwritten, and sloppily at that–or is the author really in the habit of referring to himself in the third person as “world-famous bird expert Lang Elliott”? I hope not.
A couple of the species essays also play a bit fast and a bit loose with history. Twice the author rehearses, uncritically, the canard about Benjamin Franklin and the Wild Turkey, a story that I had thought long past the need for debunking. If memory serves, the owl that Bourke describes riding on the saddle horn of one of General Crook’s soldiers in Sonora was in fact a screech-owl; I certainly wouldn’t let the talons of a Great Horned Owl anywhere near my pommel. And Bryant did not invent the name “Bobolink,” already attested a century before the fireside poet’s reedbird spinked and spanked its way into American classrooms.
Such quibbles are quickly forgotten at the first sounds from the audio cd accompanying the book. Engagingly narrated by the author, the songs, calls, and mechanical sounds of the birds range from the beautiful to the strange. I particularly enjoyed the eery “quartet” performed by trilling Eastern Screech-Owls; the juxtaposition of eastern and western Winter Wren vocalizations is extremely informative and useful, as are the illustrations of dialect differences in White-crowned Sparrows. I’m less certain just what is to be immediately learned from the slowed-down versions of the songs of Grasshopper and Henslow’s Sparrows, but in their otherworldly strangeness these sequences are indeed eye-openers, or ear-openers, reminding us that there is often much more going on in birdsong than the merely human ear can fathom.
Who will enjoy this book? Easier to pose the question in the negative: Who wouldn’t? And the answer: No one I can think of.
Winter Lingerers
Posted by: | CommentsNo luck with the recent Worm-eating or Black-and-white Warblers at Tubac, but a beautiful Christmas morning walk produced some birds all the same.
Greater Pewee is a very scarce winterer in southeast Arizona, but this one was in a nice flock of Bridled Titmice, Hutton’s Vireos, Ruby-crowned Kinglets, White-breasted Nuthatches, Audubon’s and Orange-crowned Warblers, and Chipping Sparrows. The flock was oddly silent until a juvenile Sharp-shinned Hawk flashed past, at which point the alarm went up, and the pewee joined in with its funny pee-pee calls. Everybody survived, and it was soon back to foraging.
And the Amado Gray Hawk continues to perch blithely right at exit 48 of I-19. This is thought to be possibly the same individual that spent December in the area 3 years ago; maybe this time it will last the whole winter.
Pretty nice Christmas presents!
