Archive for July, 2007
Beetle ID
Posted by: | CommentsMany thanks to Patrick, who identified our blue beetle from the Chiricahuas as Gibbifer californicus, the Pleasing Fungus Beetle. Aren’t insect names amazing?
Chiri Chase
Posted by: | CommentsIt’s a long ways from Tucson to the east side of the Chiricahuas, but Beth, Elizabeth, Michael, Denis, and I were undaunted at 3:00 this morning when it came time to head out. Apart from some early-rising Chihuahuan Ravens and a late-falling meteor, the drive across to Paradise was thankfully uneventful, and we were at the site of this weekend’s warbler sightings not long after 6:30.
Our reception on the part of the birds is nicely summed up by this slightly indecorous photo of one of the half dozen Mexican Chickadees buzzing and fussing alongside the road.
Oh, it wasn’t really all that bad, but our targets, which had apparently spent Sunday perched on camera lenses making googly eyes at the kids from Camp Chiricahua, were nowhere to be seen, or heard, or smelled, or extrasensorily perceived the whole time we and a dozen more birders kept vigil.
That doesn’t mean there were no birds at all. In addition to the chickadees, which were joined by their noisier relatives the Bridled Timouses, we also saw plenty of Western Tanagers, Grace’s and Black-throated Gray Warblers, and Painted Redstarts; Brown Creepers and Hermit Thrushes provided the acoustic background. A couple of Arizona Woodpeckers worked the pines, and the Band-tailed Pigeon numbers were downright impressive by Arizona standards, with the largest flock one of 25 birds and our morning’s total easily approaching twice that.
As is frustrated birders’ wont, our attention eventually drifted to invertebrates. This lovely beetle landed on my leg, then on my head, then finally on a somewhat more photogenic substrate. Ideas?
Leps were abundant once the sun came up; among them was this stunning red-spotted admiral (which I grew up calling by the slightly over-determined name ‘red-spotted purple’).
Most fascinating of all, though, were a couple of insects we didn’t see at all. Some sort of leaf-miner had had its way with this wild grape.
And this golf-ball-sized oak gall is (or was) the cozy home of a wasp larva. In the midwest, many of these large galls have a distinctive apple-like odor; uncertain whether it was occupied, we didn’t cut this one open to find out if it shared that characteristic.
So in spite of the elusiveness of warblers crescent-chested, it was a fun morning, and I even got a photo of a Mexican Chickadee’s front. Kind of.
A Hummingbird Answer
Posted by: | CommentsMost everybody got it right, which speaks volumes to the advances made in hummingbird identification in the last decade, thanks particularly to the splendid photographic guide by Steve Howell. In the old days of the Petersonian “field mark,” we were taught to look at the head pattern of male hummingbirds, and essentially to guess on females; but Howell’s book opened up to most of us new ways to think about hummingbirds, largely independent of plumage patterns.
In fact, hummingbird identification, at least in the US and Canada, has become remarkably similar to shorebird identification. First consider the bird’s overall structure and shape, then look at detail of the wing and tail. Age the bird. Finally, use the finer plumage characters to confirm or to eliminate the tentative identification. It’s amazing how many more hummingbirds one can identify using this approach than when struggling to determine the color of a male’s iridescent feathers.
This is a smallish but very solid-looking hummingbird. (If it were a big one, the posture at a feeder like this would have been closer to the vertical.) The tail tip projects slightly beyond the wing tip, easier to see, perhaps, in the detail from the quiz page. The primaries are uniformly broad, with no dramatic narrowing in the inners; that rules out Black-chinned immediately.
Not just the shape but the condition of those wing feathers is a great clue. A couple of old, worn, even broken outer primaries contrast strongly with new, blackish feathers, and the same goes for the secondaries, where the white sheath of an incoming feather is obvious among the browner old feathers; some coverts seem to be missing. Among the smallish hummingbirds expected here in July, Black-chinned, Broad-tailed, Calliope and Allen’s/Rufous molt on the wintering grounds; only Anna’s and Costa’s, the Calypte hummingbirds (sometimes called “helmeted” hummingbirds), have a summer wing-molt.
So Anna’s or Costa’s? In an adult male like this one, the head pattern distinguishes the two nicely: this male Anna’s Hummingbird has a red gorget and crown, with only a moderate extension of the gorget sides back onto the neck. But even without considering the head, the bird is identifiable as an Anna’s: the tail projects beyond the folded wingtip. In many male Anna’s, that projection is quite long, but here, because the bird is in molt and still growing its tail feathers, it is somewhat shorter–still, though, longer than one would expect on Costa’s.
Anna’s is a very common hummingbird in fall and winter in southeast Arizona, and increasingly common in summer. And a good one to learn before visiting the great hummingbird sites this month and next!
MEGA: Breeding Crescent-chested Warblers
Posted by: | CommentsWord on the AZ listserver is that an adult Crescent-chested Warbler is feeding a fledgling in the Chiricahuas. Stay tuned: this will be a first ABA-area breeding record!
Squatters
Posted by: | CommentsThe first sign is usually a pile of twigs in front of the front door. Then one morning I walk out onto the porch and throw a Mourning Dove into hysterics: help me, save me, that big biped is going to get me, swoon! And if I’m away for a few days this time of year, I invariably come home to find a big dove-eye staring at me from atop the porchlight.
The two chicks in the current nest (only one visible here, but they’re both up there) are getting big, and it won’t be many days now before they fall to the ground, where they’ll huddle for a day before making their first flight (it tends to be a long one, all the way over to the end of the porch, where the Lesser Goldfinches spill niger thistle from the feeder).
And then it will all start again. They’re messy, inconvenient, and give the UPS guy a heart attack, but we sure love having them around.
