Archive for August, 2010
Molt in a Field Guide
Posted by: | Comments
I was honored to serve as a consultant on Ted Floyd’s still-new Smithsonian Guide, and so have naturally forborne from reviewing it. But there are two important points that have gone unremarked in the reviews of the book I’ve read so far–they both need to be made, and both need to be considered in connection with the publication of Steve Howell’s marvelous Peterson Reference Guide.
The first is that this Smithsonian volume is the first field guide ever to include information about the molt strategy of every single species it treats. That means that birders interested in such things have ready at hand much of the fundamental information required for a consideration of molt in the field; in an important sense, then, Floyd and Howell have written–unwittingly, I think–utterly complementary books, the one a reference guide to principles, the other a field manual permitting closer investigation of individual birds.
The other point, this one perhaps even more important in the grand scheme of birderly things, is that like Howell (in Molt and in all of his writings), Floyd is somehow, magically, able to write for two audiences at once. The Smithsonian guide’s inclusion of material on molt and geographic variation makes it a fine resource for even the most would-be sophisticated birders; but the book is simultaneously ideal for new birders and casual birders, who will learn enough to satisfy them without being distracted by the more technical material so gracefully and so unobtrusively included. And who knows, curiosities may be piqued.
And that’s just what North American birding needs: birders and bird books that address the full range of who we are and what we can become, speaking at one and the same time to those who are content to enjoy the beauty around them and to those who want to learn more. We’re fortunate early in this twenty-first century that there are those who understand this need, and are taking important steps to integrate our community more than it has been at times in the past.
Howell: Molt in North American Birds
Posted by: | Comments
For long decades, guides to North American birds treated seasonal and age-related differences in plumage as fixed, discrete phenomena, with hardly a hint as to just how an individual bird’s feathers might pass from immature to adult, from winter to summer, from breeding to non-breeding. Even the banding manuals implicitly instructed us to consider the colors of a plumage rather than the timing and the circumstances of its origin, so that for most species–especially passerines–we were left in those benighted pre-Pyle days with a relatively ineloquent and relatively imprecise set of age-and-sex categories into which we had to fit the victims of our nets and potter traps.
Matters improved and eyes opened with the publication in 1987 of Peter Pyle and Steve Howell’s Identification Guide to North American Passerines, which immediately rendered the erstwhile standard texts by Dwight, Roberts, and Wood obsolete; suddenly, banders and ambitious birders had a tool that let them use not the state of a bird’s plumage–properly speaking, its aspect–but rather its relationship to other, preceding and subsequent plumages to age and sex the individual with sometimes startling precision. We learned, in a moment of almost blinding clarity, that we should be paying attention to the transitions between plumages rather than to the “plumages” themselves: that we should, in other words, be concentrating on molt rather than on its product.
I’d venture to assume that nearly every birder has heard of molt, that regular process by which birds replace old, worn feathers with new, strong ones. And I’m equally certain that even today not one North American birder in ten fully recognizes the many ways in which even a simple understanding of the phenomenon can increase our enjoyment, and our knowledge, of the birds we watch in the field.
Photo: WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide.
In a series of groundbreaking articles in Birding, Birding World, Western Birds, and elsewhere, Steve Howell has been at the forefront of introducing recent discoveries about molt into our field practice as birders. Now, with his new Peterson Reference Guide, Molt in North American Birds, Howell offers birders a concise and beautifully written summary of much of what is known about molt as a phenomenon, followed by chapters dedicated to the molt “strategies” followed in every family of birds breeding in North America north of Mexico. The result is a volume that every birder will learn a great deal from–and one that, by raising repeatedly questions still unanswered by students of molt, will inspire birders, banders, and ornithologists to learn even more about this fascinating and often complicated subject.
Howell begins with a too modestly titled 65-page “Introduction” to the subject at hand, offering first a series of interrogatories on such fundamental topics as the nature of feathers and the difference between a plumage–a set of feathers produced by a molt–and an aspect–the appearance of a bird’s feather “coat” at a given time. Richly and attractively illustrated (most of the stunning photos are Howell’s own), this catechism of molt should be required reading even for birders uninterested in the phenomenon’s broader implications for birding.
In the remaining 45 introductory pages, Howell discusses the patterns and strategies of molt observable in North American birds, defining plumages using the “modified” Humphrey-Parkes system and introducing the four fundamental sequences of molt. The Basic strategies are distinguished from Alternate strategies by their lack of a pre-alternate molt (and thus of an alternate plumage); Complex strategies differ from Simple strategies in the “insertion” of an “extra,” pre-formative molt in the first molt cycle (a cycle lasts approximately a year in most familiar species). Thus, birds exhibit a Simple Basic strategy, a Complex Basic strategy, a Simple Alternate strategy, or a Complex Alternate strategy.
The strategies, and the molts and plumages they comprise, are described with admirable clarity in Howell’s text, though in this section–unlike anywhere else in the book–I found some of the illustrations and their captions less immediately comprehensible. The series of photographs tracing the progress of molts and plumages of a nuttalli (italicized, please!) White-crowned Sparrow is itself informative, though in a quibbling moment I might have preferred a subspecies where the adults’ head pattern is brighter. Unfortunately, the caption to Figure 29, showing a bird undergoing its pre-alternate molt, might easily be misread. At least the last sentence should have been rewritten, to begin “In this first-cycle bird, most of the body feathers are still formative plumage….” As the caption stands now, it could be read–as I did at first–as suggesting that all Nuttall’s White-crowns somehow retain bits of their formative and of their juvenile plumages after their limited pre-alternate molt.
Figure 36, which uses paintings familiar to many readers from David Sibley’s Birding Basics, suffers from a lapse in design: the horizontal lines separating the illustrations of each strategy from their label should be below, not above, the accompanying diagram; as things stand, the label “Simple basic strategy” seems to belong to paintings showing a complex basic strategy, and the label “Simple alternate strategy” appears to go with paintings showing a complex alternate strategy. No matter how many times I’ve looked at this opening, my eye still mis-allocates the paintings and their labels.
Perhaps the most important illustration in the book, Figure 35, presents graphically the differences so well described in prose among the four molt strategies. But the caption here fails to do justice to the ingenuity of Howell’s diagram, leaving the reader–at least this reader–uncertain whether some of the graphic details are intended to convey meaning or, and this seems less likely, are simply inconsistencies in design. For example, the caption informs us that a broken line distinguishes body feathers from flight feathers (an important distinction, given that in all but the simple basic strategy, body feathers in at least the first cycle are molted more often than remiges and rectrices); but what does it mean when that line becomes a solid line in the diagram? And does the pre-alternate molt under the complex alternate strategy in fact commence later and last longer than the homologous molt in birds employing a simple alternate strategy–as the diagram seems to depict? This is a tremendously useful diagram, but the caption should address, if only to deny, the significance of such small differences in the graphs.
Just as useful is the table occupying pages 26-28, a clear overview of the molt strategies observed in each family of North American birds. The rarest, and perhaps the oldest, is the simple basic strategy, in which birds molt directly from juvenile plumage to basic plumage, without a formative “immature” plumage in between; the commonest–exhibited by nearly all passerine families and a range of non-passerines, too–is the complex alternate strategy, in which young birds molt from juvenile plumage into an “extra” formative plumage, and birds of all ages undergo an almost always incomplete pre-alternate molt.
This table serves as a quick guide to the family chapter that follow, each of which begins with a short account of the family’s taxonomic affinities and general natural history. There follow concise but easily understandable descriptions of each molt, often including a fascinating question or two about apparent anomalies in a species’ or group’s molting behavior: why, for example, asks Howell, do skimmers have a pre-formative molt, which tends to be more typical of long-distance migrants? Howell’s answers to these questions, when he has them, are always cogent, and the cases where he can offer only speculation are precisely those where careful and observant birders and ornithologists could make a real contribution to our knowledge of molt.
Because the systematic section of the book remains at the relatively abstract level of family, birders tempted to look here for shortcuts to species-level identification may be disappointed. There are useful hints here and there, but the significance of this splendid book is far greater than helping us distinguish the eastern crows or the western empids. With his characteristic clarity, completeness, and good humor, Steve Howell has given the birding world an entree into one of the great mysteries of bird biology, and the time spent studying Molt–and molt–will be more than rewarded by the increased sophistication and enjoyment with which we will be able to look at even the commonest birds. Molt, says the author, “offers a fascinating window through which to appreciate how the lives of birds are built.” Many thanks to Steve Howell for opening that window to the rest of us.
What I’m Hoping For in the Next ABA President
Posted by: | CommentsI know exactly what I’m hoping for from the next president (or executive director, or whatever the title becomes) of the American Birding Association: a near-miracle.
I’ve given some thought over the past few days, too, to what I’m hoping for in the next occupant of that musical chair, that is to say, what type of person with what types of qualities I’d like to see representing the ABA to the birding community. I haven’t seen the formal job description prepared by the ABA board, and it’s possible (it’s almost certain) that their preferences are not identical to mine, but that said, as a simple ABA member with no influence over the decisions reached by this latest hiring committee, I can think of several qualifications that I, as a simple ABA member with no influence over the decisions reached by this latest hiring committee, would think of as sine quibus non:
Our new president must be a birder, and a birder of a certain kind. It’s absurd to hire someone who knows nothing about the sport that is the focus of the organization, but it’s important to hire someone with a great deal of sympathy for new and beginning birders; the ideal president would be an elite birder without the least tendency to elitism, someone who while entirely at home in American birding culture also has a thorough understanding of the “outsiders” not yet part of that culture. It’s important to remember that what attracts potential birders is not necessarily a mentor’s expertise but the kindness, generosity, and pedagogic sensitivity with which s/he communicates that expertise. I would love to see a president who can lead a group of beginners, talk to a class of children, and write clearly and precisely about, say, molt or geographic variation or any of the other “cutting edge” topics that interest intermediate and advanced birders. To my mind, we need a person who can bring something to everyone, not just to the experts and not just to the wealthy traveling set. Only in that way would the ABA overcome its undeserved reputation as an organization for the hotshots, and only in that way will the membership grow and diversify.
I believe, too, that our new president should have a history with the organization and a familiarity with its workings. A healthy and well functioning organization might not need that sort of a priori knowledge, but the ABA has reached the point that whoever comes on board needs to hit the ground running (to mix a metaphor or two). There is no time to bring someone entirely innocent up to speed. Ideally, the successful candidate would not only be a long-time member, but would also have experience over the years as a volunteer or even as a member of the ABA staff.
I also think it important that the new president know–and enjoy the confidence of–the current staff and those members of the board of directors who stay on after the hiring. Very little has been said of this in public, but it is the professional ABA staff, hard-working and underpaid, who have suffered most day to day from the poor hiring decisions of the board, and I would want to know that the new president would understand and have the intellectual capacity to support the staff’s efforts when he or she finds them meritorious.
Nearly as important is the relationship between the president and the board. I would hope for a president whose confidence and sense of right would be strong enough to resist poor ideas and unsound advice; that confidence is likely found only in someone who already has experience in working with the board of a non-profit organization. I suspect that anyone with that sort of experience will also have dealt with fundraising, an important part of any president’s portfolio given the state of the ABA’s finances.
All of these skills and qualities, of course, are no good if they’re hidden under the institutional bushel. An occasional half page in Winging It just doesn’t cut it when it comes to inspiring enthusiasm among the membership. The new president must be someone with experience, expertise, and a sense of excitement about “new media.” It is no overstatement to say, as others have time and again, that most of the newest crop of birders finds a greater and more satisfying sense of community on the internet than in a club or organization. One of the ways the ABA can regain the position of leadership in that community is to establish a strong and consistent online voice that is distinctly and distinctively ABA; the organization, through its president, should seem like something everyone would want to be part of.
Whoever takes this job on is going to be walking uphill for a long time–but if she or he can save an organization so dear to my heart, it’ll be more than worth it. Here’s wishing the hiring committee a healthy dose of wisdom!
An Unfortunate Name
Posted by: | CommentsMy friends over at NEBirds have been carrying on an amusing conversation about bird names–just the sort of thing to get us through these dog-day afternoons of August. A very sharp young birder brought up the Paltry Tyrannulet, a cute little tropical flycatcher whose English name seems determined to add insult to diminutive injury.
In a fascinating bit of serendipity, this onomastically maligned bird, resident from Mexico south through Central America to Colombia, in fact has a Nebraska connection. Described 150 years ago in the genus Elainia, the tyrannulet was quickly renamed Tyranniscus vilissimus, where it remained until in 1977 the late Melvin Traylor–himself memorialized in the scientific name of the Orange-eyed Flatbill Tolmomyias traylori–erected a new genus for this and another ten or species.
Traylor named his new genus Zimmerius, in honor of the great and little-remembered American ornithologist John Todd Zimmer. Born in Ohio in 1889, Zimmer and his family moved to Nebraska in the early years of the twentieth century, and he graduated from the University of Nebraska one hundred years ago this year; he took the M.A. there in 1911, and was granted the D.Sc. honoris causa in 1943. Like others I could name, Zimmer spent much of his college time outside looking for birds and inside looking at birds, and he eventually left a large and very fine collection of Nebraska skins to the state museum, where they still reside.
Zimmer left Nebraska to hold positions in the Philippines and New Guinea, then moved to the Field Museum and finally to the American Museum, where he spent nearly thirty years working on the birds of the Neotropics, particularly Peru. The naming of Zimmerius recognizes his contribution to the taxonomy of South American birds, cited by the Brewster Medal Committee in 1952 as “truly the foundation for the work of all other current students of the South American avifauna.”
Unfortunately, when Sclater and Salvin named the Paltry Tyrannulet in 1859, they gave it the specific epithet vilissimus, the superlative of the Latin adjective vilis, meaning (as its English descendant “vile” would suggest) “contemptible, worthless, ordinary, vulgar,” a reflection of both the bird’s abundance and its relatively undistinguished appearance. With Traylor’s revision, though, the species’ current scientific name, Zimmerius vilissimus, joins the epithet to a person’s name–giving us a translation something like “the very contemptible Zimmer.” The fact that the species is polytypic makes it even worse: the nominate subspecies, Z. v. vilissimus, is “the very, very contemptible Zimmer.”
Surely not what Traylor wanted to say, but such things happen in the world of birds and words.
A Day at the Beach
Posted by: | Comments
Tucson doesn’t really have a beach, but less than four hours’ easy drive south and west are the sands and rocky points of Puerto Peñasco, the nearest and easiest place for us desert rats to do a little seabirding. This past Wednesday I led a Tucson Audubon group down to the Sea of Cortez in search of shorebirds. We wound up with only eighteen species of waders, a slightly disappointing tally for this time of year–but among them were some goodies, and there was plenty else to keep us busy during the nine hours we had on the beach before turning back to Tucson.
We left town that morning a little after 4:30, with a hint of dawn already visible behind the Rincons. By the time we entered caracara country, it was daylight, and we saw two Crested Caracaras checking out the night’s offerings on the highway east of Sells. A bit of a puzzlement was a medium-sized, relatively brown owl flying stiffly across the highway near the old Mesquital Migrant Trap: anywhere else, at any other time of year, I’d probably have ticked it off as a Long-eared Owl, but that’s just too weird for the desert in August.
Our border crossing at Lukeville was easy as pie–we didn’t even show our passports, much less have to stop for what is usually a desultory inspection. A few Black Vultures and Harris’s Hawks joined the abundant Turkey Vultures around the Sonoyta dump, and then, good conversation making the time and the miles slip away, we were in Puerto P.
We’d timed our tour so as to have a few hours before tide started coming in. We started in the inner harbor, which was lined with the usual Brown Pelicans and Heermann’s and Yellow-footed Gulls; our only Lesser Yellowlegs of the day flew past us here, and Willets hunted the rocks and the sandy edges, oblivious of fishermen and early swimmers. Off the seawall we saw our first terns of the day, mostly Common Terns but with the odd Black Tern or Royal Tern passing. Careful scoping produced small numbers of Brown and Blue-footed Boobies, and two distant Black Storm-Petrels. A couple of Black-vented Shearwaters flew in and landed on the water, but so far out that for most of us they were nothing more than occasional heads occasionally visible above the more than occasional waves.
With the tide good and low, we decided to run out to Rocky Beach (or whatever the beach at Sinaloa Ave. is called) and see if we could find any rockpipers. Wilson’s, Semipalmated, and Black-bellied Plovers were wandering the flats and pecking at the edges of the tide pools, accompanied by the omnipresent Willets. A couple of Black-vented Shearwaters were in attendance on the pelicans right in the surf, the splendid views more than making up for the frustration the earlier birds had caused. Royal Terns were almost constantly in sight here, and it wasn’t long before a fine Elegant Tern came in, passing close to us and to its thicker-billed cousins for an excellent comparison.
But this was a shorebird trip, and so we kept our eyes downcast, hoping for the movement that would betray the presence of waders on the rocks. Aha, there they are! Three Surfbirds, all adults, all still with a hint of golden spangling on their scapulars and hearts not on their sleeves but on their flanks, were feeding quiet and calm nearby.
For a long time, this was the only shorebird I’d seen in Sonora and not in the US (a fall trip to California finally took care of that for me)–and I still haven’t seen it in Vancouver, which may well have been an earlier port of call for these very individuals as they made their way south.
The day couldn’t get any better, I thought, but we trundled out to the rocks at Pelican Point, where the tide was so high that people were swimming merrily on the path I’d intended to use to get out to look for boobies. We did stand on the ever narrower strip of beach, the tide lapping at our tripod feet, long enough to see another Black and two Least Storm-Petrels, completing the list of tubenoses reasonably to be hoped for from shore.
The usual constellation of boulders had disappeared beneath the tide, so we looked for a spot to look down on the rocks. We’d been seeing both species of booby fly past all morning, but here was where we finally got good views of them perched, some of them at distances so close as to convince us that they deserved their disparaging English name. Most were Blue-footed Boobies, their eponymous webs glowing blue-violet against the white glare of the rocks.
But there were Brown Boobies among them, too, adults dapper in brown and white, juveniles elegantly somber in two-tone chocolate.
With the tide rapidly approaching its highest, we turned back to visit the head of Cholla Bay, where rising waters can concentrate shorebirds and terns in impressive numbers. I can’t say that we ran into masses of birds this time, but the quality was high if the numbers weren’t: we had up to eleven Snowy Plovers at once on the beach, and Least and Forster’s Terns joined the Commons, Blacks, and Royals loafing on the rapidly submerging sandbars. The commonest of the large sandpipers was Marbled Godwit, always a happy sight.
They shared the sand and salicornia flats with curlews, including plenty of Whimbrels
and gentle-faced Long-billed Curlews down from the prairies.
The really big show here at high tide is the abundance of Large-billed Sparrows, the large, blurry Passerculus endemic to the Sea of Cortez. When the water is low, they scamper through the saltwort, generally unseen this time of year; but when it rises, they emerge to feed on the roads and to fly flutteringly from emergent patch to emergent patch of taller vegetation. Our estimate this time: no fewer than 33 individuals, many of them giving great looks as they fed on the sandy road and sought shade under the rocks (all the time, no doubt, aware that my camera batteries had died).
I replaced my batteries, or at least my camera’s, and we struck off for terra incognita–the golf course ponds tantalizingly just visible across the head of the bay. We’d been watching birds drop in there, from terns to an adult Reddish Egret, and decided to spend the last of our day trying to figure out how to get in. Geographically, it turned out to be quite straightforward: the golf course is called Laguna del Mar, and it’s reached from Highway Eight north of town. Fortunately, it didn’t take much Spanish to let the guard at the gate know what we wanted, and even less to understand that he would give us 20 minutes, no more.
We zoomed. We zoomed past small ponds that must be some of Puerto Peñasco’s very best migrant traps, past lavishly irrigated lawns that must prove irresistible to stray grasspipers, past remnant patches of bleak saltbush that must hide Le Conte’s Thrashers. But we stopped, too. We stopped for a gang of some 45 Horned Larks, with streaky and spotty juveniles among them, and we stopped for an incongruous female-plumaged Red-breasted Merganser on one of the large ponds. And we stopped for a fine flock of shorebirds, including the day’s only dozen or so Ruddy Turnstones and a couple of American Oystercatchers.
We pushed it hard, but it was still half an hour before we turned in our permit and thanked the friendly guards for letting see their muchos pajaros; on the way out, we pondered whether it might not be worth it to buy a lot just for the birding privileges.
The drive home was as pleasant as the drive down that morning had been. Our border passage took no more than ten minutes, and Tucson was nearly in sight by the time the Lesser Nighthawks started swooping over the road. Home at 7:30 pm, and ready to dream of the next visit to our very own tropical beach.
The day’s list is on line here. If you see anything you like, join us next August for another shorebirding trip to the Sea of Cortez; it will be announced on the Tucson Audubon website as soon as we’ve settled on a date.
