The Experience of Birding
There are still about 200 American Wigeon at Jericho Park, with smaller numbers up and down the southern shore of English Bay. And they’re not alone.
This drake Eurasian Wigeon can be surprisingly hard to pin down, apparently ranging up and down the shore with changing tides and changing levels of human park use. But when he’s around, he’s not that hard to see!
Of all the highlights of a birding visit to Arizona, the sparrow watching is among the highest. But things are looking up here in Vancouver, too. Though emberizid diversity remains lowish–four species felt pretty good this morning in Jericho Park–the spirit of spring has descended, and I was never out of earshot of sparrow song.
Most abundant, naturally, were Song Sparrows. The heavily marked, somberly reddish birds here (presumptively morphna) may look startlingly unlike the familiar chocolate birds of the east and midwest (not to mention the pale, sparsely streaked fallax that breeds in Tucson). But they chup-chup like their conspecifics everywhere on the continent, and their bright songs are indistinguishable, to these middle-aged ears at least, from any Song Sparrow’s anywhere.
The dry rattles and whiny mewls of Spotted Towhees are impossible to miss in the park’s extensive area of brambles.
The towhees here are notably unspotted, with just a neat set of dotted white wingbars and nearly unmarked back and scapulars; that’s consistent with the expected local race oregonus, as is the uncomplicated trilling song with a slightly wooden quality.
Today, with bright sunshine and relatively warm weather, was the first day that Sooty Fox Sparrows had been singing.
I don’t know whether this species breeds in the park–the singing was fairly subdued, the volume low and the melody line fairly flat, suggesting that this was perhaps just “subsong” from migrants inspired by the sunshine. Heaven knows that if I could carry a tune, I’d have been singing along.
The least common of this morning’s sparrows was that drabbest of the Zonotrichias, Golden-crowned Sparrow. They’re surprisingly shy for a “crowned” sparrow, but watching the edges of the blackberry thickets and underneath dense, low-growing conifers turned up several today–suggesting that there were likely many more, unseen, in the brush.
A couple of this morning’s golden-crowns were singing, a pretty little whistled song more like that of Harris’s Sparrow than of White-crowned. Of course, I don’t know yet what the local white-crowns sound like, so I’ll just have to keep on sparrow watching this spring.
Somebody has to do it.
Look at enough birds, and you’ll quickly figure out that no two individuals are the same. Even puddle ducks, with their simple, blocky plumages, show plenty of variation from one to the next, some brighter, some duller. Drake American Wigeon are no exception: some have very broad, very extensive green face-stripes, others less so. And a few drakes have startlingly creamy white heads, with very little of the streaking and mottling that makes “normal” wigeon so gray-headed.
I saw two such birds over the long Thanksgiving weekend, one at Willcox and one at Tucson’s Lakeside Park.
The Willcox bird was very striking even at a distance, with a notable yellowish tint to the face and quite extensive green. Sunday’s Tucson bird was a little more freckly, but still obviously different from his companions.
This individual also had a little bit less green on the head than the Willcox bird, creating a bizarre pattern when it rolled and preened.
A quick glance through some of the standard resources doesn’t turn much up about variation in American Wigeon’s head pattern; BNA does illustrate a reasonably pale-headed bird (still a bit more spotted than the Lakeside bird).
How often do you see American Wigeon of this type? Looking for them in big wigeon flocks can be more rewarding than looking for Eurasian Wigeon!
As hawk migration in the East slows to the final trickle of Rough-legs, Red-tails, and Golden Eagles, things are just getting good here in southeast Arizona. Between a visit to the Lower Santa Cruz and a short day yesterday in the Sulphur Springs Valley, I saw eleven species of hawks and allies, including Osprey, Ferruginous Hawk, and Bald Eagle, plus Burrowing and Great Horned Owls.
Here as at many of the other great winter raptor sites, the falcons are an especially fine part of the show. American Kestrels are common everywhere right now, from city streets to empty desert.
The majority, like this one on the Santa Cruz Flats Friday, are females–presumably more able to handle December’s cold days than the smaller, more strictly insectivorous males.
Equally catholic in their habitat choices are Peregrine Falcons. One particularly large adult has set up housekeeping on the corner of Oracle Road, where a male American Kestrel has made it his task to keep his larger cousin from getting any rest at all. Apparent migrants are still passing through, too, among them this savage-looking and obviously well-fed juvenile at the Marana Pecan Grove on Friday.
No winter raptor spoils us more than Prairie Falcon, deceptively–even dangerously–common in the cool season. This bird is globally anything but abundant, but it’s a slender winter’s day afield indeed when we don’t see three or four. There are already several installed on their winter territories in town, and dusty agricultural roads are carefully watched over by this shy and spectacular species.
This one was eying the sparrows in a brushy row of mesquites–even as a Bendire’s Thrasher sang from the wire above.
The scarcest of our winter falcons (well, unless you count genuine wild Aplomados, which may not occur at all) is the dashing little Merlin, certainly the model for the cartoons’ Chicken Hawk (remember him?). I couldn’t find a one on the Flats on Friday, but Darlene and I had great luck yesterday, with a pale Richardson’s Merlin north of Willcox and a fine columbarius-type male near Elfrida.
This bird, perched at a dairy feedlot, must have thought he’d found paradise: hundreds of White-crowned Sparrows, thousands of icterids, and no doubt many metric tons of mice to keep him hale and happy through the winter–and thus to keep the birders hale and happy who are lucky enough to see him.
The Santa Cruz Flats, along the river downstream from Tucson, are a great place for a peaceful day afield this time of year. Raptors, today including Ferruginous Hawk, are starting to pour in, and sparrow numbers are slowly building.
The resident birds aren’t bad, either. This was one of eight Burrowing Owls we ran across in the course of the day.
But it’s the new arrivals that quicken the heart. Sage Sparrows are uncommon anywhere in southeast Arizona, so a count of 15 or more was a very happy surprise.
The birds were remarkably shy, probably in part the result of the constant presence of American Kestrels and Loggerhead Shrikes. But patience gave us some fine views of the sparrows, and watching them I learned a lot about bird I really don’t know that well. I was impressed with how sturdy their flight notes are, almost junco-like in pitch and insistence. I knew about the typical Amphispiza tail flicking (a great way to pick them out when they perch high in the saltbush they favor), but I hadn’t known, or at least hadn’t remembered, how expressive that long, narrow tail is in flight. And it was great fun to watch them drop from a low perch to hit the ground running, like tiny thrashers or roadrunners.
The day’s other exciting arrival was Mountain Bluebird. We’d run across a few Western Bluebirds in pecan groves along the way, but true to form, the half dozen Mountain Bluebirds we saw, all females, were out in the bleakest of harvested and disked cottonfields.
They’ve been scarce so far this autumn, but perhaps these few individuals–and the other scattered birds reported over the past week–are the vanguard of an invastion. We’re due, after a couple of winters without these lovely, gentle little chats.