Look Again

Does it help if I note that this curious Passer was photographed on the grounds of Puccini’s villa on Lago del Torre?

There were lots of birds to see on my scouting trip to Tuscany, but Italian Sparrows really won the heart. Every bit as confiding and friendly as their domesticus cousins, these large-billed, chestnut-crowned birds are even more dapper as they bound along the sidewalks and dip into the bread baskets at outdoor cafes.

For the birder, the real question, of course, has to do with just what the Italian Sparrow “is.” With white cheeks, a colorful crown, and often a bit of streaking at the side of the breast and flank, males look like a cross between House Sparrow and Spanish Sparrow, and have often been considered a “stable hybrid population” between the two.

That’s always struck me as faintly risible, given that Italian Sparrows breed in places like Switzerland and Austria, far from the range of Spanish Sparrow in the narrow sense; and now it seems that most sources follow Töpfer in treating the bird as a subspecies of Spanish Sparrow (though if I remember rightly, Dutch Birding gives Italian Sparrow full species status).

None of that really matters to the birds. Or to me. I just enjoyed watching them everywhere we went, and am already looking forward to repeating the experience next year on our Tuscany tour.

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All in a Day’s Work

Everybody’s interested in birds, even if they might not call themselves a birder.

Today started out with a question from a dear friend and former colleague at Princeton University’s Index of Christian Art: just what, she wanted to know, is “bird liming” exactly? (If you don’t know, you probably don’t want to know.)

And on returning from lunch I found an e-mail from the Antiques Roadshow asking for the identification of a bird painted by a famous American bird artist. You’ll have to watch the show to find out yourself, but I was able to pass on the bird’s identity–and, with a little e-sniffing around, the year the painting was likely produced.

An Amazon Kingfisher suns in Guyana, closely approximating the posture of a limed bird.
An Amazon Kingfisher suns in Guyana, closely approximating the posture of a limed bird.

It’s not quite what I had in mind when I started the “Birds and Art” tours here at WINGS (Provence this year, Tuscany and Provence in 2010, Provence and Portugal in 2011…), but it’s terrific fun!

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Grasshopper Sparrow

Marion and I spent this gloriously summer-like St. David’s Day along the lower Santa Cruz. It’s not winter down there any more, and the great raptor shows of the cold season are done with; but we still tallied a fine adult Peregrine Falcon, several Harris’s Hawks, four Northern Harriers (including two dazzling silver males), and small numbers of scattered American Kestrels and Red-tailed Hawks. We also saw three owl species, beginning with a saguaro-roosting Western Screech-Owl; the “secret” site in Marana turned up no fewer than six Burrowing Owls, and farther north we discovered a pair of Great Horned Owls at a big stick nest–while the obviously dispossessed Common Ravens were working on a new effort of their own on the other side of the tamarisk!

Sparrows were as scarce as raptors, it seemed, but we had a fine surprise in Marana. We were watching Vesper and Savannah Sparrows along a weedy fenceline when suddenly a little buffy blur blew in and perched–a Grasshopper Sparrow, I think the first I’d ever seen in Pima County.

The bird was remarkably obliging, giving us lengthy views of the sort usually to be counted on only from singing individuals.

And cute as a button, too, especially head on.

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Is My Name Legion?

There’s an interesting conversation going on (as usual) over at Amy’s WildBird blog: Just how many birders are there in North America?

La Caume birders birding

The commonest figures bandied about–77 million, 48 million–are patently absurd, but I suspect that Mike‘s guess of 200,000, though clearly more realistic, might be a little low.

It all sent me scurrying back to my copy of the 2006 NSFHWAR (gesundheit!), where a more interesting number lurks. Table 42, awkwardly entitled “Away-From-Home Wildlife Watchers by Wildlife Observed, Photographed, or Fed and Place,” claims that 20.025 million Americans “observed,” “photographed,” or “fed” birds someplace other than their own yard in 2006. Of those, though, only 8.805 million had watched “other birds”–the catch-all category taking in all but a few big, clunky, popular species such as cardinals, herons, and ducks. And of all those, only 2.657 million left their home state to look at those “other birds.”

Not a bad definition of a birder, is it: Someone who travels to look at birds that aren’t in the kiddy books. Obivously, there are plenty of birders who are content to cultivate their own sheep (or is it return to their own gardens? I can never remember), and are thus excluded by the definition; but I’m guessing that this figure of two and a half million is about as close as we can get.

Is it plausible? Is one out of every 125 Americans a birder? (I’m assuming that my Facebook “friends” roster is not a representative sample.) Pima County, Arizona, where we live, probably has as high a birder population as anywhere in the country; with a population of slightly more than a million (ack), the county should have 8,000 birders. It doesn’t. Bellevue, Nebraska, where I grew up, had a population in my day of 25,000, and so should have had 200 birders. It didn’t. Hamilton, New York, where I commute to during the academic year, has a population of 5,700, and so should have 45 birders. It doesn’t, yet.

Let’s work it backwards. I know, say, 100 birders in Tucson. I knew 25 in Bellevue. We know 5 in Hamilton. That’s 130 birders out of 1.03 million,  which would translate to about 40,000 birders in the entire United States.  That’s what, 800 in each state: Massachusetts makes it, New Jersey, California, Texas, Florida, maybe Arizona; but Nebraska, Wyoming, North Dakota….?

There’s only one solution. Ask everybody in the country a simple question: Are you a birder? If they respond with anything more than a blank stare, then they count!

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Moth and Rust

Well, to tell the truth, no moths were involved, but you can’t keep a good phrase down. Saturday’s Sandhill Crane show in Arizona’s Sulphur Springs Valley was one of the most exciting I’d ever seen there. We started with just a few birds loafing at Whitewater Draw, but as the morning wore on, more and more returned from their cornfield breakfasts.

After 30 years of crane-watching, I still can’t get enough of that sound, the first faint growls of the distant flock growing louder and louder until you start to wonder whether there is any other noise anywhere in the world–then, suddenly, the clamor gives way to the conversational mumbles of cranes at the roost.

Ambitiously, we were looking for “other” cranes, too; it’s only a matter of time before this ever-increasing flock picks up a Common Crane. Or maybe a Demoiselle. Or even, someday, a Whooping Crane. But Saturday was not to be the day. We did, though, find the brownest Sandhill Crane I’d ever seen in winter.

The birds in this flock were distant (and oddly enough, in alfalfa), but careful cropping gives us this:

Sandhill Cranes are notorious for applying iron-rich mud to their feathers during the breeding season, likely to serve as camouflage during incubation; oxidation–rusting–turns the feathers bright brown. In most birds from migratory Sandhill populations, the pre-basic molt replaces most of those brown feathers with new gray ones, leaving only old remiges and wing coverts to show a brown wash. Who knows what happened to this one–whether it skipped a molt or just found some irresistibly wallowable red mud somewhere on its autumnal way south?

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