7:30 at the Pennington School, Pennington, New Jersey.
See you there!
Lecture Tonight
Photo Quiz
A few years ago, Kenn Kaufman pointed out that the “photo quiz” was not an innovation of Birding or British Birds or Continental Birdlife.
No, the first birding photo quiz appeared in Bird-Lore in December 1900, with the intention, as Frank Chapman put it,
of arousing the student’s curiosity [and] impressing the bird’s characters on [her or ] his mind far more strongly than if its name were given with its picture.
In honor of the sesquicentennial of Chapman’s birth, coming up this summer, we’ll be “re-running” the Bird-Lore quizzes on and off over the next months.
Here’s one that seems especially timely:
What is it? Please respond in the comments, and be sure that you include an account of how you identified the bird, not just its name.
And if you already played in 1900, please give others a chance before jumping in.
Icepipers
With the shore ponds of Monmouth County mostly frozen, Alison and I spent a short hour at the tip of the Manasquan jetty yesterday mid-day, relishing the sunshine, grateful for the lack of wind, and dispassionately observing the gradual congelation of the blood in our toes.
There weren’t huge numbers of birds, but as always, the birding was fun. Common and a few Red-throated Loons put the fear of God into the fish at the mouth of the inlet, and small flocks containing all three scoters — the vast majority, as expected, Black Scoters — were in constant view on the water or slithering through the air in loose lines offshore.
The paved portions of the jetty were nearly ice-free (else we would not have been out there), but the giant tinker toy structures were still coated in a thick frosting.
That glaze was the source of some consternation for the Purple Sandpipers.
Just a few moments after we arrived, a nice flock of about 80 Purples, probably flushed by the adult Peregrine Falcon that kept buzzing us and them, flew in to land at the base of the structure.
In best purple piper fashion, every time a wave hit the jetty the flock would fly up, chittering, to land above the spray on top of the hexagonal pillars. And then, slowly at first, ever faster, and finally entirely out of control, they slid on splayed orange legs to the edge and fell fluttering off, landing, if they were lucky, on a more or less dry and more or less horizontal surface.
After a pause to catch their breath, they were back down, busy, along the water’s edge, only to repeat the whole drama with the next wave.
I almost think the birds were having fun. I know we were.
A Narrow Escape
This Slate-colored Junco is easy to pick out as it feeds on the ground outside my work room window.
Not so easy to pick off, though: it looks like one of our neighborhood Cooper’s Hawks — or, heaven forfend, a house cat — wound up with a mouthful of rectrices.
A Fork-tailed First
Audubon’s famous Fork-tailed Flycatcher, collected in New Jersey in June 1832, gets all the press.
But that wasn’t the first fork-tail recorded in the US — or even, amazingly enough, the first for New Jersey.
Sometime before 1825 — the usual date in the secondary literature seems to be “around 1820,” while Boyle gives “around 1812” —
a beautiful male, in full plumage … was shot near Bridgetown, New-Jersey, at the extraordinary season of the first week in December, and was presented by Mr. J. Woodcraft, of that town, to Mr. Titian Peale, who favoured me with the opportunity of examining it.
“Me,” of course, is Charles Lucian Bonaparte, writing in his American Ornithology, for which Peale also provided the rather stiffly elegant plate reproduced above.
When James Bond set out, almost 75 years ago now, to determine the subspecific identity of US Fork-tailed Flycatchers, he was unable to locate any of the specimens taken before 1834, “if any exist.” But even absent a skin, Bonaparte’s detailed description of the Bridgeton bird allows us to pin it down almost 200 years later:
… the three outer [primaries] have a very extraordinary and profound sinus or notch on their inner webs, near the tip, so as to terminate in a slender process.
That is enough, according to Zimmer, to identify the Woodcraft specimen as a member of the subspecies savana (then known as tyrannus).
That austral migrant, abundant in its range, is responsible for almost all northerly records of this species, though Zimmer identified one New Jersey specimen, of unknown date and locality, as sanctaemartae (a determination adjudged only “possible” by Pyle).
To Bonaparte, it was “evident” that his specimen “must have strayed from its native country under the influence of extraordinary circumstances.”
That’s for sure.