Canada – Page 2 – Birding New Jersey

April 3, 2018April 5, 2018

Vancouver Day One: Steveston – Iona – Reifel Refuge

What a blast! I picked Soheil up at his lodgings in Richmond a bit after 7:00 this morning, taking the time to enjoy northwestern crows on the way down; I’d expected rain, but there was just the barest hint of a sprinkle on my early morning drive, and though the chill never lifted, all day long we stayed dry — and even saw some sunshine by the time we enjoyed an early supper this evening under the watchful eyes of Ladner’s bald eagles.

I’d heard that white-winged crossbills were to be found in Steveston, so we zipped down there to start our morning’s birding. We stepped out of the car to the songs of Puget Sound white-crowned sparrows (yea) and Eurasian collared-doves (less yea), but after a few minutes of hearing and seeing nothing loxiac, walked the few feet down to the river. Glaucous-winged and mew gulls loafed on logs in the water, while several bald eagles kept the ducks busy; one of the eagles missed all the fun, assigned instead to incubating or brooding the contents of one of the huge riverside nests. A big, big-nosed pinniped moving through the water was probably a California sea lion.

The lawn of the condo complex behind us was hopping, too. A suet feeder proved irresistible to a couple of pairs of bushtits, and the first of the day’s half dozen rufous hummingbirds was here, too — all but one of them were males, a couple of them in vigorous “shuttling” display.

The manicured bluegrass itself provided the feeding ground for a fine varied thrush, which eventually gave up being admired and flew up into the bare tree above our heads, where he sang several times that eeriest of Pacific northwest bird songs.

The sparrow flock was shyer, but we had great looks at Lincoln, song, sooty fox, golden-crowned, and Puget Sound white-crowned sparrows, all popping out onto the grass to feed for a moment or two before taking refuge again in the hedge.

Wonderful to be back in a place where golden-crowned is the most abundant passerellid, the song sparrows are red, and the fox sparrows are plain-headed.

The biggest surprise was a flock of 34 swans that flew overhead, not trumpeting but whistling as they passed. I was too startled to make entirely certain that all of the birds were tundra swans or if perhaps there were just a few vocal birds of that species joining up with the much more expected trumpeters; tundras are rarish birds here, and we were lucky to be in the right place at the right time. We would not see any trumpeter swans until the last stop of our day, when we found sixty or seventy loafing off Westham Island.

I could have spent the rest of the week there, and we will certainly drop back by at some point to have another listen for the crossbills, but there are even birdier, even more scenic sites around Vancouver than condominium parking lots.

With an eye on the tide tables, we dashed north to Iona, where spotted towhees, another rufous hummingbird, and a few hundred noisy snow geese greeted us. The ponds were full of water and full of ducks: pinwheeling northern shovelers, elegant northern pintail and ring-necked ducks, and busily feeding lesser scaup by the hundreds.

Sparrows of what were now the expected species fed on the roads, and flyovers included my first violet-green swallows of the year and a surprise western meadowlark.

If the meadowlark was a surprise, the American minks were a shock.

Soheil saw the first one while I was busy with song sparrows; a few minutes later we saw it or another, and a few minutes later three more or less together on the path. As we watched, one of them dropped into the water and re-emerged with a dead, probably long-dead, duck, holding it tight in its teeth as it dragged it backwards across the trail, only to lose its prize when an adult bald eagle dropped out of nowhere to steal the corpse and send the mink, lucky not to have been the eagle’s second course, scampering into the next pond.

We walked out and around the “outer” pond, where marsh wrens and red-winged blackbirds were busy staking out their territories and a nice flock of tree and violet-green swallows skimmed and drank in front of us.

We’d planned to head out the jetty, too, but the rapidly ebbing tide and the cold breeze off the Salish Sea convinced us that there probably weren’t many birds out there anyway. So how about Reifel?

The place was insane, as always, with the pushy half-tame mallards joined by ducks of several other species, sparrows, and blackbirds in the rush for birdseed.

We braved our way through the madding crowd, pausing to admire a rare black-crowned night-heron at its sullen roost, and headed out to the foreshore. Another flock of snow geese did its best to deafen us, watched closely by as many as fifty-five bald eagles perched out on the tidal flat.

The real show at Reifel this afternoon, though, was the northern harriers. We’d seen scattered birds all day here and there, but as afternoon ceded to early evening, the big cattail marshes gave up their store of long-winged hawks; eventually we were watching at least five, including two beautiful silver males. It made us wonder how many owls were waiting on the ground out there for the sun to set.

We wouldn’t find out: Reifel has an early curfew, and I was cold and hungry. We stopped in Ladner for supper, fish and chips while we watched eagles fly up and down the water out our window. In the sunshine. Tomorrow is going to be a great day!

Birds

Snow Goose, Canada Goose, Trumpeter Swan, Tundra Swan, Wood Duck, Gadwall, American Wigeon, Mallard, Northern Shoveler, Northern Pintail, Green-winged Teal, Ring-necked Duck, Lesser Scaup, Greater Scaup, Bufflehead, Hooded Merganser, Common Merganser

Double-crested Cormorant

Great Blue Heron, Black-crowned Night-Heron

Northern Harrier, Bald Eagle, Red-tailed Hawk

Virginia Rail, American Coot

Killdeer

Wilson’s Snipe

Mew Gull, Glaucous-winged Gull

Rock Pigeon, Eurasian Collared-Dove

Rufous Hummingbird

Northern Flicker

Northwestern Crow

Violet-green Swallow, Tree Swallow

Black-capped Chickadee

Bushtit

Marsh Wren

American Robin

Varied Thrush

European Starling

Cedar Waxwing

Oregon Towhee, Sooty Fox Sparrow, Song Sparrow, Lincoln’s Sparrow, Puget Sound Sparrow, Gambel’s Sparrow, Golden-crowned Sparrow, Oregon Junco

Red-winged Blackbird, Western Meadowlark, Brewer’s Blackbird

House Finch, American Goldfinch

House Sparrow

Mammals

American Mink

Eastern Gray Squirrel

California Sea Lion

January 24, 2016January 24, 2016

Overreacting

I’m not a scientist, and I certainly wouldn’t play one on TV, but as an outsider and a layman, it seems to me that some Ontario birders are rolling over and playing dead for no reason at all.

In November of last year, a suspect oriole was discovered in the eastern part of the province. In the first, rather poor photos I saw — there are now much better ones out there — the bird was gray-bellied and dull-throated, with a clear black eye line. A perfectly reasonable consensus was reached that the bird was a Bullock’s oriole, a nice find indeed but hardly earth-shattering at the season anywhere in the east.

The story continued to unfold in the usual way: the exuberant posts from exuberant birders tallying a lifer, the inevitable accusations of harassment and bad manners on the part of photographers and those armed with audio recordings, the gradual settling down as the bird gradually settled in. And the “rescue.”

The absurdity of “rescuing” vagrant birds in the wintertime is something I’m happy to rant about any time you’re ready, but in this case, holding the bird in captivity provided an opportunity to conduct a little genetic analysis. As it turns out, material gathered from the bird’s droppings included mitochondrial DNA identifiable as that of a Baltimore oriole.

Meaning, of course, that among this bird’s female forebears was a Baltimore oriole.

Now come the retractions, the recantings, the regrets. You can almost hear the check marks being erased from birders’ lists. But why?

There is probably no Bullock’s oriole on the planet that does not have a bit of the Baltimore coursing through its veins. We know this, and we’re happy to ignore it when we identify birds in the field — just as we gladly ignore the fact that the family tree of nearly every mallard on the east coast is studded with black ducks, and that there isn’t a “black” towhee on the great plains that is not the product of repeated miscegenation. It’s biochemically messy out there.

For the past century and a half, we’ve known that there is no such thing as a species. For the past century and a quarter, birding in North America has been intentionally cast as an exercise in identification of species. If we want to keep understanding birding in that way — and many of us do — we have to both acknowledge and insist on the difference between what we do and what the scientists do. Our tools are our eyes and our minds, not blenders and litmus paper.

If I were in Ontario and cared, I’d count it. And I wouldn’t let a little thing like DNA get in my way.

May 6, 2014April 14, 2014

Airmail from Canada

I can’t claim to have read (or to want to read) all of the vast literature on the Passenger Pigeon and its decline, but I’ve perused enough to know that it is all much of a sameness, fact after repeated fact piling up into a story that is more and more familiar as this sad commemorative year goes on.

I’ve come to be more interested in — and sometimes more charmed by — those texts where pigeons and their habits and history are not the central subject, but rather where the birds flutter around the edges, as it were.

On May 6, 1721, the Jesuit explorer and historian Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix found himself becalmed at Quebec’s ominously named Anse de la Famine, “the worst place in the world,” as he called it. To pass the time, he caught up on his “historical journal,” composed (or at least published) as a series of letters addressed to the Duchess of Lesdiguières.

“This contrary wind,” he wrote,

gives every impression of lingering for a while and of keeping me here in the worst place in the world for more than a day. I will overcome the annoyance by writing to you. Whole armies are passing without pause of those pigeons that we call turtles; if only one of those would take up my letters, then you might learn some of my news before I leave this place: but the natives have not figured out how to train the birds to that occupation, as they say the Arabs and many other peoples did long ago.

Charlevoix’s scientific, factual report on the birds is well known and widely reproduced — and apart from its early date, just a few years after Catesby, doesn’t really add much to what we know: the flocks once darkened the skies, they’re easy to shoot from the trees, they are kept and fattened to be killed and dressed in autumn.

But doesn’t the image of the homesick writer, looking longingly out the window and hoping that the wind will change — doesn’t that passage tell us more about the way the pigeon was experienced and what the pigeon meant than a whole sheaf of life history details? I think so.

May 2, 2014April 28, 2014

A Hundred Years of Titmice

A hundred years ago today, Canada’s first Tufted Titmouse was discovered — where else? — at Point Pelee. What must it have been like to hear those now-familiar whistles for the first time?

January 7, 2014January 5, 2014

Bush Tyrants and Freckled Mockingbirds

Among the birds from the final voyage of James Cook sent back to England was a new thrush, collected at Nootka Sound in what would later be British Columbia. The skins wound up in the collection of Joseph Banks, the naturalist on Cook’s first expedition, who passed them on to John Latham to prepare the formal description.

Latham named the bird the Spotted Thrush, a name taken over into scientific Latin a few years later by Gmelin as Turdus naevius, the “thrush with freckles.”

I’ve wondered for years just what those spots and dots were meant to be, and now, thanks to The Marvel That Is The Internet, there’s no reason to guess. We can know.

Latham says that the coverts of the wing are

ash-colour; the lesser ones plain; all the others marked with a ferruginous triangular spot at the tip: the prime quills dusky; each feather marked with two ferruginous spots on the outer web, one near the base, the other about the middle; the second quills have one of these marks near the end, but paler.

Those intricate wing markings are the only “spots” Latham’s account mentions. Gmelin, too, fidus interpres that he was, points out the same “macula” and no others.

Thomas Pennant, writing two years after Latham published his description, was apparently less impressed by the bird’s freckled wing and more interested in the overall pied aspect of its plumage. Pennant gave us both one of the least successful portraits ever of the species and its enduring English name, Varied Thrush.

Pennant’s plate is so bad, in fact, that it misled Swainson and Richardson, who had access only to a single, molting specimen, to deny that the bird was a thrush at all:

it exhibits unequivocal indications of those characters by which Orpheus [the thrashers, catbirds, and mockingbirds] is so decidedly separated from the true Thrushes…. This opinion is, in a great measure, confirmed by the figure of Pennant, where the tail is represented as rounded, and fully as long as the wings, a structure which precisely agrees with the American Mocking-bird.

In order to “express what appears to us its real affinities,” Swainson coined new English and scientific names for the bird, Orpheus meruloides, the Thrush-like Mock-bird.

Swainson’s view didn’t really catch on. Audubon, with “numerous specimens of this Thrush in [his] possession,” which he compared carefully to skins of the American Robin and “another new Thrush from Chili,” came to the

opinion that both these and the Chilian species are as nearly allied as possible, and therefore ought to be considered as true Thrushes….

With few and infrequent exceptions, such as the brief entry in Lesson’s Notices of 1840, ornithology has agreed with Audubon. In January 1854, though, almost three years to the day after the old man’s death, Charles Bonaparte went out of his way to take a cheap shot at his erstwhile friend:

Notwithstanding the efforts of the pen and the paintbrush of the famous ornithologist Audubon, Turdus naevius, Gm. (Orpheus meruloides, Sw.), is neither a Turdus thrush [Bonaparte: Grive] nor even a mimid [Chanteur], but a teniopterian bird, the type of my new genus Ixoreus.

That is simply mean-spirited, and Bonaparte deserved what he got when Philip Lutley Sclater pointed out that the ornithologist prince had been far more confused than either Audubon or Swainson:

The true type of Prince Bonaparte’s .. Ixoreus … is, as I know from its having been pointed out to me by the founder [viz., Bonaparte] in the Jardin [des] Plantes’ collection, the S[outh] American Taenioptera rufiventris….

If I’ve run the synonymies correctly, Taenioptera rufiventris is an obsolete name for the Streak-throated Bush-Tyrant. Thus, even as he ridiculed Audubon for his taxonomic naivete, Bonaparte was confusing the Varied Thrush with an entirely different bird, a lovely neotropical flycatcher.

Audubon’s old protégé Spencer Baird, on learning of Bonaparte’s confusion, decided to drop Ixoreus entirely, and coined the new and very pretty genus name Hesperocichla for the thrush. Not until 1902 did Charles Richmond restore the name Ixoreus:

it is yet plain that [Bonaparte’s] term was based upon Gmelin’s name.

His heart, in other words, was in the right place, and Ixoreus it has been always since.