Information – Page 41 – Birding New Jersey

July 11, 2015July 4, 2015

A First

Dark-eyed Junco nest and young. Natl Park Service

Want to know what the nest and eggs of a North American breeding bird look like? Just google it. Full descriptions for almost every single species are at your keyboarding fingertips, and though I haven’t checked, I’m betting that there are photos of each one, too.

But bird-nesting is like everything else: Somebody had to be the first to find one. And our North American avifauna included some tough customers. The Harris sparrow, the Ross goose, and the bristle-thighed curlew, all high-latitude breeders, led researchers a merry chase for long decades before they gave up their secrets.

One hundred years ago today, and much closer to home for most of us, another long-sought nest was finally discovered. On July 11, 1915, Frederick C. Lincoln, Harold R. Durand, and A.H. Burns were able to “place on record … the first nest and eggs of the brown-capped rosy finch (Leucosticte australis) known to science.”

Even if Colorado’s Mt. Bross wasn’t the Arctic, the nest-seekers faced some challenges. At 13,500 feet,

the nest was found [on] a short cliff about forty feet in height, of Lincoln porphyry, protruding through the upper edge of the schists and shales which occur just below the granite cap. The face of this cliff had suffered considerably from erosion, resulting in “chimneys” and cavities from a few inches to several feet in diameter….

Fortunately, the female of the pair was “extremely solicitous,” and once flushed, she went back again and again to her eggs, leading the explorers to the precious nest.

Both male and female were secured.

July 8, 2015July 8, 2015

Poor Pompadour

Poor Mme de Pompadour. I suppose it’s one of the occupational hazards when you are official mistress to the king, but not everybody at the court of Louis XV seems to have liked her.

Even the king found her difficult at times.

I really want to please Louis, but alas, sometimes he thinks I’m a scoter.

An odd insult, but a cruelly skillful one indeed. As a cookbook published for the preceding Louis had explained,

The scoter is a fish-bird…. It counts as a fish because it has cold blood, which is the only criterion for us to distinguish between foods that can be eaten on fast days and those that cannot.

Poor Mme de Pompadour — née Poisson.

July 6, 2015July 6, 2015

An Eerie Scene from the Trenches

A hundred years ago, the French soldier Albert Hugues wrote from the trenches near Reims:

Sometimes even the night birds visited us, and the play of the searchlights, the flash of the rockets were part of a nocturnal spectacle these birds had grown used to.

One night around midnight, the sole sentinel of a small patrol positioned in front of the trenches and 200 meters from the enemy line, I was visited by an owl, which perched on a tree 15 meters from my patrol’s place. The bird stayed for a good ten minutes, and neither the shots fired from the enemy trenches nor the heavy tread of the men on watch atop the concrete walls disturbed the bird at its own watch post; the owl was the only witness to my own vigilance and faithfulness to my duty.

July 5, 2015July 5, 2015

Funnyface

Everybody deserves a good molt now and then.

This ratty-looking Carolina white-breasted nuthatch reminds me of my all-time favorite name for the sittids.

Jakob Theodor Klein, finding that the bird had affinities to two different groups, called it “parus facie pici,” the woodpecker-faced titmouse.

Because these little birds climb trees, they are accounted as belonging to the woodpeckers, but incorrectly, just as the creeper is incorrectly assigned to the woodpeckers. All woodpeckers have two toes pointing forward and two pointing back. Neither the nuthatch nor the creeper, both outfitted with three toes in front and one in back, is a woodpecker just because they cling to trees and branches. The nuthatch, the “blue woodpecker,” is the largest of the titmice, since its tongue is also unlike that of the woodpeckers.

Good to know.

July 4, 2015July 4, 2015

Eastern Wood-Pewee

This sweet little eastern wood-pewee kept us company over lunch today, using a stake in Alison’s garden as a perch from which to sally forth.

This species breeds in the neighborhood, and we should soon see the parents introducing their young to the flycatching life. Summer is short.