Winter Arrivals on the Flats

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.

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AOU Check-list Supplement

The Fiftieth Supplement to the AOU Check-list has been posted to the AOU website. The changes will be incorporated soon into the online version of the Check-list.

Summaries have been circulating on the web for a couple of weeks now, but there’s nothing like the horse’s mouth. And it’s always great fun to see one’s friends and colleagues cited in the Supplement. Jon Dunn, of course, is a greatly valued member of the Committee, and Jake Mohlmann and Paul Lehman are both credited here with recent additions to the North American list: Jake (along with John Yerger) the astounding first Brown Hawk-Owl for the region, and Paul the 2007 Gambell Sedge Warbler  and the nearly as surprising Yellow-browed Bunting from the same location the same year.

There’s much more in there, of course, and I’ll be spending as much time as I can over the next busy days teasing out the fascinating bits of buried material. Who’d have guessed, for example, that Linnaeus had unknowingly predicted the presence of a wild Graylag Goose in North America when he described the species 251 years ago?

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Scouting Tuscany

Our VENT Birds and Art in Tuscany tour will run again in April 2017, starting in Florence and ending in Rome. The approach is similar to that we’ve been taking for years now in Provence, Catalonia, and Germnay: birds provide the focus for the itinerary, but the experience is in getting to know a whole landscape, its history, its culture, and above all its art.

My co-leader Marco Valtriani and I spent a few days after my Provence tour scouting our route. It promises to be a good one, starting in the dramatically beautiful Apennines and Apuan Alpsarchaeological ending up in the archaeological and natural riches of southern Etruria. Some images from some of the localities we’ll be exploring:

The tiny village of Branuccio, high in the Apennines.

The lobby of our hotel in Castelnuovo, tucked into the Garfagnana between the mountain ranges and along the Serchio, where Gray Wagtails flit beneath the city’s many bridges.

The garden, as seen from the pool of our Castelnuovo hotel.

The Apuan Alps–wow.

The ceiling of the renowned church of Codiponte–and one of the proto-Romanesque capitals for which it is so famous:

Birders aren’t the only ones who enjoy the bright skies and warm days of Tuscany:

Living up to its name, Common Redstart is an abundant yard bird in Tuscan villages.

Even in the mountains, our birding is relaxed and easy-paced, on wide, level paths and roads.

Mountain streams can be good birding; this one, at Equi Therme, produced Crag Martin and White-throated Dipper during our scouting. Three Peregrine Falcons appeared high above as we left, too.

Now rare over much of their former range to the north, Red-backed Shrikes are reliably found in any open habitat. This is the male of a pair that was almost certainly nesting in the denser vegetation in the background.

It looks like snow, but it’s bright white marble at the edge of a quarry that’s been worked since antiquity.

There’s always time for a coffee break on a Birds and Art tour.

We’ll visit the fifteenth-century pilgrim hostel of San Pellegrino (not the source of the water!).

Here as everywhere else in Tuscany, we’ll be following in some pretty illustrious footsteps.

European Bee-eaters abound in coastal areas.

Orbetello Lagoon and the Argentario Promontory are major sites on our itinerary. They’ll both be crawling with migrants in May; on our June visit, notable species here included Common Shelduck, Eurasian Curlew, Stonechat, and Little Tern.

Not all culture is high culture, I suppose. (Anybody else remember the blue whale on the way to Higbee Beach?)

Our hotel near Manciano, where we’ll be spending the last five nights of the tour without the annoyance of packing and repacking, is a remodeled Tuscan estate.

And the views? Not bad.

This unassuming little pond just outside Albinia is famous for the rarities that have occurred there.

But on this visit we found the birding better at the old salt pans in Tarquinia. Those white dots are Slender-billed Gulls.

Italian Sparrows are pretty obliging, especially this male, tilting his head to show us his diagnostic crown pattern.

We’ll be eating very well indeed, both in restaurants and on a lavish picnic or two featuring local delicacies.

I hope you’ll join us next year. We’re going to have a great time.

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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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