Recent Sightings – Page 17 – Birding New Jersey

December 31, 2013December 31, 2013

Best Wishes, 2013 BotY!

I set out a year ago to write 50 “blog” entries about the Common Nighthawk, the ABA’s 2013 Bird of the Year — and an inspired choice. The 2014 bird is just as exciting, I understand.

I don’t know about you — how possibly could I? — but I learned an awful lot about this common and familiar species this year, and I think, without having the time or the vanity to count, that I may have come close to my target in writing about the bird. I do know that I was extraordinarily grateful to get to speak to so many interested and interesting birding groups about the bird, its history, and its prospects, and there are still a few nighthawk lectures on my calendar for the New Year, so hope to see the rest of you out there, too.

One thing that I learned is that nighthawks, and probably most birds, can appear at times and in places that are utterly, entirely unexpected.

One of my favorite habitat groups at the American Museum is the jaguars, an emphatically male mount and a large kitten perched on the rocks of a Sonoran mountainside at sunset. I’ve never seen that animal, alas, but I love Sonora and I love the thought of jaguars, and Alison and I always pause, in reverence and reverie, at this case when we walk through the mammals.

We’re not alone: there’s always a small crowd enthralled by these charismatic kitties. But how many notice the birds in the skies above them?

Common Nighthawks aren’t, in my experience, hugely common in northwest Mexico, but they do occur, and their presence in this group adds to its wondrousness. I can feel the last warmth of the day, the cool air rushing down the canyon below, and the atavistic excitement of being in the presence of one of the few American mammals that can lord it over us humans. And I hear the buzzes and whooshes of the nighthawks high overhead.

Let’s hope on this eve of a new year that jaguars and nighthawks and all of the other miracles of the Sierra Madre persist for the human generations to come, sending chills down the spines of our descendants in their different ways.

December 31, 2013December 27, 2013

Surly Motmots, Pouting Jacamars, and a Gloomy Birder

On his long journey through the West Indies in 1888, the Canadian cleric Léon Provancher attended a reception in Trinidad at the home of the eccentric Sylvester Devenish, where he made the acquaintance of Dr. Léotaud, “an island celebrity of whom I had already heard,” and his son-in-law, also a physician.

Provancher, fully absorbed in his host’s collections of engravings, bronzes, photographs, relics, and “ornaments of all kinds,” has no more to say about the medical men in attendance, but I want to believe that they were relatives of an even more celebrated Trinidadian, Antoine Léotaud, author of what remains nearly 150 years after its publication one of the best and most ambitious, if necessarily imperfect, neotropical ornithologies ever written.

According to an obituary quoted by Junge and Mees, Léotaud was born on Trinidad 200 years ago this New Year; he studied the sciences in Paris, eventually taking a medical degree, and returned at the age of 25 to practice in Trinidad. Léotaud’s Oiseaux was published a year before his death on January 23, 1867 from “a painful malady of fourteen months’ duration.”

I don’t know whether it is poor health, frustration at his lack of scientific resources, or a literary tristesse tropicale that is to blame for the striking tone of disappointed nostalgia that Léotaud affects in the Oiseaux.

It would be the most offensive of positivisms to draw conclusions about Léotaud’s “real life” from the attitudes he strikes in his writings. But consider the fact that in 1865, while he was hard at work on the ornithology, Léotaud was awarded the gold medal of the Medical Society of Ghent for a study entitled “Sur les causes de dépérissement des familles européennes aux Antilles” — on the sources of degeneration in European families in the Antilles.

Somebody clearly missed Paris.

Whatever Léotaud’s own state, he had some pronounced ideas about the emotional and intellectual condition of the wild birds of Trinidad.

The Black Vulture, for example, moves in ways

destitute of gracefulness, revealing the bird’s insignificance; even its anger results in nothing more than an exhaled grunt which evinces its stupidity; its quarrels, lacking in energy of any kind, bear the sign of weakness…. Even in the pleasures of love it exhibits those sad characteristics that it reveals in everything else; it is silent, it is clumsy, its preparations are tedious and only with great effort does it manage to accomplish that act that is normally so effortless in almost all birds.

Projection? Pathetic fallacy? Or just a bad mood?

Léotaud writes with greater sympathy of the Snail Kite (the photograph here is from the South American continent — we did not see the species on our visit to Trinidad and Tobago).

This bird is rarely seen here…. It is always alone, no doubt because it finds no companions…. only a few individuals come to visit us around the month of July, and thus they find themselves in conditions contrary to their usual habits.

Loneliness, in fact, seems to be a problem for many of the birds of Trinidad, if we trust Léotaud. The poor little Tropical Screech-Owl sings a song that

inspires sadness, as this bird is heard only when everything in nature is ready for slumber; its song ushers in the dusk. No doubt he is calling his companion in this way….

Even the beautiful Trinidad Motmot moves Léotaud to melancholy contemplation:

He prefers the dimness of our forests, which seems to suit so well the sluggishness of his movements and the sadness of his call. Having perched for a long time on a branch, he leaves it only with reluctance. Even the fires of love can barely raise him above his apathy. His call … is in no way meaningful; it is a call not of gaiety, or of anger, or of passion. And beyond that, his posture is heavy, his shape graceless… he draws attention only with his tail, [the shape of] which is one of those secrets that man will no doubt never manage to unravel. The female accompanies him almost always, but she is incapable of bringing animation to his so sad life.

Yes, motmots are notoriously calm, but rarely have they been accused of having a flat affect. The reproach makes even less sense when Léotaud turns it on the flashy Rufous-tailed Jacamar:

he remains immobile for hours at a time, and hardly stretches out his beak to grab an insect that happens to stray within his reach…. His call is weak and plaintive…. His companion follows him almost always to share this life that seems so sad and monotonous.

The most poignant case of all seems to be that of the Green Honeycreeper.

I’ve always found these sturdy little frugivores a colorful delight, but Léotaud had a different impression:

Its form is not very graceful, and its posture is somewhat heavy…. Its plumage is worthy of admiration, but its weak, insignificant call draws no notice. He is not made for captivity, and deprived of his liberty, he soon converts his cage into a tomb. Nevertheless one can accustom him to his prison, but only at the cost of so much effort and patience that it is a triumph of which only some people are capable, namely those whose interest in birds is a true passion.

It is harder and harder not to imagine that the author is speaking of himself and his own circumstances in such descriptions.

December 28, 2013December 28, 2013

A Twitch and an Owl

Who else out there knows that sinking feeling when you show up for a field trip in the worst possible weather–and there are people waiting for you? And who understands how just a few seconds of birding with friends can make the worst weather disappear and the day brighten?

That was our experience this morning at Kitsilano Point and Vanier Park. It was miserable when I arrived, but the four of us put up our hoods and had a great time–and the weather actually improved, with a patch of dry sky mid-morning and nothing really worse than mist by the time we broke up at 11:00.

As usual, waterfowl provided the major highlights. The strange Bufflehead x Common Goldeneye hybrid was bobbing around at very close range, giving us great looks at this strikingly beautiful bird; Alison and I had seen it yesterday afternoon on our scouting, too, so I was glad it deigned to perform for the group this morning. A drake Eurasian Wigeon was on the Vanier pond–yesterday afternoon we’d also found a female, but she was sensibly tucked up somewhere out of the rain.

The scoter flock was very close to shore this morning, hundreds of Surf Scoters forming and reforming their lines and blobs and clusters. At least half a dozen White-winged Scoters were mixed in, and the morning’s real prize was a female Black Scoter, the first for me on English Bay of a species said to have been hugely abundant there not that many years ago.

So a great morning in great company, and with the rain tapering off, I met Daniel at the eagle-adorned totem pole (real Bald Eagles, not just carved ones) and stopped quickly at home for another waterproof layer before heading south to Alaksen. We pulled in just to find a small group of birders leaving. Smiling birders. Happy birders. And we shared their delight when we found the lingering Yellow-breasted Chat right away, not just near but actually under the breezeway leading to the offices. She (a dull lore) was even vocalizing, giving a chat-like buzz and wheeze as she fed on the ground and in the open trees. Poor Karen, trying to get from one building to the other, was stranded for some moments as she very generously waited for us to tire or the chat to fly off–the latter occurred before the former, but not before we’d had splendid views of a major December rarity.

Where to next? Skies were brightening, so we decided to go looking for owls nearby. Big ones eluded us, but our 700th or so search of a trailside holly turned up a splotch of whitewash and its snoozing author.

This was my first living Northern Saw-whet Owl of the year, and one of the sweetest little creatures of 2010 so far. And of course we paused on the way back out Westham Island Road for a look at the Northern Hawk Owl, making for a pretty good strigid day on top of a pretty good warbler day on top of a pretty good waterfowl day.

I like BC in December, I’ve decided.

December 19, 2013October 13, 2014

Nymphs and Gnomes, Fairies and Sylphs

What a mess.

White-chested Emerald, Trinidad

Or am I the only one who finds it hard to keep all those sapphires and brilliants and emeralds and rubies and topazes straight?

There are so many hummingbird species, and their classification has been revised so many times over the past two centuries, that the vernacular names have inevitably become a hodgepodge of historical relics and well-meaning neologisms, often enough reflecting neither relationship nor similarity.

In 1854, Ludwig Reichenbach, director of the royal zoo in Dresden, set out to clear the decks and introduce some of that good deutsche Ordnung into trochilid nomenclature.

The hummingbirds, like many another group of beautiful and popular creatures, have been worked on more in a spirit of pleasurable dilettantism than according to the stricter requirements of scholarship.

Firmly grounded in the powerful traditions of German Idealism and organicist aesthetics, Reichenbach lays out his taxonomic principles with great clarity:

It is necessary in a scientific work that we have always before our eyes the clear need to trace the development of the Type through its degrees of intensification, that we correctly evaluate the individual components in their significance to the whole, and that we be able to demonstrate the culmination of the Type as well as its deflection to heterogeneity.

Reichenbach goes on to observe that

Heaven and earth and all sciences and arts, even music in its chords and systems of tuning, are all four-parted, just as are all living things… and this quaternary system of divisions, whose accord echoes through all of Nature, … can be called a system that rests stable in itself.

All that theoretical hoohaw behind him, Reichenbach goes on to establish (you guessed it) four large categories –families, I suppose, though he doesn’t use that word — of hummingbirds: Nymphs, Fairies, Sylphs, and Gnomes.

Each of those four large groups is further subdivided into four smaller categories — subfamilies — one of which is “typical” and the other three of which are “deflected into heterogeneity” by their similarity to one of the other families.

Thus, for example, there are “nymph-nymphs,” but there are also “fairy-nymphs,” “sylph-nymphs,” and “gnome-nymphs.”

Each of those subfamilies in turn comprises four genera, each of which in turn can be broken into four subgenera (again, only loosely translating Reichenbach’s categories into modern taxonomic terms). All of the known species of hummingbirds are then fitted into this scheme.

Our White-chested Emerald, for example, one of the most abundant and familiar trochilids of Trinidad and Tobago, would be a member of the family Fayae, the Fairies, which Reichenbach defines as “creeper-like” hummingbirds without head ornaments and with arched bills.

That family “culminates” in the subfamily Ochrurae, the Fairy-Fairies, but the emerald and its close relatives apparently tend to the “heterogeneous,” making them members of the subfamily Hylocharinae, the Nymph-Fairies, the third genus of which is Amazilia.

Richenbach’s “perfect” hummingbird, the culmination of the Type, has to be a Sylph, a member of the “genuine or typical Trochilideae: adorned with helmet, crest, ear-tufts, or extensive brilliant iridescence.” Naturally (or artificially, one might say), there are sylphs and then there are sylphs, but the ultimate hummer should be a Sylph-Sylph, of the subfamily Trochilinae. The first genus listed there is Trochilus — and the first species Reichenbach cites is Trochilus Colubris Linn. 1766.

Behold THE hummingbird,

the Ruby-throated Sylph-Sylph.

August 28, 2013August 21, 2014

Point Breeze

After yesterday afternoon’s cold front, we thought we had it made this morning. The woods along the Delaware River would, we thought, be swarming with warblers and vireos and flycatchers and tanagers. All we needed to do, we thought, was get there.

“There” in this case is a very special place in the history of American ornithology.

Point Breeze was the country estate of Joseph Bonaparte, the elder brother of the first Napoleon and erstwhile king of Naples and of Spain. At the mouth of Crosswicks Creek in Bordentown, New Jersey, Point Breeze was also the home for some five years of Charles Lucian Bonaparte and his cousin-wife, Zénaïde, and it was here on the banks of the Delaware that the Prince of Musignano and Canino conducted much of the work that would lead Coues to call the 1820s “the Bonapartian Period” in American ornithology.

Bonaparte had better luck with the birds than we did. But still we enjoyed treading the same paths trod almost two hundred years ago by the man Coues styled “the princely person.”

Back in Bonaparte days, the marsh at the bottom of the hill was a lake, formed by damming Thornton Creek. The view down Crosswicks Creek to the Delaware is still impressive, and this would be a great place to simply set up and wait on a day when migrants really did decide to show up.

The house Joseph built above the lake for his daughter and son-in-law is long gone, replaced by tall beeches and tulip trees.

The tangled banks held chipping Northern Cardinals and mewling Gray Catbirds; on a warbler day, the edges could be lively.

The most evocative spot we discovered was this crumbling stretch of carriage road.

The only intact structure from Bonaparte’s day is the old Garden House, a modest building now overlooking lawns and a sparse orchard but once guarding the entrance to Joseph Bonaparte’s formal gardens.

This little house, too, has its place in ornithological history. You can read about that, and more about Charles Bonaparte and American ornithology, tomorrow at the newly remodeled ABA Blog. See you over there!

Thanks to Alison and to Hidden New Jersey‘s Sue and Ivan for the excellent birding company, and to the Divine Word Mission in Bordentown for allowing us access to their grounds.