Author Archive | Dan Greaney

Gold Rush Into Shasta County

By Dan Greaney on November 30, 2019 in BirdWords

Common Goldeneye Pair

Goldeneyes grow up in Canada, but you don’t need to fly to Great Slave Lake to see them. They’ll fly here instead!

Common Goldeneye Drake

After a long summer of little more than mallards on our waterways, now is the season of ducks returning like rain to the North State. To the delight of Thanksgiving hunters, bird-watchers, and children at Kutras Pond, the colors, quacks, and squeals of many duck species are returning to the North State. The goldeneyes, like so many ducks that nest in the vast Canadian forests or in the midcontinent prairie potholes, are heading south from their nesting grounds to what they need–open water that won’t freeze over.

Common Goldeneye Drake

In our area they can be seen on the river, readily identifiable by–well, you can guess their eye color! The males, or drakes, have black backs, white sides, dark heads with a green cast, and, between their black bill and bright eye, a bold white spot. The hens forego that white beauty mark, but wear a tip of yellow on their bill; they replace bright white flanks with nest-camo gray, and the sheen of their head feathers is cinnamon-burgundy.

Common Goldeneye Female courtesy Corine Bliek

Goldeneyes are cavity nesters, making homes in trees near boreal waters, using the large holes formed by pileated woodpeckers or by limbs ripped from their trunks by wind or time and decay. As in several duck species, new hatchlings tumble two or more stories from nest to ground, pop up no worse for wear next to their waiting mother, and follow her to the local lake or river.

That walk can be a long one. Unlike mallards, goldeneyes are diving ducks. Their legs, situated farther back on their bodies, facilitate power and agility under water, but make land travel a stilted, more unsteady endeavor. Still, both the young ones and their mothers do what they must to accommodate reality, and make the trek from nest to water.

There they are all at home. The day-old ducklings begin to feed themselves, starting a lifestyle of diving for underwater invertebrates and small fish in both calm and rippling waters. The hen goldeneye may protect her babies, but the ducklings readily attach to a foster-mom for oversight, too.

In their first fall they will fly south to winter in the US, and the next spring will wing back to their boreal home. Apparently they are starting to fly farther north than they used to, following the forests that around the globe are retreating northward due to logging, mining, and climate change.

Boreal Bird Migration Map

Logging for paper products opens the land to further warming as exposed permafrost melts. Turning trees into toilet paper has become a widespread concern. Among locally available products Seventh Generation, Green Forest, Trader Joe’s regular (not SuperSoft), and Natural Value–generally the less gentle product lines–get high marks for using recycled content rather than virgin forest in their toilet paper.

Mining for fossil fuels also exposes permafrost, and its intended product is the source of 76% of our climate change emissions.

And climate change itself kills boreal forests by supporting beetle infestations, drying the forest, increasing fire susceptibility, and reducing the winter chill needed for new tree growth.

Goldeneyes are part of the circumpolar constriction toward the North Pole that the whole boreal forest is undergoing. In the coming decades of unrestrained climate change, they are expected to winter farther north and their gold will become rarer in the Lower Forty-eight.

Birds – Variety and Extremes

By Dan Greaney on September 28, 2019 in BirdWords

Somali Ostrich

The ten thousand species of birds in the world come with tremendous variety. The ostrich can stand nine feet tall, tip the scales at 280 pounds, and run at over forty miles per hour. The bee hummingbird is less than two and a half inches long, weighs one twentieth of an ounce, and can’t run at all, or even walk.

Bee Hummingbird

A red-breasted merganser flew even with a plane at an air speed of over 80 mph, ground speed over a hundred. Peregrine falcons stooping on prey have sped to at least 186 mph. Hummingbirds can hover in place, a flight achievement of zero mph.

The engine of a plane in Africa sucked in a Ruppell’s griffon vulture–at an altitude of 36,100 feet! Penguins “fly” only under water. New Zealand’s kiwi has stubby little wings, perhaps as useful as a T-rex’s hands; it cannot fly.

Killdeer nest in open flats, maybe gathering just a couple pebbles to mark the site. Orioles weave hanging baskets of plant fiber or other debris. Cliff swallows build with mud, swiftlets use saliva, and hummingbirds gather and form lichen and spider webs. Kingfishers nest in tunnels they dig, as much as eight feet into the ground. Emperor penguins’ feet serve as nests. Eagles build with sticks, adding more as they re-use the nest over years and generations; a nest in Florida was 9.5 feet across, 20 feet deep, and estimated to weigh over two tons. Gyrfalcons in Greenland use a cliff nest that is 2500 years old.

Chimney Swift on Nest

Osprey flap over water looking for fish to catch. The thick-billed murre has been found swimming 690 feet under water.

Goatsuckers and owls wear camouflage feathers that blend into the gray-brown bark they press against. Tanagers, orioles, and honeycreepers blaze brilliant colors with stunning richness and iridescence.

Western Screech-Owl

All this variety of behavior and physical features is the result of the distinctive habitats that grace our planet. The diverse opportunities, requirements, and happenstance of survival hone the qualities of plumage, flight, size, color, and nest building, as well as the shape and strength of feet and bills, flocking behavior, and everything else about the birds.

The thing about these adaptations is that they do not just permit living a certain way in a certain habitat; they require it. An eagle can’t catch flies from the air to have its dinner. A woodpecker can’t paddle like a duck and skim algae off the water. Like all living things, birds need the habitat they are designed for.

Amazon Fires

But now the world is changing. The Amazon is burning, the ice caps are melting, and the reefs are dying. What are the birds to do?

Many have begun the spiral toward extinction. Depending on how fast and how extremely the changes come, some will adapt, as they always have on the changing Earth.

The uneven pattern of evolution is normal. The biologist Stephen Jay Gould termed it punctuated equilibrium, long periods of relative stability “punctuated” by brief periods of rapid evolutionary change.

Generally speaking, when change comes fast, creatures with short generations do well. Bacteria, for instance, can “grow up” and reproduce–which in their case means divide in two–in as little as twenty minutes. The quick regeneration allows for more mutation and more rapid genetic development of adaptations to the new environment. We humans reproduce more slowly, so don’t do well by this measure. However, we are capable of considerable non-biological adaptation–say, build and operate an AC unit.

As for birds? So much depends.

Aw, nuts! -A Pine Forest and a Bird

By Dan Greaney on August 31, 2019 in BirdWords

Clark’s Nutcracker photo courtesy David Bogener

When Thomas Jefferson commissioned Lewis and Clark to explore the West, the president, a man with informed intelligence and curiosity, hoped the explorers might find new animals in that wild land. Of course they did not find the mastodon, mammoth, or “large lion-like creature” that Jefferson imagined from the new science of fossil research. But they did find numerous animals previously unknown to science, including grizzly bears, mountain goats, pronghorn antelopes, prairie dogs, and two bird species that now bear the explorers’ names.

Both of those birds live in our area, but to see one of them we’re best to hustle to the mountains now, before the snow flies and bars our way.

White Pine Lassen Volcanic National Park

Clark’s nutcrackers live near timberline, and even their winter retreat downslope usually keeps them well above snowline. They’ve got the chops for that wintry life.

These birds are seed-eaters. Throughout the summer and fall they gather high-calorie pine nuts, tens of thousands of them, that they hide hither and yon over their miles of range. The energy-loaded seeds allow nutcrackers to survive winter conditions that send other birds to Baja.

But of course they can’t just choose to live on pine nuts at timberline. They have to have the right adaptations.

Clark's Nutcracker

Let’s start with the bill. When William Clark first described the bird in 1805 he noted its robust bill and called it a “Bird of the woodpecker kind.” But the nutcracker is actually a corvid, closely related to jays and crows, not a woodpecker. Its powerful bill is used not for pounding through wood but for hacking into pine cones and the nuts inside them.

After extracting the seeds, the nutcrackers need to hide them for later consumption. Like ground squirrels, they have pouches in their mouths to hold the seeds for transport. Ground squirrels’ pouches are in their cheeks. Nutcrackers’ are under their tongues. They tuck scores of pine nuts into this pouch and then hide them over many square miles across their mountain homes.

Of course, if they are going to make a living by hiding seeds, the birds have to be able to find them. Nutcrackers routinely cache 30,000 pine nuts a year. They are able to find the vast majority of them, with their memory only starting to fail after six or seven months–that is, after winter is past and spring begins to bring a new supply of food to their homes.

Clark’s Nutcracker Adult Feeding Young

Their favorite nut, a high-nutrition preference they share with grizzly bears, comes from tree-line whitebark pines. These pine nuts have a higher concentration of calories than chocolate. With such a rich supply of energy, nutcrackers are able to give their young a head start on life. Rather than waiting for spring thaws to bring green shoots and the food source of buzzing bugs, nutcrackers begin to nest in the heart of winter, while mountain storms still howl. The energy locked into pine nuts keeps them going strong. But that energy must be passed on to the young. In most corvids, only the female tends the nest. But to successfully warm their eggs in the chill mountain world, male nutcrackers also help. They develop what typically only females do– a brood patch, an unfeathered area on their breast, that allows their warm skin to nestle right against their precious eggs. Once the eggs hatch, the young are fed the pine nuts directly.

Clark’s Nutcracker Juvenile

Of course the effect of nutcrackers’ success at high-altitude living doesn’t stop at the tips of their bills or their black and white tails. Whitebark pines have co-evolved with the birds and become highly dependent on them for seed dispersal. Unlike many common pine seeds, whitebark nuts don’t grow “wings” to help spread them on the wind. They count on nutcracker wings, and it is estimated that nearly all tree-line whitebark pines are planted by nutcrackers.

Unfortunately, whitebark pines are declining throughout the west. Their cones are typically opened only by nutcrackers, squirrels, and fire, so fire suppression has inhibited their reproduction. Also, warmer temperatures are spreading pinebark beetles, which are turning expanses of pine forests into matchsticks–a rather unpleasant solution to overzealous fire suppression. Most powerfully for the whitebark pines, blister rust, a fungus imported from Europe, is killing five-needled pines on a massive scale.

Fortunately, we are successfully addressing some attacks on this subalpine ecosystem. Some trees show blister rust resistance, and foresters are working to get their seeds dispersed. In Germany, foresters are putting out acorn buckets for jays to plant, and similar efforts are contemplated for whitebark pines and nutcrackers. So far the nutcrackers in most of our mountains are maintaining their populations despite the whitebark pine decline, so they may well be of service in sustaining the high-elevation ecosystems.

Listen for a Nasal Beeping in Your Neighborhood Trees

By Dan Greaney on August 10, 2019 in BirdWords

White-breasted Nuthatch

In the bird world of the North State, there’s little that’s more common than a nuthatch. You’ll find more avian tonnage in winter refuges and flooded fields, and you’ll find brighter plumages and louder songsters. But nuthatches are year-round decorations in our native trees.

Red-breasted Nuthatch

You can scarcely go for a walk up in the fir belt without hearing the tiny red-breasted nuthatches. These little cuties may be tough to see as they pick small insects from high-up in the conifers, but their quick, nasal ankh-ankh-ankh-ankh-ankh calls can be relentless and ubiquitous as they keep in touch with one another.

Down in the oak woodlands, the larger, teacup-sized white-breasted nuthatches fill the woods with calls that are similar but a touch more mellow, slower and lower.

White-breasted Nuthatch

The white-breasteds are often easily viewable, as they usually forage not in twig-tip foliage but on the open expanse of exposed trunks and large limbs. Also helpful for viewing, the oaks are shorter than firs, and many will later lose their leaves. With their regular calling and white faces that stand out against dark trunks, white-breasted nuthatches are one of the most visible little birds in the trees. When flying away, they may flash more white at the corners of their tails. You may be able to see their blue-gray backs, and, in the males, their nape and crown darkened to a rich blue-black.

White-breasted Nuthatch

But it is nuthatch behavior that really stands out. Most birds are like us–our feet are down and our heads are up. But nuthatches give the world a different look. Their regular habit is to fly high and work their way down a trunk. They pick for insects in bark fissures, and the down-trunk approach gives them a view into crevices that woodpeckers and other gleaners miss. Perhaps that less common world view helps lead to their success. These nuthatches are widespread across North America.

Pygmy Nuthatch

Their visibility can be enhanced in your own yard, especially if nearby you have some of the big old oaks they favor. Nuthatches will frequent feeders, especially those offering sunflower seeds. Unlike finches and sparrows, they dine take-out style. They will select a seed and fly away with it. If you can follow their flight, you may see them wedge the seed into some bark, either for later consumption or to hold it there as they bang at it with their bills to “hatch the nut” out! They will nest in cavities of old limbs or in nesting boxes that you can place in your yard.

White-breasted Nuthatch Nestlings in Nest Box

Nuthatches lay a half dozen or more eggs each spring, and their populations have increased over the last fifty years. They are expected to remain regular winter residents of the North State, but are likely to move north for breeding as they deal with climate change.

Swift and Secret

By Dan Greaney on June 29, 2019 in BirdWords

Black Swift

Black swifts are birds of mystery. We know they’re fast, probably powering to over 100 mph. We know they’re fliers, apparently spending up to ten months a year in flight. But much that is known or speculated about them is based on only a few observations, so uncertainty is also part of our understanding.

Black Swift at Burney Falls photo courtesy Glen Tepke

Like the Redding eagles, black swifts seem comfortable, or at least unconcerned, with having people around; but unlike the eagles, their “around” doesn’t include downtown. They do their living in out-of-the-way places, and even there they are unobtrusive neighbors. They nest in dark crevices of waterfall or oceanside cliffs; they forage high above us, and never perch on wires or trees where we can see them; and they utterly neglect to announce themselves with colorful displays or loud songs. They are small, black-brown birds that flit by with the speed of their name, and their light chittering song is often lost to our ears in the roar of nearby water. They are variously reported as having stable local populations and as having declined 94% over the last fifty years.

Burney Falls

But here in the North State they give us this much: they nest at Burney Falls. Each spring, for longer than our history can testify, black swifts make their way to the torrent, where they build and repair nests in the protected nooks among braids of tumbling water. Working with mud and moss, they fashion a hand-sized crib, palm up to cradle their single egg. In the soggy damp of the falls, the egg will take four weeks to hatch, twice as long as most birds their size. Then, with continuing slow development, the chick will not fledge for another month and a half.

Black Swift on Nest photo courtesy of Julie Price

It is at nest-sites that we can best observe these wide-ranging birds. Both parents incubate and tend the young. There are reports of adults roosting near the nest while their mates warm the baby. But those are the only documented reports of these birds landing at all.

Swifts are in the family Apodidae, meaning those without feet. In fact, their feet and legs are reduced, capable of catching cliffside toeholds, but incapable of standing, perching upright, or walking. It is said that if they ever landed on the ground they would not be able to take off again. They go into flight by dropping from their cliff-hold.

Black Swifts at Burney Falls photo courtesy Glen Tepke

Once airborne, however, they are in their element. They zip through the air, often in loose flocks, catching and eating insects on the wing, often higher up than we can see them. They drink water by skimming open-billed at the surface of a lake or pool. They apparently mate on the wing, and almost certainly sleep in the air. Studies on oceanic frigatebirds show that some birds can sleep one hemisphere of the brain at a time–a sleep schedule that seems unappealing, but beats staying awake for ten months!

When young black swifts fledge, they have no trial flights. Most songbird fledglings flutter weakly and hide and rest, gradually building their flight muscles. But swifts are immediately on their way, catching insects and winging–where?

They will fledge in July. By September they are out of Shasta County. By mid-October they are out of the country. Until 2012 we could only guess where they went. That year researchers using ultra-light geolocators studied black swifts from Colorado. They learned that those swifts winter in the lowland rainforest of western Brazil, a land rich in vegetation and the flying insects these birds need.

Maybe our Burney Falls black swifts winter there, too. But we don’t know. They haven’t told us yet.