Author Archive | Larry Jordan

Sapsuckers!

By Larry Jordan on January 20, 2024 in Birds

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker

There are about 200 species of woodpecker in the world. Twenty-three of those species are native to the United States, but only three are designated “sapsuckers.” These three were originally treated as forms of one species, the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker. In 1983 they were split into separate species. Lucky for us, even though the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker is an eastern bird, we occasionally find them here in Shasta County. This bird was found at Lema Ranch, one of our local birding hotspots. Note the two different types of holes in the bark. The large, rectangular wells must be continually maintained for sap to flow and the bird licks the sap from the hole.

The smaller round holes placed in horizontal rows are probed by the bird inserting it’s beak to retrieve the sap. This Red-breasted Sapsucker probing these small holes with its beak is probably the most often seen here in the northstate.

This Red-breasted Sapsucker was working on the largest trunk of a lilac bush in our yard.

The Red-naped Sapsucker can be a bit harder to find as they don’t have a large presence in California, even though they nest in the far northeastern corner of the state and we found this one nesting in Lassen National Park. This sapsucker has a black stripe along the side of his head, bordered by 2 white stripes and a red nape.

Unlike the Red-breasted Sapsucker, the male Red-naped Sapsucker sports a red neck over a black bib. The female chin and upper throat may be white and lower throat red.

Confusing some folks not familiar with the Williamson’s Sapsucker is the fact that the male and female look like different species. The male is very distinctive with white wing coverts and rump. Two white stripes on the face, one above and one below the eye, contrasting strongly with iridescent black upperparts, head, and breast with a red patch on the chin and upper throat, and a yellow belly.

With a fleeting glimpse the female has been mistaken for a Northern Flicker. She has a brownish head, with heavily barred wings, flanks, and upperparts of white, brown, and black as well as a yellow belly and white rump. This is the female bringing insects to the nest.

Sapsuckers don’t only feed on sap, they also consume berries and large numbers of ants and other insects, especially once young hatch. This is a shot of the nestling.

Also, sapsuckers aren’t the only birds that feed from sap wells …

A pair of yellow-bellied sapsuckers collecting insects at sap wells to feed their young.

The Dark-eyed Junco (or as some folks call it, the Snowbird)

By Larry Jordan on January 13, 2024 in Birds

It’s Dark-eyed Junco season! According to Cornell Lab of Ornithology, this “snowbird” is one of the most common and familiar North American passerines. They usually show up in Shasta County in November and grow in number until they disappear in March, except for higher elevations like Lassen Volcanic National Park. We spotted a pair of juncos with a juvenile at Manzanita Lake in July last year during our annual campout!

As you can see from this map, the Dark-eyed Junco appears throughout the United States and Canada, and even spills over into northern Mexico. A large number breed in the far North but many reside year-round in the western United States.

One way to identify the Dark-eyed Junco from a distance, even if they are flying around, is their conspicuous white outer tail feathers. These photos are from Miles and Teresa Tuffli who run the bird blog “I’m Birding Right Now“. They graciously gave me permission to use their DEJU tail feather photos.

Even this juvenile Dark-eyed Junco already has white outer tail feathers!

There are five recognized sub-species of Dark-eyed Juncos, Slate-colored, Oregon, Gray-headed, White-winged, and Guadalupe. The most common here in Shasta County is the “Oregon” subspecies, followed by the Slate-colored Dark-eyed Junco. This is a typical Oregon Junco similar to the photo at the top of the post but most likely a female.

And a different image of a female Oregon Dark-eyed Junco.

Here are a few images of the more rare (in our area) Slate-colored Dark-eyed Junco…

and another.

We love these Dark-eyed Juncos that visit us every winter. Keep an eye out for those rarer sub-species. You never know when you might find a rare Junco in our midst!

Scrub-Jay: The Elegant Bully

By Larry Jordan on May 3, 2023 in BirdWords

California Scrub-Jay

California Scrub-jays are the West Coast, lower-altitude version of the widespread jay tribe, which itself is part of the corvid family, the global group that includes crows, magpies, and similar large-billed, intelligent, opportunistic birds. Our scrub-jays are oak woodland specialists.

Like most jays in North America, the California Scrub-jay wears a lot of blue–although, following the geography of European colonization, only the Eastern bird wears the name “Blue Jay.” Our scrub-jay has a rounded head, not crested, and a blue topside with a partial necklace extending into pale gray underparts; it’s a well-dressed, thoroughly attractive bird. The jays are imposing–large, bold, and inquisitive. They often patrol their neighborhoods in brash family gangs.

Their bills are particularly hefty, allowing the versatility to acquire and eat a range of foods–fruits, nuts, and a variety of meats. Those formidable bills empower a proprietary demeanor, and seem to intimidate smaller birds, who scatter from feeders when the scrub-jays arrive and watch helplessly when the larger birds dine on their eggs or nestlings. The unstated threat that the scrub-jay’s powerful bill poses seems to reprise the Pancho and Lefty lyric: He wore his gun outside his pants, for all the honest world to feel. They are wild animals, after all, and live by a brutal code.

Some steal the acorns their companions have hidden for winter consumption. That behavior in turn seems to affect their social attitude. Scrub-jay thieves, like those among their cousin crows and other species, seem suspicious; they wait to hide their own acorns until they are alone and unobserved.

With their mates the scrub-jays appear reliable. Nearly 90% of them remain paired from one year to the next. Both adults help build their nest, and they often feed each other as well as their young.

Come winter they typically gang up and hold their territories, often with loud sorties of spread-winged flight through the neighborhood understory. Their flocking, their size and robust demeanor, their power and assertiveness, all seem to keep the scrub-jays going. Until the 1930’s California fruit and nut growers, thinking it would protect their crops, organized large-scale shoots of these birds. Still, the scrub-jays have persisted, and maintain a stable population.

Osprey are Awesome!

By Larry Jordan on June 26, 2021 in BirdWords

Osprey Adult with Nestlings Underwing

The Osprey, aka fish hawk, is a bird of prey with some very special adaptations giving them their own taxonomic genus, Pandion and family, Pandionidae. Their outer toes, like those of owls, are reversible, allowing them to grasp their prey with two toes in front and two behind. Osprey toes also have sharp spicules on their lower surface allowing them to grasp slippery fish. They are the only raptor that plunge-dives feet first for live fish, which account for over 99% of their diet.

Osprey Diving For Fish courtesy of Teddy Llovet, Flickr Creative Commons

Like the Bald Eagle, Osprey populations suffered major declines largely due to the use of DDT in the 1950s and 60s. Osprey studies provided key evidence in court to block continued use of persistent pesticides, and Osprey populations recovered rapidly thereafter. Although small pockets of contamination remain, their historic range has greatly expanded and many populations in Canada and the United States now exceed historical numbers, owing to a cleaner environment, increasingly available artificial nest sites, and this bird’s ability to tolerate human activity near its nests. Now Osprey are the second most widely distributed raptor species, after the Peregrine Falcon, found in temperate and tropical regions of all continents, except Antarctica.

Osprey Building Nest at Shasta Dam

Being a predominately fish eating raptor, they nest near fresh or salt water, building large stick nests historically atop trees, rocky cliffs, and promontories. However, predation, loss of trees, and development of shorelines have been driving forces of Osprey shifting their nesting preferences to an array of artificial sites like channel markers in harbors and busy waterways; towers for radio, cell phone, and utility lines; and platforms erected exclusively for the species.

Osprey On Nest Platform

Shasta County is blessed, having many nesting locations for Osprey, several of them being man-made platforms. There was a pair of Osprey that built a nest atop the soccer field lights at Anderson River Park for many years. Unfortunately, the lamps in that light array had to be replaced every so often which usually caused damage to the nest. Wintu Audubon Society and the late Karen Scheuermann, wildlife rehabber of Tehama Wild Care, coordinated with the City of Anderson to install a permanent nesting platform atop that light stand to allow the Osprey to nest there in the future without being disturbed.

Osprey are usually monogamous and mate for life. They also show high fidelity to successful nest sights. We are pleased to announce that a pair of Osprey have indeed accepted our nest platform at the Anderson River Park soccer field and are currently raising two young! In the coming weeks we will be mounting a plague on the light pole to commemorate this coordinated and successful effort to advance the continued breeding success of this beautiful raptor.

Osprey Adult with Nestling at Anderson River Park, June 17, 2021

The Redding Christmas Bird Count: a History

By Larry Jordan on January 25, 2020 in BirdWords, Christmas Bird Counts

Great-tailed Grackle

Up through the 19th century many folks in this country celebrated the Christmas season in “side hunts” in which they competed at how many birds they could kill, regardless of whether they had any use for the carcasses and of whether the birds were beneficial, beautiful, or rare. Ornithologists and bird watchers were appalled at the slaughter. In December 1900, Frank Chapman an early officer in the nascent Audubon Society proposed a new holiday tradition—a “Christmas Bird Census” that would count birds during the holidays rather than hunt them. On Christmas Day of that year 27 birders took part in 25 places in the United States and Canada. Since then participation has grown every year, now exceeding 80,000 people in 2,400 locations in 17 countries.

Bird Hunting

Shasta County participation, conducted by the Lassen Bird Club, began briefly in the late 1950’s but ended when the club folded in 1967. The first project of the newly formed Wintu Chapter of the National Audubon Society was the Christmas Bird Count in 1975. It was soon followed by a Count in Fall River Valley, Red Bluff and more recently Anderson. All Counts follow a standard protocol. The count is performed any day from December 14 to January 5 within “a count circle” with a diameter of 15 miles. The Redding Count is centered just north of Keswick Dam and extends north to Shasta Dam, south to Clear Creek, west to Oak Bottom Marina on Whiskeytown Lake, and east to Shasta College. It is designed to include a variety of habitats, open water, valley grasslands, oak woodlands, brush lands and conifer forest–and, of course, an increasing portion of urban and suburban habitat. The circle is divided into 10 sectors with a team leader assigned to each sector. Teams count from dawn to dusk rain or shine every bird they see by species. Participation is open to all and is free of charge. At the end of the day participants gather at a local restaurant for a no-host dinner and a compilation of the results. Learning the surprise findings of other teams is fun and emphasizes the old adage that “birds are where you find them” not always where you expect them.

The results are by no means as accurate as a human census. The experience of the birders, the weather, and the changing quality of locations examined, all influence both species identification and number of individuals. Not all of the area in the count circle is covered, and not every bird along the route is seen or identified. Big flocks can’t be counted precisely. Also, telling whether a bird has been counted twice can be difficult. A Bald Eagle in flight over the count circle may be counted by several teams, whereas only a fraction of the White-crowned Sparrows in the roadside bushes might be counted. The strength of the results lies in the long-term trends in species numbers, recognizing that the habits of birds and people remain the only constant.

Bald Eagle in flight photo courtesy Andy Morffew

Our results are sent to the National Audubon Society that along with other organizations uses data collected in this long-running wildlife census to assess the health of bird populations, and to help guide conservation action. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has included Audubon’s climate change work from CBC data as one of 26 indicators of climate change in their 2012 report.

Western Meadowlark

Now with 45 years of Christmas Bird Counts here in central Shasta County several clear trends are apparent. As expected, urban development within the count circle has reduced the habitat available for Western Meadowlarks and California Thrashers. The range expansion of Great-tailed Grackles, originating from the southeastern U.S., reached the Redding Area in 2010 and now has several established sites at Lema Ranch and the Clover Creek Preserve. The Common Raven has made a strong move into the valley and downtown Redding beginning in 2007. You can now see them on light poles along busy streets. The Red-shouldered Hawk habitat in central Shasta County historically was confined to riparian vegetation along the Sacramento River. Since 1997 it has expanded its range and can be found on farms and rural subdivisions throughout the valley. Perhaps most spectacularly, the Eurasian Collared-dove arrived in the Redding area in 2008 and is now well-established at about 60 individuals throughout Redding neighborhoods. You are probably aware of its tiresome hooting, a pushier sound than the coo of our native Mourning Doves.