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The Little All-over Invisible Owl

By on February 29, 2020 in BirdWords

Northern Saw-whet Owl courtesy Ken Sobon

We all have our blind spots, but when the spots are small and secretive we might be forgiven them.  At Wintu Audubon’s general meeting last month, Ken Sobon, director of the Northern Saw-whet Owl Project, introduced attendees to a much overlooked little predator that could well be the most numerous owl in North America.

It’s not exactly invisible, but even avid bird watchers are unlikely to have seen this puffball.   Daytimes it hides away, roosting quietly in thick foliage, remaining still even as you pass right by.  At night you might hear it, especially if you get out into our local coniferous forests. This time of year males begin their long-running nocturnal too-too-too calls, which can beckon a female from half a mile or more away.  If interested, she carols back with her own songs–high squeaks or a rising wail that is music to his ears.  He may then sing and circle her many times before alighting at her side.

The male often shows her a cavity that he thinks will make a good nest–perhaps a hole carved in a snag by a large woodpecker, with a nearby meadow for hunting.  Of course, she seems to make the final decision on just where she will lay her half-dozen eggs. That nest will be her station for the roughly forty-five days of incubation and early child care.

Like raptors around the world, she begins incubating as soon as the first egg is laid, so her young hatch not all at once, as chickens do, but over a period of a week or more.  If food is plentiful, all the young may survive; the male may even support two mates and two nests. If food is scarce, however, only the older siblings are apt to successfully fledge.

He hunts every night.  From a low perch in the quiet of the forest, he listens for the rustling of small rodents, and then swoops down.  He kills with the piercing clutch of his talons. He is scarcely the size of a man’s fist, and the mice and voles he captures can easily weigh half as much as he does.  But he ferries the load to the nest where, if the eggs have not yet hatched, the delivery may serve as both a hot meal and left-overs for later.

After her youngest is two and a half weeks old, and the oldest is almost ready to start exploring nearby branches, the female will leave the nest and either assist in hunting for the young, or she may move on to find a new mate and nest a second time.  The male continues to feed the nestlings for at least another month.

Saw-whets span North America coast to coast.  Our locals appear to migrate along the west coast, but they freely travel east-west, too.  They nest in our forests and parts north, well into Canada, where they are apt to retreat if American forests continue to suffer as expected from climate disruption.

As for their name, it is another of their mysteries.  It supposedly recognizes a similarity in the sound of saw-sharpening and the owl’s vocalization, but that match eludes most of us.

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The Redding Christmas Bird Count: a History

By on January 25, 2020 in BirdWords, Christmas Bird Counts
Great-tailed Grackle Male

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

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.

Mourning Dove

Mourning Dove

These are just some of the trends the Redding Christmas Bird Count has documented.

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A Gentle Beauty

By on December 28, 2019 in BirdWords
Mourning Dove

Mourning Dove

As they say, it takes all kinds. That all-kindliness brings a variety of glories into the world. Some are brilliant, like orioles. Some are loud, like mockingbirds; or sing melodically, like finches, or raucously, like jays. Some just dignify life with a humble beauty and gentility. Consider mourning doves.

They don’t sparkle with rainbow colors. They dress in a soft gray-brown, adorned by just a few black dots and dashes, and, for the careful observer, tinges of peach and blue.

Mourning Dove

Nor do they flutter fancy plumes. Their feathers are smooth, gentling from head to tip of tail, unruffled. In flight their tails fan white edges. At take-off their wings whistle against the wind, an unvoiced call to their mates and perhaps a distraction to predators. But they flaunt no fancy flags.

Nor do mourning doves shout for attention like carnival barkers or buyers of computer screen pop-ups. They just coo a mellow refrain, the sorrowful song that gives them their name. Listen to that song: its apparent sadness sounds not so much like a complaint as an homage to beauty.

The doves are quintessential Americana, living all over the contiguous US. Like many other Americans, they do some seasonal travel, mostly north in summer and south in winter. They live in a variety of habitats, and like historical Yankees, they make do.

Mourning Dove Range

They thrive in fields with scattered trees, but they’ll make home in suburbia or deserts, too.

They enjoy a good meal, out-eating holiday revellers with daily consumption of 12-20% of their weight in seeds and grains. Don’t try that at home, or anywhere else!

Mourning Dove

They drink deeply, sucking in water without the need to tilt up robin-style for gravity’s assistance. If fresh water is not available, they will handle brackish.

Perhaps the rarest quality of mourning doves is in how they feed their nestlings, known as squabs. In a simple nest, just a flimsy platter of twigs, the mother dove lays two eggs. When the helpless squabs hatch two weeks later, feeding must begin. But tiny seeds do not carry to a nest as readily as insects, nor do they have the same nutrient quality, nor can squabs digest them. The solution?– Both parents have crops, and hormonal changes cause their crops to switch from food storage to lactation a couple days before the young hatch. This “crop-milk” consists of sloughed-off cells from the crop lining, and, like mammalian milk, it is high in protein, fat, and antibodies–just what the babies need. Both parents feed this milk, mouth to mouth, to their young newborns.

In all the bird world, only doves and pigeons, flamingoes, and male emperor penguins (the females are away feeding in the ocean when emperors hatch) have evolved the capacity to create crop milk.

Mourning Dove

With their nutritious jump on life, and up to six clutches per year in their varied habitats, mourning doves nearly keep pace with not just the losses that all birds of our time face, but the high ingestion of lead pellets to which grain-eaters are vulnerable, and an annual hunt of twenty million. They have declined only 15% in the last half century, a terrible statistic, but better than the 50% decline of field birds in general.

Mourning Dove

And through it all, these unassuming doves sustain a special place in human lore. Not flashy, but vital, they remain a gentle and enduring symbol of peace, a beauty we can all appreciate.

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Gold Rush Into Shasta County

By on November 30, 2019 in BirdWords
Common Goldeneye Pair

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

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

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

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.

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Northstate Giving Tuesday

By on November 21, 2019 in Events

In an increasingly divided world, GivingTuesday represents a new global ritual based in joy and hope, proving that acts of kindness and goodwill can transcend country, race, religion and political ideals, and create connections between people.

GivingTuesday, taking place December 3rd, is a global day of giving that harnesses the collective power of individuals, communities and organizations to encourage giving and to celebrate generosity worldwide. Every year, on GivingTuesday, millions of people across the globe mobilize to show up, give back, and change their communities. The goal is to create a massive wave of generosity that lasts well beyond that day, and touches every person on the planet.

Those who are interested in joining Wintu Audubon Society’s GivingTuesday initiative can visit right now at https://www.northstategives.org/wintuaudubon

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