Late July, and you may see no more of Cliff Swallows than their orange rumps, heading south.
For a couple of months they have eddied around North State bridges like summer snowflakes. But now nesting is done. Roomfuls of flying insects have been caught and turned into feathers and warm heartbeats. Winter remains distant, so young birds and vagrant souls may roam with no sense of urgency.
But the flocks will tend south, to the clime that history tells them is home. For cliff swallows this is deep into South America, a 6000 mile flight to where they may be seen hawking insects over Argentinian grasslands.
Throughout most of North America, these are the swallows that build their gourd-shaped nests of mud, cemented under eaves, sills, and bridges. In Redding, they have long colonized the old Monolith at Turtle Bay. With recent developments, house sparrows have taken over those nests, and the swallows have moved to both the Sundial and Highway 44 bridges.
Architecture like the Sundial Bridge is a boon to cliff swallows. The bridge provides the ceilings and cornices where the birds can construct their nests beyond reach of terrestrial predators. The shoreline provides mud that the swallows can carry, one beakload at a time, to form their crèches. The river also hosts its salmon-fest of insects, which the swirling clouds of swallows catch in flight to feed their young.
Similar conditions made them and the Mission of San Juan Capistrano famous a century ago through the legend created by Fr. O’Sullivan, and recorded in his book Capistrano Nights:
One day, while walking through town, Father O’Sullivan saw a shopkeeper, broomstick in hand, knocking down the conically shaped mud swallow nests that were under the eaves of his shop. The birds were darting back and forth through the air squealing over the destruction of their homes.
“What in the world are you doing?” O’Sullivan asked.
“Why, these dirty birds are a nuisance and I am getting rid of them!” the shopkeeper responded.
“But where can they go?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” he replied, slashing away with his pole. “But they’ve no business here, destroying my property.”
Father O’Sullivan then said, “Come on swallows, I’ll give you shelter. Come to the Mission. There’s room enough there for all.”
The very next morning, Father O’Sullivan discovered the swallows busy building their nests outside Father Junípero Serra’s Church.
Since then, generations of tourists have marveled at the annual “Miracle of the Swallows.” Indeed, when 1990’s renovation cleaned out the nests and chased the swallows off, Capistrano undertook substantial efforts to coax the birds back.
Here in the North State our development has created our own “Miracle of the Swallows.” Their nesting success allows the hope that we will see them swirling here again each spring!
Brown-headed Cowbird Male photo courtesy David Bogener
Some folks have difficulty maintaining a charitable attitude toward cowbirds, and it’s an understandable challenge.
The birds aren’t especially ugly or messy or anything like that. You can see them herding with other blackbirds. They’re the slightly smaller ones—the females a muted mouse-gray, the males a glossy black with the brown heads that give them their name: brown-headed cowbirds.
Flapping overhead they cry a distinctive zeet-zeet-zeeet, rising on the third syllable. Or you may see several males at a treetop, chortling in the morning sun, or on a park lawn bowing to the females in spread-winged courtship.
Brown-headed Cowbirds in Courtship by Jan Malik CC
Formerly they followed bison, feeding on grains and insects that the grazers stirred up. Now they often associate with cattle, where they are joined by other blackbirds.
But bison were ramblers, and cowbirds wandered with them; and wandering is not conducive to child-rearing. Cowbirds adapted.
They learned to watch for available homes where they could leave their eggs for stable fostering. In as little as an open minute, a mother cowbird can lay her egg in another’s nest, preferably one where incubation has not yet begun. She may quickly devour an existing egg there, or, if some nestlings have already hatched, toss them out to die, promoting a new nesting attempt by the host with her own egg as the oldest. The cowbird story grows no less brutish from there.
House Finch nest with Brown-headed Cowbird Egg and Hatched Cowbird Chick
Often laid into nests with smaller eggs, cowbirds usually hatch first and bigger than their foster siblings. Scarcely functional themselves, they may, like their mothers, overtly push or yank their unfeathered nestmates over the edge to certain death. This behavior, however, is rare; cowbirds grow most quickly along with a couple nestmates. Their collective begging seems to motivate parental food deliveries, and the cowbird then uses its dominating bulk and gaping red mouth to gather the lion’s share. Its out-sized appetite can leave the smaller nestlings undernourished and weakling.
Brown-headed Cowbird chick being fed by Red-eyed Vireo
It’s a problem in the nest, and becomes a problem in whole bird communities. Today’s cattle and deforested land are more widespread than bison and prairies were, and cowbirds have expanded their range accordingly. In new lands they have found new species to raise their young. Many of the new hosts end up raising just a cowbird. The nest parasites survive; the hosts decline.
Brown-headed Cowbird chick being fed by Chickadee
Freed of the work of child-rearing, a cowbird can lay three dozen eggs or more every year, each in a separate nest. Some host species do not distinguish the cowbird egg from their own. Indeed, many cowbirds seem to specialize in particular hosts, mimicking the coloring of exactly those eggs.
Song Sparrow nest with Cowbird egg
Many species do, however, recognize the parasite egg. Larger birds are sometimes able to discard or puncture cowbird eggs and successfully raise their own. But this resistance is discouraged by cowbirds’ “mafia” behavior. Adult cowbirds are known to pillage nests from which their eggs have been removed.
Smaller birds avoid such bullying by being too small to throw the foreign egg out. Warblers often abandon their invaded nest and build a new one over it. But even if this second attempt is successful, it wastes springtime and reduces the number of clutches of their own that the warblers can hatch.
This apparent cowbird thuggery is, of course, not truly cruel, or rational or immoral at all; it is instinctive, and students of life can respect nature’s blind cleverness in devising its different ways to survive. However, overly successful parasitism is fatal, and although cowbirds have extended their range, their numbers have begun to follow the declines of their host species.
One of the best things about our annual Lassen Park campout is that we get to see several species of birds that are rarely, if ever, seen in the valley. Many of those species also nest in the park. According to their website, Lassen Volcanic National Park provides habitat for approximately 216 species of birds in which 96 have been known to actually breed in the park.
For those of you that have never been to Lassen Volcanic National Park, I thought I would post some photos I have taken inside the park of some of the bird and animal species we may encounter during our annual campout.
One of my favorite species is the Water Ouzel, more commonly known now as the American Dipper (Cinclus mexicanus). This is a photo I took at King’s Creek picnic area of an adult feeding its nestlings. Click on photos for full sized images.
and a short video of the nestlings begging for food and being fed.
Of course, LVNP has a great variety of woodpeckers on their bird list, eight of them known to nest in the area, including the White-headed Woodpecker (Picoides albolarvatus.) This is a male with some treats for the youngsters.
and a short video of the adults feeding the nestling and drumming.
We will hopefully see the rare Black-backed Woodpecker (Picoides arcticus) as well.
and maybe hear it drum!
There are Pileated Woodpeckers (Dryocopus pileatus) that hang out just adjacent to our campground in an old burn.
And Red-breasted Sapsuckers (Sphyrapicus ruber) are common.
Near Summit Lake we have been able to witness Williamson’s Sapsuckers (Sphyrapicus thyroideus) raising their young in a snag near the campground. The handsome male…
and the not as recognizable female.
Another of my favorite Lassen Park nesting birds is the Brown Creeper (Certhia americana)…
This is a video of the nesting activity of a pair of Brown Creepers at Summit Lake. Their nest is concealed in the narrow space behind loose bark on a tree.
Mountain Chickadees (Poecile sclateri) are one of the many secondary cavity nesters at the park. This is a nestling waiting to be fed at Hat Lake.
Also seen at Hat Creek, Red-breasted Nuthatches (Sitta canadensis) tending their nestlings.
And the video accompaniment.
Other secondary cavity nesters at the park include the Pygmy Nuthatch (Sitta pygmaea)…
the Mountain Bluebird (Sialia currucoides), the male seen here…
and the Bufflehead (Bucephala albeola).
Lassen Volcanic National Park is one of the few places that this incredible cavity nesting duck breeds in Northern California.
This is a video of a female Bufflehead searching Manzanita Lake for a cavity to nest in for the following nesting season. She is in a snag, at least forty feet up!
American Coots (Fulica americana) raise their young at the park also. If you have never seen a American Coot chick, Manzanita Lake is a good spot to find them.
Since we’re checking out the youngsters of the park, I found this juvenile Clark’s Nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana) at Bumpass Hell. Note the remaining flesh colored gape below the eye at the corner of the beak.
Other species that nest at the park include the Cassin’s Finch (Carpodacus cassinii). The male seen here…
and the female.
You would be hard pressed to miss the boisterous Steller’s Jay (Cyanocitta stelleri)
But if you are really lucky, you might find a young Spotted Sandpiper (Actitis macularius) at Hat Lake!
You gotta see this…
Or a Green-tailed Towhee (Pipilo maculatus) that also nests here.
Of course there are more than just birds at Lassen Volcanic National Park. The park is home to approximately 57 species of mammals ranging is size from the tiny shrew to the North American black bear. We are most likely to see the Golden-mantled Ground Squirrel (Callospermophilus lateralis)…
the American Pika (Ochotona princeps)…
and the Yellow-bellied Marmot (Marmota flaviventris).
I hope this post intrigues you enough to consider joining us this year at Lassen Volcanic National Park for our 2018 annual campout. As always we will be camping with our friends and fellow Audubon members from other Northern California chapters. As with all of our activities, the Lassen Park Campout is posted on our calendar for more information. You are welcome to campout beginning Friday, July 27th, anytime past noon, or drive up Saturday morning to join us for the hike around Manzanita Lake.
Want more information on Lassen Volcanic National Park? Visit their website! And here is an interactive map of the park.
Birds can’t vote, and they shouldn’t. They don’t study the issues.
If they could, however, they probably wouldn’t get too worked up over much of it. They mostly embrace the migrant lifestyle, so immigration isn’t a concern. Cutting Medicare and Social Security to fund tax cuts wouldn’t bother them; after all, they’re not slated to get Medicare or Social Security anyway. As for civil rights in general—well, people may aspire to things like kindness and decency, but birds, honestly, are more known for things like hen-pecking than human compassion or civility.
But if they could understand the issues rather than only suffer them, there’s one area in which birds would likely vote as a fairly united bloc. They’d vote for a healthy environment.
Birds would vote to test chemicals for toxicity. Like humans, birds start gathering toxins in utero. Adults in the US contain over 250 synthetic chemicals, new to the world, in our tissues and fluids, entering us from food, furniture, carpet, clothing, and environmental effluent, through our mouths, lungs, and skin; 70,000 more synthetics are on the market, and we imbibe them in ever-increasing dosages. Current law requires testing for carcinogenic effects only if there is evidence of potential harm, and the EPA is given only 90 days to find that harm. Cancer doesn’t work that fast. But if birds could understand the issue, they would object to this bird-brained process and the 80 million of their feathered kin killed by poisons each year. They would likely vote for synthetic chemicals to be held off the market until there was reasonable assurance that they were safe.
Birds would vote for clean water, too. They need it for healthy food supplies, drinking, and for places to swim. But government powers are reverting to Cleveland-River-on-Fire policies, trying to allow more toxic discharges into water supplies, redefining pesticides as nonpollutants, discontinuing monitoring of toxic discharges so that voters are less aware of the poisoning, and suppressing existing studies that, as the White House recently noted, would be a “public relations nightmare.” Birds with understanding would recognize that gutters run to creeks, to rivers, to all of us, and would want to protect all the waters of the US. They would know that we—birds, people, and trees, now and for our children—rely on clean water.
Clean air would also be a priority. Birds process oxygen even more rapidly than incumbent congressmen do, and those incumbents’ efforts to allow vehicles and industry to dump more mercury, benzene, and nitrous oxides into the air will most emphatically harm the lungs of fast breathers like birds and children.
Birds would also seek to protect grasslands and forests from development and destructive extraction practices. In the last 50 years, American forests have lost a quarter of their birds, and grasslands half. Past Farm Bill provisions have shown promise in curtailing habitat loss, but the current bill in congress allows increased toxic dumping.
And perhaps most emphatically, birds would vote to curb the craziness of climate change. They would recognize that the problems are devastating, with most of their kin expected to lose most of their seasonal range within the lifetime of today’s children; and that there is no good reason to exacerbate droughts, fires, and floods when clean fuels are available if people choose them.
The birds might recognize that they cannot make lifestyle changes or government changes, but they might hope that their more intelligent North American companions will.
McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park sits on the eastern edge of the Cascade Range between two active volcanoes, Mount Shasta and Lassen Peak. The Cascade Range, part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, extends from Northern California to Southern British Columbia.
The park’s landscape was created by volcanic activity as well as erosion from weather and streams. This volcanic region is covered by black volcanic rock known as basalt. Created over a million years ago, the layered, porous basalt retains rainwater and snow melt forming huge subterranean rivers and reservoirs. One of these underground aquifers feeds Burney Creek and in turn Burney Falls, giving it a consistent flow of over 100 million gallons a day all year long.
Undoubtedly one of the most interesting aspects of Burney Falls for birders is that it is one of the few locations in California where nesting Black Swifts (Cypseloides niger) can be found.
Photo from Wikipedia Commons taken by Terry Gray
Even though the Black Swift occurs widely throughout western North America in summer, with its breeding range extending as far north as southeastern Alaska, as far east as central Colorado, and south through Mexico and Central America to Costa Rica, with additional populations in the West Indies, only about 80 specific nesting localities have been documented1.
The Black Swift is considered a Species of Special Concern in California. Even though the overall breeding range remains largely unchanged from that in the 1940’s, the entire coastal population has been in recent severe decline. The entire California population appears to be composed of perhaps 200 pairs at 40 to 45 sites2.
Fortunately, Black Swifts have high nest site fidelity and traditional nest-site use by swifts is common. Most Black Swift nest sites are regularly, if not always, occupied year after year though the recent declines in the coastal populations has been a mystery.
McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park offers close viewing of these birds as well as interpretive signs throughout the park.
All of the following photos of Black Swifts were taken at Burney Falls by Glen Tepke who graciously gave me permission to use them (click on photos for full sized images).
Fortunately for me the Burney Falls Black Swift contingent consists of five to twenty pairs annually2. They can usually be seen foraging above the falls in the morning.
When I was there the first Black Swift I spotted was above the highest part of the falls heading down stream. It was obviously foraging on flying insects as it maneuvered through the air like a giant swallow with quick turns at the end of smooth arcing flights.
Apparently Black Swifts are in continuous flight when awake except when at or near the nest. I was closely observing this particular bird as it appeared and disappeared from my view until, all of a sudden, it appeared much lower and, banking down into the gorge, disappeared behind the falls into a small nest cave about a foot or two across.
These nest caves are described as “a niche on sheer rock cliffs, shaded and bathed in mist from the frigid splash of a nearby cascade often behind a rushing torrent of falling water and abundant spray1.”
This photo shows the location of the nest in relation to the full face of the falls.
Moss is the primary and sometimes only component used as nesting material by the Black Swift in inland locations. Pairs will also reuse the same nest in consecutive years, adding only a small amount of material to the nest.
The ecological requirements for Black Swifts to breed restrict them to a very limited supply of nesting locations.
Plus the fact that they only lay one egg per season which is incubated for about four weeks and the chicks don’t fledge for another fifty days gives you some notion as to why these birds are a Species of Special Concern.
This Black Swift with the white feather tips, photographed by Glen on the same day as the others above (July 5th), could be a juvenile or adult female but considering that they don’t usually begin nesting until the middle of May, it is most probably an adult female.
Of course Black Swifts are not the only reason to visit McArthur-Burney Memorial State Park. Over 130 bird species have been observed on the five miles of hiking trails that wind through evergreen and hardwood forests. The Pacific Crest Trail also passes through the park.
Burney Creek Trail follows Burney Creek through a forest of ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, incense cedar and a variety of oaks where American Dipper, White-headed and Pileated Woodpeckers, Red-breasted Sapsucker, Hermit, Black-throated Gray, McGillivray’s, Wilson’s, Nashville, Yellow-rumped and Yellow Warblers, Western Tanager, Cassin’s Vireo, Western Wood-Pewee, Evening Grosbeak, Steller’s Jay, Belted Kingfisher, Northern Flicker, Mountain Chickadee, Common Raven, Red-breasted and Pygmy Nuthatch, Brown Creeper, and Osprey can be seen, just to name a few.
A little over a mile from the falls, Burney Creek Trail terminates at a peninsula separating Burney Creek Cove from the main body of Lake Britton (see map above). This part of Lake Britton is actually part of the park and includes a boat launch facility at the cove and a sandy beach and swimming area on the lake.
Birds observed here include Common Merganser, Pied-billed, Western and Clark’s Grebes, Double-crested Cormorant, Great Blue Heron, Canada Goose, Bald and Golden Eagle, Red-tailed Hawk and Common Loon.
Nesting Purple Martins can also be found on the northwestern side of the lake and Vaux’s Swifts can be seen above the tree tops over the highway outside the park.
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