Archive | BirdWords

BirdWords: Wood Ducks

By Larry Jordan on January 23, 2016 in BirdWords

Wood Duck Female photo courtesy of David Bogener

For those who observe them, it’s small wonder that six of the new gifts offered in The Twelve Days of Christmas are birds! Not mentioned, however, are some of our most stunning winter birds, the ducks.

Wood ducks are the kings of color— green, blue, chestnut, and goldenrod, their beaks and eyes in two shades of vermilion, all set off with bold blacks and whites and decorative plumes and pony tails. The hen ducks are less outlandish, dressed mostly in their camouflage grays, but still sporting a splash of dark aquamarine and a delicate white eye-ring that thins into a teardrop behind the eye.

As their name suggests, wood ducks favor wooded byways. They spend the winter in small flocks, often with just a few friends, resting and feeding in quiet water. They eat mostly plant material—seeds, acorns, berries, and weeds—gathered either in the water or on land. Along about January they pair up. Courting involves mutual preening, and shrill whistles and stretched wing-and-tail dance moves from the male.

Then in early spring the hen wood duck, like only a handful of other duck species, chooses a cavity in a tree to make her nest. She is far too big for woodpecker holes, so she will often lay her 10-15 eggs in the rotted out scar of a fallen branch, usually 30-65 feet up. She will prefer to reuse successful nest sites from prior years. Other passing hens may dump more eggs into her nest, and she will incubate and raise them all.

Once hatched, day-old ducklings face immediate challenges. If their nest-hole is deep in a tree trunk, they might need to climb vertically many feet, up to fifteen, to reach their nest entrance. But they have clawed toes and instinct to help them out. Once reaching the entrance they blithely drop to the ground outside. It’s a long fall but doesn’t seem to faze them. They pop right up and begin to follow their mother to the nearest water, a hike that may be over a mile on their little duckling legs.

In truth, things have gotten easier for wood ducklings. With extensive tree-clearing in the late 1800’s wood duck numbers plummeted. But the ducks readily accepted human-made nesting boxes, and now they are thriving. Most nesting boxes are close to the ground, so ducklings might drop eight feet instead of their historical fifty.

Wood ducks live year-round in wet woodlands along the West Coast and throughout the Eastern US, and will winter in Mexico and nest all along the US/Canada border. Here in the North State look for them in quiet woodland waterways such as those of Battle Creek Wildlife Refuge, Anderson River Park, and Turtle Bay.

Our Education chair Dan Greaney writes for the Wintu Audubon Society and wrote this post.

The Hoarders: Birds That Store Food

By Larry Jordan on November 7, 2015 in BirdWords

Acorn Woodpecker Granary

Last month in the Birdwords column we heard about the yellow-billed magpie and its relatives in the crow (or corvid) family. Birds in that group store food away for later, also known as caching. That trait also shows up in many other species that are not related to the corvids – or to each other either.

You may see several of our common backyard birds visiting your feeders too frequently to be eating all that bounty on the spot. Both the perky little gray birds with the jaunty crest – the oak titmouse; and the sleek white, gray and black tree-clinger – the white-breasted nuthatch – can be observed doing this. In both species, a bird will carefully select a seed – often discarding ones that don’t meet its standards – and dart off to lodge the seed firmly in a crevice in the bark of a nearby tree. Studies have shown that they have remarkable memories as to where their stashes are located. In the black-capped chickadee, a close cousin of our oak titmouse, it has been found that the structures in the brain involved in memory are more highly developed than in non-caching species – although I don’t think the question has been answered as to which came first: the behavior or the brain modification.

Among the woodpeckers, there are several species that hoard food – most notably, the acorn woodpecker. If you look around, you are bound to see trees with many small holes excavated by acorn woodpeckers. Each hole was made to accommodate a single acorn. These are called granary trees. To the chagrin of ranchers, these birds don’t limit themselves to trees but will also puncture fence posts and barn walls. I’ve even seen power poles used as granaries.

Acorn woodpeckers are togetherness birds – they form a colony of a number of individuals to fill and use their granaries. They even nest communally – a behavior not seen in other woodpeckers, in which a pair will nest alone. The granaries are vigorously defended. Acorn woodpeckers go on red alert if a western scrub jay comes near. The jay is definitely not above conducting a raid if a granary is left unguarded, so the potential thief must be chased away.
The acorn woodpeckers’ acorns are strictly for their own benefit. However, various species of jays inadvertently aid the oak trees as well. They hide acorns by burying them in the ground. A certain percentage of the seeds don’t get retrieved and eaten before they have germinated and sprouted into baby trees. Young oak trees can’t grow in the shade of a parent tree, so by” planting” them elsewhere, the jays help regenerate and spread the oak forest.

A botanist noticed this connection and did some mapping. If he superimposed the areas of the world where various species of jays live over a map of the occurrence of all the oak forests of the world a remarkable pattern emerged. There were some places that had jays but no oaks – but there were no oaks where there were no jays. So, our familiar pesky western scrub jay is actually a forester!

You may have noticed this year’s acorn crop has been a good one. Keep your eyes open as the cooler days of autumn spur our avian friends to lay in their supplies for winter!

Yellow-billed Magpies

By Larry Jordan on October 17, 2015 in BirdWords

Yellow-billed Magpie photo by David Bogener

Endemic. It means they live nowhere else in the world–and we’re lucky enough to have a beautiful California endemic right here!

Yellow-billed magpies live in a swath from Redding down to Santa Barbara. They are seldom seen away from the scattered large oaks of that stretch, and never seen outside the state, where they leave the turf to their black-billed relatives.

The only thing not beautiful about these birds is their voice, a chatter variably squeaky and raspy. But visually, from yellow bill to long, graceful tail, they are striking. Clean white shoulders and belly offset their silky black feathering, which in good light shines with a deep cerulean blue. Their wingbeat, for a bird as tough as magpies, has a gossamer flow to it. If a group of crows is called a murder, we should speak of a waltz of magpies! And they look at you as if they know what they’re doing—as well they might.

Magpies, jays, and crows are part of a family of birds known as corvids. Like people, corvids usually live in social groups—not synchronized flocks, but neighborhoods of individuals. Also like people, they can physically manipulate their environment—people with opposable thumbs, corvids with long, hefty, all-purpose bills. These physical and social characteristics seem to promote problem-solving in creatures as varied as parrots, wolves, dolphins, and apes.

Corvid studies have shown these birds to far surpass Harvard students in remembering where they have hidden acorns. But their thinking gets more complex, too. Crows—much more studied than magpies–are socially and mechanically adept. Those who have pilfered other crows’ acorn stash will bury the food but then re-hide it when their chums aren’t looking! As mechanical engineers, they have replicated Aesop’s old fable—not only getting a drink by dropping pebbles in a vase to raise the water level, but dropping pebbles to raise a floating piece of meat, and declining to drop pebbles to retrieve the meat in a vase half-filled with sand instead of water.

Alas, corvid intelligence cannot solve all problems. West Nile virus has hit these birds particularly hard, and magpies show almost no development of resistance. I very rarely see them on the Shasta College campus or at Lake Redding any more. Magpie families can still be seen at Kutras Pond and Anderson River Park. There they continue to prosper in the mix of tall oaks, open ground, and nearby water. They forage in the fields for bugs, seeds, lizards, or dropped sandwiches; they crack and eat acorns, and reportedly they will even pick insects off a deer’s back.
The oaks offer magpies elevated roosts and nesting sites, where they build their little towns of stick-and-mud nests with domed roofs. They line the interior with softer materials such as hair or grass, and there they raise their half-dozen nestlings each year.

But as for so many birds, a looming threat to those nestlings is climate change. Yellow-billed magpies are expected to lose over half their range by 2050. That’s a problem that neither corvid intelligence nor any other has yet resolved.

Turtle Bay – An in-town Treat

By Larry Jordan on October 17, 2015 in BirdWords

Cinnamon Teal Pair

Since water is fundamental to all life on Earth, rivers create particularly desirable ecosystems for people and many other species. In Redding, it makes for good bird-watching right here in town.

At Turtle Bay the Sacramento River offers an especially prosperous riparian habitat. Along the Sundial stretch the river runs briskly, with gravel bars that riffle the water, oxygenating it, supporting abundant aquatic insect life. These insects become food for salmon, trout and other fish that in turn feed ospreys and cormorants, gulls, turkey vultures, kingfishers, fish-eating ducks such as mergansers, several species of grebes, and of course our famous eagles.

Many birds bypass the fish and eat the bugs directly. In winter, ducks from the high arctic and the Great Plains pothole country—golden-eyes, buffleheads, and ruddy ducks—along with the more local wood ducks and occasional scoters sheltering inland from the stormy ocean—gather for the Good Life of clean water and plenty of insects and snails. In spring, prolific hatches of aquatic insects provide food not just in the water but over it, protein and calories for cliff swallows up from South America, who nest colonially under the bridges and snatch winged breakfast for both themselves and their young.

Downriver, around the bend, the riverflow is broken into quieter bays and side channels that offer resting places for numerous species. There, along with Canada geese, more ducks of winter—mallards, gadwall, ring-necked ducks, and sometimes teal, shovelers, pintails, and canvasbacks—nibble at the pond plants, fattening up for the next spring’s long flights and nesting season.

Wading birds hunt the shorelines year round. Great blue herons, egrets, killdeer, yellowlegs, snipe, and spotted sandpipers stalk and snatch fish and invertebrates at the water’s edge.

Brush along the banks and around river backwaters provides homes for song sparrows, bushtits, and towhees, and vital feeding corridors for migrating warblers.

Above the brush, cottonwood trees create a spreading canopy for nesting and feeding. This riparian wood, especially in dead trees, is soft, so Nuttall’s and Downy woodpeckers readily excavate numerous nesting cavities, used in spring by bluebirds, titmice, nuthatches, wrens, tree swallows, and ash-throated flycatchers. The trees’ leafy twig-ends can hold the rocking cradles of orioles. Heavier branches form the foundations for robin nests, not to mention osprey and eagle eyries.

The Turtle Bay cliffs offer nesting to a pair of peregrine falcons, and merlins will appropriate the nests of other birds. These predators can prosper because the smaller birds they eat are so abundant.
It’s a rich little jewel, here in the heart of town, a gem connected to others by the flowing river that makes it all possible.

Wintu Audubon offers walks at Turtle Bay on the first Saturday of every month, meeting at 9am at the concrete monolith.

The Plight of Cavity Nesting Birds

By Larry Jordan on July 1, 2015 in BirdWords

Western Bluebird Nestlings Day 1

Some eighty-five species of North American birds excavate nesting holes (primary cavity nesters), use cavities resulting from decay, or use holes created by other species (secondary cavity nesters) in dead or deteriorating trees. Over half of those species may be encountered here in Northern California.

These deteriorating trees, commonly called snags, have often been considered undesirable by forest and recreation managers because they are not esthetically pleasing, conflict with other forest management practices, may harbor forest insect pests, or may be fire or safety hazards. In the past such dead trees were often eliminated from the forest during a timber harvest. As a result, in some areas few nesting sites were left for cavity-nesting birds.

Purple Martin Pair at Nest Cavity

Many species of cavity-nesting birds have declined because of habitat reduction. In the eastern United States, where primeval forests are gone, Purple Martins depend almost entirely on man-made nesting structures. In the southeast the Red-cockaded Woodpecker is currently listed as near threatened (NT), primarily as a result of habitat destruction, and the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is listed as critically endangered (CR) and thought by many to be extinct. The wood duck was also very scarce in many portions of its range – at least in part for the same reason – and probably owes its present status to provision of nest boxes and protection from overhunting.

As early as the 1930’s people noticed that the Eastern Bluebird was fast disappearing from their fields, their backyards and their lives. Dwindling sightings of these most endearing of North American birds encouraged several bluebird enthusiasts to sound the alarm concerning their plight. In addition to nesting sites for bluebirds being lost to deforestation and snag removal, competition for the remaining sites was brought about by the increasing populations of two non-native species, the English (House) Sparrow

House Sparrow Male

and the European Starling.

European Starling at Nest Cavity

After decades of alerting people to the plummeting bluebird problem, Dr. Lawrence Zeleny, a retired agricultural biochemist living in Maryland, with the help of several supporters from National Audubon Society chapters and the Audubon Naturalist Society, founded the North American Bluebird Society (NABS) in 1978.

The North American Bluebird Society is a non-profit education, conservation and research organization that promotes the recovery of bluebirds and other native cavity-nesting bird species in North America. An affiliate of the NABS here in California is the California Bluebird Recovery Program (CBRP). Both of these groups promote placing and monitoring nest boxes (birdhouses) in optimal locations for cavity nesting birds. Because of these programs and hundreds of thousands of nest boxes put up across North America, cavity nesting birds are on the rebound!

If you have birdhouses in your yard and want to learn how to monitor them and add your nesting statistics to the CBRP database, or you are interested in information on how to build, place and monitor nest boxes, our Wintu Audubon webmaster, Larry Jordan can help. He is the Shasta County coordinator for the CBRP and you can contact him by email at webmaster@WintuAudubon.org

You can also find lots of information about birdhouses and attracting birds on our “Attracting Birds” page.