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Northern Flicker – a Red, White, and Blue Bird

By on October 31, 2020 in BirdWords

Northern Flicker Male

It’s election season, and not too big a stretch to see red, white, and blue in some of our feathered aboriginals. Many colorful birds have headed to Mexico for the winter, but northern flickers, after spending summer in cooler areas upslope, along the river, or northward, have returned to our local woodlands.

Flickers are woodpeckers, and our western version has bright red under its wings, a bold white rump patch, and, for a willing eye in good light, a steely blue-gray face, offset in the male with a red dash of a whisker.

Northern Flicker Male Intergrade

The eastern version of the flicker shuffles some of these colors around, and substantially substitutes yellow for our western red. But yellow or red, both flickers sport a beautiful black necklace, speckled breast and belly, and a list of beneficial behaviors.

Northern Flicker Nestlings

Northern Flicker Nestlings

They act as partners: mated pairs share the work and, we can hope, pleasures of nest construction, egg incubation, and child-rearing.

Northern Flicker Nestlings

Northern Flicker Nestlings

They get along with their neighbors. Small groups routinely stick together, flocking severally through the woods. Where red- and yellow-shafted flickers meet, they associate impartially.

They communicate with one another, singing a one-pitch staccato trill to call far and wide, or drumming on hollow wood in various cadences, or murmuring to closer birds with a silky weeka-weeka-weeka call.

Of course flickers are not  immune to conflict, particularly in finding mates. But they have evolved a ritualized solution to their disputes. As in some other species, rivals face each other, bills to the sky, and they bob and weave together, perhaps calling out, until one seems to decide the other has rights and flies off with no harm done.

Northern Flicker Males

Northern Flicker Males In Conflict

Flickers interact thriftily with other species. Before eating ants, they may rub them over their bodies, or simply allow the ants to crawl over them. It is hypothesized that the ants’ formic acid helps protect the birds from mites and lice, and preening with them may improve the ants’ palatability by reducing their remaining acid content.

They provide for other species, however naively.  Many kinds of birds nest in woodpecker cavities, but flickers, because of their large size, are crucial to other large cavity nesters. Buffleheads, the most common black and white duck you’ll see on the river in winter, rely almost exclusively on flickers for nesting cavities.

And flickers live close to the earth. They chisel at bark like other woodpeckers, but most of their foraging is actually done on the ground, where they lap up ants and other insects, as well as fruits and seeds.

Northern Flicker Male Anting

Northern Flicker Male Anting

They are so comfortable with the dirt that even in nesting they will sometimes forgo a tree cavity to raise their young in a hole in the ground–say, an old kingfisher or bank swallow tunnel.

So flickers act as good partners, neighbors, and members of their larger communities and environments–making them quite patriotic, I think, even if they have no notions of that idea.  The added power of voting is just our own.

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The Thing with Feathers

By on September 26, 2020 in BirdWords, Conservation
Female Lesser Goldfinch

Female Lesser Goldfinch

Emily Dickinson famously wrote “Hope is the thing with feathers.”  Now, under the oppressive disorientation of Covid-19, massive wildfires, technological manipulation, and political fragmentation, we may find that such hope can offer useful direction.

Birds suffer illness and death just as we do, but like the canaries of old, sometimes they show the environmental effects sooner and more dramatically.  Pollution, hurricanes, and fires cost human lives.  For birds, these and other habitat changes coincide with their 30% decline in North America over the last half century.

This month hundreds of thousands of many species of songbirds were found scattered dead throughout the southern reaches of America’s Great Basin.  We don’t know why yet.  A leading initial guess is that the smoke damaged their lungs– a plausible explanation considering that the death-blow hit birds that were likely migrating, and flight muscles have a high demand for oxygen.  Whatever the cause or causes, something is clearly wrong.

We shouldn’t be surprised.  Worldwide, the international community has failed to meet a single of this past decade’s targets to maintain wildlife and life-sustaining ecosystems.  The UN’s head of biodiversity, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, reports that “Earth’s living systems as a whole are being compromised. And the more humanity exploits nature in unsustainable ways and undermines its contributions to people, the more we undermine our own wellbeing, security and prosperity.”

So we breathe toxic air, and birds fall out of it.  But faced with adversity, hope cries for action.  The big things for birds–designing development to accommodate biological health–are choices we make as a society, through government.  The little things we can do individually and right now.

Water is needed as dry weather and smokey conditions continue.  A shallow dish with a rock perch can provide both drinking and bathing opportunities.  Sloping the water from shallow to an inch or so deep can allow different sized birds to use it.  Refresh the water daily to clean out ash and thwart mosquitoes and disease.

Birdseed can sustain many species.  Finches love black oil sunflower and thistle seeds.  Sparrows, now returning from nesting grounds in Alaska and the Rockies, devour white millet and cracked grains–especially scattered on the ground.  Avoid overfeeding–if the seed rots it will introduce harmful bacteria.  If the birds eat the mix you offer, you’ve found a good one!

Food and water are best placed near plants that offer shelter from predatory hawks–but try not to conceal predatory cats!  Cats are best kept indoors.  They are one of the biggest contributors to songbird declines.

Plants, particularly native plants, offer both food and shelter for many species.  Consider the birds as you design and tend your yard.  Letting fall’s leaves lie will help develop a rich soil and natural bird food.

There are needs beyond what we can provide individually.  Clean air is not something we can deliver in our private yards, nor can we individually protect extensive and diverse habitats.  But as a society we can, and we each participate in society, locally, nationally, and globally.  The UN, our body for international cooperation, plans to set this decade’s biodiversity goals next spring.

If we will deliver health and beauty for birds, we will be reaping it for ourselves, too.  Those are feathers to hope on.

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House Finches: Loud and Brown and Red All Over

By on August 29, 2020 in Birds, BirdWords
Male and Female House Finches

Male and Female House Finches at Feeder

If you have a bird feeder in the continental United States you have almost certainly been visited by house finches.  On both sides of the Mississippi their hungry flocks coat feeders like displays of cherry and root beer lollipops.  They park themselves at providential feeding ports or flutter at their neighbors to win better ones.  Off the feeders, they are singers who greet mornings with ubiquitous cheery notes, mixing reedy discord with melodious clarity, any time of year.  They seem perfectly comfortable making our houses their homes.

House finches fledge from the nest dressed in brown, heavily streaked on their undersides.  But as they molt, the males develop a bright red wash over their head, breast, and rump.  Young females, too, may briefly wear red on their rumps.  As adults, females prefer brightly colored males.

Male House Finch

Male House Finch

Bright colors, however, are not genetically inherited.  Like most birds, finches can’t actually make red or yellow pigment.  Rather, these molting males incorporate pigments from the foods they eat.  In addition to black oil sunflower seeds at feeders, they savor a variety of fruits and vegetables that contain the carotenoids–yellows, reds, and purples–that they absorb into feather-paint.

House Finch Male

House Finch Male courtesy Kevin Gill creative commons – Click on photo for full sized image!

Because their food varies geographically, male finches in some areas will wear, instead of red feathers, a more orange or even yellow hue.  Further, because the birds don’t migrate, you may be establishing a particular finch color in your neighborhood with your local blend of fruit trees, berries, and vegetable gardens.

Female House Finch

The males, no matter their brightness, are famous for singing exuberantly near their mates while the female does the work of nest-building, laying eggs, and incubating them.  He may bring food to his mate during this period, and fully assists in tending their nestlings.  The system works for them: house finches lay 2-6 eggs in each clutch, and will clutch as many as six times a year.  With human help they have spread far and wide.

House Finch Nest with Eggs

House Finch Nest with Eggs

Native to the western US and Mexico, these desert-lovers were introduced to New York in 1940.  From there they expanded quickly throughout the east, substantially replacing the purple finch of the declining eastern forests.  Before conquering the east they were introduced into Oahu, and became abundant throughout Hawaii over a century ago.

House Finch Nestlings

House Finch Nestlings

Hawaiian birds are famously fitted to particular plants or lifestyles, and have not done well as their world has changed.  House finches, on the other hand, are generalists, typical of birds that thrive in new situations.  They nest freely in not just their traditional western scrub and cacti but now in shrubs, trees, hanging plant-pots, on building ledges, or over porch lights.  They readily flock to feeders when their fields of seeds are transformed.  Strung wires serve for their singing posts.  House finches roll with the punches, and that has allowed them to prosper.

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New Rules Defeather Birds – Again

By on August 4, 2020 in BirdWords

Great Egret in Flight

In 1896 egrets and other birds were being killed wholesale to use their feathers in women’s hats.  To protest and end the slaughter, Harriet Hemenway and Minna B. Hall formed a group, the original Massachusetts Audubon Society.  Within two years their movement had been replicated in fifteen other states and the District of Columbia.  Another five years, and the state organizations united into the National Audubon Society.

It was an era when modern industry was young and booming, and citizens were moving from family farms to jobs in the cities.  But like us, people valued the land and they recognized that its beauties and riches were not inexhaustible.  So they acted to protect those natural riches.  Women quickly abandoned feathered hats.  In 1903 our nation created the first National WIldlife Refuge, then the National Park Service in 1916, and in 1918, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, or MBTA.

The MBTA put into US law what the country had already agreed to with Canada, and subsequently with Mexico, Japan, and the Soviet Union.  It prohibited the harming or “taking” of birds.  As clarified and amended over the last century, its provisions have promoted safety and efficiency.  After the Exxon Valdez killed 250,000 birds with a spill of enough oil to cover 34 acres a foot deep, the act supported fines and reparations of over $100 million, and Congress passed a requirement that oil tankers be double-hulled.  When BP’s Deep Horizon spilled two to fifteen times more oil, killing over a million birds, the company paid, to date, nearly $70 billion in cleanup, fines, and lawsuit settlements that have offset the losses to habitat, residents, and businesses.

Pelican in Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

In the last two decades the act has been enforced with punitive damages only fourteen times, and for amounts that large businesses might shrug off.  Even BP’s Deep Horizon payouts of $70 billion were less than .2% penalties under the MBTA.  But that liability may have given teeth to the much larger public and commercial lawsuits for recovery from losses.  

The act provides for waivers for various purposes including education, research, and safety.  It protects only native species, and provides for game bird hunting seasons.  It is hailed as our nation’s best legislation to protect birds.  

But two years ago the Trump Administration gutted it.  It reinterpreted the law to allow incidental take, with no waivers required and no penalties levied.  “Incidental” takes are killings that happen as a by-product of actions.  The new interpretation eliminates fines for misapplying pesticides that kill hundreds or thousands of birds on a single mega-farm, or for poor maintenance on an oil rig that kills a million birds or more.  Every incentive to consider the well-being of birds is removed by this interpretation.  Routine practices that save millions every year–covering oil waste pits, spacing power lines to avoid electrocution, replacing tower lights with blinking ones–are rendered valueless.  This ruling replaces the public wealth of nature’s beauty and richness with a narrower, purely monetary value.

It has become common knowledge that birds are already in a precipitous decline.  Some species like the desert-adapted ash-throated flycatcher are doing well, but overall there is a 30% loss of North American birds over the last fifty years. 

Now the Administration is trying to make the interpretation that removes bird protections into permanent law.  Our representative in Congress has repeatedly stated his commitment to outdoor access, but the outdoors that we can access are being impoverished.  He calls efforts to protect wildlife and clean habitats “government overreach,” but given the decline of our birds it appears to be under-reach.  

Now there is a bill in Congress to protect the MBTA from being demolished.  Representative LaMalfa can sign on as a cosponsor to the Migratory Bird Protection Act, H.R. 5552.  He can work publicly and vigorously with the Administration, his party, to get the bill enacted into law.  If you, like Harriet Hemenway and Minna Hall of yore, want to weigh in, Rep. LaMalfa can be reached through his form at https://lamalfa.house.gov/contact or the Redding office (530) 223-5898.

The egrets won’t thank you.  But they might survive.

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Ash-throated Flycatcher, a Bird for our Time

By on June 27, 2020 in BirdWords
Ash-throated Flycatcher

Ash-throated Flycatcher with Praying Mantis

G-r-rick!  G-r-rick!  The woodland call of the ash-throated flycatcher manages to sound both dry and optimistic, and this bird has reason to feel both.  It is well adapted to the summer conditions of the arid west.

Although it sports a hipster beanie and jaunty colors–a sulphur-yellow belly, burnt orange in the wing, and a red-brown tail–you are apt to hear the bird before you see it.  From a perch or in flight, its frequent calls abound in our north state woods.

These birds are up from coastal Mexico, reversing the summer vacation travels of many pre-Covid Americans.  But of course they are here not to vacation but to raise their families on the abundant insects of the season.  Unlike many kinds of flycatchers, they rarely capture their meals out of the air.  Rather they perch in the understory, study the foliage and bark near them, and then hover to pick their insect prey from the plant.

Ash-throated Flycatcher at Natural Cavity

Ash-throated Flycatcher at Natural Cavity

Gleaning insects is a service that should not go unrewarded, and trees, particularly oaks, generously provide cavities that the birds use as nest sites.  Along with oak-rot hollows, ash-throated flycatchers readily nest in cacti cavities, woodpecker holes, nesting boxes, drain pipes, or the deep pocket of a jacket left hanging over the back fence.

Ash-throated Flycatcher

Ash-throated Flycatcher with Nesting Material

Both parents build the nest of various plant fibers.  The mother bird incubates her handful of eggs for two weeks, and both parents feed the young about sixteen days more, as their offspring grow from naked to feathered to feeding themselves.  Though just the size of grocery-story zucchinis, they develop the mesomorphic form of strong flyers–big-breasted due to powerful flight muscles.

Ash-throated Flycatcher Eggs

Ash-throated Flycatcher Eggs

Beginning as soon as July and lasting into early fall, those muscles will propel the birds on a fifteen-hundred mile migration.  The North State insect populations wane, and the flycatchers head for buggier turf to power their next month-long phase of life–shedding their worn feathers and growing new ones.

Ash-throated Flycatcher Nestlings

Ash-throated Flycatcher Nestlings

Several qualities feed the optimism that ash-throated flycatchers warrant.  Their ready adoption of human artifacts for nesting sites serves them well.  Also, they usually line their nests with mammal fur, which is soft for the nestlings but less insulating than feathers and so may reduce overheating that feathers could cause as the seasons warm.  Further, ash-throated flycatchers do not need to drink water; like some other desert dwellers, they manufacture enough for themselves in the process of digesting their food. In this warming arc of the world, ash-throated flycatcher populations have grown about 1% per year over the last fifty years.

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