Tag Archives | birds

Northern Saw-whet Owls

Northern Saw-whet Owl

Monday, November 16, 2020 at 6:30pm

Join our ZOOM Meeting by clicking the link below:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86056017933?pwd=QURMbWJ1bzBheTUrV0NqVjNDeXlOUT09

Meeting ID860 5601 7933

Passcode443463

More About the Program:

What do you know about Saw-whet Owls?

If you’re like most of us, probably not much.

But these little birds are all around us, year round, fighting out their fierce lives in our forests and woodlands. Come learn about these neighbors from Ken Sobon, director of the Northern Saw-whet Owl Research & Education Project in Northern California.

The Presenters:

Ken Sobon is an avid birder, field trip leader, Vice President of Altacal Audubon Society, and is now the Northern California representative to Audubon California board of directors. He has worked the last six seasons volunteering and assisting and is now the Director of the Northern Saw-whet Owl fall migration monitoring project. In addition Ken has been a science teacher to middle school students in Oroville since 1995. He has shared his love of science and birding with his students both in the classroom and in field.

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A Beginners Guide to the Hawks of Shasta County

Red-shouldered Hawk

Bob Yutzy will present a visual guide with commentary covering the main identification features of our local Hawks. Photos will be used to show the various plumages and phases of these magnificent flying machines.

Bob is the North American Birds sub-regional editor and eBird Reviewer for Shasta County, and our local County Checklist Chairperson. He and his wife Carol are compilers of the Fall River Mills CBC, and have been completing hawk count and breeding bird routes in Southeast Arizona and California for over 30 years.

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Northern Flicker – a Red, White, and Blue Bird

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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What is your favorite bird?

David will use the frequently asked question “What is your favorite bird?” as a way of describing some of his favorite birding experiences.  Born and raised in the Lodi/Stockton area, David continues to live in the area today.  He has had opportunities to go birding over much of the world, but considers the Central Valley his favorite place to go birding.  He’s considered an authority on birds in San Joaquin County.

David started actively birding at the very young age of 10. By the time he was in high school birding had became his favorite hobby and passion. He went to college at UC Santa Cruz, majored in biology, and bird science was always his focus. David went on to become a full-time chemist. However, birding remained his passion, and, according to his wife of 35+ years, his obsession.

David is considered the top birder and field ornithologist in his native San Joaquin County, and is one of the top birders in the Central Valley. He has authored the Annotated Checklist of the Birds of San Joaquin County. He was a Regional Editor of North American Birds, Northern California Region from 1986-1994.

David has traveled throughout the state of California, birding its every corner. He has traveled extensively throughout the US in pursuit of birds, and has made numerous visits to Mexico, Central America, and Southeast Asia as well.

David has been an active field trip leader and bird teacher since his college days. He has led numerous birding tours throughout the US and Central American for decades. He has always made sharing birds a high priority in his birding career, and loves people more than birds, (which is saying a lot!).

David is a past president of San Joaquin Audubon, the Central Valley Bird Club, and the Western Field Ornithologists. He and his wife helped start the Central Valley Birding Symposium in 1997, and he continues to serve on the steering committee.

Sacramento Audubon Society invites you to join this Webex meeting.
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Thursday, October 15, 2020
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Red Coats and Wild Birds

During the 19th century, Britain maintained a complex network of garrisons to manage its global empire. During their tours abroad, many British officers engaged in formal and informal scientific research. Kirsten A. Greer tracks British officers as they moved around the world, just as migratory birds traversed borders from season to season. Greer examines the writings of a number of ornithologist-officers, arguing that the transnational encounters between military men and birds shaped military strategy, ideas about race and masculinity, and conceptions of the British Empire. Collecting specimens and tracking migratory bird patterns enabled these men to map the British Empire and the world and therefore to exert imagined control over it. Through its examination of the influence of bird watching on military science and soldiers’ contributions to ornithology, Red Coats and Wild Birds remaps empire, nature, and scientific inquiry in the nineteenth-century world.

When: This Thursday, October 15, 2020 at 7 pm PST

How To Sign In: Our free Speaker Series webinar is available on a first come, first serve basis with a limit of 500 participants. Please make sure to download the Zoom app before the Speaker Series begins. You will need a passcode to sign into the event. Links and passcode are provided below.

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About Our Speaker: Dr. Kirsten Greer is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Geography and History at Nipissing University, and the Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Global Environmental Histories and Geographies. Her CRC program addresses specifically reparations “in place” from Northern Ontario, Canada, to the Mediterranean and the Caribbean through interdisciplinary, integrative, and engaged (community-based) scholarship in global environmental change research. She is the author of Red Coats and Wilds Birds: How Military Ornithologists and Migrant Birds Shaped Empire (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Greer is of Scottish-Scandinavian descent, from the unceded lands of Tiohtiàke/Montréal.

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