Ecuador is arguably one of the most species-rich countries in the world. As a science teacher, it was Ken Sobon’s lifelong dream to visit the Amazon jungle. Follow his journey from Quito, the historical city on the Equator, to the high-altitude cloud forest, making stops all the way down to the Amazon Basin’s Rio Napo.
Ken Sobon is an avid birder and has been a science teacher to middle school students in Oroville since 1995. He is the President of AltaCal and is the Northern California representative on the California Audubon state board. He has also been the Director of the Northern Saw-whet Owl Research Project for the past seven years.
I was mixing gallons of sugar water with Anna’s Hummingbirds sucking it up as fast as I could make it just a few weeks ago. Where did they all go?
They went back to nature!
The local Manzanitas are blooming this time of year and, of course, the hummers prefer the real thing to sugar water.
During the spring and summer months, there are many native plants offering food for hungry hummers. Here are just a few.
California Thistle (Cirsium occidentale)
Female Anna’s Hummingbird at California Thistle
Red Yucca (Hesperaloe parviflora)
Juvenile Male Anna’s Hummingbird at Red Yucca
Autumn Sage (Salvia greggii)
Female Anna’s Hummingbird at Autumn Sage
Hummingbird Sage (Salvia spathacea)
Female Anna’s Hummingbird at Hummingbird Sage
and my favorite, Woolly Blue Curls (Trichostema lanatum)
Female Anna’s Hummingbird at Wooly Blue Curls
You may have noticed a few other behaviors regarding the Anna’s Hummingbirds. In April, I had several instances of females landing in my graveled driveway and apparently consuming small particles of sand or other minerals from the gravel. According to Cornell’s “Birds of the World,” they are probably acquiring minerals for egg laying.
Getting back to the present, if you are lucky, you might find female Anna’s Hummingbirds gathering nesting material now, maybe in your yard or while out on a bird walk.
You can also provide natural cotton nesting material for them yourself, available at several outlets.
Again from Cornell Lab on the nest building. The inner cup is lined loosely with downy material (plant, feathers, hair). The walls are made of downy material including cattail (Typha), willow, underside of sycamore leaves, thistle, eucalyptus flowers, velvet groundsel (Senecio petasites), and small feathers. Binding materials are mostly spider webs and insect cocoon fibers, but also fibrous plant material and rodent hairs. Usually ornamented on the outside with bits of lichens, mosses, and dead leaves; occasionally bark, algae (Protococcus) or other plant materials, and paint chips. Nest materials are often stolen from another hummingbird’s nest. This is what the completed nest looks like, found at Turtle Bay Arboretum
Anna’s Hummingbird in the Nest at Turtle Bay Arboretum.
Obviously, if female hummers are gathering nesting material, it’s breeding time! Just last Saturday, on our outing to Lema Ranch, we observed the male’s incredible mating flight! This video is incredible! Isn’t nature amazing?
Join us for a new series of Thursday bird walks with Tricia Ford of the Shasta Birding Society. Every walk will feature a discussion of a birding skill and/or a hot topic in the world of birding. Beginning birdwatchers are especially encouraged to join us in learning to identify the large variety of avian life in the area.
The February 15 walk will discuss how and why to use eBird, a free app for your cell phone that can keep track of all your birding adventures and allow you to participate in community science.
We will meet each month at the for a leisurely two-hour stroll along the Sacramento River Trail. Meet at the Turtle Bay Redding Boat Launch, located behind the Redding Civic Auditorium (Map: https://shorturl.at/twRVX). Join us for a leisurely two-hour stroll on both paved and gravel trails. Bathrooms can be found at three locations along the way.
Binoculars are available to borrow, and instructions will be provided for their use. Rain will cancel. Contact Tricia Ford at triciathebirdnerd@gmail.com for more information.
It’s Dark-eyed Junco season! According to Cornell Lab of Ornithology, this “snowbird” is one of the most common and familiar North American passerines. They usually show up in Shasta County in November and grow in number until they disappear in March, except for higher elevations like Lassen Volcanic National Park. We spotted a pair of juncos with a juvenile at Manzanita Lake in July last year during our annual campout!
As you can see from this map, the Dark-eyed Junco appears throughout the United States and Canada, and even spills over into northern Mexico. A large number breed in the far North but many reside year-round in the western United States.
One way to identify the Dark-eyed Junco from a distance, even if they are flying around, is their conspicuous white outer tail feathers. These photos are from Miles and Teresa Tuffli who run the bird blog “I’m Birding Right Now“. They graciously gave me permission to use their DEJU tail feather photos.
Even this juvenile Dark-eyed Junco already has white outer tail feathers!
There are five recognized sub-species of Dark-eyed Juncos, Slate-colored, Oregon, Gray-headed, White-winged, and Guadalupe. The most common here in Shasta County is the “Oregon” subspecies, followed by the Slate-colored Dark-eyed Junco. This is a typical Oregon Junco similar to the photo at the top of the post but most likely a female.
And a different image of a female Oregon Dark-eyed Junco.
Here are a few images of the more rare (in our area) Slate-colored Dark-eyed Junco…
and another.
We love these Dark-eyed Juncos that visit us every winter. Keep an eye out for those rarer sub-species. You never know when you might find a rare Junco in our midst!
Our recent past president and author of our “BirdWords” articles has a new book out! It is appropriately titled “BirdWords from Blue Oak Country” and can be found here. Dan was an educator by trade until his recent retirement, and it shows. His incredible wit and command of the english language reveals itself throughout the book. So does his love of birds and the environment.
As an example of Dan’s pros, I would like to give you just a taste of the beginning of his article “Great Egrets” – “Camouflage clearly makes survival sense. But nature doesn’t settle for just one kind of sense. Out along river shorelines and on the damp fields of winter, great egrets are blatantly visible, as uncamouflaged as possible in head-to-tail white. They’re large. They’re out in the open. They’re plainly visible. Shouldn’t they be dead? A hundred years ago they almost were.”
The book presents in chronological order of winter, spring, summer and fall. It not only gives you specific information on several species of birds but also contains information on Christmas Bird Counts, bird migration, outdoor cats, how to begin birding, plants for birds, and importantly, the environment.
