Vermillion Flycatcher
Please join our webmaster as he highlights some of his favorite bird photos from the last fifteen years. Don’t be surprised if there may be a few short videos as well. This is the second part of his presentation.
Join us as we celebrate the annual Return of the Salmon Festival at Coleman National Fish Hatchery, 24411 Coleman Fish Hatchery Rd. in Anderson. This family-friendly event is free to the public and will have over 50 booths with information and activities. View salmon spawning operations, a salmon aquarium, natural resource information booths and much more. Wintu Audubon will be there with a booth, handing out information on birds and the chapter and engaging families with hands-on activities.
If you can spare a couple hours to help staff our booth, please contact Education Chair Tricia Ford at triciathebirdnerd@gmail.com
Larry Jordan has been enthralled with birds since he spotted a Burrowing Owl in his Oak Run driveway on the way home one evening over 30 years ago. He didn’t know what the bird was so he bought his first field guide and opened up a whole new world of wonder. Since that evening he has been involved in several endeavors to protect birds and advance the joy of birding. He started his own birding blog in 2007 and also posted to the well known 10000 Birds blog. Larry joined Wintu Audubon Society, became the webmaster for the organization, and began photographing birds in 2008. Please join our webmaster as he highlights some of his favorite bird photos from the last fifteen years. Don’t be surprised if there may be a few short videos as well.
His photographs are available on his Flickr site here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/soaringfalcon/
His youtube channel is here: https://www.youtube.com/@LarryJordanWildlifeAdvocate/videos
His blog is here: https://thebirdersreport.com/
Wintu Audubon Society is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Some of Larry Jordan’s favorite bird photos.
Time: Sep 13, 2023 07:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89075919908
Meeting ID: 890 7591 9908
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Meeting ID: 890 7591 9908
Find your local number: https://us06web.zoom.us/u/kCr86cZNJ
California Scrub-Jay
California Scrub-jays are the West Coast, lower-altitude version of the widespread jay tribe, which itself is part of the corvid family, the global group that includes crows, magpies, and similar large-billed, intelligent, opportunistic birds. Our scrub-jays are oak woodland specialists.
Like most jays in North America, the California Scrub-jay wears a lot of blue–although, following the geography of European colonization, only the Eastern bird wears the name “Blue Jay.” Our scrub-jay has a rounded head, not crested, and a blue topside with a partial necklace extending into pale gray underparts; it’s a well-dressed, thoroughly attractive bird. The jays are imposing–large, bold, and inquisitive. They often patrol their neighborhoods in brash family gangs.
Their bills are particularly hefty, allowing the versatility to acquire and eat a range of foods–fruits, nuts, and a variety of meats. Those formidable bills empower a proprietary demeanor, and seem to intimidate smaller birds, who scatter from feeders when the scrub-jays arrive and watch helplessly when the larger birds dine on their eggs or nestlings. The unstated threat that the scrub-jay’s powerful bill poses seems to reprise the Pancho and Lefty lyric: He wore his gun outside his pants, for all the honest world to feel. They are wild animals, after all, and live by a brutal code.
Some steal the acorns their companions have hidden for winter consumption. That behavior in turn seems to affect their social attitude. Scrub-jay thieves, like those among their cousin crows and other species, seem suspicious; they wait to hide their own acorns until they are alone and unobserved.
With their mates the scrub-jays appear reliable. Nearly 90% of them remain paired from one year to the next. Both adults help build their nest, and they often feed each other as well as their young.
Come winter they typically gang up and hold their territories, often with loud sorties of spread-winged flight through the neighborhood understory. Their flocking, their size and robust demeanor, their power and assertiveness, all seem to keep the scrub-jays going. Until the 1930’s California fruit and nut growers, thinking it would protect their crops, organized large-scale shoots of these birds. Still, the scrub-jays have persisted, and maintain a stable population.
Marsh Wren Singing
The cattails are chattering, chittering, burbling, trilling, and buzzing! The noises of spring, evidence of things not seen, are pouring forth! And now is the best time to actually see the maestros of the marsh!
Responsible for most of the cattail chatter you’ll likely hear are marsh wrens. They are quintessential and versatile singers, storming the reeds with song from their little walnut-sized bodies. Some have stayed around all winter, quietly tucked into the tules. Now the longer and warmer days draw them out from their hideaways, both down in the ditches and down south.
Males are busy building many nests throughout their marshy turf, and scolding away invaders–other male marsh wrens, too-forward blackbirds, poking egrets, and passing people. The nests are about a yard above water, big hollow softballs of reeds with a small entrance hole, all tied to surrounding vegetation. When a female arrives, with song and fluttering he will give her a guided tour of his six or ten or twenty nests. If she sees him as energetic enough to keep local predators away and help feed the fledglings, and if his territory is biologically rich enough to provide abundant insects and snails, she will line one of his nests with soft vegetation and feathers, and there incubate a handful of eggs.
A second and even a third female will receive the same treatment from the male, and the new females will make similar instinctive calculations.
All the parents seek to protect resources for their children, and will pierce the eggs or nestlings of competitors–usually blackbirds or other wrens. The birds are conducting their own sub-humane warfare, each parent liable to the same treatment it tries to deliver.
Eggs hatch after two weeks of incubation. Both parents feed the blind and naked babies, who in another two weeks turn bugs into a nest full of young birds as big as their parents.
Eventually the young will grow their adult feathers–buffy browns, a white-ish eyebrow, and decorative black and white-lined plumes on their back. Good luck seeing them! Now, while they’re out courting, is the time!
