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.
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.
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!
Starlings may offer us a mirror as much as a window, but let’s look through the window at this versatile, widespread, up-and-down species.
Starlings are ubiquitous in North America, living from Alaska to Florida and from Labrador to Baja California. They typically follow human development, preferring lands cleared for agriculture, golf courses, or parking lots. In winter they gather in vast herds which can descend on open fields and scour them like locusts, their quick-scuttling movements prodding some to call them “winged vermin.” But then they leap into the air where, as a flock and perhaps with other blackbirds, they dance in beautiful murmurations, the wheeling starbursts of motion that 1990’s screen-savers sought to emulate and that have been filmed and set to classical music.
Starlings are one of our blackbirds, not taxonomically but functionally. They’re the chunky ones with stubby tails and, in flight, wings that extend like isosceles triangles. They walk quickly, their heads bobbing like chickens’. The new feathers they grow each fall are tipped white gold, creating a winter plumage that can surprise viewers who have close-up or binocular looks. Over the winter months their bright spots wear away, leaving spring birds with an iridescent black coat shining behind a bill that turns a sunny yellow.
Males woo females by establishing a nest site. They are aggressive, and will harass other birds–flycatchers, bluebirds, ducks, etc.– from a woodpecker hole to claim it for their own. They will stuff the cavity with plant and animal debris, from pine needles to trash, and form a hollow inside. Sufficiently impressed, the female will make her finishing touches and lay a handful of eggs. The parents will share incubation duties for twelve days, and then feed the young in the nest until they fledge three weeks later.
European Starling Feeding Nestling
Starlings are social and socially adept, if not always friendly. Vocally they are first-rate mimics of other birds. In murmurations they coordinate their synchronized flights by attending to and following the birds right near them. They have been reported playing–taking turns sliding down a metal roof with morning frost. When they have disputes, over, say, territory, starlings are plain-spoken. A bird wanting to enforce its turf will simply encroach on another’s space until, sidling down the wire or branch, the second bird runs out of space and flutters away. Not much nuance in problem-solving for these birds.
The starlings in America are not native, but European. They were introduced into New York’s Central Park in the 1890’s by Shakespeare fans who wanted to import all the birds the bard mentioned. In the hundred-thirty years since, they have followed the development of European-cum-Americans across the continent. The birds have not had time to genetically diversify, and their rapid expansion is now in reverse. As it is with many songbirds, there are about half as many starlings in North America as there were when we celebrated our first Earth Day.
Who would have thought it? Shovelers have been around much longer than shovels! The oldest known shovels, rough tools made of wood and sometimes a shoulder blade, are less than 4000 years old, whippersnappers like the folks who made them. Shovelers, on the other hand, are ducks, which, allowing for some evolution, date back to sixty-five million years ago, about the time dinosaurs proper were going extinct.
Of course, for purposes of our understanding and communication, we are the ones giving out names, and shoveler bills are broad, reminding us of our digging tools, and thus the name we use for them.
But shoveler bills are not for digging. Their broad bills, like those of many dabbling ducks, are edged with comb-like ridges. No, ducks don’t have teeth. Crowns and root canals are not required. Rather their bills are bony cores covered in keratin sheathes–think fingernail material. The keratin edge is scalloped into ridges that catch small aquatic crustaceans and seeds as the ducks squeeze water through, just as on a larger scale whales net krill in their baleen. Shoveler bills are for filter-feeding, not digging.
In their long history of acquiring food, shovelers have learned a further trick: the benefit of cooperation. As they squeeze water through their bills they often paddle in a tight circle with a friend, or twenty or more friends. Apparently this action creates a tornado-current that pulls up foodstuff from deeper in the water, making the foraging more profitable for everyone involved. One can only imagine how they learned that stratagem.
It seems to have worked. Our species, the northern shoveler, prospers at mid-northern latitudes around the globe, mainly from western North America through Siberia to Scandinavia. Each summer a mated pair settles on a quiet pond or wetland. As with other ducks, the female raises the young on her own. She forms a scrape in the reeds or fields nearby, and there lays about ten eggs, which she incubates for over three weeks. When the young hatch, she quickly leads them to the water, where they feed and grow under her watchful eye, until they fledge after about seven weeks more.
Now that winter and water have returned to the North State, so have the northern shovelers. You can spot them, in small groups or by the hundreds, on quiet waters–the males with rusty red flanks and tuxedo-white breasts, the females in dappled browns. Her bill is orange, his black. The bills of both are noticeably large–but they remain bills, not shovels.
