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Red-winged Blackbirds: Tule Tycoons

By on May 29, 2022 in BirdWords

Red-winged Blackbird Male

Nearly anywhere in the US, and throughout most of North America, pick your springtime pond or marsh or ditch–any place with a stand of tules or cattails–and you are apt to see and hear red-winged blackbirds. The males perch boldly atop the reeds, their glossy black feathers adorned with large scarlet epaulets, usually fringed in yellow. They sing loudly, a pond-side staple often transcribed as conk-la-ree!

Throughout the winter they congregated in numbers that can reach into the millions, and created in the sky the flowing flocks that have been joined to grand and fluid classical music. Now, come spring, they spread over the nation’s shallow waters and ephemeral cattail patches, bring out their bright feathers, and unleash their song.

The males stake out their breeding territory with both vocals and aggressive policing, vigorously chasing encroaching males for much of each day. Successful males end up sprinkled over their reed-patch perhaps thirty feet apart. Each will breed with a handful of females, sometimes as many as fifteen, who will nest in his territory. For all his energy, however, they do not limit their breeding to this local lord of the manor. Studies indicate that 25%-50% of the young in his fiefdom are sired by different males–either a nearby turf-holder or some landless bird.

The local males marshal to drive off potential predators who wander too close to their nesting grounds, creating vigorous sorties that are thorough-going even if not always discerning. Objects of their harassment regularly include hawks, crows, cats, people, and even horses–anything, it seems of known danger or suspect unfamiliarity.

Red-winged Blackbird Female

For their part, the females maintain a lower profile. Their feathers are brown, with undersides heavily streaked. They build a cup nest low in the reeds, and there they incubate and feed 2-4 young birds, bringing hatchlings from blind and naked to flying in two weeks.

Being widespread, red-winged blackbirds have regional variation in their size and looks. Interestingly, when eggs are relocated to “foreign” variants, the young grow substantially into the forms of their adoptive parents. Regarding these in-species variations, environment seems to affect the growing birds more than their genetics.

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What’s the buzz? Could be a Chipping Sparrow

By on May 1, 2022 in BirdWords

Chipping Sparrow courtesy David Bogener

Quick! They’re passing through just now, so this is the time: check your feeders, walk your woodlands! The cutest little sparrows of North America are dressed up and on the move!

They’ve been in their winter browns, south of us and down into Mexico. But now the chipping sparrows have donned their red caps and broad white eyebrows. They are flocking up the Sacramento Valley and will nest in the mountains above us and northward far into Canada.

Look in the grasses among the oaks. Like other sparrows, “chippers” have the short, hefty bills designed for eating grass and weed seeds. But look in the trees, too. Insects are hatching out, and traveling sparrows are eager to load up on that high-protein fare.

And listen! Often traveling in small groups the birds keep in touch with one another and tune up for the breeding grounds with their song, a distinctive reedy trill on a single pitch.

A male will use that trill to stake out a breeding turf, usually in an open conifer forest. There he will vigorously chase off encroaching males–just as he will be chased from neighboring territories. Neither males nor females seem finicky about fidelity.

They are attentive parents, however. The female builds the nest, usually on or near the ground. It is a flimsy thing of grasses and soft fibers; it only needs to last about twenty-four days from eggs to fledging–even though the young hatch naked, blind, and weighing just one twentieth of an ounce. After a good start with the first fledglings the male typically continues to tend them while the female starts a second nest.

Chipping sparrows are common in their habitat from coast to coast, and number among the continent’s most numerous species, with population estimates up to 230 million. Still, they are not immune to changes in the world. Like other birds, their numbers have declined by about a third over the last fifty years, and now, like other birds, they are expected to be shifted northward.

There they will meet boreal forests that are being heavily logged for paper products. Efforts to keep the northern forests intact for chipping sparrows, numerous other feathered and furred creatures, and climate stability include consumer information about paper product sourcing. Our purchases impact these birds! Of widely available toilet paper, paper towels, and facial tissue, products from Green Forest consistently get high marks for their high recycled content. A substantial paper-product scorecard is available with an internet search of NRDC’s “The Issue with Tissue.”

Keep their nesting grounds intact, and look today for this red-capped cutie trilling buzzily as it passes through your neighborhood!  It’s a spring treat!

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California Condor – Coming Soon to a Sky Near You

By on March 28, 2022 in BirdWords, Conservation

This condor soaring in Zion National Park shows its white wing wedges, its bald head that sheds bacteria, and the number tags that allow the condor recovery team to track their releases.

For some people, there is a hole in the sky, a blank spot. The condor is missing.

When humans first crossed the Bering Strait into North America condors soared widely across the continent. Their fossils have been found along all the coastal regions of the contiguous US. But the megafauna–mastodons, ground sloths, and other giants–began to die off, and the scavengers that likely ate their carcasses also declined. By the time Lewis and Clark sighted condors in the Columbia River gorge in 1805, it appears they lived only from British Columbia down to Baja California. It is likely that marine mammals as well as elk fed these birds. In any case, as pioneers and settlers moved into the area, they dwindled, their range further shrank, and they became known as “California” condors.

Condors are huge. Their wingspan is routinely over nine feet. Their flight habits resemble those of their little cousins, turkey vultures. On spread wings they ride warm columns of air to thousands of feet up. Then they can float for miles and miles, seeking the dead animals below that will make their meals, all without once flapping their airplane wings after the initial labor of getting airborne.

Condors have keen eyesight, but they lack the sense of smell that turkey vultures have. So sometimes the smaller vultures can find a dinner carcass first. But if the hide is too thick, they cannot cut through it, and must await the condor, whose size and power allows it to rip through the tougher hides. Once a carcass is opened, first golden eagles may dine, then condors, and then the other scavengers.

Over the last couple centuries shooting, poisoning, egg-collecting, and harassment brought the number of California condors down to twenty-seven. In a desperate attempt to save them, the US Fish & Wildlife Service captured the last wild condors in 1987 and launched a breeding program that sought to bring them back by protecting them, avoiding inbreeding, and promoting egg-laying.

Condors reproduce slowly. They lay just one egg in a nest, and after two months of incubation the hatchling depends on its parents for at least another six months. With this long fledging period, the parents usually nest only every other year. The captive breeding team successfully doubled population growth by removing the first egg quickly, to be raised by hand.  The mother bird then was likely to lay a second egg, which the condors themselves incubated and raised.
The captive breeding program has been successful, so that now three hundred twenty-four condors are flying free in Arizona and Southern California. And now comes the North State’s turn.

In 2008 the Yurok tribe, centered along the lower Klamath River, began the work of returning the condor, prey-go-neesh by its older name, to North State skies. They collaborated with many groups and agencies, including US Fish and Wildlife, National and State Parks, and the Oregon, Los Angeles, and San Diego Zoos. They evaluated essential elements of habitat. They found that marine and terrestrial wildlife carcasses will likely be available to North State condors. They found that DDT and its related chemicals, which are still produced in South America, are at non-catastrophic levels this far north. They found that lead from ingested bullets could be fatal, and were working with hunters to replace lead bullets when the state banned lead bullets in 2019.

The tribe has also worked to develop their own capacity to acclimate new releases, monitor the birds, and treat them for problems such as lead poisoning.
The birds to be released in the North State will be young, just two years old. They can begin to breed at age seven or eight. The condor lifespan can be upwards of sixty years.  The plan is to release six birds each year for twenty years.

If there is a hole in our sky, the condors will begin to fill it this spring. The first two birds are slated to be released this April or May. Look skyward for updates!

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Eared Grebes Tone Things Down for Winter

By on February 28, 2022 in BirdWords

There is, apparently, a lot to be said for having a time of rest: trees drop their leaves and go dormant; fungi retreat underground; insects wrap in cocoons, and chipmunks hibernate; lizards and turtles brumate – the reptilian version of hibernating; we humans developed a Sabbath, and weekends.

Birds, however, are largely committed to being lightweight and active. Hibernation and weekends are not options for them. Some smaller birds and nightjars can lower their metabolism to sleep through a cold night or even longer harsh conditions, but mostly birds survive tough weather by either migrating away or foraging voraciously.

Eared grebes, however, have found another way to amplify the benefits of rest.

Out on our lakes and rivers, they are in their resting mode right now. As many birds do, they have toned down their social demands, dropping their extravagant yellow plumes of breeding plumage–their “ears”–and the showy dances that go with them. They wear plain black and white now. They are not singing, and scarcely even talking, spending their time in loose solitude. Most stunningly, they cannot even fly.

For 9-10 months of the year, eared grebes don’t need to take wing. They need to feed–for themselves in winter, for their young in the spring. So they give up flying for extended periods of the year. Their flight muscles shrink, and their digestive organs grow. They eat and they rest. The invertebrates of open water in places like Turtle Bay and along Park Marina become their meals and muscle. The water itself is their home and refuge. The birds don’t hibernate, but they eat and store their calories with high efficiency.

Spring will call soon. Then the eared grebes’ pectoral flight muscles will grow, and the winter’s rest and food storage will power their flights. First they will wing their way to either Mono Lake on the east side of the Sierras or the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Those two lakes act as a staging ground for 99% of all the eared grebes in North America. They are rich in brine shrimp, and the grebes feed voluminously. The more shrimp they swallow, the greater their reproductive success.

Well fed, the grebe flight muscles again develop and they fan northward to nest in freshwater and saline lakes from northern California up through central Alberta and Saskatchewan. There they will court with elaborate dances on the water.

Well built for swimming, with their feet located back toward their tails, grebes are awkward, essentially crippled, on land. Following their successful aquatic-dance courtships, they will build floating nests in cattails or similar vegetation. Depending in part on the density of brine shrimp in their staging ground lake, the grebes will raise one to eight chicks.

The chicks are quickly active, diving and hiding just an hour after hatching. But they are also not above taking warm rides on their parents’ backs. Eared grebe parents will join with neighboring nesters to share their parental duties.

As summer progresses the young will be increasingly on their own. By September they will have developed the strength to fly to one of the great saline lakes of the American west, where they can continue the cycle of losing their flight muscles, and feeding and resting.

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Great Egrets don’t make sense – sort of

By on January 29, 2022 in BirdWords

Great Egret with Cattle 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?

Great Egret Reflection

A hundred years ago they almost were dead. Ninety-five percent of great egrets in North America were wiped out, and it was indeed because of their feathers. The fashion of the day was to decorate lady’s hats with their fancy plumes, and so the birds were slaughtered and plucked. The plumes are especially showy in breeding season, so the birds were often taken while they had chicks in the nest; the young of course subsequently starved. This avian massacre sparked the founding of the Audubon Society, whose emblem became the great egret. Those Audubon activists moved a responsive Congress to pass the Migratory Bird Act in 1913, and egrets and other feather-hunted birds quickly recovered.

An interesting side note on John James Audubon, who died half a century before the organization took his name in honor of his famed bird paintings: he was blind to birds’ conservation needs. According to Smithsonian Magazine “Audubon insisted that birds were so plentiful in North America that no depredation—whether hunting, the encroachment of cities and farmlands, or any other act of man—could extinguish a species.” Recent trends, of course, have shown him exceedingly wrong.

Nonetheless, although other birds are in decline, great egrets are flourishing. They are versatile, readily foraging in the shallows of marshes, riversides, or coastal shores for fish, or reptiles, amphibians, crustaceans, or insects; or hunting in the deeper water of protected bays by standing, toes spread, on floating kelp. Or they will move into fields and spear gophers or voles with their dagger-like bills. Their foraging flexibility allows them to shift from less productive habitats into livelier ones.

Great Egret

Great Egret Fishing

Beyond their feeding versatility, great egrets nest with flexibility, too. They nest in colonies with other egrets or herons; but they can nest alone, too.

The male starts to build a platform of sticks, high in a tree; or, as availability requires, at the top of a bush, or even on the ground.

He courts a female with displays of his fancy plumes and his long beak, which turns green at its base, and with tumbling flights and offerings of twigs. She, also dressed to impress, may return his displays and then help complete the nest. Together they incubate and feed a few chicks. Birds are not universal practitioners of civilization, however, and if food is tight, larger chicks may stab and kill their younger siblings. It takes a while for young egrets to develop the cooperation and tolerance their parents exercise.

Great Egrets Nesting By Larry Goodwin

Great Egrets Nesting By Larry Goodwin

There are always things we don’t know. Great egrets are large, and large birds often mate for life. But egrets also carry out extensive courtship, which can suggest the wooing of a new mate. Or, again, perhaps egrets are among those fine creatures who sustain courtship throughout their relationship. We just don’t know.
But we know that they survive and prosper without a bit of camouflage. It’s a beautiful thing that Nature supports more than what at first glance seems rudimentary.

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