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Golden-crowned Kinglet – A good thing in a little package

By Dan Greaney on December 25, 2021 in BirdWords, Uncategorized

Golden-crowned Kinglet photo by David Bogener

When the nights are long and frost can be expected, most insects forsake activity and hunker down as eggs or pupae, waiting for spring to resume their active lives. Insect-eating birds feel the rhythm of the season and their sleeping food source, and head south. But some stay, making their winter-living by searching hungrily, maybe frantically, for those sleeping insects.

One such bird is the golden-crowned kinglet. It’s a “king” because it wears a crown – golden in the female and brightening to orange – gold in the male. It’s a kinglet because it’s tiny. At a fifth of an ounce, the golden-crowned kinglet is scarcely larger than a hummingbird. But when hummingbirds head south, vacating the eastern US and leaving just one of their kind to face the milder climes of California, the kinglets stay closer to their nesting grounds. They remain as far north as southern Canada, where they can face temperatures down to -40 degrees. It seems they should shiver, starve, and die, but they do not. Instead they hustle in small flocks, usually high in winter’s trees, scouring twigs and conifer needles for the precious calories in moth cocoons and tucked-up spiders.

Golden-crowned Kinglet by Rhododendrites – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95715477

Still, they must not waste at night those calories found throughout the day. Like other social animals, a single kinglet in such cold would likely freeze. Instead, they huddle together in protected cavities, bunched close, sharing body warmth. They fluff their small downy feathers, slowing their loss of heat. They survive.

Our area, of course, is not quite so frigid–although plenty cold enough to kill a lost hiker or solo pip. Many of our local golden-crowned kinglets seasonally drop down from the mountains where they raise their offspring. Some winters they can be seen in good numbers along the Sacramento River. An acute ear might hear their brief high trill as they keep in touch with their fellows in the highest foliage.

A studied glance upward might reveal them flitting about in the canopy. However, without binoculars and some practice using them, golden-crowned kinglets are likely to remain barely discernible silhouettes. But if the bird and the viewer contrive to enable a good look, then the viewer will have eyed one of nature’s sweeter gems.

They’re like a sunrise behind hills: pale gray below, then above mixing yellows and darks. Their bright crown is offset with a trim of black; when the male is excited the copper-alloy gold of his crown is raised and especially prominent. The whole of their feathering seems to include both gentility and radiance.

All packaged small. It does take some time and intent to see a golden-crowned kinglet, but the experience is worth it.

Brewer’s Blackbirds

By Dan Greaney on October 27, 2021 in Birds, BirdWords

Brewer’s Blackbird Male

We mostly see blackbirds in suburban settings, but they are not limited to our neighborhoods. Blackbirds now returning to local parks and parking lots may have just finished a nesting season in the sagebrush of the Great Basin or in marshy alpine meadows. But even when they’re here, it’s easy to overlook them. They seem a common and ordinary part of the background, too plain to attract attention.

But the blackbird tribe is varied and beautiful. Male red-winged blackbirds strike the eye with their bright scarlet wing patches. Starlings, the stumpy-tailed birds in the group, shed their shiny black feathers for new winter plumage, a gala coat of black and brown speckles. Brewer’s blackbirds look slightly more elegant–no speckles, and they stand more erect and seem more considerate in their movements.

Brewer’s blackbirds might be a soft brown, tip to tail. Those are the females, matte-finished for camouflaged child-rearing. Others might peer at you with a golden eye from glossy black feathers that gleam in sunlight with a purple and green wash. Those are the ones you’ll notice, the males, designed by nature to catch the eye and perhaps draw predators. It is the males’ hapless duty to guard the nest while the females incubate their young.

Blackbirds nest in colonies. The first females to settle into nesting set the trend, choosing almost any sort of habitat, but mostly in brush or trees near water. Other females select nearby sites to build their nests; they all incubate their eggs for about two weeks. More like raptors than songbirds, sometimes Brewer’s blackbirds begin incubating before all the eggs are laid. This results in eggs hatching over several days instead of all at once, a condition that typically favors the eldest nestlings if food gets scarce.

During incubation, the males chase predators from the vicinity and may bring food to their mates on the nest. Once their young hatch, blind and naked, males and females together feed them insects along with some seeds and fruit, until the nestlings fledge and can feed themselves.

In winter, mated pairs may separate into the huge flocks that blackbirds often form for foraging and roosting. But most will rejoin their partners for the following nesting season.

The ability of blackbirds to live in a wide variety of habitats–arid scrubland, high mountain meadows, cattails, golf courses, city parks–usually bodes well for species to thrive through changes. It is not surprising that blackbirds are among our most numerous songbirds.

Still, they have not been able to escape the world’s massive declines in habitat. In 1966 the global number of Brewer’s blackbirds was estimated at nearly seventy million, three and a half times California’s human population at the time. Now the blackbirds, down to about twenty million, number just half our increased state population.

With Gulls Among Us

By Dan Greaney on September 26, 2021 in BirdWords

Ring-billed Gull

Trying to distinguish among the twenty-seven different species of North American gulls, with their look-alike and changing plumages, we are often at a loss. The birds, however, know just what they are about.

This time of year, ring-billed gulls are leaving their nesting lakes of the upper Midwest and Canada. The lakes will be icing over, and they know it’s time to head to the balmier promise of a California winter.

Ring-billed Gull Landing

You might see them enjoying a float on the river or resting on the shoreline, sitting quietly or squabbling with their friends over a nutritious bite of salmon. Sometimes they’ll snack at shopping malls and in parks. All over the North State, ring-bills offer some assistance in gull identification.

Ring-billed Gull

First, they are by far our most numerous gull. Call any local pale-winged gull with substantial black at the wing-tips a ring-bill, and you’re making a good guess.

Second, they are one of only two species here whose adults have yellow feet and legs–and their yellow is brighter than the yellow-green of the California gulls.

Ring-billed Gull

Third, they have a distinctive bill, a black ring just back of the tip. The other yellow-footed gull of our area has a red and black spot. More on these markings later.

Fourth, they are substantially smaller than the other gulls that frequent our area. Size can be tricky to judge, but it can also be helpful.

So ring-billed gulls are quite identifiable. Alas, however, what I have described applies only to adults, the ivory-headed beauties with winter speckles of brown on head and nape. What about all those mottled brown and splotchy gulls?

Ring-billed Gull First Year

Depending on the species, gulls take two to four years to reach adulthood, and their immature plumages vary widely. Ring-bills are a three-year gull. In their first winter, they are typically well freckled and glossed with brown, have light gray shoulders, and a black band on their tail; their bill is tipped black, and their feet are pinkish. In their second winter they look like adults except the brown speckles extend over their whole face and down their breast, and they may retain a black bill-tip and a small black bar on their tail.

So even North State ring-bills aren’t as easy to identify as we’d like. But the gulls don’t wear these plumages for our benefit.

Immature plumage apparently protects young gulls. Notorious for their quarreling over riverside and picnic snacks, adult gulls apparently give their immatures first rights, or at least generous leeway, in accessing food. Even in these seemingly squabblesome species, nature has rules about protecting its more vulnerable members.

Ring-billed Gull

Their bill-tip marks, known as gonys spots, also help gulls prosper. Having traded in hands for wings a long time ago, many birds, including gulls, swallow food to carry it to their young. Nestlings recognize their parents’ gonys spots and instinctively peck at them. That pecking stimulates regurgitation from the parent, and thus dinner is delivered. It’s a process that violates our etiquette; but then, we have hands.

Ring-billed Gull

Having wings, however, allows gulls their own kind of sport. They drop food from a height and then dive-bomb to catch it in mid-air. As in humans, their seeming games develop skills that can help the birds prosper.

Ring-billed gulls are social, versatile, and successful. They have the skills to gather fish, grains, insects, and garbage, and the guts to live on them. As our young nation grew around them, they suffered severely from feather-hunting and habitat loss, but with the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act they bounced back and now thrive across the continent.

Gulls may remain tough to identify, but they and we seem to have found a way to live together.

Rock Pigeons are both Wild Birds and Human Associates

By Dan Greaney on August 29, 2021 in BirdWords

Rock Pigeon

For better and for worse, many species have cast their lot with humans. Dogs, cats, barnyard and feedlot animals, plants that feed and house us, many bacteria that make us their home, and of course many viruses, too, all prosper or fail in accord with our disposition. Among birds, rock pigeons have closely associated with us for some five thousand years.

Living with people for that long has created changes in the species. These birds, familiarly known as “city pigeons,” have expanded their range from the Mediterranean to temperate regions around the world, following the proliferation of granaries that concentrate the grains they eat and architectural ledges that mimic the rocky cliffs where they historically roosted and nested. Of course, human reaction to them has varied. The birds are sometimes reviled for soiling revered monuments, and sometimes loved for the same action. They are both disparaged as “winged rats” and honored as beauties that invite our kindness for just “tuppence a bag.”

Rock Pigeon

When we take time to observe them, the beauty of their smooth, rainbow iridescence is evident. Living in and out of domestication for five millenia, they have been bred into many forms–rusty browns, ivory whites, sooty blacks, and endless mixes of those hues. Some variation of the historic wild form seems most prevalent: an orange eye in a slate-colored head that blends into a lustrous green neck, lavender shoulders, pale ashen wings with two black bars, perhaps a white rump, and a dark tail tipped in black. To an attentive viewer, their feet in good light stand out like their eyes: pink, sometimes with eye-popping brilliance.

Rock Pigeon

Some domestic rock pigeon strains, notably the homing pigeon and the carrier pigeon, have been bred for specialized uses. Rock pigeons navigate effectively by sensing the Earth’s magnetic field and noting the position of the sun. With that navigational prowess, these birds have been bred into service for the sport of pigeon racing.

For that same skill they have been pressed into military service. Smaller pigeons are usually called doves, symbols of peace, so making rock pigeons into tools of war is a curious case of beating ploughshares into swords. Julius Caesar used them to carry military messages, a practice that continued through WWII. The birds then were also trained as suicide missile guidance systems. Riding in the missile, they would peck at their target through a window; the location of their pecks would guide the missile to the target.

Rock Pigeon

For themselves, rock pigeons are prolific breeders. Males select a nest site on a ledge and coo to woo a female to it. He subsequently delivers twigs to her, which she arranges into a flimsy nest. She lays one to three eggs. Like other pigeons, both parents feed the young “pigeon milk,” a high protein, high fat secretion from their crops. The young grow so quickly on this fare that the pair can repeat the nesting process as many as six times a year if conditions of food, water, and security are right.

Despite their fertility, abundance, and widespread range, rock pigeons have not avoided the worldwide decline of living things. Their North American population has fallen by about half in the last fifty-five years.

The Gifts of the Oaks

By Dan Greaney on August 1, 2021 in BirdWords

Oak Tree

The earliest oak tree fossils, found in what is now the eastern US, are dated from twenty-five million years ago. Since then oaks have diversified around the globe, where they provide a wealth of food and shelter in support of a variety of rich, diverse ecosystems.

Western Bluebird Male

Several types of oaks make the North State home. Valley oaks deck our waterways with the majestic art of massive trunks and branches. Live oaks provide green foliage year round. Black oaks finger into conifers, painting our lower mountains with streaks and fields of autumn golds. But in the bathtub ring around the Central Valley, the foothills below the cooling mountain altitudes but above historic waterways, in the land of summer heat and drought, it is the blue oaks that dominate and define much of the landscape.

Female Lesser Goldfinch Feeding Nestlings

As one of the few trees that can populate this seasonally harsh environment, blue oaks are home to a vast variety of life forms. Their summer leaves, gone bluish and leathery to protect from water loss, are often studded with starbursts of galls, the nests of tiny wasps and flies. Studies on the blue oak’s Midwest cousins have shown as many as five hundred fifty-seven species of caterpillars on a single tree. As larvae and pupae these insects are life-sustaining for the birds that pick them from leaf and twig and trunk, variably to raise their young, fuel migration, and survive the winter–nuthatches, titmice, wrens, kinglets, warblers, vireos, and orioles. When the insects morph into adults with wings, they similarly feed flycatchers, hummingbirds, bluebirds, swallows, and waxwings.

Oak Titmouse Approaches Nest with Grub for Nestlings

Oak Titmouse Approaches Nest with Insect for Nestlings

Downy woodpeckers join oak tree specialists–the theatrical acorn woodpeckers, beautiful Lewis’s woodpeckers, and trilling Nuttall’s woodpeckers–in picking beetle larvae, ants, and termites from the trees, and in making homes in the long-standing soft wood of dying oak branches–homes that are used for nesting by most of the birds already feeding on the oaks, plus a variety of owls and a falcon.

Great Horned Owl with Owlets Nesting in an Oak Tree

But none of this vitality even mentions the defining characteristic of oaks: acorns! Acorns are packed with proteins and fats and calories in general. Woodpeckers, band-tailed pigeons, scrub-jays, and turkeys are only some of their gourmands. Deer and bears feast on them. Gophers, mice, and ground squirrels chomp on fallen acorns, and in turn are eaten by bobcats, foxes, coyotes, and hawks. Yet more insects infest the acorns, and are eaten by reptiles, amphibians, and ground-feeding birds–sparrows, towhees, and quail.