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Buntings: a tale of time, song, and brilliance

By Dan Greaney on June 2, 2021 in BirdWords

Lazuli Bunting Male

This season last year we had a torrent of reports of lazuli buntings scouring through the Whiskeytown brush and in the chaparral all around the North State. These little birds attract attention because they are visually stunning.

Western Bluebird Male

A superficial description of a male lazuli bunting makes it sound like a western bluebird: blue on the head and topside, pale belly, and a rusty-colored breast. But there’s no room for confusion in daylight viewing. The bluebird is darker, almost cobalt, its breast a burnt brick. The lazuli bunting, in contrast, looks like plugged-in high wattage gemstones–turquoise lapis up top, a moonstone belly, and red jasper on the breast. The bird doesn’t actually glow in the dark, but it has that look to it.

Lazuli Bunting Male

Each spring the females, with the same feather pattern as their mates but browner over all, follow up from Mexico a few days behind the males, who arrive first on the breeding grounds–Great Basin oases or brushy thickets throughout the West. The females will build their nests low to the ground, but first the males establish nesting territories by chasing and singing other males away.

Lazuli Bunting Female

Their music is vital. Buntings are like most songbirds in the way males stake out their breeding grounds by singing. But the song means so much more, too.

Yearling males arrive on breeding grounds with no song of their own. But like young people developing their place, they assimilate snippets from their older kith and kin, and piece those musical fragments into a pattern that becomes their own. In this way, they develop distinctive individual songs that share the phrasing of their community. The neighborhood recognizes and tolerates some encroachment from birds that share their song. Other buntings with unfamiliar music are vigorously chased off.

In evolutionary terms, buntings’ vocal cues serve to support perpetuation of a localized gene pool, a condition that can develop both distinctive beauties and destructive in-breeding. But change, for better and worse, is written into the laws of nature.

The tropics, so rich in the conditions for abundant life, churn out an amazing variety of species. It seems that buntings of yore expanded northward from South America, likely sometime well after our continents joined perhaps fifteen million years ago. But the birds became separated east and west when they hit the Great Plains, the vast grassland of North America that sported bison but not the brushy thickets where buntings make their homes. Divided, the western birds developed into what we call lazuli buntings, and the eastern group became indigo buntings.

Indigo Bunting Male By Kenneth Cole Schneider

More recently, however, the Plains have been breached; agriculture and other development introduced brushland where buntings from both east and west could live; and both could sing there, and hear each other’s songs. Apparently the young of both species readily adopt songs from either. They become musically bilingual, and then, as often happens when the same language is spoken, the two groups begin to court and nest together. Their young are proving to be fertile, so the hybridizing and rejoining of the two bunting species is ongoing in mid-America.

Whether that reunion will reach the west coast, and what new beauties it may produce, remains to be seen. Conditions change, and so then do nature’s children.

Lazuli Bunting Male

For now, though, we can enjoy the treat of our time. Lazuli buntings are striking compatriots. You might not recognize the nuances of their warbler-like trill as well as they do, but look for their blazing color in our North State brushlands!

Lawrence’s Goldfinch: Feathered Wealth

By Dan Greaney on April 24, 2021 in BirdWords

Male Lawrence’s Goldfinch

Gold comes in many forms–in nuggets, flakes, and veins. It also comes in birds.

One of the cutest little finches has got to be the Lawrence’s goldfinch. It’s gold is not the brilliant blaze of an American goldfinch, an almost neon beauty, but rather more subdued, with just wing and breast patches of yellow in its mostly-gray feathering. Not much longer than your longest finger, this little lemon freshet of song exuberantly trills, buzzes, chirps, and tweets wherever it is; and right now, it is here.

Core Lawrence’s goldfinch country is along coastal California for about 150 miles north and south of San Diego. In winter some will explore across the arid southwest as far east as El Paso. In spring some will flutter north as far as Redding.

Here they feast on the bounty of spring wildflower seeds, packed with proteins and solar energy locked in by the plants. A goldfinch favorite is fiddlenecks, whose golden blooms deck our oak savannah meadows. The lucky observer will see a goldfinch perched right on the flimsy flower stalk, riding it tipsily as she reaches into the flower cup for breakfast.

Fiddleneck

Wherever they roam, Lawrence’s goldfinches customarily travel in flocks and, like many finches, often wander nomadically. When settling down to nest, they invariably select a building site near a water source. Along a spring rivulet through a flowered meadow is perfect. There the flock begins to break up as nesting pairs form, although they often choose to nest in a sort of neighborhood.

Lawrence’s Goldfinch Female

Courtship includes perching close to each other, calling, and then beak-touching, wing-fluttering, singing, and feeding. Mated pairs continue much of their courting behavior. She builds a nest of soft plant parts, fur, and feathers, typically about ten feet above ground, and there lays her handful of eggs. She tends them assiduously, hiding them beneath her subdued coloring, keeping them close to her warmth, almost never leaving. Her little mate defends the area close around the nest, and brings her food, supporting her dedicated incubation. When she does leave the nest, he assumes incubation duties.

Lawrence’s Goldfinch Nest

Both parents gather insects to feed their helpless young, and then, if all goes well, reform their flocks to roam the meadows of their west-coast world. As home to these little finches, California is indeed the Golden State.

The Lonesome Goose

By Jeannette Carroll on March 3, 2021 in BirdWords

Canada Goose with Young

The number of Canada Geese inhabiting the Sacramento River area as well as ponds and lakes in the northern Sacramento Valley seems to be increasing every year. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife affirms this with both aerial and ground counts of the species each year. Increased food supplies from grain and rice fields seem to surpass nutrients the geese can find farther south. Large lawns and golf courses are another attractant.

Canada Geese In Flight

The consistent “V-shaped” flying formations and lilting chatter of the Canada Goose is familiar to most northern California residents. Some people call these waterfowl “HONKERS” due to these vocalizations. The large size and distinctive plumage of these geese with black heads and necks and a bold white cheek patch combined with gray brown bodies and white feathers under their tails make them easy to identify. Their wingspans range from 43 to 60 inches, varying among subspecies. Some researchers estimate 4 total Canada Goose subspecies while others estimate as many as 11, grouping the 4 smaller subspecies as a separate species, Cackling Geese.

The colorization of males and females is identical in all the groups. However, the male is larger and holds his body more upright, ready to defend his mate or offspring.

Canada Geese typically nest close to water, building their nest with large mounds of vegetation such as grass or reeds and lining it with down. The female usually lays 4 to 8 eggs before she begins to incubate them. It takes from 25 to 30 days before the eggs hatch. When one sees a pair of geese with 12 to 18 goslings it is usually because another female has parasitized their nest, adding her eggs to their own.

Canada Goose On Nest

Goslings are precocial, which means they can swim, walk and feed as soon as they hatch. They are led to the water where they find grasses, tender herbs and even water insects the day after they hatch. Canada Geese are excellent parents. One adult swims in front and the other behind with a straight line of goslings between them. Both adults guard while the young feed, and when feeding is done, it’s the same routine: one parent in front and one behind with the offspring in a straight line between them. Ducklings only have the female to guard them and baby ducks tend to swim and feed helter-skelter, making them much more vulnerable to predators. Female ducks often lose many of their little ones, while geese rarely lose even one gosling.

Canada Geese with Goslings

Canada geese form strong bonds within their family unit which includes the adult pair and all of the goslings, who seem to imprint on their parents as well as all their siblings. Groups of five to twelve flying in their “V” formations are likely to be a family group from the previous year. Young geese usually do not breed until they are 2 to 4 years old.

Mated pairs of Canada Geese can be together as long as 20 years but usually find new mates if one of them dies. Last year a devoted pair of geese nested and raised five goslings on the edge of the Sacramento River just below this reporter’s house. The male guarded them fiercely, so the family prospered and all five fledged. The original pair returned the following year, but unfortunately something happened to the female, so she couldn’t fly or swim. Eventually she disappeared, likely the victim of some predator.

Canada Goose Portrait

The lonesome gander remained close to where she had been for about a week. He then joined a small flock of other geese and flew away with them. However, he returned after just 10 minutes. Another lone goose came and stayed with him for a few days and then they flew off but after about an hour he was back. This sort of thing happened repeatedly for several weeks. It was well over a month before he left for good.

Now we have a new pair of Canada Geese checking out the same nesting area. It may be our faithful lonesome goose returning with a new mate. Neither bird is banded, and they look identical. Guess we’ll never know, but we wish them luck and success.

Spotted Sandpipers Dance to Their Own Tune

By Dan Greaney on January 31, 2021 in BirdWords

Spotted Sandpiper

If you stroll along the river much this winter you’ll likely see a brown bird the size of a handspan doing the same thing. But you might notice that, unlike you, it is busy poking about the shoreline for insects and crustaceans, and its hind end bobs up and down almost incessantly. The bird may stop bobbing to fly skittering away from you, low over the water’s surface, showing white wing-stripes through its gray-brown topside. This bouncing bird is the spotted sandpiper.

Now don’t expect the spotted sandpiper to have spots this time of year. Spots are a dress-up item for the breeding season, dark dots boldly decking the bird’s white breast and belly, and their brown backsides, too. For now, though, they live their lives plainly–unadorned brown and white, always over or along water, and with just their tail-bobbing to provide some flair.

Spring, however, brings more than spots to these little shorebirds. They are one of the handful of species who break the breeding pattern common to birds and large fauna in general.

Most sandpipers breed in the Far North, where the twenty-four hour sun spurs explosive growth of plants and lichens, and the hordes of insects that feed on them. Those insects are food for millions of birds, and crucial to their efforts to feed their young. That environment is rich, but only briefly so. Winter encroaches at it from both ends. To nest there, sandpipers have evolved young who develop fast. They lay large eggs; the chicks emerge precocial, ready to run and feed themselves. To guide and protect their chicks through their brief, busy childhood, parents bond for at least a season, and sometimes for multiple seasons.

But spotted sandpipers, those bobbing birds along our riverbank, have spread their nesting grounds to include not just the Far North but rivers, mountain lakes and meadows, flats and shorelines throughout Canada and most of the US. They are the most widespread sandpiper on the continent. This gives them a longer nesting season than their Arctic cousins. But the females still lay those large precocial eggs, each egg 20% of its mother’s weight. They don’t produce more than four for a single nest; the physical toll seems to be too high.

Spotted Sandpiper Nest with Eggs

To take advantage of the longer warm season, perhaps the birds could raise two broods, as many songbirds do. But nature finds many ways to solve life’s puzzles. Spotted sandpipers maximize their reproduction by having the females focus on egg-laying and the males focus on child-rearing.

At breeding season, female spotted sandpipers establish breeding territories which they vigorously defend from other females and where they court up to four males with elaborate swooping displays and strutting. Over a 6-7 week breeding season, they lay an average of eight eggs but as many as twenty, with never more than four in a nest. The total number of eggs seems to be determined by the availability of food and males. For their part, the males separately tend and protect, even from one another, their individual nests and hatchlings.

Biological changes have evolved to support this reproductive process. At breeding season, females undergo a sevenfold increase in their testosterone, promoting their active courting and territory defense. Males produce high levels of prolactin, a hormone that promotes parental care-giving.

While nature has pioneered this reproductive technique, nature does not guarantee the success of any particular strategy. Like many species, spotted sandpipers, despite being widespread, have declined over 50% in the last fifty years. What comes next for them remains unknown.

Another unknown is the function of sandpiper tail-bobbing. Guesses range from the mildly plausible – say, aiding in balancing on rough terrain – to the absurd – say, pumping body oils over their feathers to improve waterproofing. That latter reckoning is imaginative, but completely lacks physiological evidence. Since convincing explanations still elude us, the hypothesizing is wide open. Have at it!

American Kestrels, Looking for a Good Home

By Dan Greaney on November 21, 2020 in BirdWords

American Kestrel Male

American kestrels are striking, with burnt-red backs and tails, steel-blue wings on the males, and bold falconid markings, black and white on the face. All this is packaged into a little hawk that could perch on your finger, and can inspire fascination in children and their attentive elders. And these rainbow dynamos are pretty to watch in action, too.

American Kestrel Female

They will leap from a field-side post or overhead wire and flap forward until, spotting possible prey, they will fly in place, maybe twenty feet in the air, awaiting the chance to strike. Their prey may be a grasshopper or spider; or perhaps a vole. Vole trails are decked with their rodent urine, making pathways to dinner that kestrels see clearly with their UV vision.

Kestrels do not truly hover, as they cannot flip their wings over like hummingbirds in front of a flower, but they face into the wind and flap at an angle to hold their heads motionless, able then to discern the important motion below them. Their descent to that prey is not a peregrine dive but rather a wing-raised drop, ending, the bird hopes, in clutching a meal with its noodle-thin but wire-strong talons.

The kestrel may dine right there on the ground, or carry the meal to a higher perch. It may stash extra food in a handy clump of grass for later consumption. Or it may feed its hungry chicks.

Kestrels nest in cavities, where for a month the male brings food to the female while she incubates four or five eggs. Both parents then feed their nestlings for another month, when the young fledge. At that point, if food is abundant, the female may start a second clutch. The male will continue to feed both the fledglings and his mate.

Many songbirds are able to keep a relatively clean nest. Their young defecate in fairly dry packets that parent birds can lift and remove. Kestrel nestlings, alas, release a more liquid poop; but they do, at least, raise their tails and squirt against the cavity walls, keeping their nestling area as clean as possible.

Kestrels live year-round along open country across most of the US. Some migrate, to nest as far north as Alaska and winter as far south as Panama. Older folks may remember them as the common “sparrow hawk” of farms and fields, but over the last fifty years American kestrel numbers have dropped by half as other Americans have paved and built on the fields, sprayed pesticides that have killed their prey, and cleared old cavity-bearing trees that provided nesting sites.

But Americans can offset these losses, too. To help counter the habitat change, you can put out nesting boxes for kestrels and other birds. Construction directions can be found at nestwatch.org; click “All About Birdhouses.” Do it now, and then see who comes along in the spring!

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