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Bright Spots in Northern California

By on April 25, 2020 in BirdWords
Bullock's Oriole Male

Bullock’s Oriole Male

Nature with its feathers and its viruses does not dance for our pleasure or pain.  Water does not need us to make a river. But we, of course, can both minimize natural suffering and enjoy natural beauties.

There are uncounted bright spots freshly arrived in northern California.  Spring blooms deck our yards and fields, and, in the bird world, subtropical migrants have returned, decked in their finest plumage.

Bullock's Oriole Male

Bullock’s Oriole Male

Among the brightest are orioles.  Bullock’s oriole males sport brilliant orange breasts and faces; their topside is mainly black, including an onyx cap, eyeline, and chin, with contrasting bright white patches on their wings.  Females are yellow breasted, fading to a whitish belly; their backs are pale brown–the pale colors that help hide them and their nests, and so keep the species going.

Bullock's Oriole Female

Bullock’s Oriole Female at the Nest

And these beauties dance.  When I was six years old I was given a package of plastic animals, each about my pinky-length.  The mammals were cast in brown, the birds in blue. In less than a day I lost my instant favorite, the wily weasel.  Gradually I lost the others, roughly in order of how much I valued and therefore played with them. The last to go was a clunky blue thing identified as an oriole.

It did the orioles injustice.  They are not clunky. The uniform blue I could allow; it was the color of the plastic, and I knew nothing different.  But its statue-stiff stance belied the birds’ reality. More accurately, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology opens its description of these orioles with the word “nimble.”

Orioles are nimble in so many ways.  Our Bullock’s orioles dangle from the swaying tips of cottonwood and valley oak branches and weave there the hanging baskets that will hold their eggs and nestlings.  They glean insect meals from those same precarious twigs–or from larger branches, or trunks, or from spider webs, or brush on the ground. They are versatile, and also resourceful.  If they catch a bee, they’ll pull and discard the stinger before dining. If they catch a toxic butterfly, such as a monarch or pipevine swallowtail, they’ll bang it on a branch to extract just the insides and avoid the poisons stored in the butterfly’s skin.  Or they’ll eat fruit, creating juice by piercing the skin and opening their bills inside, and then lapping the mushy liquid with their long tongues. Or they’ll use those tongues at hummingbird feeders, where a modest perch and a broken-out floret can invite repeat visits.

Their flexibility extends even to their human association and naming.  For a while Bullock’s orioles had been lumped into a single species with Baltimore orioles; the two do hybridize where their ranges meet in the Great Plains.  Further studies, however, have separated them back into the two species that their different color patterns had originally suggested.

Besides being brilliant and nimble, these birds are fast.  To see them, listen for their harsh chatter mixed with melodious squeaking, and keep an eye to your taller trees.  Perhaps you will find one of their twig-end nests, a hanging basket the size of a big orange. After two weeks of incubation, both parents will tend the nestlings there, offering ready views of some of nature’s brightest beauties.

Bullock's Oriole Nestling

Bullock’s Oriole Nestling

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Numbers

By on March 28, 2020 in BirdWords
Snow Goose Flock

Snow Goose Flock Taking Off at Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge

How many feathers are on a swan?  How many miles does a black swift fly in a year?  How many breaths does a hummingbird take in ten seconds?  Numbers can tell fascinating stories. Unfortunately, they can also become a blur that fails to have meaning.

As a teacher, some years back I was exposed to the idea of innumeracy, the math equivalent of illiteracy.  We know that habits of both thoughtful reading and number evaluation expand our scope of competence as citizens and consumers.

American Robin

American Robin

Birds, however, show only rudimentary math abilities.  In one study, researchers let robins watch as they dropped two worms into a box, but they rigged the box with an upper layer holding only one worm.  The robins subsequently went to the box and, on finding only one worm where they saw two dropped, pecked at the box long and hard in apparent frustration.  When the researchers allowed access to both worms, the birds gobbled the two and quickly moved on.

Other studies indicate that parrots can count up to six, and crows to eight.  Cormorants used by fishermen on the Li River in China are normally allowed to eat every eighth fish they catch, and have been observed after catching seven fish refusing to dive until their neck ring is loosened–a sort of minimum-wage strike among the birds.

Pigeons have learned to peck at groups of objects in order of the number of objects in them.  Interestingly, having learned to peck in order 1, 2, 3, they can continue with numbers beyond their training, pecking in order groups of up to eight, clearly showing some arithmetic sense.  Above eight, well, researchers have not boldly gone into the uncharted territory of nine and beyond.

Of course, mathematical sense probably has limited use for most birds.  Mostly bird intelligence trends toward other skills such as long-distance navigation, nest-weaving, and music.

For us, math has more varied meanings: finding the best buy with grocery store arithmetic, understanding interest rates for both investments and loans, calculating income and cost of living.  In business and government, arithmetic shows potential profits and losses, and allows planning for pandemics, climate change, and the quantity of waste products of our still-growing human population.  Understanding these numbers can help us design efforts to treat one another humanely and leave a beautiful world behind us.

Regarding birds, I used to use ballpark figures: ten billion birds in winter in North America, twenty billion in spring right after the nesting season.  But now the winter number is cut to 7 billion, a 30% decline in my lifetime. These numbers are echoed and exceeded in studies of fisheries and insects. They are numbers that, for moral, esthetic, and practical reasons we should not ignore.  They speak of degrading habitats worldwide that increasingly cannot support a full array of wildlife or human life. How many more millions of acres are becoming unfarmable? How many nations are becoming unable to feed themselves, and so feeding only their wealthy and their thugs, turning how many more people into refugees and extremists?

Right now we are immersed in dealing with a coronavirus, whose numbers are potentially brutal.  Beyond that priority we must look ahead to climate change, whose numbers are yet more disastrous and longer-term.  We form and manage those numbers through our lifestyles, our purchases, our votes, our literacy and our numeracy. They are numbers that can guide us well or can undercut both our direct prosperity and our world’s wealth of swan feathers, black swift miles, and hummingbird breaths.  The numbers are important.

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The Little All-over Invisible Owl

By on February 29, 2020 in BirdWords

Northern Saw-whet Owl courtesy Ken Sobon

We all have our blind spots, but when the spots are small and secretive we might be forgiven them.  At Wintu Audubon’s general meeting last month, Ken Sobon, director of the Northern Saw-whet Owl Project, introduced attendees to a much overlooked little predator that could well be the most numerous owl in North America.

It’s not exactly invisible, but even avid bird watchers are unlikely to have seen this puffball.   Daytimes it hides away, roosting quietly in thick foliage, remaining still even as you pass right by.  At night you might hear it, especially if you get out into our local coniferous forests. This time of year males begin their long-running nocturnal too-too-too calls, which can beckon a female from half a mile or more away.  If interested, she carols back with her own songs–high squeaks or a rising wail that is music to his ears.  He may then sing and circle her many times before alighting at her side.

The male often shows her a cavity that he thinks will make a good nest–perhaps a hole carved in a snag by a large woodpecker, with a nearby meadow for hunting.  Of course, she seems to make the final decision on just where she will lay her half-dozen eggs. That nest will be her station for the roughly forty-five days of incubation and early child care.

Like raptors around the world, she begins incubating as soon as the first egg is laid, so her young hatch not all at once, as chickens do, but over a period of a week or more.  If food is plentiful, all the young may survive; the male may even support two mates and two nests. If food is scarce, however, only the older siblings are apt to successfully fledge.

He hunts every night.  From a low perch in the quiet of the forest, he listens for the rustling of small rodents, and then swoops down.  He kills with the piercing clutch of his talons. He is scarcely the size of a man’s fist, and the mice and voles he captures can easily weigh half as much as he does.  But he ferries the load to the nest where, if the eggs have not yet hatched, the delivery may serve as both a hot meal and left-overs for later.

After her youngest is two and a half weeks old, and the oldest is almost ready to start exploring nearby branches, the female will leave the nest and either assist in hunting for the young, or she may move on to find a new mate and nest a second time.  The male continues to feed the nestlings for at least another month.

Saw-whets span North America coast to coast.  Our locals appear to migrate along the west coast, but they freely travel east-west, too.  They nest in our forests and parts north, well into Canada, where they are apt to retreat if American forests continue to suffer as expected from climate disruption.

As for their name, it is another of their mysteries.  It supposedly recognizes a similarity in the sound of saw-sharpening and the owl’s vocalization, but that match eludes most of us.

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The Redding Christmas Bird Count: a History

By on January 25, 2020 in BirdWords, Christmas Bird Counts
Great-tailed Grackle Male

Great-tailed Grackle

Up through the 19th century many folks in this country celebrated the Christmas season in “side hunts” in which they competed at how many birds they could kill, regardless of whether they had any use for the carcasses and of whether the birds were beneficial, beautiful, or rare. Ornithologists and bird watchers were appalled at the slaughter. In December 1900, Frank Chapman an early officer in the nascent Audubon Society proposed a new holiday tradition—a “Christmas Bird Census” that would count birds during the holidays rather than hunt them. On Christmas Day of that year 27 birders took part in 25 places in the United States and Canada. Since then participation has grown every year, now exceeding 80,000 people in 2,400 locations in 17 countries.

Bird Hunting

Shasta County participation, conducted by the Lassen Bird Club, began briefly in the late 1950’s but ended when the club folded in 1967. The first project of the newly formed Wintu Chapter of the National Audubon Society was the Christmas Bird Count in 1975. It was soon followed by a Count in Fall River Valley, Red Bluff and more recently Anderson. All Counts follow a standard protocol. The count is performed any day from December 14 to January 5 within “a count circle” with a diameter of 15 miles. The Redding Count is centered just north of Keswick Dam and extends north to Shasta Dam, south to Clear Creek, west to Oak Bottom Marina on Whiskeytown Lake, and east to Shasta College. It is designed to include a variety of habitats, open water, valley grasslands, oak woodlands, brush lands and conifer forest–and, of course, an increasing portion of urban and suburban habitat. The circle is divided into 10 sectors with a team leader assigned to each sector. Teams count from dawn to dusk rain or shine every bird they see by species. Participation is open to all and is free of charge. At the end of the day participants gather at a local restaurant for a no-host dinner and a compilation of the results. Learning the surprise findings of other teams is fun and emphasizes the old adage that “birds are where you find them” not always where you expect them.

The results are by no means as accurate as a human census. The experience of the birders, the weather, and the changing quality of locations examined, all influence both species identification and number of individuals. Not all of the area in the count circle is covered, and not every bird along the route is seen or identified. Big flocks can’t be counted precisely. Also, telling whether a bird has been counted twice can be difficult. A Bald Eagle in flight over the count circle may be counted by several teams, whereas only a fraction of the White-crowned Sparrows in the roadside bushes might be counted. The strength of the results lies in the long-term trends in species numbers, recognizing that the habits of birds and people remain the only constant.

Bald Eagle in flight photo courtesy Andy Morffew

Our results are sent to the National Audubon Society that along with other organizations uses data collected in this long-running wildlife census to assess the health of bird populations, and to help guide conservation action. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has included Audubon’s climate change work from CBC data as one of 26 indicators of climate change in their 2012 report.

Western Meadowlark

Western Meadowlark

Now with 45 years of Christmas Bird Counts here in central Shasta County several clear trends are apparent. As expected, urban development within the count circle has reduced the habitat available for Western Meadowlarks and California Thrashers. The range expansion of Great-tailed Grackles, originating from the southeastern U.S., reached the Redding Area in 2010 and now has several established sites at Lema Ranch and the Clover Creek Preserve. The Common Raven has made a strong move into the valley and downtown Redding beginning in 2007. You can now see them on light poles along busy streets. The Red-shouldered Hawk habitat in central Shasta County historically was confined to riparian vegetation along the Sacramento River. Since 1997 it has expanded its range and can be found on farms and rural subdivisions throughout the valley. Perhaps most spectacularly, the Eurasian Collared-dove arrived in the Redding area in 2008 and is now well-established at about 60 individuals throughout Redding neighborhoods. You are probably aware of its tiresome hooting, a pushier sound than the coo of our native Mourning Doves.

Mourning Dove

Mourning Dove

These are just some of the trends the Redding Christmas Bird Count has documented.

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A Gentle Beauty

By on December 28, 2019 in BirdWords
Mourning Dove

Mourning Dove

As they say, it takes all kinds. That all-kindliness brings a variety of glories into the world. Some are brilliant, like orioles. Some are loud, like mockingbirds; or sing melodically, like finches, or raucously, like jays. Some just dignify life with a humble beauty and gentility. Consider mourning doves.

They don’t sparkle with rainbow colors. They dress in a soft gray-brown, adorned by just a few black dots and dashes, and, for the careful observer, tinges of peach and blue.

Mourning Dove

Nor do they flutter fancy plumes. Their feathers are smooth, gentling from head to tip of tail, unruffled. In flight their tails fan white edges. At take-off their wings whistle against the wind, an unvoiced call to their mates and perhaps a distraction to predators. But they flaunt no fancy flags.

Nor do mourning doves shout for attention like carnival barkers or buyers of computer screen pop-ups. They just coo a mellow refrain, the sorrowful song that gives them their name. Listen to that song: its apparent sadness sounds not so much like a complaint as an homage to beauty.

The doves are quintessential Americana, living all over the contiguous US. Like many other Americans, they do some seasonal travel, mostly north in summer and south in winter. They live in a variety of habitats, and like historical Yankees, they make do.

Mourning Dove Range

They thrive in fields with scattered trees, but they’ll make home in suburbia or deserts, too.

They enjoy a good meal, out-eating holiday revellers with daily consumption of 12-20% of their weight in seeds and grains. Don’t try that at home, or anywhere else!

Mourning Dove

They drink deeply, sucking in water without the need to tilt up robin-style for gravity’s assistance. If fresh water is not available, they will handle brackish.

Perhaps the rarest quality of mourning doves is in how they feed their nestlings, known as squabs. In a simple nest, just a flimsy platter of twigs, the mother dove lays two eggs. When the helpless squabs hatch two weeks later, feeding must begin. But tiny seeds do not carry to a nest as readily as insects, nor do they have the same nutrient quality, nor can squabs digest them. The solution?– Both parents have crops, and hormonal changes cause their crops to switch from food storage to lactation a couple days before the young hatch. This “crop-milk” consists of sloughed-off cells from the crop lining, and, like mammalian milk, it is high in protein, fat, and antibodies–just what the babies need. Both parents feed this milk, mouth to mouth, to their young newborns.

In all the bird world, only doves and pigeons, flamingoes, and male emperor penguins (the females are away feeding in the ocean when emperors hatch) have evolved the capacity to create crop milk.

Mourning Dove

With their nutritious jump on life, and up to six clutches per year in their varied habitats, mourning doves nearly keep pace with not just the losses that all birds of our time face, but the high ingestion of lead pellets to which grain-eaters are vulnerable, and an annual hunt of twenty million. They have declined only 15% in the last half century, a terrible statistic, but better than the 50% decline of field birds in general.

Mourning Dove

And through it all, these unassuming doves sustain a special place in human lore. Not flashy, but vital, they remain a gentle and enduring symbol of peace, a beauty we can all appreciate.

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