Battle Creek Wildlife Area is a CDFW fee area which can certainly handle and thrive with this winter’s wet season and provide us with great birding opportunities. Please join us at Wildlife area’s parking lot located at: 23999 Coleman Fish Hatchery Rd, Anderson, CA
These 582 acres of riparian forests, marshes, and oak woodland supports a diverse variety of migratory and resident bird species, as well as aquatic and terrestrial mammals. Bald eagles and ospreys nest here in spring.
We will explore the two primary trails, Oaktree and Coleman Hatchery, for a 2.6-mile hike for the best viewing of the area.
Please contact Dan Bye, by text/cell 530 228 9373 or email danbye56@gmail.com for more information.
The wide-open vistas, grassy fields, large ponds and oak woodlands of Lema Ranch offer quite a variety of bird species. Winter waterfowl, woodpeckers and sparrows are a particular treat this time of year and if we’re lucky, we might spot a Canvasback or a Merlin!
Meet at 8:00 am at Gate 10 located at the end of Lema Road, just past the maintenance facility. Park on the right-hand side of the road by the maintenance facility. We will walk the paved trails to view all five ponds. There is a bathroom located near Gate 10. Rain cancels the outing. Contact Larry Jordan at webmaster@wintuaudubon.org for more information.
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.
Seasonal colors, check! Pumpkin spices, check! Plentiful food and gathering with family? Check and check! Cinnamon teals are birds of the season! Turkeys notwithstanding.
Their color is brilliant autumn rust, a very red cinnamon.
The spice, of course, is in their name.
Feasting? That’s what the season is for: they dine and rest in preparation for raising young next spring.
And gathering with family? Cinnamon teals often feed together in tight groups, but they are not so numerous that they cover lakes the way some ducks and geese do. Fortunately, they seem to have an inclusive attitude, and readily paddle among other ducks on the ponds– adding spice to the mix, one might say.
Cinnamon Teal Drake
Teals are small dabbling ducks. The dabblers are ducks who feed not by diving but by skimming aquatic plants and insects from the surface or tipping tail-up to stretch below water to gather snails from the bottom of their shallow ponds. Cinnamon teal, with relatively large bills perfect for filtering surface water, often skim the top of a pond near the cattails and tules that ring it.
Along those tules a male may establish a favored resting spot, perhaps in the morning sun. There his fiery eye and brilliant rust-colored head and lower body can shine. If he stretches a wing he shows a green patch at the hind end of his upper wing, the teal color that defines this group. Forward of that color patch, known as a speculum, he shows an even larger strip of powdery blue feathers. But he does not always shine so brightly.
Ducks are heavy birds, and their aerodynamics require them to fly fast or not at all. That requires all their feathers to be in good form. Most birds molt, or replace their feathers, piecemeal, but ducks doing so would be flight-compromised for a long time. Instead they lose all their large feathers at once, becoming completely flightless for a much shorter period. Male ducks typically enter this phase after their young have hatched. They lose their bright colors and their flight feathers. Brown camouflage feathers grow in, and they retire from public life for a couple months. By mid to late fall they will grow colorful new feathers, including flight feathers
Cinnamon Teal Female
The timing works well. The females have raised their ducklings, and the young have fledged and flown. She is ready to start looking for a mate for next year just as he is freshly dressed to impress. She will study the males as they preen and strut for her attention, and make her selection. The pair will bond over the winter.
The female runs nesting. She builds her nest in dead pond-side vegetation, often under overhanging reeds that require her to tunnel into the den. There she will incubate 4-16 eggs, sometimes including eggs donated by a female from another species. When the young hatch in about three weeks she will guide them for a couple months, until they take wing to spread their own spice.
Join us at the City of Redding Clear Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant on Metz Road off of Hwy 273 for a sunrise stroll around the ponds and Sacramento River. We will be looking for wintering waterfowl/waders as well as riparian and oak woodland passerines. Dress for chilly and windy weather on a 2-hour flat terrain hike, bring water and snacks. Rain cancels the trip.
