Tag Archives | Northern Pintail

Decoding Puddle Ducks: Identification of Teals, Shovelers, and Pintail With Dessi Sieburth

Join us for an informative webinar on the identification of puddle ducks, presented by expert birder Dessi Sieburth. This session will focus on key species like the Blue-winged Teal, Cinnamon Teal, Green-winged Teal, Northern Shoveler, Gadwall, Mallard, and Northern Pintail. Dessi will walk us through the distinguishing characteristics of each species, helping both beginners and experienced birders sharpen their identification skills.

Through detailed comparisons of plumage, behavior, and habitat preferences, we will learn how to confidently identify these common yet diverse waterfowl. Whether you’re new to birding or looking to refine your field skills, this webinar offers valuable insights into recognizing puddle ducks in various stages of life and seasonal appearances.

Please join us for a fun and informative evening!

This webinar will be livestreamed on our YouTube channel and will also be recorded for later viewing. Please use the YouTube link above (alternatively: https://tinyurl.com/2y6efp3f) which will take you directly to LAB’s main page, where the live webinar should be visible once it begins at 7pm.

Become a LAB Member! Though our webinars will always remain free and available to all, members of Los Angeles Birders have access to live webinars via Zoom, invitations to special LAB-only field trips, priority sign-up on LAB field trips & events, and discounts on paid LAB programs. To learn more about membership, please see our website!

Looking for a past webinar? Don’t forget that a list of all of our previously recorded webinars is available on our website – which might come in handy if you want to study up before a field trip, or if you’re looking to build your birding skills from home! Just scroll all the way down, past our upcoming and most recent online programs and you’ll find a list of webinars sorted by category. These recordings are all viewable via our YouTube page.

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Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge

Northern Pintail Drake

Northern Pintail Drake

On Saturday January 21st we will tour the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge. Caravan leaves the parking lot at Kutras at 6:00 am or meet at the parking lot at the refuge at 7:30 am. We will have walkie talkies to hand out to each vehicle. Portable restrooms are located at the “closed for remodeling visitors center” and at the half-way point in the auto tour at the viewing platform. Bring snacks to eat during the tour and at our pause at the platform. There is an entrance fee, dependent on your age and situation, see the link below for information.
https://www.fws.gov/refuge/sacramento/sacramento-nwr-complex-passes-and-permits

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Saying Thanks for the Birds

Northern Pintail Drake

Northern Pintail Drake

Family, warmth, beauty… There is so much to be thankful for. Perhaps we can be especially thankful for just that – our capacity to appreciate.

Appreciate is one cool word. It means both “to be thankful for” and “to increase the value of.” Those two things seem properly bound in a single word.

We appreciate birds in many ways. At our homes we may grow brush and trees that give birds places to forage and rest. Perhaps we reduce or stop our use of toxins in the yard. In our neighborhoods we sustain parks, with thickets of trees, ponds, creeks, and rivers; maybe we decrease the number of introduced predators. In these places of earthly beauty the birds can sing and scratch the leaves, and we can enjoy it all.

On a grander scale, too, we have done some good for birds. Banning DDT and lead has reduced those toxins in the ecosystem, famously supporting the comeback of eagles and falcons, and now the health of waterfowl. However, sometimes our large-scale societal actions seem distant and convoluted; we don’t even know what good we do.

Take the Farm Bill. In 1933 it was created to help farmers suffering from Depression Era crop prices. Now, with its impact on not just rural economies but global trade, food safety, nutrition, and conservation, it is often the subject of hard-nosed debate as Congress tries to discern just what the good thing is. Other issues aside, the bill has been able to steer a path that seems to support both farmers and wildlife.

Well over 60% of the Lower 48 is private land, including 911 million acres of farmland and 400 million acres of forests or tree farms. Forest birds had declined 19% in the two decades measured when, in 1990, the Farm Bill created financial incentives for timber companies to improve habitat. Since then woodland bird numbers have stopped their decline and edged up a modest 3%. Also in the 1990’s wetland easements were introduced, paying farmers to keep their fallow fields flooded. Since then ducks and shorebirds ended their decline of 10% in the prior 22 years and have increased an impressive 51%.

Grassland birds had also declined, by nearly half from 1968-2003. Then grassland easements were begun, paying farmers to leave their upland, often marginal, acres untilled. The bird decline stopped and, like the forest bird populations, have crept up a hopeful 3%.

Farm Bill conservation is also credited with keeping 22 million tons of soil out of waterways in 2013 alone. That much soil would put a big hole in your yard—or in Redding, or in the Central Valley; and it couldn’t be good for salmon, or birds that eat fish, or any who, like us, drink river water. Our choices have kept that land in the fields and forests where it should be. Farm Bill conservation is further credited with generating $430 million annually in hunting and bird-watching activities and with water absorption and flood control valued at $150 billion.

Our choices matter, and we’ve made some good ones. But we are, thankfully, alive, and so the responsibility and opportunity of making choices continues. The Farm Bill subsidizes agribusiness and timber companies to do good on private land. Now Congress is deciding whether we should subsidize oil companies with our public land in the Arctic, not to protect habitat but to turn it into oilfields. Further, our House representative just forwarded a bill that would absolve those companies from responsibility for marine mammal and bird kills in the Arctic, the Gulf, or anywhere else. Arctic oil would produce about 1% of the world’s total, not enough to affect gas prices or create security; but it would degrade nesting grounds and contribute to climate change, which greatly harms birds and people alike.

We get to make all kinds of choices. A basic choice is deciding what we want to appreciate.

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