Birds in the Funnies- Dance Lessons

Ah, PowerPoint.
Loose Parts, 8/2/07:

So did the lessons work? Lets see...

Birds are Good for Trees

There's a neat article out in this month's Ecology detailing a University of Colorado study showing the beneficial effects of birds on pine forests.

I don't get Ecology and the online site doesn't have the August issue up yet so I haven't read the technical article, but CU did a press release about the study- here's the opening line to give you a taste:

Chickadees, nuthatches and warblers foraging their way through forests have been shown to spur the growth of pine trees in the West by as much as one-third, according to a new University of Colorado at Boulder study.

So yesterday a CU publicist emailed me to see if they could use a Mountain Chickadee picture to send out with their press release. As an alum (I got my master's degree there in '01), I happily obliged, sending them a couple to choose from.

Well, imagine my surprise when I pulled my Denver Post out of its orange plastic bag this morning and saw my chickadee pic on the front page, with an accompanying article about the study! Here's a link to the online article by the Post, featuring a couple of my Mountain Chickadee pics. I wonder where else they might turn up?

Coming Apart

On our hike up Mt. Audubon (see yesterday's post), we ran into tons of Red-breasted Nuthatches on the way up and back down the trail near the tree line. It isn't unusual to hear or see this species in this habitat, but we had well over 100 of 'em, certainly a personal high count by far for me on such an outing. At one point, a tall dead snag looked like a birdy totem pole with nuthatch above nuthatch all the way to the top. Anyway, when we got some closer looks at the birds it appeared that most or all of them were in heavy body molt, giving them a splotchy, mottled appearance due to muchos missing feathers. Ted Floyd summed it up in an email exchange:

They have that if-you-breathe-too-hard-they'll-blow-apart look about them. Not sure if they're dandelion seedheads or birds!

Anyway, it seem like something funny might be going on with Red-breasted Nuthatches this summer across a wide swath of the country, with early out-of-season reports from places like New York's Central Park. Maybe someone at North American Birds will connect the dots on this phenomenon, or maybe it is just "one of those things..."

Tundra Chickens

A couple of days ago I hiked up the Mt. Audubon Trail in western Boulder County with Ted Floyd and Walter Szeliga. The trail climbs through spruce-fir habitat, krummholz, and alpine tundra on its way up the 13,223 foot summit in the Indian Peaks Wilderness Area. It is one of the more reliable spots in Boulder County for White-tailed Ptarmigan, and it didn't disappoint on this trek.

Even when you know they are around, ptarmigan can be hard to find when they sit still and keep quiet. Eventually, though, Walter heard some soft clucking in a likely area and within a few dozen meters we had spotted a pair of chickens. In the summer, the males keep their white belly and tail while the females are all brown. You'll also notice the bright orange comb on the male. The female has a comb, too, but it isn't as big and she often totally conceals it.

If you take your time and relax, the birds will carry on their routine with you quite close by. I just move slowly, hunker down or sit on the ground a lot, and they don't get alarmed. Sometimes, if they are working in a particular direction, you can get a little ahead of them and sit down and they will walk right by you. As they feed they will often key in on a certain food item. These birds were focusing on the black tips of some kind of grass, and they would give each one a close, quizzical inspection before plucking it.

On the way down we crossed paths with two more groups of ptarmigan- both females with chicks. They can already fly at this size, but typically will just walk or run around. In the same area a few years ago, Ted & I saw a weasel stalking a family group. Instead of flying off, the mom just calmly led her chicks away from the talus where the weasel was popping in and out of the rocks like an attack submarine. She led the chicks to more open ground nearby where presumably it couldn't get the drop on them. I would have expected them to fly away at the first sight of the fierce little predator. Anyway, it was great to see them running around!

And Now For Something Completely Different

What does this have to do with birds, birdwatching, bird comics, or bird photography? Nothing!! But stick with it- after about the first minute it gets very surreal...

Underage Drinking

While watching hummingbirds at the Fawnbrook Inn (Allenspark, CO), this Downy Woodpecker came in for some nectar-tipplin'. It isn't unheard of to see woodpeckers and orioles do so at hummingbird feeders, but it was still kind of cool to watch. I didn't capture the action on "film", but a few Broad-tailed Hummingbirds took exception and aggressively buzzed the complacent woodpecker. Others just seemed puzzled and unsure of what to do when the came in for their accustomed turn at the feeder only to find the behemoth in their usual spot.
You'll notice that this Downy Woodpecker has red where you might not expect it- on the crown instead of on the nape. This is found in juvenal plumage- this bird was born this year and is probably not long out of the nest. Kids these days, what with their sugary breakfast habits!! In fact, the limited red tipping of the crown feathers and lack of red on the forehead in front of the eye indicates that this is a female, per Peter Pyle's information-rich Identification Guide to North American Birds, Part 1. (I hear that Part 2, the birds "up to" doves, is coming soon...) Easterners especially might also note how dark the bird looks, a result of diminished or even lack of spotting in the upper half of the folded wing (scapulars and coverts.) Rocky Mountain Downy Woodpeckers (leucurus group) differ from their eastern counterparts (pubescens group) in this way. Here are a couple more pics of the bird in a more natural setting.

Catching Up

Long time no blog... One of the things about being "off" for the summer is that I get time to do stuff I normally don't during the school year. Some of it is fun, like the 3 days I spent backpacking in my breeding bird atlas block since my last post. Some is more mundane but important, like painting the front porch railings and fixing the back patio. That involved concrete demolition, hauling in road base and sand, and placing about 1000 lbs of paver bricks. I'm sore. The family hit the road for a wedding, and I've been busy with researching, organizing, and submitting pics for a few book projects. In other words, no problem with boredom around here, but I haven't had much blog fodder of late, either.

That changed this week when within a day of each other, I got my latest Birding and WildBird magazines. Flipping through Birding, I was pleasantly surprised to see my amiga Amy Hooper's portrait and accompanying interview in Noah Strycker's column. Amy edits WildBird and writes the WildBird On The Fly blog. Then I realized that my mug was in the issue too- but not as big as Amy's!! Lori Fujimoto, ABA's education manager, acknowledged the judges for the ABA's Young Birder of the Year contest (I've judged the photo module for the last several years) and slipped in our pics. I didn't know that was coming- what of a fun surprise!

Well, the pleasant surprises kept coming when I saw that another birding amiga of mine had a big article in WildBird. Sharon Stiteler, AKA the Bird Chick, wrote about birding in the technological age- check it out if you can! And I snuck a few pics into this issue, too- thanks, Amy!

I did actually go birding the other day- my dad & I went up to Allenspark (in the foothills west of Boulder, Colorado) for a few hours of hummingbird immersion. The Fawnbrook Inn there is famous for its rosy-finches in the winter, but they put out a big hummingbird feeder array and get a resulting swarm of birds- mostly Broad-tails but a smattering of Calliopes and Rufous Hummingbirds swing by on their way south, too. I'll bet they've had a mega hummer or two (Magnificent &/or Blue-throated come to mind)- the place doesn't get birded much in the summer and one could easily visit for days undetected in the ruck. Anyway, it clouded up and even rained on us some, which didn't bother the hummers any but I had to switch to using a flash. You can really see the different photographic qualities of using natural light (the female Broad-tailed) vs. the speedlight (male Broad-tailed and Rufous.) It gives some pretty dramatic results, though, really jazzing up those iridescent feathers.

Birds in the Funnies- Wrong Number!

This one got a little funnier when I looked up Paramus...

Loose Parts, 7/11/07:

Speaks With Forked Tongue

This guy is within earshot of my house- lovely to hear, but did you realize they have a forked tongue like that? (click the pic to get the enlargement)

Higher Ground

As the July heat sets in, it is nice to have Arctic Tundra within easy day-trip range. For Colorado's second Breeding Bird Atlas, I've got a priority block within the East Portal quad that encompasses some of this wonderful habitat, along with other high-elevation habitats like Krummholz, Spruce/Fir, Aspen, Lodgepole Pine, and Willow wetlands. The block also contains the Moffat Tunnel, a 6-mile bore that crosses under the Continental Divide, carrying heavy railroad traffic including Amtrak's very cool-named California Zephyr. Gotta trek to the W. Coast by train someday, but I digress...

Anyway, I went up to the highest parts of my block a few days ago to do some atlasing as well as to just enjoy the tundra environment. My luck was in when I drove the old Rollins Pass Road up from Winter Park, as I heard the ruckus of woodpecker nestlings being fed. Stopping to check, I found an American Three-toed Woodpecker nest right along the road in a small aspen grove. Very cool birds. Hey- did you know that with the re-name (used to be just Three-toed Woodpecker, but now split from the Euro birds), this is now the longest name for an ABA-area bird? Alas, not in my priority block but still a good one to document nesting for the atlas.This Broad-tailed Hummingbird perched nicely along the road, too. Heading on up, I parked above the tree line as near as I could get and walked the rest of the way up onto the ridge line and into my priority block. (There is only one road leading into my block and that is down low along S. Boulder Creek, following the railroad until it enters the tunnel.) The first part of the slope has an extensive patch of shrub willows, and amidst the ubiquitous White-crowned Sparrow songs I heard the buzzy song of a Brewer's Sparrow. The question remains as to if these high-elevation Brewer's Sparrows in Colorado have dispersed up from their normal sage-shrubland habitats, or if they belong to an undocumented southern population of "Timberline" Sparrows (taverneri Brewer's Sparrows, found above timberline in Alaska and NW Canada.) Folks are working on it- probably need sonograms and/or genetic samples to solve this problem definitively. Anyway, here's the singer- looks big-billed for a Brewer's Sparrow, doesn't it?

At the highest point in my block (about 12,200'), I chose a perch to eat lunch that overlooked two cliffy cirques with a sharp arête separating them and was rewarded by a couple of Brown-capped Rosy-Finches swooping through a slot in the ridge between basins. Unfortunately, the closest I came to getting White-tailed Ptarmigan was finding a few molted feathers and droppings- I know they are somewhere up there but haven't pinned them down yet. Beyond that, I was able to record the expected tundra birds like Horned Lark and American Pipit. But in-between birds it is hard to ignore the butterflies that often concentrate on ridge and hill tops. So I'll leave you with some of the bugs- IDs are tentative since I don't know much about Butterflies.
Anise (Nitra) Swallowtail (black form). Per the Kaufman butterfly guide, this form found in the eastern part of the Rockies may be the result of past interbreeding with Black Swallowtails.

Speaking of which, here's a Black Swallowtail. Can't tell from this pic but it was distinctly bigger than the Anise Swallowtail.

Melissa Arctic. I love these harsh environment loving, cryptic butterflies. It takes these butterflies two years to mature in the short summer seasons found above timberline- they overwinter as first-stage caterpillars.

Milbert's Tortoiseshell. Flashy above, dull below!

Variable Checkerspot. Great splashes of color on the tundra- unlike many others, their underwings are brightly colored, too.

Eight Random Facts

Sherrie over at Brush & Barren tagged me with the Eight Random Facts meme.

Here are the rules for Eight Random Facts:

• Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
• At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

And here are the eight random facts:

I think by now folks know I like birds and bird photography. But did you know...

1) In 1999 I completed the Leadville Trail 100 (mile) endurance mountain bike race in 10 hours, 13 minutes. Besides bragging rights, I got my LT100 silver belt buckle to commemorate the experience!

2) Now I ride a Chris Holm mountain unicycle.

3) When I'm not out birding or riding my MUNI, I teach middle school science at Centennial Middle School in N. Boulder, Colorado. I'll be starting year 15 there in August!

4) I also like to garden. I specialize in plantings to attract hummingbirds (surprise, surprise) and tomatoes. As of today (July 4), lots of green 'maters are set- won't be long now!!

5) I also like to run rivers by raft or canoe. I rowed the Grand Canyon on a private trip in October, 2002. I'm scheduled for another Grand trip in April, 2011 (I kid you not.)

6) For a while I was into cave photography. I once rappelled 280 feet into a New Mexico cave (appropriately enough, called Deep Cave) on one such expedition. That was easy, but ascending back out was a bit tougher. I've got to scan my cave slides someday so I can get them on the web...

7) Another outdoor adventure sport I used to do was telemark skiing. In fact, I got my lifer Boreal Owl on a backcountry trip when I flushed one from its day roost alongside the trail- a majorly unexpected benefit of breaking trail!!

8) And, the day after I graduated from high school (been a while), my best friend & I drove my van to Alaska. To fish. On a whim we drove all of the way up to Prudhoe Bay- this was before the haul road was open to the public and we had to sneak past the southern checkpoint in the wee hours of the early morning, and once there we had to ask around to find a fleet operator that would sell us gas to fill up for the return trip- there were no public gas stations up there. At each end was a sign saying "Speed Limit 45, Next 460 Miles." While I tallied Willow Ptarmigan, I weep at the birds I missed in a summer of driving around AK. I did catch some King Salmon as long as my leg, though!!

OK, now who shall I tag?

How about:
Bird Chick
Jeff Bouton's Leica Birding Blog
Tom McKinney's Birding Diary
WildBird on the Fly
Mike's Birding & Digiscoping
Peregrine's Bird Blog
Woodcreeper.com
and, Jeff Gyr Blog

Birds in the Funnies- Caffeinated!

Hummingbird + Caffeine = Trouble!! I wonder if the artists that produce Brevity are birders, or at least bird watchers- seems like they have some good insight into the hyper world of hummers. Already on near-constant red-line, a strong cup of joe might just put a hummer over the edge, indeed!

Good timing on the comic, too- a few folks are already reporting the first Rufous Hummingbirds coming through the Front Range of Colorado. They breed far to the NW of here and the males skadoodle right after breeding- no paternal duties for these love-em & run dads. So these are fall migrants, just a few days past the summer solstice! I'll be watching my hummer-friendly flowers (I've got lots in my Longmont yard for this very reason) but I won't put out a feeder for a while. Even when I do, the hummers I get mostly feed on my salvia and agastache. I've also got a new honeysuckle that is kicking out lots of tempting-looking flowers. I hope it becomes a hummer magnet! I've had 4 species in my yard (in rough order of abundance: Calliope, Rufous, Broad-tailed, and Black-chinned.) Species #5 is going to be a good one!!

Brevity, 6/24/07:

Burst Mode is My Friend

Here's a quicky from the Colorado Field Ornithologist's Convention in Craig, Colorado a couple of weekends ago. I co-led a trip to Dinosaur National Monument and we spent some time in Piñon-Juniper habitat working on the specialty birds found there. One such bird was this cooperative male Black-throated Gray Warbler. It was ascending a juniper, probing the needles for insects and singing as it climbed. When it got to the top I knew it would fly out, but timing such events can be very hard. I try to look for signs of impending takeoff, but often the bird is in the viewfinder one second and gone the next without any apparent warning. Anyway, when I think a bird might launch I often shoot lots of long bursts, hoping to get the initial flight captured. Getting something usable is tough, and often I'll miss the event entirely, but this time I got a nice frame of the bird launching itself to the next tree.

Birds in the Funnies- Flamingo Day

Weird coincidence today as two strips in my morning paper featured flamingo gags. Wish I saw one in the wild instead of in the funnies!

F-Minus, 6/19/07:

Bound and Gagged, 6/19/07:

Another Photo Mash-Up

Sometimes when I get strings of flight shots, particularly when the bird is beyond ideal range for good enlargements, I like to make a composite shot showing the various aspects the bird takes on in its flight. The last one I posted was of a sky-dancing Northern Harrier. This time the subject is a White-throated Swift taken on The Nature Conservancy's Carpenter Ranch property west of Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I was there on a trip during the Colorado Field Ornithologists' annual convention out of Craig, Colorado. (Click the pic to enlarge.)
The concept is pretty straightforward- first, shoot lots of frames as fast as your camera will fire (in my case, 5 frames per second.) Then, at home I pick shots that show the different aspects that I'd like to include. Out of these, I try to pick one with suitable room around it (although if I run out of room I can enlarge the "canvas" in Photoshop and clone in more sky for background.) Then, I crop out the bird in each additional frame I'll use, and use the "duplicate layer" function in Photoshop to copy it onto the master frame. Then, I use the magic wand tool to select the sky in the copied layer and cut it out (just using the "edit-cut" command), leaving only the bird in that layer (sometimes having to adjust the tolerance level so it selects the right amount of sky, leaving only the bird behind.) Then I can move the layer with the bird in it until I get it where I want it in the sequence. Occasionally I'll rotate the layer to fit the sequence as well- I can't always keep a level frame of reference since I'm not shooting off of a tripod. Plus, my sequences are really photo illustrations, not necessarily sequential shots showing exactly where the bird was in each successive frame, and I nearly always leave out frames for various reasons. In fact, sometimes I put them together in different order than the shooting sequence because it tells the story better, in my opinion. By their very nature, swifts are tough to photograph so I was pretty pleased to get those shots, even at a distance. Frustratingly, when nimble, fast birds like these are closer in and have much better potential for detail, they are also much harder to track and focus on. I did get a couple of cool closer shots, though. This one isn't tack-sharp, but the bird is about to nab a bug in flight (total serendipity- didn't see the bug 'till I got home), as swifts are wont to do. By the next frame 1/5 second later the bug was already gone- yum!! And one more parting swift shot... The day wasn't all about swifts, though. Led by Ted Floyd (editor of Birding Magazine and birder extraordinaire), we tallied 95 species entirely on foot (us, not the birds), walking about 8 miles around the amazing property on the Yampa River. Fortunately, the mileage was mitigated by a near-total lack of climbing. Our steepest challenge was to get up onto and later back down off of the railroad grade. Otherwise the section of the Yampa Valley where we birded is forgivingly flat. In typical Colorado fashion, there was frost on the railroad ties as we began our hike at dawn and by lunch we were enjoying temps in the 70's. Our remarkable big-walk total was due to the convergence of many habitat types, including mid-elevation riparian, wet meadows, arid brushy hillsides, and coniferous forest. Here are a few other photo highlights from the day. Peace out- Bill

Ain't Red Shorebirds Grand??

I'll be the first to admit that some of my favorite shorebird sightings involve red birds. Maybe it is because most shorebirding I do here in Colorado involves dull fall birds and often the most red I get to see is the little racing stripe in the scapulars of Western Sandpipers or some vestigial red in Red-necked Phalaropes that come through. The first Red Knots and Curlew Sandpipers I saw were fall birds, pretty gray although still very exciting. Then I went to Cape May in the spring and saw nice red versions of both- danged cool, especially a deep red Curlew Sandpiper along with a more pinkish companion! Well, on Sunday I upgraded my previous Red Phalarope sightings (all of which involved gray fall birds) by picking up a drop-dead gorgeous breeding-plumage female. A friend and fellow Boulder-area birder, Bill Kaempfer, was leading a trip to the Pawnee National Grassland and danged if they didn't find the bird on a little muddy ephemeral pond near the Wyoming Border, probably no bigger than an acre and a few inches deep. I couldn't make the hour's run on the Saturday when they found it, but I headed up on Sunday morning. Initially scanning the playa with my bins as I pulled up, it appeared to be birdless- Noooooo! But the pond sits back a way from the road, and when I combed it more carefully with my scope I found the red beauty against the far side, sleeping in emergent vegetation. WOW!
The bird seemed pretty healthy and content, considering it was thousands of kilometers away from either the pelagic or arctic tundra environs where I would expect it. It was successfully feeding on invertebrates, some quite large. I wasn't sure what could be in an ephemeral pond out on the shortgrass prairie like that, but a couple of knowledgeable correspondents (Henry Armknecht and Steve Larson) suggested that they were probably Fairy Shrimp &/or Tadpole Shrimp. I did some brief online research and both seemed plausible and indeed likely. While I didn't go into much depth in my studies, I found that both reside in ephemeral ponds, the eggs and/or embryos of both can survive complete desiccation for long periods of time- years if necessary (in fact they many species' eggs require drying before they will hatch when the water returns.) They can also survive extremes of temperatures while dried out. Some species of both groups can grow to decent size in short periods of time, with some reaching several centimeters long in just a few weeks. There are many species in these two invertebrate groups (both are crustaceans in the class Branchiopoda, Tadpole Shrimp in the order Notostraca and Fairy Shrimp in the order Anostraca), some with very narrow ranges and even endangered status and some quite common. It seems that in many settings Tadpole Shrimp will eat Fairy Shrimp, along with about everything else animal or vegetable they can find in their ponds, including each other! I did notice that some of the prey items the Red Phalarope captured were eaten quickly and pretty easily, while others required a lot of effort (dashing, lashing, thrashing, bashing, crashing, smashing and occasionally just giving up and trashing.) Perhaps the Fairy shrimp were the easier prey and the Tadpole Shrimp the troublesome items?? I did get one blurry series of the bird with a critter in its bill. I wasn't sure what I was looking at until I compared it to Tadpole Shrimp pictures, when I realized that their horseshoe crab-shaped carapace was almost certainly what I was seeing. Another acquaintance with lots of ecological experience and knowledge of invertebrate biology, David Leatherman, confirmed that the victim in this picture is indeed a Tadpole Shrimp (click on the pic to enlarge.)
While there, I also enjoyed the vigorous singing, skylarking, and chasing behaviors of many shortgrass prairie birds. Horned Larks ruled by numbers, but Lark Buntings seemed to be everywhere, too, seconded by McCown's Longspurs. But one song amongst the cacophony tweaked my radar and I turned my attention north of the pond to find a Mountain Plover skylarking, giving its display song as it glided above the horizon. A bit later, three Mountain Plovers blew by me in a heated chase, giving their little wherrt calls as they went, which took them all around the perimeter of the pond and then out of sight beyond the road to the NE. I wonder if males of the species chase females- it appeared that one bird was being pursued by two followers. After that, one of them, or another Mountain Plover, snuck in from my right to the pond's edge and walked around to where the Red Phalarope was hanging out again near the west shore in emergent vegetation. Maybe I was imagining things, but it seemed like the Mountain Plover walked down to take a look at the weird red thing that was in its pond... Sorry that this pic isn't real sharp but there was a lot of bad air to shoot though across the whole lake. I had to try, though- after all, when was the last time you saw a picture of a breeding Red Phalarope and Mountain Plover in the same frame?I digiscoped these pics through my Leica APO-Televid 77 using a 32X WW eyepiece and Digital Adapter 2 with a new camera I got last week- a Leica C-Lux 2. I had been using the C-Lux 1, which I loved, but the great folks at Leica upgraded me to the current model. It sports a little better resolution (7 MP) but perhaps more importantly, the new sensor has a bit less noise at high ISOs. Other than re-positioning my shutter release bracket a bit, I can still use my same digiscoping rig with this camera. It shoots pretty cool video, too- I'll leave you with a little compilation of some scenes that I shot of the bird in action. The preening clip almost seems speeded up but that is just the frenetic phalarope's pace, I guess. Enjoy- Bill