Welcoming Waterfowl and Snowless Snowshoeing: Winter Wings Festival, Day 1

Klamath Falls is a small town near the Oregon / California border that gave us some of our first impressions of Oregon on our drive up last April. Although we'd done our birding exclusively from the car at the time, we'd still picked up great birds like Black-billed Magpie and Common Raven. We knew we'd be back someday, given its proximity to Crater Lake, and we were happy that the occasion of our return was their annual Presidents' Day weekend birding festival a couple of weeks ago, Winter Wings.

Ruddy Duck

Common Merganser

This merganser was either practicing to be a bittern...

… or a rock star

This was only the second birding festival we'd attended, and it was considerably smaller than Florida's massive Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival. Even so, there were some great events scheduled, and the Klamath Basin is a helluva playground. We had one trip booked for our first day, but we started off our morning at lake in town at Veterans Park, just the two of us. Right away, we knew we were going to have a fantastic weekend. We got excited at the very first Common Goldeneye, which we can find in small numbers along the coast where we regularly visit, but not as close as this. Another popped up right beside it -- a female. Then another -- a first-winter male. Then another and another.

Common Goldeneye

1st winter male Common Goldeneye

Nicely illustrating the three plumages shown in Sibley. Why can't all birds do that?

Overhead, 15 or so Black-crowned Night-herons were either coming from or going to their roost site. It had been so long since we'd even seen one, so a whole flock at once was a real treat. We crossed the road, leaving the park, and hit the night-heron jackpot: their roosting site, right in someone's backyard (oh, to be so lucky) housing at least 50, and probably more. Not only that, but lots more Goldeneyes… BOTH kinds! Barrow's Goldeneyes were our first of several lifers this trip, and we saw enough of them to forever put us past our anxiety of figuring out which Goldeneye is which (I hope).

Black-crowned Night-heron

Barrow's Goldeneye

Male and female Barrow's

As for the field trip, unfortunately it largely fell casualty to our uncharacteristically mild winter. This was billed as a snowshoeing hike, with an emphasis on identifying wildlife tracks, but instead of the anticipated 3' of snow they usually enjoy, we had to settle for tramping around in the mud. It was still fun, but we'd been looking forward to snowshoeing, which would have been new for us. There were plenty of scat, bones, and hoof prints along the way, although the only mammal we actually saw was a lone coyote tracking across a field. One other notable find was a swarm of Thatch Ants that Maureen spotted. These ants can apparently construct impressively huge mounds of plant material, which we didn't manage to come across.

Mt. McLaughlin

Coyote

Lichen-covered snag

I forget which ungulate this belonged to. I want to say Elk

Thatch Ant

On the way to the snowshoeing / not-snowshoeing trip, we'd passed a lake that seemed to have hundreds, if not thousands, of Tundra Swans. We filed it in the back of our minds for future use, and headed straight there once we left the return bus. Besides swans, Upper Klamath Lake was chockablock with Northern Pintails, Greater White-fronted Geese, and assorted other waterfowl. Maureen somehow managed to find a Eurasian Wigeon. I picked out a swan from the multitudes that looked bigger than the surrounding Tundras, with no yellow on the lores, that I tentatively called a Trumpeter. So far nobody's contradicted us, but feel free shatter our illusions if you see fit.

With 10 Bald Eagles patrolling the premises, its no wonder the waterfowl were jittery

Tundra Swans and Greater White-fronted Geese

Trumpeter Swan (back left) with Tundra Swans

The #1 field trip we wanted to attend at the festival was the Klamath Falls Owl Prowl. Oregon has everything from Great Gray Owl, to Northern Pygmy, Northern Saw-whet, Spotted, Flammulated… The only owls we've managed to see here in the past 9 months are species that are common enough back East (Barred and Burrowing Owls), so we were hungry for something new, and this would have been our best shot for rounding up a whole bunch of Oregon's owls in one fell swoop. Even though we registered for the festival on only the second day, the trip had already maxed out. This was a bummer, obviously, but we managed to get the inside scoop on exactly where the trip had been successful a night earlier, and we decided to head there ourselves.

Astoundingly, we'd neglected to bring a flashlight with us, so tracking one down was our first priority. Next, the drive from Klamath Falls to Klamath Marsh NWR was unexpectedly long, and we were getting nervous, since we had no assurance that we weren't going to run into any locked gates or No-Trespassing-After-Hours signs. Fortunately, neither difficulty manifested, and we took the long, straight Silver Lake Rd. into the refuge. Along the way, our car flushed a large bird from the side of the road while we drove, which took off across the dike, and over the marsh. My first throughout was night-heron, but as Maureen expertly got the light on it, we knew we had a Short-eared Owl. We'd flush three more on the way to the refuge. Try as we might, we never turned up any other species once we got to the refuge, but for us, we were happy to count our owl excursion an unqualified success!

Finding Some of Everything at Ankeny NWR

Everyone should live this close to a National Wildlife Refuge. From our apartment in south Salem, we’re a mere 8 minutes’ drive from Ankeny NWR, one of the crown jewels of the Willamette Valley National Wildlife Complex, and a top spot for wintering waterfowl. We arrived in Oregon too late for wintering birds, but there are have been good numbers of Canada and Cackling Geese, Cinnamon Teal, and Ruddy and Ring-necked Ducks to enjoy into the summer. The Ruddy Ducks, in particular, are looking mighty handsome and we’ve been able to watch males perform their bizarre mating display, bouncing their bills off of their chests with increasing rapidity.

Cackling Geese

Ruddy Duck

Black-headed Grosbeak

I don't have any idea what this is, but it's incredible

There's an emu on the farm across from one of the main trails at Ankeny.
I wouldn't be terribly surprised if somebody tried to eBird it.

Right in the parking lot, Maureen spotted a gorgeous pink and gray moth. It was super tame, crawling over the ground right in front of us without flushing. Maureen was so taken with it that she almost would have preferred it’s colors to the navy and coral she chose as our wedding colors! It was a Cinnabar Moth, which isn’t native, but was introduced intentionally to help combat invasive ragwort, its host plant. Once we got started on the trail, we started noticing golden beetles clustered together on the tops of certain plants. Given that we’d just seen a Cinnabar Moth, I thought they could have been Ragwort Flea Beetles — another introduced species that’s also partial to ragwort, which happens to be a metallic gold — but now I'm leaning toward some kind of leaf beetle in the Chrysolina genus.

Cinnabar Moth

Chrysolina sp.

Recently, I was taking a stroll around our neighborhood and stumbled across a huge number of ragwort plants, each one totally covered in Cinnabar Moth caterpillars. Instead of the pink and gray of the adults, the caterpillars wear a striking orange and black striped pattern. With all of these Cinnabars consuming the ragwort, I’m surprised there’s still any ragwort left. If/when it is finally eradicated, I wonder what happens to the moths? The idea of introducing a species to help fight another introduced species is amusing and absurd, and I can’t help but think of an episode of The Simpsons: Bart cares for a pair of Bolivian Tree Lizards that eventually escape and decimate the Springfield’s pigeon population. To address the lizard problem, Skinner proposes “unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes”.

Lisa: But aren’t the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we’re prepared for that. We’ve lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we’re stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that’s the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.

An army of Cinnabar Moth caterpillars

Our other exciting Lep. find of the day was a beautiful Lorquin’s Admiral. We haven’t been chasing down West coast butterflies with quite the same gusto as we have the birds, but this was one that caught our attention. It makes me wonder what else we might have been missing while butterflies flit about in our periphery. We might just have to work on building up our Oregon butterfly list a bit.

Lorquin's Admiral

We also had some interesting Odes that morning. The damselflies were in fine form, mating every which way we looked. Actually, I shouldn’t speculate on whether they were in fine form or not because damselfly sex doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. As I understand it, below, the male’s terminal appendages (cerci and paraprocts) are clasped onto the female’s prothorax, which helps them determine whether they’re the same species or not. This step precedes copulation. Either that or he’s a zombie damselfly, vacuuming out her brains in an futile attempt to sate his unquenchable, ceaseless hunger for damselfly brains. We also had a nice look at some Eight-spotted Skimmers.

Zombie damselfly courtship

Spreadwing damselfly (Lestes sp.)

Female Eight-spotted Skimmer

Male Eight-spotted Skimmer

During our last trip to Ankeny we also found a motherlode of Pacific Tree Frogs. These little guys were all huddled together along blades of tall grasses, as well as dodging and diving around our feet while we walked the trails. Some groups preferred to take refuge in the wider leaves of blackberry plants (which are everywhere, and should be ripe in another a couple of weeks!). The frogs show astonishing diversity in color and pattern, but they all share dark striping that runs from their noses, through their eyes, and down their flanks.

Along the same trail as where we found the frogs, we came across a Northern Flicker doing some excavating. I rather prefer the bright red mustaches of these fellows to the black mustaches of the Yellow-shafted Flickers back East, but this is only quibbling: any bird unabashedly sporting statement-making facial hair has my respect (here's looking at you, Black-throated Sparrow).

The past several times we’ve gone there’s been a 2nd-year Bald Eagle perched up in a snag, just off the path. He stayed put for good, long stretches, giving us ample time to admire and photograph him, before he would take off over the water to terrify the ducks and geese.

2nd-year Bald Eagle

The highlight of our Ankeny birding, though, was an epic back-and-forth battle supreme between a female Tree Swallow and the Cliff Swallow whose nest she was trying to usurp. A dozen or so Cliff Swallow nests were built underneath the roof of the observation gazebo, and swallows were flying in and out almost continuously, alternately hunting and homemaking. One nest in particular was intensely coveted by an interloping Tree Swallow, who tried repeatedly to annex these other birds’ territory. We watched as, time and time again, the Cliff ejected the female Tree Swallow by force. The Tree clung on for dear life, despite being relentlessly bitten in the face and legs. Somehow, inevitably, she would shove herself back inside again. We watched this brutal war of attrition for nearly ten minutes, but it still wasn’t long enough to see the outcome. We were able to record some of the action, though:

Cliff Swallow in a Cliff Swallow nest

Tree Swallow in a Cliff Swallow nest

This Tree Swallow asserts his dominance by issuing a furious bellow. No Cliff Swallow will ever feel safe as long as this rage-machine and his brutish kin patrol the otherwise placid shores of Ankeny. Aye, this may be a designated NWR, but the designation serves merely as a bitter and ironic reminder there can be no refuge for weary Cliff Swallows.