Tybee Island Birding

In south Florida, we lived 10 minutes from the beach. In Savannah, we live 10 minutes from the beach. It's probably best to chalk up the parallel to happy coincidence, but Maureen and I do consider ourselves beach people. We're not often interested in going to the beach qua beach, but you can nevertheless expect to see us there every couple of weeks. Instead of catching waves and laying out in the sun, our weekend hegiras have a decidedly different (and predictable) character: they're all about the birds. And Tybee Island has some awesome birds.

An assortment of typical Tybee birds -- Willets, American Oystercatchers, Black Skimmers, Ring-billed Gull

American Oystercatchers

It also has awesome numbers of awesome birds. It might be an exaggeration to say that we've watched the sky darken with a cloud of Black Skimmers, but only just. To have 800 of them circle close over your heads may not mean watching the sun get blotted out of the sky, but the experience certainly eclipses any ordinary day at the beach (wordplay!).

A LOT of Black Skimmers

 
The Skimmers usually congregate in a tightly packed group at a sharp elbow in the shoreline. Occasionally, they'll rise up all together for no apparent reason, fly a couple of laps, and then settle back down as a unit. Other times, it's clear why they've risen up: a rascally scamp sprinting into their midst, or a bird-blind couple blithely strolls through them on their way from Point A to Point B. Both situations are annoying, but it's hard to get too upset when I know I've probably been guilty of both at different stages of my life. 

  

On one recent outing a family was having professional photos taken, and as we approached the elbow the patriarch would rush the birds and hurry back to his family in order to capture the skimmers swirling about in the background. It seemed a fairly indecent thing to do, and fortunately it stopped as soon as we set up scope. I will say this about non-birders, though -- they usually won't go out of their way to spook birds that others are taking an active interest in. 

 

And here's a bird we were definitely interested in: a Piping Plover. This lonely little guy represents 1/8000th of all Piping Ploverdom. He's hung around all winter with nary another Piping to be seen, but plenty of Semipalmated Plovers to make him feel different and awkward. Or not. I mean, look at him -- he's ADORABLE! Who could ostracize that?

Piping Plover taking his lunch to-go

Yanking a hapless invertebrate out of the ground

Standing his ground against a Sanderling

Mostly Semipalmated Plovers, with some Western Sandpipers thrown in for good measure

Tying the Knot

I know, you're going through Hipster Birders withdrawal, and it's killing you. Well, we are trying to get back into the swing of things, but life has been getting in the way. But all good things, of course! As you may have surmised from this post's title.... We're tying the knot! =D So there's been lots of excitement lately, and much more hullabaloo to come. But we are going to try our best to squeeze in our birding tales between wedding planning.

So, in celebration of our future tying the knot, we're going to show you pictures of, what else but.... Red Knots! We had the complete and utter joy of seeing these traveling shorebirds from very close distances not too long ago on the shores of our local beach on Tybee Island. This past late August, after hearing reports of these beauties appearing at our beach, we had to go check them out. And boy oh boy, we were not disappointed. The only other times we have seen Red Knots have been from VERY far distances when we had to stare and squint very hard through binoculars (before having our scope) while looking back and forth from our field guide to figure out that what we were looking at were indeed Red Knots.





Well, there was no doubt about it this time! These rounded-bellied shorebirds were right out in the open, and some of them even had lingering evidence of their notable rusty hues. We giggled and squealed with delight at the sight of these Red Knots casually walking by just feet away from us.

And Tybee Island beach, being the wonderful place that it is, had other lovely migrants to show off during this nice early spike in migration. We had a Western Sandpiper amongst a number of Semipalmated Plovers and a Common Tern standing out amongst the crowd of the usual masses of Royal Terns.





So as we ride into the sunset together, we hope you continue to enjoy the chronicles of the Hipster Birders that you know and love.

Jaeger Shots!

Just this past week, an out-of-town birder who visited the Savannah area reported seeing an odd bird on the shore of North Beach of Tybee Island that he didn't figure out what it was until after he had returned home. And lo and behold, he had found a most unusual bird indeed - a Pomarine Jaeger!

Pomarine Jaeger with his foot sticking out

Pomarine Jaeger on Tybee Island

This bird isn't odd to find in this part of the country. However, it is extremely odd to find it on shore! These hefty birds are almost always found offshore, flying powerfully out over the ocean waters. What probably brought this bird inland was a problem with its left eye which was clearly injured and/ or infected somehow.

 

A close-up view of the injured/infected left eye

Left eye can't open

Another look at his left eye

Knowing that we'd probably never see a Pomarine Jaeger, or any jaeger for that matter, this up-close, we went over to re-locate it on Tybee in the early evening after I got off of work as we knew that most beach-goers would be gone for the day on this summer weekend. We trekked through the sand as we have many times before, and just at the bend of the shore where we have found many shorebirds, gulls and terns, there lay the lone jaeger, so sweet and peaceful.

Pomarine Jaeger preening

A look at the twisted tail

Pomarine Jaeger

We watched him as we inched up ever so slowly and cautiously towards him. "Regular" beach-goers (those not outfitted with binoculars, a camera, and a scope) walked right past him and he didn't flinch, so we decided to move in closer and get some better looks and shots of him. He seemed as calm as a cucumber and didn't seem to mind our presence. We figured he must have gotten used to it with all of the beach visitors that come and go. And he probably figured no one was really interested in him, except for these odd creatures approaching him with large black lenses.

As we gazed upon him, we relished admiringly over its mighty bill and beautiful face and physique. As we came around the side of him, we saw that very distinctive long and twisted central tail feather, clinching its identity along with its dark malar and lack of pale crescent at the base of its bill as in the Parasitic Jaeger. On his other side, his beauty was slightly blemished only by his wonky left eye which you could see was not able to open entirely. The poor thing had to turn the right side of his face upward in order to see what was going on above him.

Pomarine Jaeger had an itch, so he turned over on his side to scratch it!

Jaeger looking up with his good right eye

We had heard from other local birders that had previously re-located the bird that it could fly. And after about an hour at the beach, Nick witnessed the jaeger take a short burst of flight to move about 100 feet from where we originally spotted it. So although the bird is able to fly, his eye is keeping him grounded. We know that one other birder has contacted a rehabber to try to pick up the bird, but they did not have success in re-locating him. We, too, are trying to reach out to see if anyone can try to come back and get him. We've been told that rehabbing ocean birds can be very difficult, so the fate of this awesome bird is unknown at this time. But we have hope for him yet.

Farewell and good luck to you, Mr. Jaeger

Lazy-ass Birds

Birds perform some of the most incredible, energy-intensive feats of any animal on the planet: Bar-headed geese regularly pass over the top of the Himalayas; Bar-tailed Godwits are known to fly more than 7,000 miles non-stop from Alaska to New Zealand; and Great Snipes make sustained flights of 60 mph for several days at a time.

Even so, birds are sometimes just plain lay-ZEE.

We've been noticing it more often within the past several weeks, with the weather growing increasingly unpleasant, and the birds doing their best to cope. While these strategies may all have sound adaptive value, having been meticulously honed over the course of millions of years of natural selection, their chief virtue is in making birds look hilarious.

Take the Black Skimmer, for instance. Such an odd-looking bird to begin with, skimmers really take it to the next level with their lugubrious habit of lying out flat, resting with their head and bill extended forward over the ground. It's a behavior that's been depicted in Sibley, but that we'd never actually seen until recently. We were beginning to think it must be an uncommon sight, since we've lived along the coast for several years now and see skimmers fairly regularly, but we must always have been in the wrong place at the wrong time; on this particular beach outing, at least half a dozen skimmers were stretched out in this manner.

These Black Skimmers look like they've given up on life

A couple of lazy skimmers

I can certainly sympathize with these skimmers -- it can hardly be fun lugging those massive mandibles around wherever they go, and sometimes you've just got to take a load off. In addition to helping the skimmers rest more comfortably, this method of laying out also reduces the amount of heat they absorb (cf. Gochfeld & Burger, 1994), making it doubly helpful… assuming they don't care what anyone else thinks of them. 

Do they make Prozac for skimmers?

Black Skimmers

Another example of an apparently lazy bird is this young Brown Thrasher we found in Forsyth Park last week. He fluffed out all of his body feathers and held himself in a rather peculiar position for some time, even walking around a bit while holding himself in the same position. Unlike with the skimmers, I suspect that this may have been more about delousing. Some ornithologists have proposed that feather fluffing is a means of removing parasites, either by exposing them to sun (as shown) or by dislodging them with dust (cf. Hauser, 1957). In fact, in revisiting the park yesterday, I did see another thrasher (or the same one) holding himself in a similar position, but with the clear intention of saturating his underparts in earthy goodness. Assuming that these behaviors are related, basking, then, may be one tool in the arsenal against mites. This spaced-out looking Northern Cardinal that Maureen digiscoped seems to support that notion. He certainly seemed more interested in sunlight than dirt, anyway -- maybe with the same idea? Hauser (1957) noted that this type of behavior is especially likely after emerging from long, cloudy periods. 

A particularly fluffy Brown Thrasher

Spaced-out looking Northern Cardinal

But the trophy for laziest-looking bird has to go to this Tufted Titmouse sunning at Skidaway Island State Park. As much as he might look like roadkill, he was up and off just a few seconds after Maureen took this photo. I'm not absolutely positive what this ridiculous creature could have been up to, but in trying to figure it out I came across this fascinating old article titled, "Some Observations on Sun-bathing Birds" (Hauser, 1957). I'm sure the science has improved considerably in the 55 years since it was written, but the hypotheses and illustrations are worth a look. One hypothesis in particular had to do with the preen gland. Specifically, when the preening secretions are exposed to sunlight and then ingested, they can provide a source of Vitamin D. And what do you know! In the picture, you can actually see that the preen gland is fully exposed on the titmouse (the pink, fleshy bit just at the base of the tail). 

A Tufted Titmouse doing... something?

So who's to say a little laziness isn't a good thing? It seems to work for these birds; it's something you should keep in mind next time I go a month without writing a blog post, too. Here's to laziness! 

References

Gochfeld, M. and Burger, J. (1994). Black Skimmer (Rynchops niger), The Birds of North America Online (A. Poole, Ed.). Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Retrieved from the Birds of North America Online: http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/species/108

Hauser, D. (1957). Some observations on sun-bathing in birds. Wilson Bull., 69:78-90.