All I Want for Christmas... are Some Year Birds

Guess what, folks – New Year’s resolutions work. If they didn’t there’s little chance you’d be reading this. Back in August we took an epic road trip throughout California, and around the same time we bought our first house, so there’s been plenty to keep us busy over here in Hipsterland. We’ll tackle CA in due course, but recently we’ve been sorting through photos from our holiday circuit, which brought us over to Upstate NY to visit my parents, and then down to Houston to see Maureen’s family.

Black-capped Chickadee

(Slate-colored) Dark-eyed Junco

We usually don’t have a lot of time to bird when we fly to NY, but the one patch we visit reliably is Schodack Island State Park, which BirdLife International deems an Important Bird Area because of its status as a breeding ground for Cerulean Warblers. No chance of seeing them in December – someday we’ll have to make it up there in spring – but we can usually turn up an American Tree Sparrow or two. Or in this case, 30.

American Tree Sparrow

In Texas we stayed in Missouri City, a bit southwest of Houston-proper. The manmade ponds in the local neighborhood are a sure bet for scads of Black-bellied Whistling Ducks and assorted herons. The herons are a special treat, since we don’t get to spend much time with Snowy Egrets, Little Blue Herons, or Tricolored Herons these days – also herons are what got me into birding initially, given the diversity of the eastern varieties.

Black-bellied Whistling-Ducks

Little Blue Heron

Snowy Egret

Bad hair day, or best hair day?

On our way out to the ponds, a pair of Black Vultures were picking over the remains of a roadkill squirrel. The vultures were crushed in turn by Maureen, who mercilessly slayed them with her lens. Circle of life. The vultures scarfed down their Sciurid lunch in the road, but scooted out of the way whenever a car passed. Seems like a crow would know better, and maybe remove the corpse to a sidewalk where it could enjoy its squirrel guts in peace. Vutures: they’re no crows.

Black Vulture

"Have Fun"

A stroll through Sienna Plantation is a major boon to our year lists and we can generally turn up birds we won't see anywhere else in our annual travels. Neotropic Cormorants are present in smaller numbers than the Double-cresteds, but we've been able to find them pretty reliably over our past few visits. As for Ruby-throated Hummingbirds -- I can't believe we used to live where we only had one species of hummingbird. As spoiled as we are to live out west now, I sure miss these guys. At least we still have a chance to find them now and again.

Neotropic Cormorant

 

Ruby-throated Hummingbird

One Houston park we’ve enjoyed in the past is Bear Creek Park where we visited last spring and picked up some good stuff, like Acadian Flycatcher, Summer Tanager, Prothonotary Warbler. When I was looking through eBird reports this time around, I saw there were recent sightings of Couch’s Kingbird, LeConte’s Sparrow, and, oh yeah… Greater Pewee! (Spoiler, we didn’t find any of those)

Pileated Woodpecker

Pine Warbler

Blue-gray Gnatcatcher

But we did still manage to leave perfectly satisfied with ourselves after tracking down a female Vermilion Flycatcher. We saw our first and only Vermilions in 2014 during our cross-country move. We’d hoped to find some at Joshua Tree this summer without luck, so this was a bit of a redemption.

Next time we'll pick up with a day-trip to Brazos Bend State Park to finish off our Texas trip.

Northern Mockingbird with a cutworm of some kind. Maybe we should import some mockingbirds to our yard while we still have some grass left.

Northern Cardinal

Birding in NYC: Central Park

Just this past May, Nick and I had the absolute pleasure of visiting New York City for a friend's wedding, and we, of course, had to bird one of the greatest urban birding spots - Central Park! Our trip started out a *bit* rough. We drove 2 hours north to the Charleston, SC airport to be 2.5 hours early for our flight only to be told 30 minutes before boarding that our flight was cancelled! Another flight to NYC was also cancelled, which left Nick and I scrambling like a scene from a movie trying every airline counter to see if anyone had any way of getting us to NYC that day. Well, that wasn't going to happen. The only flight that may have gotten us there would have us land around 11pm. So what does this pair of crazies do? We decide to drive up to the Big Apple since we would end up there at the same time, while avoiding having to pay for a whole new ticket, and going for one heck of a long road trip. Life's always an adventure with us two! 

Central Park Scenery

William Shakespeare Statue in Central Park

So when we finally get to the city, we waste no time in getting up early, getting a hearty breakfast at the famous Carnegie Deli, and trekking out to Central Park. The weather was not ideal - it was very gray and cloudy, and did end up raining later that day. But we made the most of it and hit up the Ramble, an area in Central Park well known for great birding. It did take us a while to make our way to the Ramble as we kept getting distracted by any flitting we saw. This wasn't our first time to the City, but it was our first time there together as birders, and we didn't want to miss any county, state, or life birds!

Cool Fungus

Pretty White flowers

The Ramble did not disappoint! We were charmed by the sweet songs and great, long looks at our lifer Warbling Vireo. He was quite the performer and delighted us for a good while. Nearby our avian crooner was a Baltimore Oriole that went back and forth from a nest that kept it well-hidden once it was in there.

Warbling Vireo

Warbling Vireo singing

Notice the black crown of the Baltimore Oriole poking out at the top of its nest

Oh, and the Warblers! Definitely most birders' favorite birds to search for, these little beauties were so bright and bold in their breeding plumage - something we almost never saw while living in South Florida, and something that's still pretty uncommon for us to see in Savannah. The Yellow Warblers were so yellow, the Blackpoll Warblers had such bold black caps and streaks, and the Chestnut-Sided Warblers just screamed with beauty with their yellow caps, black war paint on their faces, and just good ole chestnutty goodness.

Female Blackpoll Warbler (the males didn't want to pose)

Another look at a Female Blackpoll Warbler

Female Common Yellowthroat

A not-so great pic of a Chestnut-sided Warbler, but you can tell how handsome he is

Another look at this handsome Chestnut-sided Warbler

Even the birds that we've seen down in the Southeast seemed even lovelier up there. The Cardinals were redder. The Gadwalls were in close proximity to allow for better looks. And we even had amazing look at Cedar Waxwings, which had been all over Savannah for all spring and in early summer. We actually had a very intimate look at what seemed to be a little courtship ritual between a pair of waxwings. One of them collected a small, juicy berry and passed it to the other. Then they proceeded to pass the berry back and forth to each other a few more times before one of them ate it. It was very sweet and endearing and a behavior that we hadn't witnessed before. I could just hear them speaking to each other in French accents, "Here you go, mon cheri. A sweet berry for my sweet berry. Oh no, mon amour. Please, I insist you take it."

Back...

And forth...

And Back.

Over the several days of our trip, we made it to Central Park as much as possible and enjoyed so many lovely birds and all of the spring flowers, and even the dark morph of the gray squirrel which I have only seen in the Northeast. We only wished that we could have stayed longer on our last day to enjoy the sunshine that had finally decided to make an appearance. But alas, we had to make the 14 hour drive back home. One of our mornings we did spend in the famous Jamaica Bay, but that'll have to wait for another post!

 

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.