5/22/2021 0 Comments The Butterflies of the Bird WorldIf April is the month for mucking about in Nebraska's sheetwater mudflats and enjoying all the variety of northbound shorebirds, then May invites us into the woods to look for warblers. In the past three weeks, I've added 40 new birds to my Adams Co. Year List, 13 of which have been warblers (and 4 have been their boring cousins, the vireos, which lack both the busy behavior and the bright attire of warblers, but share similar habitat and migration timing.) I'm not sure who is was who observed that "warblers are the butterflies of the bird world," but the saying about North America's 50-some regularly occurring wood-warblers has stayed with me, and I look forward to their arrival each spring. They'll pass back through in September, but I remember the Peterson Field Guide I grew up had a whole section labeled "Confusing Fall Warblers" because many of them have molted into less vibrant and spectacular colors, so May is the month to see them. But, as far as this blog is concerned, here's the problem. I do all my photography by a method known as digiscoping, holding a small camera -- and now often my iPhone -- up to my spotting scope or even binoculars, which then serves as a long lens. It works well for birds at a distance and birds that sit still, but warblers are constantly on the move, and usually if you're at any distance, there are branches obstructing your view. Most of my photo collection of these birds is made up of shots like these, sufficient for a diagnostic, but certainly not an adequate representation of their true beauty.... We've got some great photographers in Nebraska, including Joel Sartore and Michael Forsberg, and I admire the images of little forest birds that Phil Swanson gets. So maybe just treat yourself and search online for photos of Chestnut-sided or Blackburnian or even the common Yellow-rumped Warbler, all of which I've seen recently at our local migrant hotspot, Parkview Cemetery (which is graced with old trees and a meandering creek along its southern border, a perfect stop for weary travelers to get a drink and eat some bugs.) Or better yet, grab some binoculars, head for the trees yourself, and see them in the wild. That's best. You won't forget the first time you get a singing Yellow Warbler in focus from 20 feet away. Promise.
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5/2/2021 0 Comments The Spice of LifeOur delightful firstborn, Phoebe, when asked where she might like to live (she's nearing the end of her college years), answered "Arkansas." I thought it might have been because of what I read recently on Rent.com, which is that while the average price of a studio apartment in the US is $1690 (what?!) Arkansas comes in #1 at less than $700. But, nope, that wasn't the reason. "I've been thinking a lot about species diversity" was her answer. A girl after her father's heart, though she's most interested in the diversity of reptiles and amphibians. Variety is truly the spice of my life. I love buffets, flights of beers, sample platters. And right now Nebraska is offering up a deluxe buffet of migrant birds, a literal flight (dad joke), and for our forbearers surviving on the land, a literal platter. In the 10 days since I posted last, I've added 30 new species to my county year list, nine of them shorebirds like this Whimbrel. There are also some Glossy Ibises moving through, if you have the patience to pick them out from among their more common, northern brothers and sisters, the White-faced Ibis. See the bird below, the one that instead of a reddish eye fronted by pinkish facial skin has a dark brown eye with gray facial skin, and instead of a white line encircling the eyes has an electric blue set of lines instead? That's what I'm looking for, the Glossy in the haystack. Here are several other long-legged, long-billed waders, superficially similar but distinct species that I've had the joy of seeing and sorting out in late April: a Great, a Snowy, and a Cattle Egret. Can you tell them apart?
4/22/2021 3 Comments 1000 miles from any shore....Some birders love hummingbirds, others warblers, some prefer gull- or hawk-watching, but my favorite type of bird to find and study is the "shorebird". They come in a dizzying diversity of sizes and shapes, which makes them fun to identify. They never show up at backyard bird feeders, which means that to see them you have to go afield and spend time in lonely, wide-skied, muddy places, which is good for a person, despite what neatnik parents may tell their sheltered children. And, it turns out, vast numbers of these lovely creatures (shorebirds, that is, not oppressive parents or their indoor children) migrate up and down the Central Flyway where I am blessed to live.
Since I last posted 10 days ago, I've seen 11 new species for the year here in Adams County, Nebraska, and 7 of those new birds have been shorbs. Check out the variety below. And even more will be arriving here in the next few weeks: Dunlin, Sanderling, White-rumped, Solitary, Upland, Least, Western, maybe even Black-necked Stilt, Snowy Plover, Whimbrel, or Ruddy Turnstone. So much to see! 4/12/2021 1 Comment Insectivores and more!I haven't posted in 3 weeks (sorry!) but in that time I've added 15 species to my Adams County year list, including some birds (such as swallows) that eat mostly bugs, which signals the next major push in migration. When insects become available as a food source again after a winter dormancy, all kinds of birds (and other animals, for that matter) are quick to follow. Here are a couple champion bug-eaters, newly arrived. I've also seen four new sparrow species: Chipping, Lincoln's, Field, and Vesper's, all pretty common here. There are still at least five more sparrows I expect to see before the year is out: Clay-colored, Grasshopper, Le Conte's, Lark, and White-throated, with Swamp as a bonus if I'm lucky. So many LBJ's ("little brown jobs," as birders call those small, earth-toned, and easily confused birds. I love the subtleties.) The most memorable sighting I had, just yesterday, was a Peregrine Falcon dive-bombing an adult Bald Eagle over marshland a few miles south of town. Eagles are powerful, but their massive bodies aren't easily maneuverable like the sleek, pointy-winged Peregrine, so it was like watching a fighter jet strafe a bomber, and the eagle soon turned tail and flew off. The Peregrine holds the record for world's fastest animal, with a diving speed of 240 mph by one measurement. Imagine being a pigeon hit at that speed....Lights. Out. Not all birds can be as cool as the Peregrine Falcon. Case in point, #110 on my year list, this Eared Grebe, which not only in appearance but even in name is everything the falcon is not. I still love it. Okay, one last bird. I love to go fishing almost as much as I love to go birding, and there have been a number of days when I've watched myself be out-fished by Osprey. I mean, the Belted Kingfisher is an amazing angler, too, but let's face it, it's catching minnows. By contrast, I've seen Osprey haul off fish I would have gladly taken home myself. I got to see two of these "fish hawks" in the past three days. Look for more on Lake Hastings!
3/21/2021 3 Comments Two posts in a day?!Yeah, the birding is just that good! I thought I'd check a couple marshes before sunset tonight and was rewarded with three new birds for the list: Long-billed Dowitcher, (which gets the prestigious Bird #100 spot for the year) Wilson's Snipe, and Horned Grebe. I got some photos of the grebe, but none as good as ones I took a couple years ago. So cute, and check out that reflection in the water. Extra head! I'm not a hunter but I can see the appeal of trying to hunt snipe. They blend in really well to the marshes they live in, and when they flush, these stripy little footballs fly really quickly and erratically. Here's one I watched tonight, colored very much like the corn stubble it was feeding in, where, I might add, it was very successful in finding worms. I must have watched it pull up five of them in as many minutes.
3/21/2021 0 Comments And the hits keep comingYesterday's steady south breezes blew out lots of the migrant waterfowl that had been stacked up here in south-central Nebraska awaiting good tailwinds, but they blew in a few new birds as well, including two FOY Eastern Phoebes. (My wife & I named our firstborn Phoebe, an homage to both the bird and to the female church leader mentioned in the Bible in Romans 16. Hi, Phoebe, you delight, you!) I've always loved these early spring flycatchers of farm and wet woodland with their simple song and gentle tail-wagging habit. Something about the humble, brown phoebes quietly but busily building their little mud cup nests under bridges reminds me of Hobbits, which Tolkien says "have been living and farming for many hundreds of years, quite content to ignore and be ignored by the world of the Big Folk" and "must seem of little importance." Phoebes won't grab your attention or demand your allegiance; they win our affection by gracefully going about their lives in earth-tone suits. Blessed are the meek. One species I was getting nervous I wouldn't be able to find in Adams Co this year was the Greater Prairie-Chicken, but I finally located a flock of six yesterday. They were along a rutted, minimum maintenance road through rolling sandhills covered in tall, native grasses. Prairie chickens have something of a celebrity status here, second only to our Sandhill Cranes; birders from all over the world have paid for space in a Nebraska photo blind to watch these rare, native birds on their leks (communal dancing grounds where males come to compete and perform while females watch and choose a mate.) I won't be able to give adequate description of how they stamp their feet and erect their "horns," raising their orange eyebrows and inflating their orange air sacks, so look for a video online. A phoebe would blush to see such a gaudy and audacious display!
3/19/2021 2 Comments More new goodiesSt. Patty's Day brought to Hastings one of Nebraska's biggest birds, the American White Pelican, which holds the local wingspan record at over 9 feet! Go get a tape measure and check that out. I'll wait.... Crazy big, right?! When one comes soaring in, I always think of a B-52, or Howard Hughes's "Spruce Goose." Harlan County Reservoir about an hour southwest of town hosts thousands of these amazing birds. A contender for my "best bird of the year" so far is the Lesser Black-backed Gull that graced Lake Hastings for just a few minutes on March 18. This European species had never been reported in the state before 1992, but now is considered an "uncommon regular spring and fall migrant and winter visitor statewide," according to the excellent resource Birds of Nebraska Online. Today's best bird -- out of five new birds I added to my Adams County year list -- was a male Cinnamon Teal. As you can see on the Bird List, the other species were Franklin's Gulls (which can be found by the 100's in spring flying low over newly plowed cropland, a sight which often surprises people since these "seagulls" are so far from any sea), and Baird's Sandpipers and Lesser Yellowlegs (both common shorebird species which can be found here in largest numbers in April.) Oh, and I almost forgot: I got to see a first-of-year (FOY) Turkey Vulture tilting over town on its dihedral wings, a bird which my wife spotted before I did and pointed out to me. She knows way more birds than she likes to admit or is comfortable with. Thank you, my eagle-eyed Elmy, for giving me Bird #96 for the year! This one's for her ;)
3/16/2021 2 Comments Love is in the airI began writing this post in my head back about three weeks ago when I first started noticing more birdsong in the mornings, even before sunrise. And then, still in late February, I watched both a pair of Northern Cardinals and a pair of Eurasian Collared-Doves (the latter looking like the dove returning to Noah's ark) carrying sticks in their beaks into the blue spruce just outside my office window, a sure sign of nest-building. And then one of the doves got on top of the other...you get the picture. It's spring. Oh, and speaking of Noah, we got about 5" of rain over the weekend which, while flooding a number of local basements and dropping several FEET of snow farther west of us, has left Adams County full of amazing habitat for the migrating ducks and the soon-to-follow shorebirds (my favorite type of bird). In the past week I've added nine waterfowl species to my year list, and last evening I spotted my first shorebird that wasn't a Killdeer (the most widespread and familiar of this subset of birds which includes sandpipers, plovers, curlews, godwits, dowitchers, and phalaropes, among others). It thrilled my heart, an American Golden-Plover. These remarkable creatures spend the winter deep in South America and summer on the high Arctic tundra, traveling some 25,000 miles in a year. How many hours of daylight do they have in January to explore Patagonia, and how many more will greet them in northern Nunavut in June?! A bird no bigger than a robin chasing sunlight up and down the globe. And think of all the things it sees in between....including a flooded cornfield in south-central Nebraska in the lower pasture where my friends graze their cattle, where it stops for the night to rest and refuel and lift up its mournful cry for my ear to hear. It feels sacred, standing on a gravel road at twilight, watching this gold-flecked, long-distance flyer, like I've encountered something truly wild in a tamed world. I'm inspired to travel, too.
Oh, and since I titled my post "Love is in the air," I'll close with this: Did you know that if you look at just the right angle at the back of the head of the Northern Flicker (a large, fairly common woodpecker that you might see on the ground where they love to probe the soil looking for ants and other insects), you'll see the shape of a heart? I took this photo out my kitchen window on Valentine's Day. No joke! 2/28/2021 0 Comments Oh, it's on...After a mid-February that set all-time records for low temps (-30 in Hastings!) and made this birder reluctant to get out in the field, the snow is now melting, the sun building strength, and the birds on the move in earnest. Like an ice dam giving way, the waterfowl have finally broken loose from the south and have flooded their way into Nebraska in skeins that stretch to the horizon. Check out these Snow Geese (likely mixed with the smaller and less common Ross's Geese at a ratio of something like 98% to 2%.) How many geese is this? Dear daughter Phoebe, what's your guess? (She's helping out with some Sandhill Crane population studies in Kearney and has been given a training course game where you're given a series of photos of flocks of birds and have to estimate the number to within 10%.) The numbers of geese, especially the white geese, coming through central Nebraska in February and March is really astounding. It's not uncommon to find flocks like this... And it's not just waterfowl. One of the most under-appreciated mass migration events taking place simultaneously involves the little brown birds most often noticed after snow storms when they gather at the roadsides to get seed and gravel (the seed for food and the little rocks to fill their crops and grind the seed up, since they don't have teeth.) I say "little brown birds", but you'll see they're really quite colorful if you get a close look at them. These big flocks are comprised of a mix of Horned Larks and Lapland Longspurs (which should be a sports team name, don't you think?) The longspurs alone can occur in flocks 50,000 strong. It's quite a spectacle. And I bet you can guess which bird is which in the photos below... I've added several new species to my year list this weekend, including Ring-billed Gull, Green-winged Teal, and Fox Sparrow, and I'll be surprised if I don't find more this week as lakes and marshes open up from their long freeze. What are you seeing and hearing?
2/2/2021 3 Comments ButcherbirdFirst a little Greek and Latin. Today I was blessed to find a Northern Shrike, scientific name Lanius borealis. Lanius is Latin for "butcher," and borealis derives from the Greek god of the north wind, Boreas. The Northern Shrike is very much at home riding icy winds year round, coming down from the Arctic Circle to winter-- yes, winter! -- across Canada and the northern tier of U.S. states. Here in the Midwest, Nebraska is about as far south as it's regularly found. A truly boreal bird which I found on a truly boreal day. (I felt like I was birding on Hoth, for you Star Wars fans.) At first glance you might mistake the shrike for a fruit- or seed-eater, don't be fooled. This black-masked songbird, not even as large as a robin, is a fierce predator famed for its habit of catching small animals and impaling them on barbed wire fences and thorn bushes, hung up to be eaten later. As I scoped this bird just before sunset today, I watched it dive down into the snow and come up with a vole in its sharply hooked beak and then store it in a spiny bush. So if you're ever tromping around outside and happen to come across a strange sight like the one below, which I stumbled on several years ago in Clay County, now you'll know who's responsible. Oh, two other comments. First, back about eight years ago, birding on a hilltop prairie south of Lincoln in early April, I spotted a pair of Loggerhead Shrikes (southern kin to the N. Shrike.) I was standing quite still when they flew over, and apparently the male mistook me for a short tree or a tall post, because he came and landed directly on my head, calling loudly for his mate while I held my breath. I guess she didn't think my hair was a suitable place to build a nest because she didn't join him, and after about a minute of insistent "kaak-kaak-kaak"ing, he gave up and flew off after her. I'll never forget it. Secondly, did you notice the hoarfrost in the top picture? I can't remember when I've seen it so thick before. I'm a birder first and general nature enthusiast second, with photography coming in a distant third. None of these do it justice -- it was just magical -- so I'd love to know if any of you got some good hoarfrost pictures today.
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