Neighborhood birds – not so ordinary

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ornithology, birds, bird watching, photographs

This is how baby robins look the day they hatch. On most monitors this image will be just a little smaller than actual size.

We had the good fortune that a pair of robins built a nest on the kitchen window ledge. They anchored it to the thermometer support. Four blue eggs were followed by four pink nestlings, covered with sparse white fuzz. We kept the window shade down, except when taking pictures, to keep from spooking the parent birds, and later, the fledglings.

I am not much of a bird watcher, but I pay attention to them, particularly the ones in my yard and neighborhood. In Jack Gedney's book The Private Lives of Public Birds: Learning to Listen to the Birds Where We Live, the author wants, most of all, that we all pay attention. Birds are all around us.

When we step outside in the morning (or if we have an open window at sunrise), do we notice the birdsong? When we turn a corner at the end of the house and hear a flutter from a nearby bush, do we bother to look for the rapidly-exiting bird we just spooked? When a catbird is crying nearby, do we crane about, hoping to see it? Do we thrill to see a cardinal in the birdbath?

The book has the stories of 15 common birds of California, where the author lives. A few, the towhee and two species of native sparrow, were new to me. The rest were familiar. Hmm: Chapter 10, on the White-crowned sparrow and golden-crowned sparrow, is two-for-one, so that's 16 bird species.

Although I've lived in California three times, for a total of eleven years, I never learned of the California towhee. Gedney calls it "the brown bird", which reflects its principal characteristic. However, the average songbird is a "little brown thing"—think of common (English) sparrow and wrens—which makes sense. For prey birds, being inconspicuous is a life strategy. So I was probably in the presence of towhees daily and never noticed.

I love the way he writes: lyrically, without being maudlin. In Chapter 6, about the House Finch, he invites us to "reenchant our lives": "You can choose to peel away the concealing layer of quotidian gray and rediscover the brilliant core that's been present all along." From any distance farther than halfway across your yard, it's hard to tell this is a red bird. Particularly in fall and winter, its winter coat is more of a stately pink than this blazing red.

Writing of owls, he remarks on the way they add their own sounds to the night (the stereotypical "Hoo-hoo Hoooo!" is generally a great horned owl; hard to spot in spite of its size). Yet with the spread of artificial light, the monthly cycle of the moon's phases is lost on us, and the changes in owl song that were once so familiar: "[We] lose the evening, erase the quiet time between activity and sleep. Moonlit groves grow lonely in an age of off-and-on." He turns to a poet, Pablo Neruda, to limn the Anna's hummingbird: "You are / a seed in the sun / a fire / dressed in feathers." Although mourning doves have the fastest level flight of any bird, Anna's hummingbirds fly faster relative to their size than any other bird. Put another way, the hummingbird is a bit slower than the dove, but is 1/3rd the length and 1/30th the weight.

I suspect if almost anyone put their mind to it, they could recall at least a dozen birds with which they are at least a little familiar.

I live some 10 km west of the Delaware River, near the PA-DE state line. This is the northern end of the Mid-Atlantic region. The ranges of many populations of northeastern and mid-southern birds overlap, so folks that keep life lists have a rich harvest without going far.

The larger birds we see are typically turkey vultures, such as these two (photographed by my wife), after chopping up some small carcass in our yard, peering in the neighbor's window. I've seen bald eagles in nearby areas, but never from our neighborhood. Even from far away, it's easy to distinguish eagle from vulture. The eagle's wings are held flat and its flight is very steady. The vulture's wings are held in a shallow "V", and it tends to teeter in flight, catching every tiny shift in the updrafts that keep it aloft. The turkey vulture, if close enough, sports long, white triangles on the rear of its wings. Half the tail is also white.

We also have black vultures, with black skin on the head rather than red. Turkey vultures have the best sense of smell of any bird, and black vultures keep an eye on them because they can smell what no vulture can see.

Slightly smaller raptors in the area include this Cooper's hawk, that was sitting our our fence, and both red-tailed hawks and red-shouldered hawks. Cooper's hawks are bird hawks, but one day a friend and I were in the driveway talking, and heard a thump. We turned just in time to see the Cooper's hawk flying off with a squirrel. That's a lot of load for this hawk, for they are smaller than red-tailed hawks.

Middle sized birds are dominated by robins. In certain seasons, it's interesting to see a nearby schoolyard hosting 20 or more feeding robins, which keep 10-20 feet apart, while not far away, a flock of 100 blackbirds, with much closer spacing, could fit in the area of a garage. We also have cardinals—this picture is of two cardinal eggs in a nest in our privet hedge. There are also catbirds, starlings, mourning doves, tree swallows, blue jays, and occasional goldfinches.

Smaller birds include several "little brown things": English sparrows, Carolina wrens, and another wren species I haven't identified. We also have chickadees. Neighbors have reported seeing bluebirds, but I haven't.

That's nineteen. Not much of a life list compared to many folks I know. But for me, it's enough. I can't identify them all by sound, but with observation that ought to improve. I hope Mr. Gedney would approve.

Seeing half the birds — and more

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, bird watching, birding, obsessions, travelogues

Everybody collects something…or several somethings. Collections of small things are most popular because the collections don't take much space. A collection of 50,000 postage stamps takes up a few cubic feet; 10,000 worldwide coins would be of a similar size. These days, if one foregoes printing photos and putting them in albums, a collection of tens of thousands of high-resolution photos will fit on a single 64- or 128-Gbyte SD Card.

At the other end of the spectrum, H. F. du Pont, defining what it means to be filthy rich, collected salons. Not just "rooms", but the very large rooms used for large scale entertaining, complete with all furnishings, from 175 American mansions at his "home" in Greenville, Delaware, now known as the Winterthur Museum. A typical tour at Winterthur takes up to two hours to show just five of the rooms. I wonder whether many of the rooms have ever been toured; I don't think they have nearly enough unique tours.

Bird watching, bird listing, and other facets of "birding" can take up very little space, if one collects mainly memories. Just seeing and getting to know the habits of a few or a few dozen—or a few hundred—species of bird is very rewarding to many people. Lists can be made of the birds that visit your yard or neighborhood, or a certain town, county, state or country. Or the whole world.

Noah Strycker decided to take a whack at the all-time one-year record list of world birds by planning to see at least one-half of all species of bird in one year. 365 days. There is more than one "official" list of all species (biologists differ on a few percent of species, whether they are truly one species or more than one). Anyway, the number of known bird species in 2014 was roughly 10,500, so Noah set out to see at least 5,025 if possible, and possibly more. He traveled upwards of 40,000 miles, spent time in 41 countries in all seven continents, at a cost of about $60,000.

Just to get ready, he had to collect as many bird handbooks as possible. This photo shows the stack. Its volume is greater tha most stamp or coin collections…and that's just his prep work. How did he carry it with him? He scanned every page and stored them in his phone. It must have taken months! My guess is that the stack represents about 20,000 pages. I hope he had several backup copies, including one "in the cloud" in case his phone was lost, stolen, smashed by a Cassowary or whatever.

As chronicled in his book Birding Without Borders, An Obsession, a Quest, and the Biggest Year in the World, he eventually saw, including verification by other bird enthusiasts that were with him, 6,042 species of birds. The prior record for a year's quest had been about 2/3 of that.

Creating such a world record is amazing in itself. To Noah, it was secondary to the memories of the birds, the stories about many of them as told by local birders who helped him along the way, and the relationships he built with literally hundreds of bird enthusiasts in every one of the 41 countries.

I had a vague thought of putting a lot of photos in this post. But I took Noah's example; he didn't put many photos in the book. Just 22. So I'll confine myself to just one more picture, of the world's most famous bird, a Giant Antpitta in Ecuador, that one of his new-found friends, Angel Pax, had half-tamed so visiting birders would actually get a chance to see one of the shyest bird species.

Birding Without Borders is astonishing. For one thing, Noah had much less trouble overall than he or anyone else would have any right to expect. When you share an obsessive fascination with people around the world, and you call on them for help, stand back! you're going to get help. Many of the local birders who accompanied Noah went out of their way to show him the rarest species they knew how to find, while keeping in mind the pace he had to maintain.

Just to see 6,000+ birds in 365 days requires a pace of 16-17 new species every single day. Since there are bound to be a few unfavorable days, and Noah even had a couple of "zero" days, seeing 30-40 birds on some days is practically a requirement. This is hyper-endurance marathon stuff.

The reading is much more enjoyable than running a marathon (at least for me, with my poor joints!). I consider portions of this book to be micro-biographies of a few dozen of the wonderful people Noah met all around the world. There's a lot of good stuff packed into this book.

Bird nest season again

kw: observations, bird watching, photographs

'Tis the season for checking bluebird boxes again. Two colleagues and I get to take a stroll weekly to check six boxes. I have a different set of boxes to monitor this year.

One of the boxes houses a family of swallows. Here is Mom watching us approach. I could have gotten an even closer picture (this was more than twelve feet away), because she didn't bolt until I was within three feet. Inside the box, we saw four eggs.

This is the only swallow family in this group of boxes. Three boxes are empty so far, which is puzzling. Nice cavity nests like these are usually a hot commodity.

One nest had a moss nest with chickadee eggs in it two weeks ago, but last week they were gone, and a twiggy nest was built atop the moss. This week more twigs were evident, and we saw a wren leave the box as we approached. The nest fills the box so tightly that we couldn't get a mirror in to see if there are eggs.

One other box has a chickadee family, and if you count carefully, you'll see five little ones in this picture. I was expecting the eggs we saw for the past two weeks to have hatched, so we opened the nest quickly, with camera ready, snapped (no flash) and closed it back up. These chicks must have hatched just yesterday or the day before. We'll leave them alone for a couple of weeks to grow undisturbed, and make one more visit when they're due to be almost fledged out.

His life really is for the birds

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, birding, bird watching, conservation

During the years I studied Geology as an undergraduate, I had a travel friend, a fellow-student who did most of the driving on our many field trips. He always carried two sets of binoculars, because it was a sure thing that any drive we took, we'd be stopping at least a time or two to watch birds. We always planned an extra hour or so for any drive we took. While I enjoy watching birds, particularly with a knowledgeable companion, I was never hooked by the birding bug.

Luke Dempsey got hooked, and hooked hard, the first time a friend induced him to actually look at what a little bird was doing. It was a Common Yellowthroat, one of the warblers, and once he looked at it, really looked, it was love at first sight. Dempsey reports the event in the opening pages of A Supremely Bad Idea: Three Mad Birders and Their Quest to See It All. He goes on to note, he was in love, "But I didn't really want this kind of love."

His premonition was correct, but futile. Though he doesn't come right out and say it, the flow of events he records made it clear that birding had a lot to do with the failure of his marriage. In the wake of that failure, with a bit more time on his hands, he gradually embarked on a quest to see many, most...perhaps all the birds that inhabit, pass through, or touch some corner of the United States. He's halfway there.

[Image and its larger original Copyright Fotosearch.] I wonder what might have been, had his wife become a bird watcher also. He graciously fails to reveal hardly anything about her. I imagine someone a bit like my son: it isn't hard to get him to peer through the binoculars at a bird for, say, ten seconds, whereupon he looks you in the eye saying, "Cool. Now what?"

He does the same when induced to look through my telescope at craters on the Moon, the rings of Saturn, or the Whirlpool Galaxy. Once he's seen it, he doesn't "need" to see it again...ever. Oh, well, he has turned into a much better poet than I am, and has a number of other virtues that I find quizzical, to say the least. We're even.

But we were talking about this author, and his travel and birding companions Don and Donna. In the Acknowledgments section I found that they are "mostly a product of [his] fevered imagination." There is another couple, Dave and Deb, with whom he also seems to have traveled. The "Don and Donna Graffiti" of the book are composite characters, with a large dollop of said imagination.

I rarely quote a jacket blurb, but I have to now. This is probably the product of Amy King, the designer: "3 obsessive friends, / 8 states, / 1 foreign country, / 129 towns, / 34 national parks, / 6 long-suffering rental cars, one rather alluring OnStar navigator, / 17 bed-and-breakfasts, too many alarming motel rooms, 1 real-life ark, / and more than 400 species of birds..."

It took me a while to get used to the author's style, a mixture of understated British humor (he hails from England) and over-the-top Stateside comedy. Learning curve aside, we read of the travails of compiling, in about three years, the life list of a solid beginner, with nearly 450 entries. This is a bit less than half the birds one might see in North America.

But he is not, he says a few times, a "lister"; he feels charged "with witnessing them all over again, while we can." It is one thing to see, at least once, an Elegant Trogon or Kirtland's Warbler. It is quite another to see a Yellowthroat, Robin, Chickadee or Blue Jay, over and over again and sustain one's relish at their lives and actions, the sheer alertness most birds continually convey. After all, though God may feed the sparrows, the sparrows do have to work at it themselves, for nearly every waking minute. It is not God but Human expansion that makes it harder and harder to gather a long life list of bird species. The book has a strong conservationist tone, and a bit of well-needed exhortation.

Listing, Birding, Bird Watching, or just the occasional stroll with binoculars in hand (to take them in descending order of fanaticism), all have their satisfactions. Choosing to travel about the country for birding's sake is as good an excuse as any. I'd like to see 34 national parks, for any reason!

This advice is for the birds – er, birders

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, bird watching, bird listing

I confess, I am not a birder lister, a birder, or much of a bird watcher. I simply carry binoculars when I remember to, and look at whatever I see, or look for whatever I hear. We have a somewhat bird-friendly yard with a shallow bird bath, so we see plenty of birds through the kitchen window.

Now, if I decide to spend more time with birds in my retirement (not quite imminent, but getting close), I know where to turn. Pete Dunne, current director of the Cape May Bird Observatory, has compiled Good Birders Don't Wear White: 50 Tips from North America's Top Birders. In addition to the fifty essays, Robert A. Braunfield has contributed 24 illustrations in the text plus one on the cover. They are informative and humorous by turns, as the one shown, from page 174.

The essays are grouped in fourteen topics, and cover the gamut of birding attitudes and activities. Bill Thompson III (current editor of Bird Watcher's Digest) describes in detail how to clean the lenses of your binoculars or spotting scope. Hint: Don't use your shirttail...you don't know what kind of grit it has picked up from the dust in the air and from the washing machine. You'll scratch the coating, and maybe the glass. In the title essay, Sheri Williamson (author of A Field Guide to Hummingbirds of North America in the Peterson Field Guide series) explains how a moving patch of white mimics the alarm displays of many birds. Just how close do you imagine you'll get?

Kevin J. Cook (a writer-naturalist and columnist for The Coloradoan) urges us to shift "from birding to birds," taking time to learn not just the distinguishing marks, but the habits, ecology, preferred food (in different seasons), and nesting behavior; to get to know the living animal once you've filed the appropriate notch on your field guide. In a similar vein, Stephen Shunk (owner and operator of Paradise Birding shows how sighting birds, often in less "natural" locales, can lift our spirits.

And one more I can't help mentioning, Jon L. Dunn (a tour leader for WINGS and a prolific writer) encourages us all to think like a birder, for the welfare of the birds and of ourselves. That's just a hint at one tenth of the gems. Read up and dig out the rest!

A bird in the hand just might draw blood

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, birds, bird watching

I've had friends who were serious bird watchers, but never become one myself. When I'm with one, I enjoy the walking, looking, listening, talking. When I was a kid (9th grade, I think), and had a tape recorder, I sometimes recorded a half hour or so of the morning bird chorus. I wonder where the tapes are.

I've never tried putting out bird feeders or bird houses. Even though I suddenly know a lot more about both subjects, I probably still won't, but I see more now, that I've been told a few useful things to look for. We do have a shallow bird bath, which has water in it about half the time (shallow ones evaporate quickly). It is enough to see a variety of local birds from time to time, right outside the kitchen window.

Mike O'Connor owns the Bird Watchers General Store on Cape Cod, and writes a Q/A column in The Cape Codder. He has collected about ninety of the best entries for his new book Why Don't Woodpeckers Get Headaches?: And Other Bird Questions You Know You Want to Ask.

There are about a dozen Q/A items in each of eight sections, answering questions with a cool combination of knowledge and edgy wit. Some excerpts from one:
Blue Jays are Smart and Handsome...and No One Likes Them

Dear Bird Folks:
Blue Jays are one of my favorite birds, yet many of my neighbors complain about them. The say that they are nothing but mean bullies. Could you please write something nice about them so I don't feel guilty about liking them?

—Diana, Long Island, NY

Sure, Di,

I'll write something nice about Blue jays. I don't have trouble writing nice things about any bird. It's your neighbors I'd worry about. Talk about mean bullies. That's a pretty rough crowd out there on Long Island. You don't want to get near any of them before they've had thier morning latte.

Blue Jays are clearly one of the most fascinating and handsome of all our native birds. There are few birds in North America that can compare with their striking beauty. Yet other birds, including the dumpy little Eastern Bluebird, seem to receive most of the love while the Blue Jay draws the wrath. Apparently some birds have better PR agents than others.
...
In fact, for the most part, jays are vegetarians. Researchers who examined the contents of hundreds of jays' stomachs found only 25 percent contained insects and other animal matter. The other 75 percent contained nuts, acorns, seeds from you neighbors' feeders, and, or course, vegetarian-approved tofu. ...

I didn't check closely, but it seems every paragraph ends with a quip. He also tends to begin letters with an in-your-face attitude; in answer to a letter consisting of three short questions about cardinals:

You sure are asking for a lot of information. What do you think this is, Twenty Questions? You people from [--] sure are demanding. Below is probably more information than you really wanted to know about cardinals...

Anyway, he does answer the title question, near the end of the book, clearly and informatively. Simply put, woodpecker heads are well-suited to the hammering, with plenty of cushioning for a brain small and light enough that it won't get much abuse anyway.

Well, it is fortunate there are only about 10,000 known birds

kw: book reviews, natural history, ornithology, bird watching, bird listing, obsessions

After finishing To See Every Bird on Earth: a Father, a Son, and a Lifelong Obsession by Dan Koeppel, I spent a couple days thinking about it. So now it is late on Christmas day, and I still don't know what to think about someone who has seen a life total of nearly more than 7,500 birds (to date), yet cut himself almost wholly off from his family to do so.

Richard Keoppel, the author's father, is one of the top twelve "Big Listers." Sixty years mostly spent obsessively seeing and listing bird after bird, between periods of a year or two in which his shame kept him from going after any; sixty years of saying, "I'm done, I've seen enough," at 2,000, 3,000, 4,000...

To be a Big Lister means lots of travel. Just to get to the first thousand, one must travel overseas; there are 914 bird species in North America by the latest count. To see 70% or 80% of the species in any area, one must go a few times. At different times of the year. As you might imagine, a Big Lister doesn't have much time for anything else. Most are pretty much failures in the Family Life department.

It took the author decades to come to a kind of peace about bird watching, and listing. Then he could go with his father to Brazil, to witness the sighting of his 7,000th listed species. I find this is the rule; whatever someone's obsession, if you want to relate to that person, you must enter their world. They are unable to leave it.

Thirteen birds. The book's thirteen chapters each begin with an episode from Richard Koeppel's memory, about seeing the species, and the chapter content is woven about the time period in which that particular sighting occurred, usually a period of a few years. From the Brown Thrasher—which got young Richard started birding, and the first he recorded, though the 24th species he could recall seeing—to the Saw-Whet Owl—the smallest owl known, and his 726th—to the Harpy Eagle, #4,706; the tales tell the man.

Researching and writing the articles that make up the book, and taking the journeys that led to the culmination of the research, and the final healing of the relationship, the author developed a fondness for the birds, learned quite a bit of birding lore, met most of today's Big Listers, and came to grips with his own personality and development. Whatever may become of his father, Dan Koeppel has been bettered for it.

For myself, the question arises, "Do I have an obsession that is harming my family?" Being able just to ask the question is helpful.