Ducks stop traffic

"Traffic on the busy freeway ground to a near halt as one or more momma ducks tried to get their brood safely across the 10-lane freeway, towards the adjacent Los Angeles River."

Overthinking it

On Saturday, I took part in an exciting discovery at Placerita Canyon. My fellow-birder and I were able to ID, based on its unique cat-like mewing call, a California Gnatcatcher. The bird list I got from the nature center there indicates it as a rare winter visitor to that park, recorded before only in 1972 and 1999. 

         

This morning, I am going over a photo that I took yesterday. Because the photo is taken from directly below it, all I can really make out was the plain underside, and a little bit of the head, showing a light supercilium. Very little is visible of the wings, and its back is completely hidden.

I can tell it is a sparrow, but which one? I sift and scan through pictures and drawings of various native species in books and websites. White-crowned sparrow? Chipping sparrow? Clearly not, no indication of the stripes on the crown, plus, wrong beak coloration. Song sparrow? Lincoln sparrow? No, no streaking on the chest. Savannah sparrow? No, no yellow visible. Brewer's sparrow? Possibly, but the facial markings would be different ... I groan and complain loudly to no one in particular how hard this bird is to identify. I even go so far as to send out the photos to some birder friends asking for help.

Hearing my vexation, my six-year old strolls up from behind, takes one look at the picture on the computer screen, and says, "Dad, isn't that just a regular [house] sparrow?"

Oh.

He's right, of course.

Augury

Image from http://birdsandclimate.audubon.org/

The augur was a priest and official in the classical world, especially ancient Rome and Etruria. His main role was to interpret the will of the gods by studying the flight of birds: whether they are flying in groups or alone, what noises they make as they fly, direction of flight and what kind of birds they are. This was known as "taking the auspices." The ceremony and function of the augur was central to any major undertaking in Roman society—public or private—including matters of war, commerce, and religion.   (from Wikipedia)

The NYTimes today carries an excellent op-ed piece by Brian Kimberling that advocates paying serious attention to todays augurs. He points at the following finding by Audubon about the connection between bird movements and climate change, based on a review of its annual Christmas Bird Counts over the last forty years (see also the image above for a visual illustration of this fact):

Nearly 60% of the 305 species found in North America in winter are on the move, shifting their ranges northward by an average of 35 miles. Audubon scientists analyzed 40 years of citizen-science Christmas Bird Count data — and their findings provide new and powerful evidence that global warming is having a serious impact on natural systems. Northward movement was detected among species of every type, including more than 70 percent of highly adaptable forest and feeder birds.

The Wikipedia article on "Augur" notes that an augur "does not predict what course of action should be taken, but through his augury he finds signs on whether or not a course already decided upon meets with divine sanction and should proceed." The signs we are getting from the birds adds weight to the growing consensus that the course we humans have been following must be changed.

(The author of that NYTimes piece Brian Kimberling has a new book out called "Snapper", apparently a collection of fictional stories about an ornithologist who studies the connection between bird migration and climate change. I look forward to reading it.)

Big Day

Female Western Bluebird at Malibu Creek, March 16, 2013

I spent Saturday with two friends, doing a thrilling "Big Day". We went to beaches, camp grounds, parks, wildlife reserves, lakes, creeks, and rivers all over L.A. county, at Malibu, San Fernando Valley, Playa del Rey, South Bay, Long Beach, trying to find and identify as many birds as we could.

The first time I had done this was in December with another birder.  I had seen 84 different birds that day, but it left me feeling that I could have done better, given we had faced a combination of starting late, limited daylight hours, heavy traffic, and poor planning. I therefore set myself a target to see a 100 birds this time. To make the day more enjoyable (and yes, to increase my chances to meeting that target), I invited a couple of  birder friends I've met several times and gotten to know over the past year at various Audubon walks and trips.

We planned quite carefully in advance, with many excited emails sent back and forth a few days before. We discussed and argued about alternative locations. We solicited inputs from other birders we know. We took into account factors including the times of first light, sunrise, sunset and last-light, and poured over tide charts. We examined our own old birding records and read through online reports of birds sighted in our planned locations on eBird.

 

Clockwise from top left: Western Gull, Snow Egret, Oak Titmouse, Whimbrel

All this preparation paid off beautifully. Over a span of about twelve hours, covering around 80 miles of ground in driving between sites, we identified a total of 119 species** of birds, including two I had never seen before (see the full list). The day began a little before sunrise at Malibu Lagoon, and ended in L.A. river a little after sunset. One of the first birds we identified was a song-sparrow trilling just before day-break. My last view in the fading light was of an indescribably beautiful gathering of hundreds of Black-necked Stilts.

Glaucous-winged Gull at Malibu Lagoon

Inter alia, we saw three different types of Loons (Common, Pacific, Red-throated), a Glaucous-winged Gull, Caspian and Royal Terns at Malibu Lagoon, a Chipping Sparrow at Malibu Creek, a Eurasian Wigeon pair (a life bird for me) and two Cackling Geese at Reseda Park, an early Bullock's Oriole at Lake Balboa, a gorgeous male Wood Duck at Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve, Elegant and Royal Terns at Playa del Rey beach, three pairs of hooded Mergansers at Ballona Freshwater Marsh, Canvasback and several Ring-necked ducks at Alondra Park, and a Blue-winged Teal pair at L.A. River - Willow Street.

Chipping Sparrow at Malibu Creek

Because I wanted to focus on identifying birds, and because my lens's autofocus broke half-way through the day, I don't have a lot of photos to show. Luckily, one of my companions took a great set of photos as well.

There were also some remarkable "easy" misses: Northern Flicker, Downy Woodpecker, American Kestrel, Northern Harrier, some of which we thought we might have seen but couldn't confirm because we didn't get a sufficiently good look. On the drive back, mulling this over, we concluded that with more experience and skill we might well have added another dozen birds to our list. For next time...

** Update: Three days later, we were able to resolve one of the photos we took that we weren't sure about to be of a Sharp-Shinned Hawk, not Cooper's (one of the notoriously hard identification problems in North American birding). This brings our total from the day to 120!

Curb your cat

Cat eyeing a bird, Phoenix, Arizona.

The following is from the abstract of a recent study in Nature Communications, titled "The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States" by Loss, Will, and Marra:

Here we conduct a systematic review and quantitatively estimate mortality caused by cats in the United States. We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.4–3.7 billion birds and 6.9–20.7 billion mammals annually. Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality. Our findings suggest that free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals. Scientifically sound conservation and policy intervention is needed to reduce this impact.

Many of the news reports have emphasized only the total counts of birds killed. I was curious to find out which particular birds are affected and  how much. I found an interesting table in the supplement to their paper, listing the birds affected in order of proportion of mortality estimated to be caused by cat predation. It addresses the very question I had. The following is a piece of it:

Why I can't be an Ornithologist

Savannah Sparrow, Playa Del Rey

I came across a news article on Wired today  discussing a new research finding that the neural pathway for songbirds hearing birdsong is very similar to that of humans enjoying music.

Delighted, I sought and found the original article by researchers from Emory University. The abstract reads:

Since the time of Darwin, biologists have wondered whether birdsong and music may serve similar purposes or have the same evolutionary precursors. Most attempts to compare song with music have focused on the qualities of the sounds themselves, such as melody and rhythm. Song is a signal, however, and as such its meaning is tied inextricably to the response of the receiver. Imaging studies in humans have revealed that hearing music induces neural responses in the mesolimbic reward pathway. In this study, we tested whether the homologous pathway responds in songbirds exposed to conspecific song. We played male song to laboratory-housed white-throated sparrows, and immunolabeled the immediate early gene product Egr-1 in each region of the reward pathway that has a clear or putative homologue in humans. We found that the responses, and how well they mirrored those of humans listening to music, depended on sex and endocrine state. In females with breeding-typical plasma levels of estradiol, all of the regions of the mesolimbic reward pathway that respond to music in humans responded to song.  In males, we saw responses in the amygdala but not the nucleus accumbens – similar to the pattern reported in humans listening to unpleasant music. The shared responses in the evolutionarily ancient mesolimbic reward system suggest that birdsong and music engage the same neuroaffective mechanisms in the intended listeners.

So, specifically, they've found that the reaction to male birdsong differs by gender. The females find it musical, while the males find it cacophonous.

I was interested in more details. I started reading the full text of the paper... until I came across this sentence, describing the methodology of the experiments:

"Sixty min following the onset of the stimulus presentation, birds were deeply anaesthetized with isoflurane and decapitated."

Evolving Security

Image taken from the LA Times Article

According to an article in the LA Times today, Australian scientists have made a fascinating finding, that the Superb Fairy-Wren has evolved a security counter-measure to foil brood parasites: while still inside the eggs, they learn from their mother a secret catch-phrase (unique to each nest!) that they can use to request food. The mother only feeds in response to this particular vocalization.

The original article appears in Current Biology.

Iridescence of a Hummingbird

Costa's Hummingbird, taken at Indian Wells today, Oct 28, 2012

I have never seen this species of hummingbird before. I chanced upon it in the grounds of the hotel where I was staying this weekend. It is a desert bird, named after a French ornithologist. Like all hummingbirds, the male has a spectacular metallic sheen to the feathers in its head and gorget. 

Why do they look so cool? 

The following is taken from asknature.org: 

"To summarize, hummingbird iridescence is due to interference colors produced by a stack of about three films whose optical thickness is one-half the peak wave length. Each film is a mosaic of platelets of elliptical form. Each platelet is about 2.5 microns long and one micron wide. The platelets are not homogeneous and consist of air bubbles encased in a matrix of refractive index about two." (Greenewalt et al. 1960:253)

Greenewalt CH; Brandt W; Friel DD. 1960. The iridescent colors of hummingbird feathers. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 104: 249-253. 

Seeking for that bird

(Say's Phoebe at Madrona Marsh, Oct 14, 2012)

I came across these beautiful lines in an essay by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Lantern Bearers:

"There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life: the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself on his return a stranger at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and of all his comrades there survived but one to recognise him. It is not only in the woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. He sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him and chuckles, and the days are moments... All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands: seeking for that bird and hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable."

Urban owl

Exciting night! I was just about to sleep when I heard a western screech owl just outside the bedroom window! Much to the amazement of the bird expert who alerted me to it, it had been recently spotted in our neighborhood just this past month by another birder.

What makes this is so unusual is that these owls normally live only in the woods up in the mountains in L.A., away from people and urban areas. You can see this clearly in the map of reported sightings that I captured from ebird.org; my report from last night is the lonely one in orange near Beverly Hills. Blue reports are older; the one closest to it in blue dates back to 1949! The expert had said "I suppose it is a dispersing hatch-year bird looking for a place to settle in."

I didn't get a good look at the bird, but got to see it fly out of the tree it was in (outside my immediate neighbor's backdoor). Having never seen one before, I was surprised to see it was quite small, only about 8 inches or so.

Oh, and I could record its soft calls that are comprised of a rapid series of "bouncing ball" whistles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aoXS_C5SbA&feature=plcp

Mottled wit

On this warm september saturday, we were sitting on the sand, by the lagoon, eyeing this elegant bird methodically probing and digging with its long pointed beak. I told my nine-year-old its name. He responded, quick as a fox, sharp as a needle,  "Ah, a Marbled God-I-had-it-wit-you!" 

This bird is featured in a lovely song by the folk band The Bowerbirds in their album "Hymns for a Dark Horse", which I mean to listen to more of:

Just as I suspected...

Was Hafiz a birder too?

A little wren

Among the dwellings framed by birds
In field or forest with nice care,
Is none that with the little Wren's
In snugness may compare.

   --- from A Wren's Nest by William Wordsworth


This little House Wren has made our backyard its home. It flits from bush to bush, and makes a variety of sounds from singing in beautifully bubbly bursts to a harsh scolding chatter. 

I am thrilled to see this musical bird just outside our backdoor, but then.. I see this article about them: http://www.sialis.org/wrens.htm

It warns, ominously: 

They have been known to destroy bluebird and other cavity nester's eggs by piercing them (holes of 3 mm or less, or a large ragged hole in the middle), and then often removing them from the nest. They can remove an entire chickadee nest in a matter of hours. In one study in eastern MA, 20% of Black-capped Chickadee nests were destroyed by House Wrens. Althea Sherman reported that House Wrens destroyed eggs of 29 different birds. House Wrens may even displace the uncommon Bewick's Wren.

Then again, we don't have other cavity nesting birds around here that I know of...

Swift Impressions

Common Swift (click to see individual images)

Common swifts are the fastest recorded birds in level flight, known to reach speeds close to 70mph flying horizontally, even upwards. They can eat, sleep, even mate on the wing, flying more than 500 miles each day.  

I was thrilled to see and hear them at close range in Rome and had the chance to take a few pics. I like how they appear in duo-tone; someone called these images "bird calligraphy."

Gassing Geese

I was startled and rather disturbed to read an article today about the ongoing annual goose slaughter in New York City, aimed at reducing aircraft accidents such as the widely-reported "Miracle on the Hudson" incident.

I can somewhat understand the fears and concerns about human safety that have driven the city to adopt this approach, but should it not at least strike us as sad that such is the world we must live in? No, sir.  Instead, this article from CBS News instructs us on how we should perceive this state of affairs: "The initiative seems to be a success, with government officials reporting the lowest total of geese killed this summer of any year since the roundups started."  What a grand victory for humans versus nature! Worth celebrating indeed. 

An article by Mary Lou Simms from earlier this month in the Birmingham news titled "Geese roundups around airports are for profit, not safety," offers a balancing viewpoint.

I am left rather dumb-struck by this revelation in her article:

"Wildlife Services -- the agency responsible -- is the USDA's dirty little secret... taxpayers are subsidizing a $126.5 million program that exterminates more than 5 million wild animals annually, including thousands of community geese... More than half of the agency's overall budget comes from "killing" contracts, such as the $100,000 highly controversial New York City roundups every summer."

Are there really a few million wild animals inconveniencing us each year? 

Another article by Mary Lou Simms from last year discusses a related issue. Even if we must "manage" populations of wild birds, can this not be done in a more humane fashion rather than gassing them en masse? I am encouraged to find that there is an effort along these lines called GeesePeace , which advocates a much more ethically-grounded approach to reducing Geese populations, using well-thought-out protocols that include "coating eggs with corn oil, egg replacement and strategic nest destruction."

***

Resources for Additional Information

• This "case study" provides an accounting of the explosive growth of Canada Goose populations adapted to human environments, their adverse economic impact on some business including Golf courses, and some of the legal issues surrounding their management.
• Canadageese.org is an informational site maintained by an advocacy group aiming to "prevent the destruction of Canada Geese".

The cowbird situation

I came across an interesting sight at the Ballona Freshwater Marsh. The bird on the right was going around following and begging the little bird on the left for food. And that bird on the left, a male Common Yellowthroat, was dashing frantically all over, finding morsels to put in its mouth. Now, it should be obvious from the size mismatch that they are completely different species! Turns out the brown bird is an immature brown-headed cowbird (see also the second picture below), one of the most notorious brood parasites. It has grown up in the Yellowthroat's nest this year, where its mother dropped off the egg (while getting rid of one of the host's original eggs). It's not good to anthropomorphize birds too much perhaps, but I found the close relationship between these two sad and sweet at the same time.

An article titled "Brown-headed Cowbirds in California: Historical Perspectives and Management Opportunities in Riparian Habitats", by S. A. Laymon documents the steady increase of brown-headed cowbirds in California over the past century, and their devastating impact on host populations of small birds; As a remedy, it advocates trapping and killing them, a possibly necessary act of intervention, but one that I nevertheless find rather troubling. This growth in cowbirds has been linked to human activities such as deforestation.

There is also some interesting information about this at the Griffith Wildlife Biology's page about Cowbird control:   "when a cowbird parasitizes a small species like the vireo, flycatcher, or gnatcatcher, these smaller hosts are able to raise only the cowbird and none of their own young – a short route to extinction." Sigh.

Bird Book Review

I am mesmerized by these beautiful words in a review of birding books, by Laura Jacob, in the Wall Street Journal:

It is wonder that brings young people into birding and wonder that holds older people there. All levels of passion have a place. There are, for instance, backyard birders watching the feeder through the window over the sink; there are compulsive birders, collectors who drop everything to drive or fly to the next new bird for their list; and there are cowboy birders, young men who can identify teeny warblers in silhouette at dawn, all based on a bird's flight call or tail length. They're doing calculus while the rest of us are doing basic math, listening every spring to tapes of warbler song, poring endlessly over the imperceptible differences of Empids—those difficult little flycatchers. 

The pursuit of such mastery must eventually make room for what Keats called "negative capability," an aptitude for "being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact." The cyclical nature of birding, its concentration on the horizon and the sky, its unanswered questions about migration, speak to unknowns, to the unthinkables in life: time and loss and life span. Birds bring us these complex questions of existence, but quietly, dressed in feathers and flight. 

"A good ornithologist," writes Gilbert White, the author of the 18th-century classic "The Natural History of Selbourne," "should be able to distinguish birds by their air." Such is the transcendence that birders work toward, the moment when experience becomes instinct. Deep beneath the social, competitive, aesthetic and poetic attractions of birding is a longing, not for Eden, where nothing was yet named and knowledge was unnecessary, but for a role in nature's mystery play, where to tell a hawk from a handsaw is a matter of life and death. 

Images of flight

There is something utterly pure about birds in flight. As they take off, flap, soar, wheel, turn, stretch, rise, dive, hover, land, there is an inexpressible grace to each motion. It is delightful to be able to freeze time and capture them in their moments of perfection, suspended between heaven and earth. 

I am starting an album of photos taken of different kinds of birds flying. So far, all the photos posted are of L.A. birds taken over the past couple of months (mostly water-birds: gulls, terns, pelicans, cormorants, and a few others, notably swallows). This will hopefully grow to include many more kinds of birds, from more places.

Phoebe update

From about May 3 to May 10, the two baby black phoebes left the nest outside our door and were observed hopping about the branches of trees in our backyard, which turned into a combo nursery/flight school. The daddy would feed them periodically. Now they seem to have left our backyard and moved on. 

And the female is back at her nest hatching a second brood. Yesterday, we discovered that there are 4 eggs in the nest.  More to come!

The two babies on the bottom right; Dad on the top left.

Father feeding one of the little ones

Little one hopping on the ground

(Photos by Zhen Nie Krishnamachari)

Early Birds

A pair of California Quails painted by J.R. Prevost, one of the illustrators on the
La Pérouse expedition. This is the "small grey crested partridge" mentioned in the text. 

Browsing the shelves at the library this afternoon, quite at random, I pulled out a book titled "Life in a California Mission" (Heyday Books, 1989).

On September 14, 1786, a French expedition lead by Jean François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse landed in Monterey, California. Their mission was exploration and scientific discovery. The two ships, Astrolabe and Boussole, had on board a remarkable group, including an astronomer, a geologist, a botanist, illustrators, and even an ornithologist. (It is said that a young Corsican by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte applied to join the expedition but was not accepted.)

The book I had picked up was a translation of the Journals of de La Pérouse containing an account of his visit to the Monterey and its vicinity, including the Spanish mission at Carmel.

I found interesting the accounts of birds in his writings. They may well be the earliest known written descriptions of California birds.

On discovering land by sighting birds:

"At noon our longitude was 124 deg 52 min. I could see no land, but at four o' clock we were enveloped in fog. We could not be far from shore, for several land birds flew around us, and we caught a gyrfalcon."

On encountering what I presume were brown pelicans based on the further description below "grey and white ... with yellow tufts":

"The sea was covered with pelicans. It appears that these birds never fly more than five or six leagues from the land, and navigators who encounter them during a  fog may be certain of being no further distant from it. We saw them for the first time in Bay, and I have since been informed that they are common over the whole coast of California. The Spaniards call them alcatraz."

(Interestingly, it turns out the English albatross also comes from the same root.)

On how the natives hunt birds:

"These Indians are extremely skillful with the bow and killed before us the smallest birds. Their patience in approaching them is inexpressible. They conceal themselves and slide in a manner after their game, seldom shooting until within fifteen paces."

The following passage describes the birds they encountered in more detail:

"The coppices and plains are covered with small grey crested partridges, which live in society like those of Europe but in coveys of three or four hundred. They are fat and of excellent taste.

The trees are inhabited by the most charming birds. Our ornithologist stuffed several varieties of sparrows, blue jays, titmice, speckled woodpeckers, and troupiales. Among the birds of prey, we observed the white-headed eagle, the large and small falcon, the goshawk, the sparrow hawk, the black vulture, the large owl, and the raven.

In  the ponds and on the seacoast are found the duck, the grey and white pelican with yellow tufts, different species of gulls, cormorants, curlews, ring plovers, small water hens, and herons. Lastly, we killed and stuffed a bee-eater, which ornithologists have supposed to be peculiar to the old continent."

A California Thrasher, also drawn by
 J.R. Prevost during this expedition.

It is fun to speculate on what birds are being described. I am not sure about the gyrfalcon described in the first quote; the blue jay is of course a western scrub jay; the speckled woodpecker might have been a northern flicker; the troupiales appear to refer to orioles; the white-headed eagle is obviously a bald eagle; the small falcon must have been a kestrel; the goshawk might have been the red-tailed or red-shouldered hawk; the black vulture the turkey vulture; the ring plover might have been killdeer; the water-hen must have been coots. My guess for the bee-eater would be a Cassin's or western kingbird. Any other guesses?

Sadly, the expedition was lost at sea about two years later. Fortunately, much material including the above accounts and drawings that had been dispatched during stops made by the expedition made their way back to France, and were published as Voyage de La Pérouse autour du Monde in 1797.

Years later, in 1826, Peter Dillon, an Irish merchant, found remains of La Pérouse's ships among the Santa Cruz Islands, east of the Solomons, in the South Sea.