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.