Strange mockingbird

Sometimes even familiar birds can fool you. This is a picture taken just outside my house a month ago. I suspect most birdwatchers would do a double-take when they see this bird for the first time. The beak is just not right. After struggling with it for a day, I figured out that it was just an immature northern mockingbird with a funny overgrown bill, and confirmed it with an expert. They are usually shorter with a slight downwards curve (see, for example, the Wikipedia picture ). 

It also made me ponder whether one is more likely to see variations among the very young of a species. Mutations that are not well-suited to their lifestyle or the environment are likely to result in earlier deaths, making significant mutations as a whole less likely to be observed in grown-up birds. 

Owl in the daylight

My eight-year-old and I chanced across this beautiful Burrowing Owl at the Rio Hondo Spreading Grounds where we also saw more than 400 wintering Canada Geese. Notice how its two pupils are dilated in inverse proportion to the amount of light hitting them.

We were surprised to see an owl up and about in the day. While they are nocturnal like most owls, apparently they are sometimes active in the daytime, especially when building their burrows. You can see this bird's burrow just behind it, to the right. 

A shy and hidden bird

In the swamp, in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.

Solitary, the thrush,
The hermit, withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.

- Walt Whitman, in When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d (Leaves of Grass)

Because my first and only other sighting of it some weeks back had been rather brief, I was thrilled to have a long and close look at the aptly-named Hermit Thrush today at the Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve.

I had no idea how famous it is in American poetry. Besides the above quote, consider the following:

• A Hermit Thrush is the title of a beautiful poem by Amy Clampitt. (This link provides both the text and a recording where you can hear her read it herself).
  
  
• It is also the title of a poem by Henry Van Dyke, which I must confess is too treacly for my taste.
  
  
• It finds mention in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.
  
  
• The Hermit Thrush is the name of a collection of poems by Kathleen Millay, Edna's lesser-known youngest sister.

in with the new...

I wrote a long post for this blog after the new year and my screen froze, so it was all wiped out. Sigh.

Anyway, the short version is that I was reporting on a few birding trips:

* A new year's eve trip to Antelope Valley, a trip lead by Louis Tucker, focused on identifying Raptors. I got to sit in a car with experienced birders (with 20 and 30 years of birding experience each, respectively) and listen with rapt attention as they talked about their passion. I got to see all kinds of raptors (including Northern Harrier, Rough-legged Hawk) and other interesting birds including the Greater Roadrunner and California Quail. Another highlight of this trip was meeting a 9 year old who has seen close to 200 species already over the past six months that he has been birding. This made me resolve to involve my little ones more in  bird-watching this year...

* On Jan 2, I participated for the first time in the annual Christmas Bird Count organized by the Audubon Society, at Hahn Park, joining Eric and Ann Brooks, local experts. New sightings for me included the Peregrine Falcon, House Wren and Bewick's Wren.

* These are pictures of Rose-ringed parakeets we found at the Del Rey Lagoon. Seeing them felt somehow magical, because I re-connected to something forgotten from my childhood. These are birds I grew up with more than two decades ago in India. I remembered that they used to eat up nearly all the fruits in the Guava tree behind my house, before they could ripen, much to our frustration. And I remembered how their loud but not entirely unpleasant squawking filled the evening air as they roosted in large numbers.

   

(Photos by Zhen Krishnamachari)

***

I came across a nice birding blog today, by the poly-lingual Tom Miko, titled the "The Pro-Nuclear Birder":
http://radioactivebirdwatcher.blogspot.com/

This made me plan to compile a list of blogs by birders...

Rara Avis!

 

I was returning back from taking out the trash this morning and heard a clear "chip" in the tree above me. Thinking it was probably a yellow-rumped warbler (which are rather plentiful around here), I looked up casually. What I saw made me freeze: high up on the tree was a bird with black and white markings on its face like I had not ever seen before. I stared at it a bit, but felt unsure that I'd be able to identify it later because of how far away it was. So I raced back home to pick up my binoculars and a camera. 

Luckily, it was still there when I got back. I took as many photos as I could and stood there a while observing the pretty little thing flit from branch to branch and tree to tree, all the while continuing to "chip" away. 

When I got back home, I checked two different field guides to confirm what I was seeing. It looked quite definitively to me like the yellow-throated warbler. This warbler (Setophaga dominica) comes in two main varieties/subspecies: white-lored or yellow-lored. What I had seen was a yellow-lored one. 

However, there was one troubling issue. According to both books I was consulting as well as online sources, this bird is not really supposed to be seen in this part of the country, being primarily a bird of the southeastern USA. I found only one report of this bird in the LA area, dating back to May 2007. I also discovered that it is considered a statewide rarity for California.

So I sent my pics to Mr. Kimball Garrett, the Ornithology Collections Manager at the LA County Natural History Museum, a very well known and accomplished birder in this area. To my delight, he wrote back, confirming my identification, with the words: "Yes, this is certainly a Yellow-throated Warbler -- nice documentation of one of the few winter records for coastal southern California." And another local birding expert that I consulted on the pics wrote: "It might start a small stampede if the bird's location was known!"


It was beginner's luck, no doubt, but I am on cloud nine. What a wonderful way to cap the year!

Bird-being

Breathtaking.

The Human Flamingo

By Gesine Marwedel, Photo by Thomas van de Wall, November 2011.

To pish or not to pish

What are the tools of a bird-watcher? It is easy enough to come up with a list: binoculars / scope, field guides, notebooks, perhaps a GPS device...

But one of the more unusual tools in the birders arsenal is not a physically tangible object at all. It is "pishing", which refers to the act of making bird-like sounds, specifically, a soft "pish"-like sound,  to attract birds. 

In the above video, American naturalist Pete Dunne demonstrates how to do pishing and make other bird calls.

The first time I heard a birder do this recently on an LA Audubon society-led bird-watching trip, I was a bit skeptical. But the literature shows it really does work! Consider these two papers:

[1] J. R. Zimmerling and C. D. Ankney, "A Technique that increases detectability of passerine species during point counts", Journal of Field Ornithology 71(4):638-649, 2000.

The abstract of this paper starts out with:

During April–July 1997, we censused birds in three woodlands near Arnprior, Ontario, Canada using conventional point counts (n = 12) and point counts supplemented with “pishing” (n = 12), a well-known method for attracting various bird species. Overall, 3.6 (19%) more species were detected per census using pishing. Irrespective of statistical significance of individual species, 45 (74%) of the 61 species were detected on more days using pishing, whereas 5 (8%) species were detected on more days using the conventional method. A higher number of males and a higher number of visually detected species were recorded using pishing as compared to the conventional method, and these differences did not change with date. 

And the following paper by Langham et al. presents a hypothesis for why pishing works, based on the similarity of pishing to the scolding sounds of Titmouse:

[2] G. Langham et al., "Why pishing works: Titmouse (Paridae) scolds elicit a generalized response in bird communities", Ecoscience 13(4):485-496, 2006.

***

There is, of course, an ethical issue that arises here. Is it really ok for a birder to, well, deceive birds into showing up? How much does it affect birds as they go about their everyday routines to respond to a false alarm?

The American Birding Association's code of ethics advises birders to "limit the use of recordings and other methods of attracting birds, and never use such methods in heavily birded areas, or for attracting any species that is Threatened, Endangered, or of Special Concern, or is rare in your local area." It also adds "if you are attracting birds to an area, ensure the birds are not exposed to predation from cats and other domestic animals, or dangers posed by artificial hazards."

(Come now, don't laugh! This is a serious matter. Banish that vision you just conjured up, of Silvester using pishing to lure little Tweety bird.)

***

Anyway, the next time you see someone on a hiking trail making strange shushing sounds at no one in particular, please don't shake your head thinking "poor demented chap." It might just be me.