North Coast Diaries

Wanderlust

Dan Fay finally got his pictures back of the hybrid jay that came to visit his feeder back in October. It is, as we thought, a Steller's x Western Scrub Jay. There's only one other documented record (that we can find) of this cross seen in Spannaway, WA back in 1999.

Western Scrub Jay has been steadily expanding its range northward since the early 20th century. It was once considered uncommon north of southern Oregon. By the 1970's, they could be easily found up and down the Willamette Valley. Scrub jays were rare fall vagrants here in Astoria until the early 1990's when a small group began appearing at Dan Fay's feeder. Scrub Jay is now locally common on the North Coast of Oregon. Reports from Seattle are now common place.

Hybrids are always a bit of a surprise, but it seems reasonable to expect an increase in the occurrence of hybrids along the leading edge of an expanding range.

Here's a link to see additional photos of Dan's hybrid.

A rumble in Olympia

The big news in the Pacific Northwest this week is the appearance of a Redwing (Turdus iliacus), in Olympia, WA. This should not to be confused with Red-winged Blackbird. My wife couldn't understand what the fuss was about until I clarified the difference.

And no, I'm not going to argue that it's an escape. I just thought I'd wax on the question "so, are you going up to Olympia to see the Redwing?"

It's a fair question. Olympia is about 2 hours away. Everybody knows I'm a bird watcher. So, the short, polite answer--- no, I'm not.

I rarely chase. My rule of thumb is that if I have to spend more time in the car driving than out of the car looking at stuff, I probably won't go. Life is too short. I don't like driving all that much. Long distance driving? especially around the holidays? No thanks.

But I have a darker reason. I'm a bit of a snob.

By all accounts, this sounds like a classic mob-scene twitch. Way too many birders with 2-way radios, moving enmasse from one place to another any time somebody thinks they saw something. Very few of them noticing any of the other birds in the area or making any real connection with the environment. It's not why I signed on as a birder.

The bird is getting difficult to find, as well. Maybe a natural consequence of bird behavior that has nothing to do with crowds of Subaru driving, L.L.Bean clad, Zeiss wielding twitchers... then again maybe it wants to be left alone. Stories now about the one guy who came in from out of state, very reputable, who says he saw it sans witnesses. A crowd of 200 people with binoculars and this guys manages to see the thing by himself.

Heck, I'm reasonably reputable and I mistake kittens for Catbirds.

Yeah, maybe I'm cynical, but I'm checking the robin flocks in my neighborhood a little more carefully than usual, too. It's not that I don't want to see a Redwing. I just don't want to have to stand in line.

A picture of the Olympia Redwing is posted at Surfbirds Stop the Presses.

Mistakes, I've made a few....

I went out to do a bit of early morning bird watching on Christmas morning in Cottage Grove, Lane Co. where my folks live. I went to a little park that used to be a gravel quarry and is now series of shrubby ponds. Black Phoebes had been reported at this site and I thought I'd go looking for them. It was a nice morning with lots of sparrows and a very cooperative phoebe.

Then I heard the noise, series of chucks and whistles, that no regularly occurring species would make. It stopped before I could get a good make on its position and no amount of pishing seemed to rouse it into calling again. I processed the call... vaguely chat-like, but not a chat. Mockingbird? Catbird?....maybe Brown Thrasher. I waited around a bit then went back to my parent's house and immediately got on the internet and downloaded a Brown Thrasher recording. Not exactly right, but close enough to put the word out, just in case... possible Brown Thrasher at East Regional Park.

Of course anyone who read the title of this piece and has an inkling of the literary definition of foreshadowing, knows it wasn't a Brown Thrasher.

The next morning I was out at the park again and the first bird I heard while getting out of the car was this thing, except much louder. The volume alone meant it couldn't be a thrasher. Within a half hour or so, I had come to the conclusion, later confirmed by another birder familiar with the site, that I was hearing a recording of scary bird noises coming from a building next to the park. The recording was meant to frighten starlings and gulls away from the roof....

We birders have a ridiculous need to attach a name to everything we see or hear. And we almost reflexively pick rare over common, extraordinary over mundane. I should know better. Just two months ago a very small kitten had me convinced I was chasing a Catbird through the shrubbery. I had actually excluded cat because I expected something larger than a 6 inch kitten (probably barely weaned and certainly abandoned). Not seeing a big cat and not pushing enough grass out of the way to see a tiny one, I assumed it must be a bird. It even answered to the Catbird tape I returned with.

Nobody's perfect.....
And I'd rather be on record reporting Catbirds in a timely fashion that turn out to be cats, than shy away from the probables and get chewed out for not sharing when they turn out to be something.

But that doesn't make being wrong any easier.

Things that make you go humm...

The earliest known record for Anna's Hummingbird in Oregon is Dec 1944, North Bend, Coos Co. The next bird didn't materialize until Dec 1958 when a single bird wintered in Ashland, Jackson Co. A rapid expansion throughout w. Oregon occurred between 1964 and 1970. Many of the earliest reports were from feeders in Portland, Multnomah Co. and were, probably, biased toward observer concentrations.

The one real constant for Anna's Hummingbird records in winter was bird feeders or, at least winter gardens. But that has been breaking down in the past few years. More and more birds are being seen well away from feeder or even flowers.

Today, for example, I found two Anna's Hummingbirds well away from anything remotely residential. The first was a hatch-year male, singing happily from the top of a young Red Alder. The second, a hatch-year female, seemed very out of place in the middle of a stand of mature Sitka Spruce and Red Alder. It was associating with a fairly typical feeding flock of winter passerines that included Black-capped and Chestnut-back Chickadees, Golden-crowned and Ruby-crowned Kinglets, Hutton's Vireo and Townsend's Warbler. The hummingbird's association with a winter feeding flock is interesting since all these species gang together to feed primarily on insects.

The prevailing assumption has been that wintering Anna's are heavily supplimenting their diets with insects, so associating with an insect foraging group makes sense. It's the roving part that's a bit surprising since these feeding parties do a lot of traveling throughout the day. I expect hummingbirds to set up territories.

You live, you learn.

Oriole returns

The Bullock's Oriole turned up this morning. Count week at least.

16,000 gulls

As post count check-ups go, today was pretty successful.  I didn't find the Wilson's Warbler, but the spot where it was found is good habitat. The Band-tails turned out to be Rock Pigeons, but that was more of a clerical error than a misidentification.

There's been a wreck of bait fish, mostly Pacific Mackerel in the mouth of the Columbia River and it's attracted many Bald Eagles, I saw 15 today from one spot (44 were seen on the count yesterday).  And conservatively 16,000 gulls, a mix of Mew, Herring and Western/Glaucous-wing.

That's how we do Westerns and Glaucous-wings here, with a slash. The Columbia River is just about the center of the zone of hybridization between the two species.  We talk in terms of a bird being "mostly" Western or "mostly" Glaucous-winged.  Taking the time, from a distance, to try and assess the degree of grayness in the primaries to sort the intermediates from the end points is usually more trouble than it's worth. Heresy, I know, if you're a lariphile, but the way we do things in a world where other stuff needs to get counted, too.

And now through the magic of the internet you can download the studies from Condor and Auk detailing the problems we face here on the lower Columbia.
http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/Condor/files/issues/v099n03/p0585-p0594.pdf
http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/Condor/files/issues/v098n03/p0527-p0546.pdf
http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/Auk/v095n03/p0441-p0458.pdf

A so this is Christmas...

Bird Count season

There is some unwritten rule that says the weather can't be nice two days in a row during the Christmas Bird Count season. Warm and sunny Saturday, cool and unsettled on Sunday. At least it wasn't gale force wind and steady, driving rain.

I've been doing Christmas counts for 34 or so years and I've been a compiler for about 20 years. The day after the count is the day to go looking for stuff that needs to be verified. So today I will be going out to look for Wilson's Warbler, Glaucous Gull, Caspian Tern, and Mountain Chickadee. The warbler will need photographs, if possible.

The nice lady who did a feeder watch for me says she counted 81 Chestnut-backed Chickadees and 12 Hermit Thrush. I'm interpreting this as 8 chickadee and 1 Hermit Thrush counted over and over again throughout the day, but I probably need to check. The lady with the Bullock's Oriole coming to her feeder hasn't checked in, yet. I need to call her.

The Palm Warblers we thought we had staked out went unseen. I should go see if they'll make an appearance for count week, at least. Maybe see if the American Bittern will show itself, too.

Real Teal Deal

A Baikal Teal was photographed yesterday (12-17-2004) at Kent Ponds, King Co., WA.  The photos clearly show a Baikal Teal, but is it a real one.  By real I mean, not an escaped aviary specimen.  Escaped or origin questionable birds would be, in the parlance of northwest birders, fake.

In a day and age when one can buy Baikal Teal over the internet, it's becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real ducks from the fake ones. And teal are a favorite among amateur aviculturists because they're so gosh darn cute. Escapes are routine.

Meanwhile, genuinely real Baikal Teal in their native spaces are undergoing a population decline.  This would mean that the likelihood of catching a stray vagrant in Washington state would be smaller than it used to be. There hasn't been an accepted record of Baikal Teal on the West Coast since the 1970's.  There was what could be called an irruption in 1974-75 with  whopping 4 birds showing up in California and Oregon. All of the accepted records south of Alaska fall into a window from late-Nov to Jan when taken together.

The average birder naturally wants to be able to count this Baikal Teal and to be countable it has to be real.  Washington state has been getting a suspisciously large number of vagrant waterfowl in recent years including Bean Goose, Pink-footed Goose and Falcated Teal to name a few. And, not surprisingly, there have been heated and often rancorous discussions about countability.  Is there a leaky aviary somewhere in Washington? or are the Hoquim Valley and Puget Sound just a very attractive place for real strays to winter?

This recently reported bird falls into the temporal window for accepted records suggesting that it could be a real vagrant, but I'd like to see an irruptive pattern along the West Coast before I make any concrete claims about its legitimacy.

Shopping for gulls

An interesting topic bubbled up around an article which appeared a couple days ago in the NY Times. I won't bother linking it because one has to subscribe to get into it. Anyway, the article was about "barcoding" life. A layman friendly way of describing the process of cataloging DNA in various species as a means of identifying them. Not a new idea.

The Times article was based on a paper published online at Plosbiology and also available from the authors at their website.

Most of the birder discussion has centered around the 4 "new" species that pop out using this technique. These 4 would presumably be splits involving already described subspecies although the paper is not clear about whether the splits would actually fall along already described morphological boundaries.

What I found more interesting were the species that, if barcodes alone were used, would get lumped. Some like Northwestern Crow deserve to be lumped, but seven species of gulls (Herring, Mew, Ring-billed, Iceland, Glaucous, Great Black-backed and Thayer's Gulls) showed low divergence. In fact, the variations between individuals within a given species were as great as between species.

I can identify gulls when I have to, but I admit openly that I'm not the kind of lariphile that spends hours studying the nuances at a garbage dump full of gulls. I am disinclined to dive into the gull debates on ID-frontiers. I would not shed many tears if all these North American gulls got lumped. But I don't believe for a minute that Mew Gulls and Great Black-backed Gulls are the same species.

So I have to ask: what good is a barcode that doesn't seem to work on 5% of the species? The authors blame recent divergence and frequent hybridization. They further state that finding more genetic markers will probably solve this problem. That would be like, to push the analogy, needing two different scanners at the store to buy groceries. Clearly, this is not a magic bullet.

A critique of the barcode process takes these concerns even farther, suggesting that the phylogeography of North American species is less complex than the tropics and that the rules for a barcode methodology for tropical species may prove to be even squishier.

Lingering Rufous Hummingbirds

I dropped by a feeder in Astoria where a Rufous Hummingbird had been reported a couple weeks back and found two.

Technically, there are two Selasphorus type hummingbirds that could appear here, Allen's or Rufous, but the hatch-year male coming to the feeder seems pretty obviously a Rufous. I'll play the game an report the hatch-year female as Selasphorus sp., but statistally it's probably also a Rufous, since the breeding range for Allen's is way south of here and there's no pattern of northward dispersal.

This is another species which is increasingly being reported wintering in places that would not seem hospitable to nectar/insect dependent neotropicals. Perhaps not so surprising here in the banana belt, but there's a bird currently wintering in Minnesota and a couple in New York.

Goose chase

The American Ornithological Union (AOU) finally decided to split Canada Goose. The big ones will continue to be called Canada Geese and the small ones will be called Cackling Geese (at least for now). Taxonomists do their lumping and splitting to reflect the most recent consensus on relationships, evolution and ecology for given species. They do not necessarily care if they've added or subtracted ticks from a birder's lifelist. They do not necessarily care if they've created a field-recognizable unit. And I don't expect them to.

But there are one or two birders out there who believe that if the AOU calls it a species then there's got to be some suite of characters that can be used to reliably diagnose every bird encountered. We've been through this with Emidonax flycatchers and large pink-footed gulls already.

I've been spending a lot of time with geese in the last couple weeks. The very large ones are very easy to tell from the very small ones. But I'm afraid that many of the ones in the middle may be undiagnosable, especially at the parvipes/tavernerii cusp where parvipes (Lesser Canada Goose) has been placed with the big form and tavernerii (Taverner's Goose) has been placed with the small form. You'd be able to sort them on their respective breeding grounds, but they may be pretty much "Canada Goose Complex" anywhere else.

I have a feeling that this "differences only matter when breeding" thing is a fairly common and under appreciated reality among closely related migrant species, especially those that are obliged to share wintering grounds. Seems like there might even be some selective benefit. The fact that we can't tell them apart away from the breeding grounds may be part of the point.

Now here's where I risk exposing my elitist tendencies....
If there is a suite of characters that can diagnose a statistically significant portion of these middle ground individuals, they are likely to be subtle. Joe-average Birder is not likely to spend enough time in the field internalizing these features to really use them. Yet, he will read about these miracle fieldmarks in Birding magazine, then go out and start naming geese. He will make what amount to guesses based mostly on what his needs are for the day list or the year list or the county list or whatever, see what he wants to see and cite some reasonably well known author as the source of his expertise.

So What?

If indeed the only point to birding is to generate lists of things to be compared annually with the lists generated by others, then it really doesn't matter.

On the other hand, maybe admitting that we can't aways make identifications to species celebrates a greater observation about nature and any prentense of greater knowledge misses the real point...

Some references:
PDF of ODFW's Guide
Sibley's Goose Guide
Angus Wilson's breakdown

The case of the confused Neotropical Migrant

On November 17th of this year an adult male Bullock's Oriole turned up in my apple tree. It was working the holes in the apples that had been made by Northern Flickers. November 17th is a bit late for a bird that's supposed to go south for the winter.

All by itself, this is an interesting record, but there's more. An immature male Bullock's Oriole spent last winter near a suet feeder about 5 blocks down the street. The woman who lives in that house just sent me a note regarding an oriole there today. It is almost certainly the bird that wintered there last year and it's probably the bird that was at my feeder in November.

Wintering site fidelity is pretty well documented for routine winter residents. A Barrow's Goldeneye is putting in its 4th winter in Youngs Bay across from the Dairy Queen. I have 5 years of banding data that goes with wintering Sooty Fox Sparrows returning to the same place on the Neawanna River in Seaside. I have long suspected that there might be wintering site fidelity for these lost neotropical species, too. A Northern Mockingbird appeared at Hammond 3 years in a row and Tropical Kingbirds have an affinity for the area around Seaside High School that seems to be greater than chance alone. But one bad winter would, in theory, take these individuals out.

There's probably an explanation.... oh yeah, we don't seem to have bad winters anymore.

the graph

A temperature graph showing the average January maximum and minimum temperatures for Astoria, OR. At 42 degrees of freedom the probability is greater than 95% that the regressed line represents the trend of the data. A 4°F temperature rise in 40 years and fewer big temperature swings from year to year.

Imagine what it would look like if global warming was real....

reflections on a Red-shoulderd Hawk

Red-shouldered Hawk, Astoria Airport, Clatsop Co., Oregon

I started birding back in 1970 when I was 14. Back then you'd measure the distance between any two Red-shouldered Hawks in years rather than miles. Red-shoulders are now routinely reported in northern Oregon and Southwest Washington. And because I know where to look, I can seen one or two everyday now. They're about 3 miles apart....

Red-shouldered Hawk is not the only species that seems to be moving north. I can remember making multiple trips to Finley NWR in Linn County south of Corvallis in the late 70's trying to find the one White-tailed Kite that had taken up residence there.... and not being able to find it. I saw three today all from one spot. Anna's Hummingbirds have gone from being rare winter visitors to being common year-round residents. There are females nesting on both ends of my block. Black Phoebes are nesting in the Willamette Valley. Tropical Kingbirds have become annual in the fall (one has been eating yellowjackets within walking distance of my house since early November.

Yeah, there's a pattern. Maybe I'll post some graphs.