North Coast Diaries

Southbound again

I met a birder from Great Britain today out at the South Jetty of the Columbia River.  It's not unusual to meet visiting birders there.  It's not unusual for them to be from someplace other than the United States.  It's also not unusual for them to spot things that are unusual.

In this case, the unusual bird was a Buff-breasted Sandpiper.  This is actually an annual migrant to the region, but an easily missed one because its habitat is atypical for "shorebirds" and the numbers that come through are low.  Buff-breasted Sandpipers like areas with short grass like golf courses, grazed cow pastures and Salicornia wetlands.  And naturally, the reported bird was in none of those places.  It was on a beach that rarely gets checked because it's usually too crowded with salmon fishermen.

We also got a report of an American Redstart today just south of Seaside.  I saw one about 3 weeks ago in the same approximate location.  Was it the same bird? or are we on the front edge of a redstart year?  It's also the same place where interesting eastern vagrants turned up last fall.  I'm going to go poke around the spot tomorrow.

A Rose-breasted Grosbeak stopped for a short while at the Neawanna on the day we were out bird banding.  A House Wren spent two days up on Coxcomb Hill.

The southbound migration has been evident up on Coxcomb the past several days.  Mixed flocks of Townsend's, Black-throated Gray and Hermit Warblers have been especially obvious.  Coxcomb is a curious rarity here in the county, an accessible Coast Range migrant fallout spot.  And only 6 blocks from my house....

Flight of the meadowhawks

Sometime, late in the summer, when the wind blows east and temperatures rise into the 80's, something weird and wonderful happens. For reasons as yet unexplained, thousands of Variegated Meadowhawks (Sympetrum corruptum) concentrate near the ocean and head south. No one is sure where they come from. No one is sure where they go when the wind shifts and the temperature goes down.

No northbound migration has ever been documented nor has anyone been able to show a cryptic migration during other kinds of weather.

Today, meadowhawks were going by at about 60/min and true to form the migration shut down when the wind came around to northwest. I have seen movements where 100's were going by per minute sometimes mixed with southbound butterflies, California Tortoiseshells, Red Admirables and Painted Ladies all of which have been shown to have northbound movements.

The case of the disappearing lady

2005 can rightly be called the year of the PAINTED LADY (Vanessa cardui). I have been regularly commenting on the remarkable numbers being reported throughout the west. On most days, one can go out and easily find them. They prefer to lay eggs on various species of thistle (Cirsium sp.) and it's not difficult to find the caterpillars if you know what to look for.

So my daughter, Michelle, and I decided we would collect a couple of these larvae, feed them thistles, allow them to pupate and then watch them turn into butterflies. They ate thistles, got nice and fat, crawled to the top of the rearing cage and turned into chrysalises. After about 3 weeks, Michelle looked in on the progress and said she thought they'd died. When I looked at the chrysalises, I could see that they were open, but there were no butterflies in the cage....

Where did the Painted Ladies go?

It turns out that being a caterpillar on a thistle is more dangerous than one might imagine. I took a closer look at the dried thistle in the bottom of the rearing cage and found that it was not empty. There were two interesting, and strikingly colored wasps, ichneumon wasps (we still haven't got any farther than family). These wasps lay eggs in the caterpillars, the caterpillars pupate, then the larval wasp feeds on the caterpillar while it's in the chrysalis. It's a metamorphosis is a different sort.

And now for something completely different...salamanders

On Thursday, 4 August, Craig Steele and I went up to the north side of Saddle Mountain to look for Cope's Giant Salamander (Dicamptodon copei). Craig is doing genetic analysis of Dicamptodons in the Pacific Northwest for his doctorate and Oregon Coast Range Cope's Salamanders were the last significant gap that he needed to fill.

Larval Cope's Giant Salamander (left) and Pacific Giant Salamander from
Saddle Mountain. Note head shape, gill structure and spotting.

Many of the historical sites for Cope's in the Oregon Coast Range are now silted in as a result of intensive logging near streams the salamanders depend upon. Cope's hardier cousin, the Pacific Giant Salamander (D. tenebrosus), seems less affected by these stream changes (though not immune to them) and is generally easier to find. It certainly was on our trip Thursday.

I should point out that we didn't get to the best streams for finding Copes until late in the day. I took a wrong turn, which put us on the wrong fork of the creek system and we didn't reach the best habitats until fairly late in the day. It also didn't help that I took two nasty falls, one of which left me with a cut and badly bruised knee. This slowed me down to an embarrassing degree and, I think, rattle me enough that I was no longer on my A-game as a guide.

Anyway, we found at least 3 Cope's Giant Salamanders in a very rocky narrow channel with exposed bedrock. Genetic samples were secured via tail clipping. The salamanders were released back into their stream. Now Craig has to go back to his lab a do some gene sequencing. He has already established a definitive set of markers for distinguishing Cope's from Pacific Giant and has also been able to show that the Columbia River is a significant genetic barrier for populations of Pacific Giant Salamander. The original genetic lines for Pacific Giant Salamander probably hail from the Siskiyous and lines that moved north along the Cascade are different from the lines that came up the Coast Range.

Craig had samples of Cope's from the Cascades of Washington and Northern Oregon, the Olympics and Washington Coast Range, but he was missing the Oregon Coast Range, in large part because most of the historical sites are now, apparently no longer viable. Our trip to Saddle Mountain allowed him to plug that gap. It also speaks volumes for exactly how vulnerable this population is in the Oregon Coast Range.

I look forward to finding out how genetically distinctive the Saddle Mountain population is and what that might mean for stream conservation in the region.

The herp list:
Cope's Giant Salamander
Pacific Giant Salamander
Tailed Frog
Red-legged Frog
Northern Alligator Lizard

Ivory-billed Woodpecker skeptics back off

Word from yesterday's New York Times is that Dr. Blum and Dr. Robbins have been given access to recordings made in the Cache River swamps of Arkansas. They are apparently now convinced that there are at least two Ivory-billed Woodpeckers there. They are either withdrawing their pending article critiquing the video or, at least, re-evaluating its content.

The true-believers are piling on the I-told-you-sos, choosing to ignore the fundamental problem in the originally presented evidence. The original evidence was tantalizing and provocative, but not definitive. It required criticism. And the result was more and better evidence. This is how science operates and it's the reason why claims tempered by the fires of the scientific method are generally more reliable than those generated by faith alone. The claimants are evaluated on the evidence. The burden of proof is on the claimants. It is the evidence that counts, not the letters behind the names of the claimants. Nothing by authority.

Let's not confuse the Ivory-billed Woodpecker with the evidence for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Lack of evidence is not evidence against. Hours and hours of field time searching for something and NOT finding it is not lack of evidence, though. The hours spent not finding Ivory-billed Woodpeckers tells us a lot and should not be discounted. Every claim for an Ivory-billed Woodpecker should continue to require high skepticism and scrupulous evidentiary documentation.

July Lowdown

Summer finally came with temperatures in the upper 60's. Southbound shorebird movements were right on schedule. The most impressive migrant was the LESSER SAND-PLOVER that spent about 4 days on the Necanicum Estuary. Several SEMIPALMATED SANDPIPERS and at least 1 BAIRD'S SANDPIPER were also reported.

Above average ocean temperatures farther south and west have pushed large numbers of NORTHERN ANCHOVY nearshore. They are congregating between Tillamook Head and Gearhart attracting spectacular numbers of seabirds and mammals. At least one juvenile SABINE'S GULL has been lurking on the edge of a flock of well over 10,000 CALIFORNIA GULLS on Little Beach. HEERMANN'S GULL numbers are also remarkable at about 5000 on most days, the greatest concentrations at Seaside Cove. COMMON MURRES, BROWN PELICANS and all three cormorant species are in abundance as well.

A HUMP-BACKED WHALE, HARBOR PORPOISES, seals and sealions are also putting on quite a show.

In butterfly news, the numbers of butterflies at Saddle Mountain and Nicolai have been disappointing. It's hard to know wheather this is the result of the weird, below average June weather, the above average early spring temperatures or something human caused (like spraying). Butterfly counts on Clatsop Plains are showing early peaks for both nectaring plants and some lep species.