North Coast Diaries

Eagles and Falcons

There were 5 BALD EAGLES working on a dead Harbor Seal at the South Jetty of the Columbia River on Monday Morning. A GYRFALCON was reported in the area Sunday, but I couldn't find it when I looks.

An immature PEREGRINE FALCON was on the trestle at Trestle Bay, I managed a bad digi-scope, just in case it was something better, but even this bad photo shows enough details of the face to clinch the ID.

Adult Red-shouldered Hawk

This photo, taken at Astoria Airport this morning, came out kind of okay

Thoughts on an errant albatross

The "Great Backyard Bird Count" (GBBC) just wrapped up this last weekend. It's an event sponsored by the Cornell Lab for Ornithology and the National Audubon Society that asks ordinary folks to count the stuff coming to their feeders and send the data in via the internet. I've been participating in this event since its beginnings about 10 years ago. This year I spent my Saturday at the Lewis and Clark National Park giving slide presentations and leading bird walks around a Backyard Bird Count theme. I also spent about 10 or 12 hours on the other three days of the count period counting stuff in my local patch and posting it in the database.

I think I qualify as a veteran of this event. And I wouldn’t keep doing it if I didn’t find value in it.

The Great Backyard Bird Count has its detractors. Some of them have some pretty solid reasons for their complaints and others pick on the event for reasons which are less sound. Almost every year reported data pops into the database that is in error, some of it deliberately falsified- most of it, the product of novice error. False reports are almost certainly the product of bored teenagers messing with the assignment their science teacher gave them or something equally peripheral. It’s also pretty easy to spot and cut out of the database.... and boy does it get spotted. Nothing makes us birder-types more twitchy than an albatross reported from the Ponderosa slopes of central Oregon mountain ranges.

More problematic are the honest mis-ID’s. There is nothing surprising about someone with little or no prior knowledge or training seeing a jay, noting that it’s blue and recording Blue Jay or seeing a large brown sparrow scratching around in a towhee-like fashion and recording California (Brown) Towhee. These mistakes are tougher to spot and tougher to tactfully correct. If the goal is to bring people into the birding fold, asking them to participate and then telling them they’re wrong may not be the best way to do it. And if these novices are misidentifying Blue Jays, they’re probably mixing up their Carpodacus finches and calling Song Sparrows Fox Sparrows. What invisible damage are they doing to the database?

The weakness in the data entry portion of the GBBC is not really in the mistakes, however. It’s in the management of the mistakes. There was a time when there didn’t seem to be any obvious mechanism for editing the counts, the Blue Jays and albatrosses may have eventually been removed from the system, but observers looking at the species totals during the count and comparing their results had no way of knowing who to call or what to do. The magic of near-real-time results compilation was being sullied by errant data. In the often too competitive world of birding, knowing that the next town over has more species than yours is especially frustrating when you know several are in error. Here in Oregon we now know there’s someone fixing the data. He’s catching the worst of the junk in a very timely manner. We have a way of managing our irrational anxiety. I, for one, feel better.

I don’t think the creators of the GBBC anticipated the number of participants they’d attract. I don’t think they took the quirks, neuroses and (dare I say it?) snobbery of “serious” birders into account. I remember that the earliest incarnation of the GBBC was very backyard centered. It was clearly about winter finches and chickadees; a simple list and simple objectives. But the competitive nature of birding pushed the counts to a completely different place and that’s okay.

The cold, hard truth is that, from the perspective of meaningful data, one or two Blue Jays or California Towhees don’t matter. Those are not the species a biogeographer is likely to look at. They’ll be looking at the thousand of House Finches or American Crows or European Starlings. An occasional mistake mixed in with thousands of correctly identified birds gets gobbled up by the standard error calculation. It’s no big deal. The Blue Jay matters to us birders because we value the rarity, the weird single individual. In the science of ornithology, the value is not in single birds, it’s in populations of birds; outliers are of only passing interest.

Besides, the GBBC has really been taken over by an entirely different subset of people anyway, indifferent to the eccentricities of birders or onithologists…. BIRD WATCHERS.

I live in one of those places on the GBBC national map that typically shows fewer than 10 lists entered. In the early years, I was the only person entering data from my neck of the woods. In the past several years, list from folks I can’t account for started popping up. This year, for the first time ever, I came across someone else doing a survey in a park. I met a woman, well into her 60's, out with her 12-year-old grandson. She had a printout list from the GBBC website and the old 1966 edition of the Golden Guide (you know, the one with the ugly greenish cover). I walked with them for about 20 minutes, put my scope on a Greater Scaup for them get good looks at, showed them how to pish out Hutton's Vireo and Brown Creeper, then we went our separate ways.

To me the greatest value of the GBBC has absolutely nothing to do with birding, or ornithology, or errant albatrosses. It has everything to do with making connections, bringing people back outside. It’s about learning and teaching; discovering and rediscovering. The Great Backyard Bird Count is not about data collection, it’s about sharing what we know with friends we don’t know, about sharing a common pastime with total strangers.

And sometimes that means complaining, together, about Black-footed Albatross reports from the mountains of central Oregon.

Brownsmead Birds of Prey

I did a Columbia River raptor survey today and managed a pretty good count that included some decent photos. A MERLIN was especially cooperative. The PRAIRIE FALCON that has been reported off and on over the past 2 month sat for a not too shabby digiscope and a RED-TAILED HAWK posed for a very nice portrait shot. I've included a PEREGRINE shot from earlier in the week to round things out.

As far as the raptor survey goes, this is the peak of "eagle season". I saw 36 today, most of them adults in pairs. Ten raptor species in total, including a BARN OWL and 3 WHITE-TAILED KITES.

Posted by mbalame at 4:09 PM

Eurasian Green-winged Teal

He's an Eurasian Green-winged Teal from Wireless Rd.