This morning on Coxcomb Hill…

Today I counted 124 WESTERN TANAGERS at Coxcomb Hill.

We are in the thick of spring migration and Coxcomb Hill is one of the best spots along the coastal corridor to watch. I approach spring observations the way I would approach a seawatch. I pick a spot and watch birds go past. In the spring, the spot to watch from is “the gap” at the bottom of the big meadow. Birds move up the hill from the south and make the short hop across the open meadow (the gap in the canopy). The fall pattern is completely different. Birds arrive from the north, dropping in at the top of the hill and move along the roadside corridor.

Today I sat in the gap for about an hour and a half (~8:00 to 9:30).  Every tanager I saw, every warbler that I saw, every grosbeak that I saw came across the gap from the south and headed north.  Here’s my partial list…

If I were doing a seawatch and saw this kind of directed movement, I would call it active migration.  The conventional wisdom is that neotropical passerines only migrate at night, pausing to rest and feed during the day.  But in the extended forest corridors of the Coast Range (and certainly corridors in other places), many migrant species can and do continue moving north as they feed in the canopy.

With cooperative weather, the movements at Coxcomb Hill should continue for several days.  Bring a chair and your favorite morning beverage and watch the action.

Boy howdy, that Fox Sparrow sure has a big bill and we actually caught two on Sunday, both with roughly similar measurements.

There are, according to most authorities, 17 or so different subspecies of Fox Sparrow. These are generally broken up into 4 broad (possibly species level) groups. One group, collectively bundled as megarhyncha, has a pretty big bill.  Could this be a vagrant from that group?

No, believe it or not, its bill isn’t big enough.  There are two measurements that we make on Fox Sparrows.  One along the upper ridge of the bill tells us the length.  The other, taken from the place outboard of the holes in the nose down to the flat part at the base of the bill tells us the thickness.  The bill of our bird in hand is plenty long enough, but it’s not deep enough to be a megarhyncha.

But there are other “big billed” Fox Sparrows and they fall into the Sooty Group.  We only seem to catch them in the early fall and late spring, presumably because they winter farther south than our “average” Sooties.  We put them in a pile we call unalaschensis/ridgewayi, because that’s (approximately) where they land on the graph.

I’ve been catching and measuring Fox Sparrows for quite a while.  It took me a couple of seasons before I realized I could not sort individual Sooty Fox Sparrows reliably into these finer  subspecific categories.  I can say with some confidence that we catch all Sooty-type subspecies, because when I can take all the measurements we make, put them on a scatter plot, they the cover continuum of sizes and shapes from the largish, deep-billed sinuosa to the smallish, tiny-billed fuliginosa (in fact, most of the birds we catch seem to match fuliginosa).  But the key here is continuum.  There are no clean boundaries.

A handy map made by Robert Zink was publish a few years back in Birding Magazine (December 1999) which lays out the breeding ranges for most of the forms.

As can be seen, it’s kind of unlikely that any of the Fox Sparrow types other than Sooty are going to turn up in a net on the North Coast of Oregon, especially megarhyncha.  Of the Slate-colored forms only olivacea seems likely and it’s a “small-billed” type.

So, assuming I’ve made the proper diagnosis and our bird genuinely belongs in the unalaschensis/ridgewayi pile, our quiz bird is headed to Kodiak or the Aleutians.

For those of you who want to play along at home, the measurements of the two birds caught Sunday were:

Bird one is the bird in the photographs.

And just for closure…
The other quiz bird was, as most of you correctly surmised, a female MacGillivray’s Warbler. We rarely catch this species. They don’t seem to come down to the coastal riparia, preferring the clearcuts up higher in the Coast Range.

Last week we posted a gray-headed warbler quiz bird that turned out to be an out of town Orange-crowned Warbler.  Here’s another gray-headed warbler…

And if you think that one’s too easy, can you guess where this one is most likely going to spend the summer…

I took a trip to Brownsmead today to see how the shorebird numbers were up river.  I stopped at the Twilight Eagle Sanctuary along the way.

My final pelican count at Prairie Channel was thirty-nine. I found fourteen more at Bughole near Brownsmead.

We’re starting to get used to having white pelicans on the lower Columbia.  More surprising was the bird I found along Jackson Rd…

There was a time when I’d have to drive all the way to Eastern Oregon to find these two species…

As for the primary mission, there were a few shorebirds around, out in the flooded pastures.

And big flocks of Cackling and Greater White-fronted Geese.

You can see more of today’s photos HERE.

Each spring, right around the 1st of May, the annual northbound migration of shorebirds peaks. Numbers can be quite astounding. Last evening, Lee Cain reported big numbers using the pastures around Wireless Rd. I got there early this morning and found that many of the birds he reported were still present.

Wireless Road usually attracts big numbers of WHIMBREL and BLACK-BELLIED PLOVER in the spring. There are also usually a few MARBLED GODWITS, GREATER and LESSER YELLOWLEGS, dowitchers and small Calidris sandpipers, the most impressive numbers coinciding with high tide.

Some years turn up a LONG-BILLED CURLEW or two. I had to take a picture through my spotting scope to get the photo voucher.

All the shorebird activity has attracted the attention of BALD EAGLES, RED-TAILED HAWKS and a PEREGRINE.

More photos of the Wireless Road shorebird extravaganza HERE.

Last year around this time, I expounded on variations in Orange-crowned Warblers during migration, focusing on the two most commonly encountered forms caught and banded at our banding sites. We’re back at the nets for another season and yesterday we caught 21 Orange-crowned Warblers over the 4 hours that the nets were up. We had a FLOCK of nine in one net and that was when we caught this:

I posted this as a quiz photo yesterday and, not surprisingly, many folks did not immediately recognize it an an Orange-crowned Warbler. It’s from out of town.

If you get out your Sibley’s, you’ll note that he illustrates two forms “Taiga” and “Pacific”, one is grayer; one is yellower.  We banders use a more technical guide called Identification Guide to North American Birds by Peter Pyle (1997) which breaks down these variations more quantitatively into 4 subspecies, three of which are migratory: a very yellow one, a very gray one and a greenish-grayish-yellowish one.  Most of the birds we see on the Pacific Coast are yellowish to greenish-grayish-yellow.

Measurements and other features tell us the this is a likely male and those worn coverts with the pale tips tells us this is a second-year (hatched last summer) individual.

The Stanley Lake/Thompson Creek Wetland is an active restoration site managed by the North Coast Land Conservancy.  We set our nets to compare and contrast the older mitigated restoration of 25 years ago to the newly planted portions on recently acquired properties.  The project is already turning into a series of teachable moments

Photographed today at Stanley Marsh Banding Station, Seaside, Clatsop Co.,  OR.