February 2016’s featured bird, the Northern Saw-whet Owl. Click the link to individually download printable calendar pages for the coming 2016 year.
As I always do about this time of year, I put together a free, downloadable and printable bird calendar for the coming year. As a long-time South Dakota “tradition”, the calendar of course features the Great Kiskadee for the month of December (in honor of the one freakishly lost bird that is still around!). You can access the calendar here:
Colored pencil drawing of a White-eared Hummingbird, a species that in the U.S. is found only on occasion in far southern Arizona.
A nice relaxing weekend at home (my favorite kind). The weather this fall has been spectacular, with crisp cool nights and sunny cool to warm days. Yesterday was a day of fishing with my son. Not a huge amount of success, although he did tie into a big carp and got a real kick out of battling it for a while.
Today, a day at home. Thought I’d get back to drawing so got out the equipment this morning and rew this White-eared Hummingbird. If you just looked at the species I drew, you’d probably think I lived somewhere tropical, given that I love drawing hummingbirds and other species I don’t typically get a chance to see in South Dakota. There is a method to the madness though, in terms of choosing what to draw. I typically draw things that I don’t have photos of! It fills a needed gap on my regular website! Given that I have species description pages for every species seen in North Dakota, I need some image for each, and drawings work nicely when I don’t have a photo.
I also chose a “rare” U.S. hummingbird because I have a work trip coming up next month to Tucson. I’ll likely take a couple of vacation days on my own, and go out birding. November isn’t a great time to look for Hummingbirds, as it’s really summer when you get the biggest variety, and most chance to see a rare one that’s made it’s way up to southern Arizona from their more normal range in Mexico. But there will be some hummingbirds around. This is a White-eared Hummingbird, a species normally found in Mexico, but sometimes found in far southern Arizona.
I don’t know why I don’t draw more. It always seems like a chore to get all the equipment out and devote several hours to it. But I’m always so happy when I’m doing it and when I’m done. I’m more pleased with how this one turned out, than for most I do.
Do you see Barred Owls in any part of Wyoming on this range map?
I’m not a huge Netflix junkie, but there are a few TV series that I have watched in their entirety. Recently I’ve been watching “Longmire”, a series focused on (fictional) Absaroka County in Wyoming. It follows the Absaroka County Sheriff’s Department, with the sheriff himself being “:Walt Longmire”.
There are four seasons of the show on Netflix, and 43 episodes. Last night I watched the last one, episode 43. After devoting the time to watch the entire series, after following all the individual storylines, after waiting in anticipation how some of those may play out in this episode, my impression of the entire series changed on a dime with the very first sound of episode 43.
When episode 43 starts, the scene is set at a medicine woman’s house out in the middle of nowhere, in the ‘mountains” on a Crow Indian reservation. The first sound you hear as the scene fades in from black…an owl calling. I’ve been birding 15 years now. I can identify anything by sight. I’m not the world’s greatest birder in identifying things by sound, but it certainly sounded like the distinctive hooting of a Barred Owl that opened up episode 43.
The problem? There are no Barred Owls in Wyoming!! It’s never quite clear where the fictional Absaroka County is supposed to lie in Wyoming, but it doesn’t matter as there’s no region in Wyoming where the species is found.
43 episodes. 43 hours devoted to a show. RUINED by careless sound editing.
Somehow, someway, I managed to struggle through the remaining 59 minutes of the show. During that time there’s another instance where you hear the hooting of a Barred Owl. OK, no, it really didn’t “ruin” the show for me, but it is irritating when you’re watching a movie or a TV show and there’s an “inappropriate” bird sound. It happens a lot. Note that if you see ANY kind of hawk or eagle in a movie, the accompanying sound is very likely to be the distinctive cry of a Red-tailed Hawk. Sure, it’s a cool sound, a sound that helps to set the stage for a “wild” scene. But c’mon! When I see a circling Bald Eagle on the screen, I don’t want to hear the accompanying cry of a Red-tailed Hawk!!
Be careful, Hollywood! We birders are watching! Inappropriate bird sounds in entertainment could be Hollywood’s undoing! A revolution is brewing, a revolution led to disgruntled birders who want REALISM in their Hollywood entertainment!!
A Nelson’s Sparrow, one of the rather elusive “skulkers” that moves through the area in the fall.
For a website that started out as a place to share my bird photos, it sure seems like it’s been a long time since I’ve actually posted any bird photos. Snakes? Check! Insects? Check? Even an aurora? Check!! But photos of creatures with feathers haven’t been very prominent lately.
It’s not like I haven’t been out birding. Since late May, I haven’t birded as much as I would over a normal summer, but I have been out on occasion. I truly haven’t had much luck getting good photos though. Part of the issue is 1) my reluctance to shoot (yet more) photos of species that I already have many photographs, and 2) a higher standard for what constitutes a “keeper” photo. In bird photography, it’s inevitable that you’ll toss most of your photos (dang things don’t sit still and pose for a nice picture!), but I toss more photos now than I ever have.
A Red-tailed Hawk, busy feeding on grasshoppers. This guy was gorging, looking down from this fence post, dropping down to grab the sluggish fall grasshoppers, coming back to the post to consume it, and then looking for another.
I spent time birding and taking photos the last couple of days, with the intention of actually getting photos “good enough” to put on my website. Mission accomplished! I really love birding in the fall. While May is a magical month for warblers and other migrants that move through, October is a month for sparrows! Sparrows aren’t exactly high on the “must see” list for most people (even many birders), but there’s a wonderful variety that moves through in the fall. Despite the tendency for most people to think of sparrows as rather drab birds, there are also several with truly beautiful plumage.
One of the highlights in the fall for me are finding Le Conte’s and Nelson’s Sparrows. Neither breed in my part of the state, and I never seem to be able to find them when they move north through the area in the spring. However, I have multiple locations where I’ve had great luck finding them in the fall, particularly Le Conte’s Sparrows. The species is highly sought by many birders, having a reputation of being “skulky” and difficult to find. They definitely do stick to thick vegetation, usually in thick wet meadows or along the edges of wetlands, but with patience, you’ll usually get some good looks of them as they forage and go about their business in the fall.
One of the more common sparrows moving through in the fall, a Savannah Sparrow. You often see loose collections of a few dozen birds at this time of year.
Raptors can also be fun in the fall, typically not so much for variety of species in this part of the state (southeastern South Dakota), but in terms of sheer number. You tend to see concentrations of American Kestrels, Red-tailed Hawks, and a handful of others as they move through in the fall. It also tends to be a pretty good time for photographing them, as many are first year birds that tend to not be as spooky as older birds.
Note although it’s likely too early, I spent some time this weekend bushwhacking through cedar thickets, looking for early arrival Northern Saw-whet Owls. No luck! But I am looking forward to their arrival. One of the few bright spots of a chilly South Dakota winter!
As always, click on the images for larger views.
Ever since I started birding 15 years ago, I had wished I could somehow link my hobby of birding, with my job as a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey. I’ve finally been able to do so in the past couple of years. My work right now focuses on the modeling of future land use and land cover, taking existing land cover maps produced by satellite imagery, and using a model to project what the landscape will look like in the coming decades. I’ve been able to take those projected land cover data and projected climate data, and look at how future bird species’ distributions will likely be impacted in the future.
Fun work! But since I started birding, it’s been interesting to see other research related to both my initial love (my bachelor’s degree was in meteorology) and in remote sensing technologies (satellite imagery, aerial photography, etc.) that dominate my current work. Over the years we’ve had a couple of visiting scientists who have presented work on the use of weather radar to track bird migrations. Here’s a nice feature story on the basics:
Doppler Radar Shows Bird Migrations
A cool thing to see! I guess I’m not quite sure of the practical applications in terms of bird conservation. Perhaps long term records and comparisons of radar patterns over multiple years could identify trends in the timing or patterns of migration. In the meantime, it’s a neat application of a technology devised for other purposes.
Drink up little Rufous Humminbird! One flower down, 1,163 cans of Coke (hummingbird equivalent) to go!!
From Slate.com, there’s a nice feature today about the “fierceness” of hummingbirds:
Hummingbirds are Fierce, Deadly Gods of War
I can relate to this. Pop (hey, I’m from the Midwest, it’s “pop”, not “soda” or anything else) is my downfall. I don’t drink coffee, and especially during the week, a can of pop somehow makes it into my office. Mostly it’s Coke. If I’m really having a bad, tiring day, a Mountain Dew has been known to slip into my office. But having an occasional can of Coke is nothing, if you read this story.
Given the metabolism of a hummingbird, they consume half their body weight in sugar every day. As the article notes, an equivalent would be a human being drinking 1,163 cans of Coke a day, or 1,106 cans of Pepsi (Pepsi has more sugar).
Therefore, I have determined my occasional can of Coke isn’t bad. It may actually be a health food, based on this comparison. Not only am I drinking the “right” pop in Coke (the less sugary one), but I’m only drinking 0.09% of my daily allowance of sugar, in hummingbird terms.
It’s all a matter of perspective…
Double-crested Cormorant. Clearly by the evil look in his eye, you can tell he’s up to no good. Clearly, this 2 pound bird is a much better fisherman than all the “sportsmen” in the Pacific Northwest, as cormorants have been (wrongly) accused of destroying salmon populations in the region.
Ah, the perks of being a government scientist. The high pay. The adulation. The outpouring and love from an American public that doesn’t seem to believe in science any more, a public that seems quite content to ignore those pesky temperature increases on their thermometer, a public that would rather believe that great-great-grandpa Eddie used to ride around on a dinosaur than believe in evolution. It just keeps better and better. At least there’s the work, right? The thought of doing real, unbiased SCIENCE for the public good?
Well sure, there is the work itself. It’s just a wee bit disheartening however to DO the work the government asks you to do, but have that work ignored by said government. With that as background…
If you’re not aware of it, there have been active campaigns against the evil Double-crested Cormorant for decades now, with interest groups (primarily fishermen and other “sportsmen”) claiming that the birds are eating all their fish, and therefor they must be destroyed. It’s been in multiple locations, from the South, to the Great Lakes, and most recently, on the Columbia River basin where fisherman are bemoaning declining salmon populations. One COULD blame over-fishing. One COULD also blame a much warmer northern Pacific (global warming anyone?) that has been shown to be taking a toll on salmon. But no…of course it’s none of that according to these brilliant “sportsmen”. It’s the evil Double-crested Cormorant that is eating all of “their” salmon.
You might wonder how a species that’s co-existed with salmon for thousands of years suddenly is (supposedly) single-handedly wiping out Cormorant populations. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was also wondering, and thus tasked their biologists to study the issue. The conclusion from the government scientists? Double-crested Cormorants weren’t having much of an impact, if any, on salmon populations in the Columbia. The next course of action by Fish & Wildlife? Giving their stamp of approval on a plan to KILL 10,000 Double-crested Cormorants in the region.
Yes, that’s correct. Your tax dollars pay for scientists to study EVIDENCE, to use the best available techniques and analyses to study issues such as this. In this case, government biologists found no connection between the birds and the salmon. That same government, however, decided to ignore their scientists and STILL start the slaughter of 10,000 birds. Why? I’m sure it has EVERYTHING to do with politics and keeping the “sportsman” (HAH!!) lobby happy. It sure as hell has nothing to do with the science.
If I’m a tax payer, I’m wondering what the hell the government is doing, playing politics instead of paying attention to the science.
As a fellow government scientist, I’m left wondering why the hell any of us are doing our jobs, if our work is going to be ignored.
A tiny feather I saw stuck on a tree branch this morning. I hear “birds” have feathers. Might want to try photographing one someday. It’s kind of telling the mode I’m in right now, when I got out with a goal of actually shooting birds, yet in my macro-mania, I instead come back with a macro photo of a bird feather.
I went out with my 400mm lens today. Truly, truly I did. Truly, truly I meant to photograph a bird, and break free of my recent macro obsession.
In fact, I DID take a photo of a bird. A small Empidonax flycatcher of undetermined species. There aren’t many bird species I can’t immediately ID by sight, but these guys are. I thought it was kind of fitting that while I’m in my bird photo rut, the one nice bird photo I got today was of the one group of birds I have a hard time ID’ing.
I did get a lot more macro photos though! I’m rapidly filling up my hard drive with unprocessed macro photos. They now sit there alongside all my bezillion bird photos that sit on my hard drive, longing for the day when they’ll see the light of day. To facilitate the processing of the macro photos though, I did finally set up an official macro photo page on my main website. You can access it here:
A (new favorite!) photo of a Carpenter bee on a bloom. The species of Carpenter Bee? Uh…WHOA…would you look at the time…uh…I gotta run, I’ll catch up to you later!!
When I started photography 15 years ago and started shooting birds, I knew absolutely nothing about my subject matter. Species identification? Hah! For the first several months I was constantly bugging my friend Jim at work with identification questions, showing him photo after photo while he patiently helped me identify birds. After this much time, I’ve photographed most birds you could expect to find in South Dakota, and I have very little trouble identifying birds from sight or from a photo (by ear is another matter…).
It did take a while though to become proficient in bird identification. After all, there are about 430 species that have been seen in South Dakota. Now as I’m getting into macro photography, i”m having the same issue with insects and spiders, but the magnitude of the problem is MUCH worse! In the continental U.S. and Canada, there have been over 900 different bird species sighted, including many stray birds, and many pelagic birds you’d never see unless you were off the coast some distance. In the U.S. alone, there are over 4,000 BEE SPECIES ALONE!!! Many insect species are also differentiated from each other by only very small ID keys. In other words…it’s DAMNED hard to nail many insects down to a given species.
I’m not satisfied taking a bird photo, but not knowing the exact species. With macro photography and insects…I’m going to HAVE to be satisfied in most cases not knowing the exact species, but perhaps only arriving at the basic genus that species belongs to. The photo above of a Carpenter Bee (I think!!) is a good example. There are over 500 species of Carpenter Bees worldwide. .But as soon as I took this photo and looked at it on my screen yesterday, I knew it was instantly one of my favorite photos!
And that’s going to have to be good enough, as I may NEVER know the exact species shown here…
“Pirate Island”, created from dredged sand in order to provide breeding habitat for coastal birds. A nice idea! Then the selfish “Me First” crowd found the island and turned it into “Party Island” for all intents and purposes. It’s hard to image many birds breeding on an island with this much human activity.
There’s a bird “news” blog I like to read, LittleBirdieHome. Three times a week, there are new stories posted that relate to birds, from the mundane stories such as “Johnny saw a Three-toed Kingbird down at Newton’s Corner!” to bird research published in scientific journals. Many times they are feel-good stories. However, as with any “news”, it ain’t always good.
This week there’s a story from near our old stomping grounds. After college, we lived in Maryland for a couple of years. Every once in a while we’d head east on a weekend to enjoy Ocean City or another beach on the coast. It was a nice change of pace for a Midwestern couple who hadn’t even seen the ocean many times. However, it was also a complete MADHOUSE. Just traveling back and forth to the coast on a weekend was often bumper to bumper, and you certainly couldn’t ever find solitude once you arrived
The story posted by LittleBirdieHome highlights the attitude that certainly seemed to permeate coastal areas when we were there. People first! WITHOUT exception!! That’s the general rule. Wildlife? That’s about 48th on the list of most important concerns for coastal visitors. The story concerns newly created islands and a conflict between birds, and people. Several small islands were created off the coast to benefit bird species that need quiet, isolated locations for breeding. However, boaters in the area have made one of the islands into a favorite weekend getaway location, flocking to the sandy beach on the island and the relative solitude compared to the coast itself. Breeding bird species, for which the island was built? There’s simply not going to be many breeding birds when people are using the island so heavily.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, as it’s really no different here in South Dakota. Public lands and parks are DEFINITELY “people first”, with wildlife concerns far down the list of most important land management concerns It’s SO sad here to visit a favored State Park, only to find that areas of wonderful habitat have been cleared to make room for campers, archers, off-road vehicles, etc. It seems the people-first method of management is universal in the United States, where the ONLY concern for the public is how they can use (and abuse) public lands. While the article linked above notes that officials are considering permanently closing the island to human visitation, I would bet the farm that the boating/party/beachbum/LOSER interests win out.
I’d like to think that they’d default to the use the island was built for, but when it comes down to people vs. birds, people always win. It’s as simple as that.