One week from today — February 15-18 — the Great Backyard Bird Count will take a real-time snapshot of birds around the world. You can help.
Since 1998 the Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) has enlisted volunteers like us to count the birds we see for four days in mid-February. Last year our worldwide effort counted 6,459 species and nearly 29 million birds!
Register for an eBird or GBBC account if you don’t already have one. (GBBC uses eBird so you don’t need both.)
Count birds for at least 15 minutes during the four-day period. You can count in more than one place and longer than 15 mins if you wish. Keep track of the highest number of each species you see with a separate checklist for each new day, for each new location, or for the same location if you counted at a different time of day.
You can count birds anywhere — in your backyard, in a park, at the shore, or on a hike. If the weather’s bad, stay indoors and count birds at your feeders.
Climate change is giving us extreme weather, melting glaciers and rising seas. It’s not the first time we humans lived through this but the last event was during the Stone Age and nobody wrote it down.
During the last Ice Age England was connected to Europe. As the glaciers receded people moved to the land between. Dogger Bank was the highest ground, about 100 feet above sea level.
100 feet sounds like a safe height, right? Nope. The glaciers kept melting. Dogger Bank disappeared 8,200 years ago.
Many islands face this fate in the 21st century including Tangier Island, Virginia (map below) and the island nations of Kiribati and the Maldives with 100,000 to 400,000 residents respectively.
Pittsburgh’s peregrines won’t lay eggs until March but they’re already busy claiming territory, attracting mates, and courting. You’ll see them perching near each other in prominent locations, engaging in spectacular courtship flights, the male bringing food for his lady, and the pair bowing at the nest (only visible on a falconcam). This activity makes February and March my favorite months for peregrine watching.
Claiming territory is a blatant activity but the peregrine’s first egg date is nearly impossible to determine without a falconcam. Unlike bald eagles, peregrines nest on inaccessible ledges and don’t begin incubation until the next to last egg has been laid. The only sign that they’re incubating is that you see only one peregrine for more than a month; the other one’s on the nest.
Visit the sites below to see Pittsburgh’s peregrines in person. Every site (except Pitt) needs additional observers and every observation is useful. You can help! Leave a comment if you want to join.
Region
Nesting Territory
City of Pittsburgh
Cathedral of Learning
Downtown Pittsburgh
Monongahela Watershed
Westinghouse Bridge
Elizabeth Bridge
Ohio River Valley
McKees Rocks Bridge
Neville Island I-79 Bridge
Monaca/Beaver bridges
Allegheny River Valley
Harmar: Hulton Bridge
Tarentum Bridge
Kittanning: Graff Bridge
For additional information and resources see my Peregrine FAQs page.
(photo by Chad+Chris Saladin of the peregrine pair at Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Ohio. Yes, they perch in trees there.)
Ravens (Corvus corax) are becoming more common in Pittsburgh but you might not notice them because they resemble crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos).
In the past month I’ve looked closely at pairs and solo crows. Sometimes I discover they’re ravens. Here are tips for telling them apart, listed from easiest to hardest.
Tail shape: In flight ravens have wedge-shaped tails, crows have straight-across or curved-tip tails.
Sound: The raven’s call is a rough “Brock! Brock!” Crows say “Caw! Caw!” Ravens also say a lot of bizarre things.
Flight style: Ravens soar and sometimes tumble, crows flap. If you see a soaring corvid it’s a raven.
Social behavior: In Pittsburgh, ravens travel alone or in pairs, crows travel in big flocks or family groups of 3-4. (In Los Angeles there are flocks of ravens.)
Size (not always helpful): Ravens are larger, the size of a red-tailed hawk.
Silhouette: Because the raven’s tail is longer and wider, his head looks relatively small and pointy.
Beak: Ravens have big powerful beaks, crows do not.
These silhouettes illustrate two field marks. On the left, two crows have straight-across or curved tips on their tails. On the right, the solo raven has a wedge-shaped tail and his head looks relatively small and pointy.
Two American crows on the left, one raven on the right (photos by stonebird on Flickr and Shutterstock)
Sound is the best field mark if the birds are calling. This audio clip from Xeno Canto has a raven in the foreground (Brock! Brock!) and crows cawing in the background.
Bald eagle nesting season has come to western Pennsylvania. Our favorite pair at Hays Woods finished their new nest in early winter and are spending lots of time together. The Hays eaglecam is up and running. Everyone’s ready for eggs.
Yesterday Dan Dasynich spent time on the Three Rivers Heritage Trail taking photos of the eagles. He captured this one just after they had a mating session. Then the male flew off downriver.
Because the Hays pair has been on camera for five years we have details of their nesting history. From 2014 through 2018 the female laid her first egg between February 10 and February 19.
Her earliest date was in an unusual year. In 2017 she laid her first egg on February 10 but the nest tree blew down on February 12 so the pair built another nest very quickly. She laid her first egg in the replacement nest on 20 Feb 2017.
If history is any guide, the first egg is one to two weeks away. Meanwhile the Hays eagles are putting finishing touches on the nest, the male is bringing food for his lady, and they mate many times.
When will the first egg arrive? Watch for it on Audubon Society of Western PA’s camera at Hays, PA Bald Eagle Nest
Baby Eurasian eagle owl at the National Aviary, 18 Jan 2019 (photo courtesy National Aviary)
Super Bowl Sunday is “Superb Owl Sunday”
Hatched at the National Aviary on 12 January 2019, this Eurasian eagle owl chick is growing up fast. In the photo above he’s six days old.
His parents are education birds at the National Aviary and he(*) will be, too. To prepare him for this role he’s being hand-raised with lots of love and attention and began close encounters with a few Aviary visitors at the tender age of 17 days.
By the time he’s four weeks old he’ll look like this owlet — one of his siblings from 2013.
Baby Eurasian Eagle Owl at the National Aviary, April 2013 (photo courtesy of the National Aviary)
When he grows up he’ll look like his parents. By then he’ll be a very big bird.
Eurasian eagle owls (Bubo bubo) are virtually the world’s largest owl. Native to Europe and Asia, they can weigh up to 10 pounds with a wingspan more than six feet long. That’s 1.5 times larger than North America’s great horned owl. You can tell the difference between the two species — even in photographs — when they open their eyes. Adult Eurasian eagle owls have orange eyes. Great horned owls have yellow eyes.
Watch the owlet grow up at the National Aviary‘s Avian Care Center window or schedule a close encounter to meet him in person. Participants can touch the chick’s downy feathers, take photos, and interact with him under the supervision of National Aviary animal care experts. The number of encounters is limited and available for only a few weeks. Click here to sign up for an owlet encounter.
Tomorrow is the mid-point of winter, halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. It’s also Candelmas in the Christian church and Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.
A very special groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, will make his prediction just after dawn tomorrow morning, 2 February around 7:20am. I don’t know if he’ll see his shadow and predict six more weeks of winter, but I do know it won’t feel so wintry tomorrow. We’ll be out of the deep freeze at last! A high of 41oF in Pittsburgh and 37oF in Punxsutawney.
When I saw forty sandhill cranes near Volant, Pennsylvania on Monday, I thought of the time I saw 500,000 in Nebraska in March 2004. Half a million sandhill cranes are a breathtaking, exhilarating, stupendous experience! It has to be seen in person. Here’s what it’s like.
Every spring the cranes leave their wintering grounds in Mexico and Texas to converge on an 80-mile stretch of the Platte River in Nebraska. Their numbers peak in March when 80% of all the sandhill cranes on Earth are there.
Cranes are drawn to this location because the Platte is still “a mile wide and an inch deep” between Lexington and Grand Island. The water is shallow enough to roost in overnight and there’s abundant plant food in local wetlands and waste corn in the cattle fields(*). The cranes spend three to four weeks fattening up for their 3,000 mile journey to their breeding grounds in Canada, Alaska and Siberia.
At dusk and dawn they move to and from the Platte River in spectacular numbers. Their sight and sound is amazing, especially when you’re in a bird blind near the action. They dance with their mates and jump for joy.
I saw their great migration in late March 2004. Before my trip I booked dusk and dawn visits to the bird blinds at the Platte, then I flew to Omaha and drove west to Grand Island and Kearny (pronounced Karney). I didn’t mind the 2.5 hour drive because I wanted to see a piece of the Great Plains and experience this: For over 100 miles there are no cranes at all then suddenly, just as I-80 approaches the Platte River, the sky is filled with them. I’d arrived!
I saw hundreds of thousands of sandhill cranes at dusk and dawn and spent my days at local birding hotspots where my highlights were white pelicans, burrowing owls, lapland longspurs, and a Harris’ sparrow. I had hoped to see a whooping crane but I was too early that year. (Whoopers leave Texas later than the sandhills.)
Nothing can beat the sandhill cranes’ migration in Nebraska in March! Don’t miss it!
For information on seeing the cranes’ migration visit Nebraska Flyway‘s website with links to Sandhill Viewing, lodging and food, brochures and maps.
(photo credits: cranes at the Platte from Wikimedia Commons, map of crane migration linked from Visit Grand Island, click on the captions to see the originals. YouTube video by The Chicago Tribune)
(*) There’s a connection between beef and cranes: Half a million sandhill cranes get enough to eat in Nebraska because there’s leftover corn in the cattle fields. There are more cattle than humans in Nebraska.
An article about ice on a very icy day, 8oF and falling.
Considering how often the temperature has fluctuated in Pittsburgh this winter I’m surprised we haven’t seen more glaze ice.
Glaze ice is the name for the icy coating caused by freezing rain or freezing drizzle. If the accumulation is small, the effect is beautiful and the electricity stays on. The photo above from Wikimedia Commons is more beautiful than my own below.
Glaze ice on a tree, overcast sky, Pittsburgh (photo by Kate St. John)
When glaze ice is 1/4 inch thick or more the Weather Service calls it an ice storm. A quarter of an inch doesn’t sound like much but it’s so heavy that it weighs down the trees and they fall on power lines, streets, parked cars and houses. Power lines and power towers can fall, too. According to Wikipedia, “just one quarter of an inch of ice accumulation can add about 500 pounds (230 kg) of weight per [power] line span.” No wonder things come crashing down.
In January 1998 I wasn’t in Maine for the Great Ice Storm but I remember its results quite vividly. We visited central Maine in September and there were still broken trees everywhere. Folks who lived through it said they were without power for weeks. Everyone was stuck near home — couldn’t drive anywhere — so the radio stations connected people by announcing supplies and requests for help. Everyone pulled together.
