1 January 2019
May your new year be filled with beautiful birds!
This beauty looks like a red-tailed hawk but he’s from Africa. His tail is red but he doesn’t have the telltale “belly band” of dashes on his chest.
This is an augur buzzard (Buteo augur) from Serengeti National Park, Tanzania. Click on the photo caption to see the original featured photo on Wikimedia Commons.
p.s. Augur buzzards have charcoal gray backs and very hooked beaks, but you can’t see those features in this photo.
Pittsburgh’s bald eagles have been busy this month. Here’s the latest news in case you missed it.
If I’ve missed something let me know and I’ll post it here.
(photo by Dana Nesiti, Eagles of Hays PA)
Pigeons (Columba livia) and the raptors who hunt them have evolved together for millions of years. The raptors’ successful hunts leave only the fastest, most maneuverable pigeons. Speedy, elusive pigeons mean only the most skillful raptors can survive. Most of us never get to see this interaction so this dramatic video from Romania is a real treat.
In 9 minutes Porumbeiro shows how his racing pigeons work to elude two raptors: first a peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus), then a northern goshawk (Accipiter gentilis).
The pigeons stay in a tight flock because raptors can’t pick out a victim in a moving ball of birds. The raptors try to separate one bird from the group by slicing through the flock. If it works, the raptor pursues the lone bird.
Who will win?
(video by pomumbeiro on YouTube)
Here’s a bird you won’t see in Pennsylvania. He was photographed at Carrizo Plain National Monument, 100 miles (as the crow flies) northwest of Los Angeles, California.
Quiz: Who is this on the wire? … Notice his long legs.
(photo by Bob Wick, BLM via Wikimedia Commons; click on the caption to see the original)
Earlier this month we watched expert falconer Lloyd Buck fly his peregrine falcons in The World’s Fastest Animal on NOVA. Here he is in a 6+ minute video putting a northern goshawk through her paces. Watch her perform in slow motion.
You’ll probably notice how similar the northern goshawk is to a peregrine falcon. The two species aren’t closely related but they need similar skills to survive, so their bodies and actions are similar, too. The difference is that the goshawk doesn’t dive on prey like a peregrine. The goshawk always chases.
p.s. The complete 53-minute video of PBS NOVA’s program on peregrine falcons — The World’s Fastest Animal — is viewable online at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/worlds-fastest-animal/
(video from BBC Earth Unplugged on YouTube)
What’s that noise in the backyard tonight? Who’s out there?
In autumn in Pennsylvania, great horned owls (Bubo viginianus) call to establish territory and court their mates. Their family time is coming soon. She’ll lay eggs before any other raptor species, sometimes as early as December.
Listen for their 5-note syncopated call: “hu-hu-Hoo HOO HOO“
If you’re lucky you’ll hear them “sing” a duet. (Turn up your speakers to hear both birds in this recording. The male’s voice is the lower one.)
Anywhere you live in North America, if there are woods or fields nearby great horned owls are there year round.
Sometimes they make very odd noises.
Whooo’s out there?
‘Tis the season for great horned owls.
(photo by Alan Wolf via Flickr, Creative Commons license, audio from Xeno Canto, click on the captions to hear the originals.)
Hays hillside, Pittsburgh, PA
This fall the Hays bald eagle pair chose a new nest site and went on a building binge that lasted several weeks. They started with huge branches …
… and worked their way down to the smaller stuff.
With leaves on the trees in October, it was hard to see the new nest when one of them flew in –> see Gerry Devinney’s video, 6 Oct 2018.
By last Sunday, 11 Nov 2018, a gap in the trees revealed an eagle on the nest. Click the screenshot below (arrow added) or on the caption to see Dana Nesiti’s video from Eagles of Hays PA Facebook page.
Hays isn’t the only site where nest renovations are in progress. The eagles at Canonsburg Lake in Washington County have been bringing sticks, too. Rich McPeek caught one in the act on Veterans Day and posted it on the Canonsburg Lake Eagles Facebook page.
And in Butler County, Steve Gosser found this adult bald eagle cruising at Moraine State Park on Veterans Day.
I’m sure there’s bald eagle activity at Dashields Dam and Harmar but I’ve heard no news from those sites. Meanwhile, check out the eagles at North Park Lake. They may be up to something. 😉
(photo credits: Dana Nesiti at Eagles of Hays PA on Facebook, Rich McPeek at Canonsburg Lake Eagles on Facebook, and Steve Gosser)
Mid-September is the peak of broad-winged hawk migration in Pennsylvania as these woodland raptors head for the forests of Central and South America.
Broad-winged hawks (Buteo platypterus) breed in North American forests but spend only four months of the year up here. In late August they start to move south, reaching the forests in Central and South America by early November.
What’s unusual about broad-wings is that they travel in flocks — most raptors don’t — and they watch each other for flight cues. If one finds a thermal with good lift, others join him and rise on it as well. Soon they form a “kettle” of hawks stirring round and round in the rising air. As each one reaches sufficient altitude it sets its wings and glides south to find the next thermal.
If the weather’s good this weekend, hundreds if not thousands of broad-wings will kettle up and stream out over hawk watches in the Mid-Atlantic. Here’s what it looks like on a good day, recorded at Ashland Hawk Watch in Hockessin, Delaware on September 15, 2013.
Make plans to visit a hawk watch soon. Here’s how to find one near you: Hawk Watch Information
Bald eagles have made an amazing comeback since the days of DDT. From less than 900 birds nationwide in the early 1960s to more than 20,000 in the U.S. in 2007, their population more than doubled in Pennsylvania in the last 10 years.
At some point the number of nesting bald eagles will reach Pennsylvania’s carrying capacity. What happens then? How do bald eagles respond to match available food and nest sites? We can look to Virginia for the answer.
Since 1964 the Center for Conservation Biology in Williamsburg has monitored and mapped bald eagle nests in the James River watershed. Every year they do a flyover of the entire area to count both nests and chicks. Their eagle population grew from none in 1976 to a record 289 nests in 2018. Meanwhile the number of chicks per nest — called “productivity” — rose sharply in the early years of recovery and now is dropping. CCB announced this trend in two articles:
To see how this works, I have made a slideshow of two graphs from the Center for Conservation Biology’s article. The bar chart is the count of nesting pairs, 0 to 289. The line chart, the arc, is the average number of chicks per nest, 0 to 1.6.
As you can see, the number of nesting pairs continues to increase while the number of chicks per nest moves down.
CCB reports that in 2018 the number of chicks reached 1.09 and adds, “The two opposing trends appear to continue the population’s path to stability.”
“Productivity decline” sounds bad but it’s actually good news. Breeding eagles respond naturally to accommodate lots of adults in the habitat.
So what does this mean for Pennsylvania’s bald eagles?
If the James River experience applies here, we’ll still see an increasing number of bald eagle nests that will eventually average one eaglet per nest. We know bald eagles can produce more if they need to. The good news is, they don’t need to.
p.s. See how rapidly the James River nest count grew! Click here for CCB’s maps of the James River bald eagle population, 1990-2017.
(photo of juvenile bald eagle H8 at the Hays nest site by Dana Nesiti. Slideshow of two graphs from the Center for Conservation Biology article Eagle Productivity Continues to Slide.)
Last week in Newfoundland our birding tour witnessed an amazing bird interaction when a merlin attacked a big black corvid in the air. It happened so fast that we had to think hard about the birds’ identities.
Yes the attacker was a merlin — a small, streaky dark, very fast falcon that made this sound as it attacked. (Xeno-canto XC332445: alarm calls of merlin pair recorded by Pritam Baruah in Churchill, MB, August 2016)
But was the big black bird a crow or a raven?
Fellow traveler Trina Anderson captured the action with her camera. Before we saw her photos we could only identify the corvid by size and behavior. We decided “raven” based on the relative size of the two birds and the behavior of the raven.
It’s hard to tell ravens from crows unless you have some practice. Get tips on how to tell them apart in this 3 minute video from The Raven Diaries: Ravens vs Crows, they’re different!
(photos by Trina Anderson. See more of photos of our Newfoundland trip in her Flickr album.)
