Category Archives: Beyond Bounds

Magic of the Snowy Owl

Beyond Bounds, Birds of Prey, Books & Events

Ten months ago thousands of young snowy owls came here for the winter.  That irruption was unusual, an atypical episode in a life spent in one of the harshest habitats on the planet.

Where did those young owls come from?  What were their lives like in the arctic?  How do they thrive in a place so foreign to our experience?

Next week we’ll find out how when PBS NATURE premieres Magic of the Snowy Owl.

The program begins in familiar territory, a farm in Wisconsin where two young snowies hunt the winter fields.  Meanwhile their parents are back home in perpetual darkness.  The show’s excellent footage of the arctic night gives a real taste of life in the dark.

In spring the camera crew searches for nesting owls, eventually finding a pair alone.  Their solitude might not be a good sign.  Will there be enough to eat?  Will their young survive to adulthood?

Peregrine nestcam fans will love watching close-ups of Mother Owl with her cute babies.  The saga of Father Owl’s hunt for food will sound familiar, but the dangers of polar bears and the plague of mosquitoes will not.

 

And there isn’t enough food.  Eventually the parents have to move their entire family to the coast even though the babies can’t fly yet.  The young have to walk and swim(!) to get there.

The family’s endurance is amazing.  The snowy owls are almost magical.

Don’t miss Magic of the Snowy Owl on Wednesday October 24 at 8:00pm on WQED.  Check local PBS listings if you’re outside WQED’s viewing area.

(photos of snowy owls in the arctic from PBS NATURE)

 

p.s. If you like to identify birds by ear, you’ll enjoy the soundtrack of the arctic summer.

The Pirate

Beyond Bounds

This morning the #ABArare Twitter feed is full of news of a piratic flycatcher at Rattlesnake Springs in Eddy, New Mexico.  I usually don’t follow up on rare birds that far away but the name of the bird intrigued me.

Native from central Mexico to northern Argentina the piratic flycatcher is a small bird, 5.75″ long, that eats insects and fruit.  Those on the edge of their range migrate toward the center.  The bird in New Mexico went too far or perhaps in the wrong direction.

And he’s a pirate?

Yes.  He steals the nests of other birds.

Though smaller than a sparrow piratic flycatchers steal the domed nests of birds as big as crows!  Those of crested oropendolas, for instance.

They don’t attack the nest owners.  Instead they keep showing up and vocalizing and being so totally annoying that the rightful owners abandon their nest even if they’ve laid eggs in it.  When persistence pays off, the pirates throw out the abandoned eggs and the female lays her own.

These birds even look like pirates.  They wear the pirates’ mask.

(photo by Dominic Sherony from Wikimedia Commons.  Click on the image to see the original)

Beachy Bird

Beyond Bounds, Migration

According to Birds of North America Online this slender, inconspicuous bird begins its southward migration next month.

American pipits breed in some of the harshest habitat of any songbird.  They prefer open tundra and mountaintops above treeline where bad weather is the greatest threat to their nesting success.  In a bad year, their nests suffer 80% mortality when deep springtime snow covers their eggs and young.

In the fall they avoid the coming snow, flying south to beaches and open mudflats. I’ve seen them at the edge of Shenango Lake and on the treeless mountaintops of Acadia National Park.

I even saw several lone pipits on the beach at Cape Cod in early August.

I don’t know why those August pipits left the tundra for the beach but it certainly wasn’t because of snow this summer!

(photo by Alan Vernon via Wikimedia Commons. Click on the photo to see the original)

No Matter How You Look At It

Beyond Bounds, Birds of Prey

Since they can’t move their eyes, owls have very flexible necks.

Here’s a video of a juvenile burrowing owl demonstrating his talent in Cape Coral, Florida.

“What is this?”  he says.  “No matter how I look at it, it doesn’t make sense.”

 

(video by heykayde on YouTube.  For more information about the video, click here or see Cape Coral Friends of Wildlife.)

p.s. Sorry about the ads, they come with the video.

Made In The Shade

Beyond Bounds, Musings & News
Coffee plantation in Brazil (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Here’s a photograph of a coffee plantation in the mountains of Brazil.

What’s wrong with this picture?

The trees are missing.  And so are the birds.

Last week the University of Utah announced the results of a new study on bird diversity that compared intact tropical forest, agroforests, and open farmland.  The result was not surprising:  Birds do better in agroforests than on farms.

Agroforests are “a type of farm where the crops are grown under trees at a reasonable density,” according to study author Çagan Sekercioglu. “Often, it’s not like forest-forest — it feels more like a open park.”

In the past, coffee and chocolate crops were both grown in agroforests — or in full tropical forest — because they are shade-loving plants.

But agri-business found even moderately shady habitat too labor intensive.  Always on the lookout for ways to cut costs, they bred coffee bushes to tolerate full sun.  For the past two decades they have cleared land, planted coffee in the sun, and harvested it mechanically.

Sadly, bird diversity drops as the habitat becomes more open. The study analyzed over 6,000 species and found that the more open the land, the fewer insect-eaters (flycatchers and warblers), fruit eaters (orioles and parrots), and nectar-eaters (hummingbirds).  Agroforests can support many of these species but the study showed that open farmland supports only seed and grain eaters — and these birds are often considered pests.

Does open farmland south of the border affect “our” birds?

Yes.  Most of our breeding forest birds are neotropical migrants who spend less than half their lives in North America.  The majority of their time is spent in tropical forests — or agroforests — in Central and South America.

Every year there are fewer intact forests and fewer agroforests.  Meanwhile many of our neotropical migrants are in decline including cerulean warblers and scarlet tanagers.

You can help. Your coffee is good for birds if it’s made in the shade.

How do you know if coffee is shade-grown?

Check the label for bird-friendly, shade-grown certification by a trustworthy environmental organization such as the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC) or the Rainforest Alliance. (Unfortunately some manufacturers have co-opted the term shade-grown because they know it’s worth more.)

Certified bird-friendly coffee and chocolate(!) aren’t always easy to find.  If you have a favorite place to buy them, let us know by leaving a comment.

(photo by Fernando Rebêlo from Wikimedia Commons.  Click on the caption to see the original)

Click here for more on the University of Utah bird study.

Green, But Not A Hummer

Beyond Bounds, Insects

Yes, he’s green but he isn’t a hummingbird.

If you follow Chuck Tague on Facebook, you saw his comment when he posted this photo last year on June 29, 2011:

“Leapin’ Lizard (with a sweet tooth). I caught this Carolina Anole, “Anolis carolinensis”, licking sugar water from a hummingbird feeder near Hontoon Island, Volusia County, FL. This is the first time I saw anoles eat anything but small invertebrates.”

A quick glance at the hummingbird feeder might not have revealed that this isn’t a ruby-throat.

Expect the unexpected in Florida.

(photo by Chuck Tague)

In Free Fall

Beyond Bounds, Musings & News, Songbirds

Last Sunday the Orlando Sentinel reported the grim news that the population of this bird, the Florida grasshopper sparrow, has plunged so far and so fast that it may go extinct in as little as three years.

Florida grasshopper sparrows are a unique non-migratory subspecies of the grasshopper sparrow that live their entire life in Florida’s dry prairie habitat.  Their loyalty to this habitat has made them endangered.

90% of the prairie is gone, converted to cattle ranches, farms, and development in the past 150 years.   By 1986 the Florida grasshopper sparrow was placed on the Endangered Species List.  The birds held their own in three remaining prairie preserves until recent population surveys found less than 200 individuals left.  It is now the most endangered bird in the continental U.S.

Loss of habitat obviously caused this bird’s decline but scientists say other factors have sent it over the cliff.  One factor is fire ants, accidentally imported from South America in the 1930’s.  Florida grasshopper sparrows nest on the ground.  The fire ants overwhelm their nests and eat the baby birds so there are no young sparrows to reach maturity in the next generation.

If this trend continues Florida grasshopper sparrows will go extinct when the last adults die.  Meanwhile U.S. Fish and Wildlife and other members of the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow Working Group consider this a wildlife emergency and are focusing intensive efforts to save the bird.

Back in January 2008, Dan Irizarry visited a banding station at Kissimmee Prairie Preserve where he photographed this bird.  Little did he know… little did we know… that this may be one of the last living Florida grasshopper sparrows on earth.

If you’ve seen a Florida grasshopper sparrow you are lucky indeed.

(photo by Dan Irizarry. Click on the image to see Dan’s Flickr set from Kissimmee.)

 

A Trick Of The Light

Beyond Bounds, Songbirds

Have you ever noticed how the amount and direction of light can make a bird look different?

Male Costa’s hummingbirds have shiny purple feathers all over their heads but the feathers look black when the light is at the wrong angle.

This male fluffed his face feathers while Bill Parker was taking his picture in California last winter.  Here’s what he could have looked like had he kept his feathers sleeked.

The light has been subdued in Pittsburgh this weekend because of cloudy, rainy weather.   The birds look dull but we need the rain.

(photo of a Costa’s hummingbird by William Parker)

Extreme Builder

Beyond Bounds, Nesting & Courtship
Hamerkops (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Most birds build nests but this one takes construction to an extreme.

The hamerkop (Scopus umbretta) is a heron-like bird native to Africa that builds a domed nest so large a man can stand on it.

When they begin a new nest, the hamerkops find a suitable tree and spend six to eight weeks collecting 10,000 sticks and cementing them with mud to create a dome with a hidden entrance.  They finish it off with thatch and decorations… er, rather, their idea of decorations which are sometimes colorful bits of trash.

A new nest is approximately three by five feet, perhaps not sturdy enough to support a man.  But don’t worry, the hamerkops aren’t going anywhere (they’re non-migratory) and they’re not going to abandon their investment.  Year after year they add more sticks and mud and the nest grows, sometimes to 6.5 feet in diameter.  Now you can stand on it.

Hamerkop nest (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Click here to see another example.

What a big pile of sticks! And a remarkable feat for a dull brown bird just slightly larger than a green heron.

(photo from Wikimedia Commons)

p.s. If you want to see a hamerkop in Pittsburgh there’s one in the Wetlands Room at the National Aviary.  Until I learned about his nest, I never noticed him there because he’s dull brown and stays in the background.