Here’s a courtship display we will never see in Pennsylvania.
This is a magnificent frigatebird, a sea bird who inflates the bald patch on his throat to impress his lady.
What do you think? Will she fall for it?
(photo in the public domain by E. Kirdler of U.S. Fish and Wildlife. Click on the photo to see the original.)
This is not your average woodpecker. It’s an endangered red-cockaded woodpecker.
Though he resembles a downy or hairy woodpecker, a close inspection shows how different he is. His wings and flanks are spotted instead of striped and he has a large white cheek patch instead of a black face with an eyebrow stripe. The cheek patch is the big clue.
He’s called “red cockaded” because the males have a tiny red stripe at the black-white border behind their eyes but this stripe is not always visible — and the ladies don’t have it at all — so you can’t use it as an easy field mark.
Red-cockaded woopeckers require open stands of mature southern pine forests for their livelihood. They hammer a nest hole in longleaf pines with softened heartwood and the trees ooze resin around the opening that protects the nest with a sticky goo. This also makes the woodpecker’s nest easy for birders to see.
Much of the red-cockaded woodpecker’s habitat has been chopped down to create commercial forests, the mono-cultures of soft pine that become wood or paper. That habitat doesn’t work for this bird so if you want to find him you’ll have to visit a southern National Forest. This one was photographed by Chuck Tague in the Ocala National Forest in Florida.
(photo by Chuck Tague)
What is this wood stork doing?
Is he yawning? Is he calling to a passing bird? Is he about to cast a pellet? Do wood storks even have pellets?
I checked Cornell’s Birds of North America Online and they said of the wood stork, “No information on pellet-casting.” However, wood storks eat fish so they might need to regurgitate fishbones.
I prefer to think he’s smiling for the camera. 😉
(photo by Chuck Tague)
This beautiful bird is a male western tanager.
Because I don’t go west very often, I’ve only seen one once — at Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevadas. At the time it was July and he was in breeding plumage with a completely orange-red face.
Western tanagers (Piranga ludoviciana) are truly western birds. If you draw a line down the middle of North America they’re always west of it (the 104th meridian). Even then, they spend most of the year outside the United States in southwestern Mexico, south to Costa Rica.
Western tanagers breed in North American forests and travel farther north than any other tanager, ranging all the way to Canada’s Northwest Territory. The birds who travel that far have such a long trip that they spend only two months on their breeding grounds.
Right now, except for a small winter range in coastal southern California, these birds are still in Mexico and Central America. They’ll head north with the main body of spring migrants, arriving at this latitude in late April or early May. It’s something to look forward to out west, just as we look forward to scarlet tanagers in the east.
But, alas, it’s still winter. The tanagers are not here, not now.
(photo by Julie Brown)
I never knew this bird existing until Mary DeVaughn sent me a link last weekend.
This is a red-crested cardinal (Paroaria coronata), native to South America and introduced in Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
Although he looks like a northern cardinal wearing a gray cloak, he’s actually in the tanager family.
(photo from Wikimedia Commons. Click the caption to see the original)
I have been mesmerized by this photo since the moment I first saw it.
I’m drawn in by the bird’s ghostly white color, by the warning look on its face, by its intense, red eye.
This is a white-tailed kite, a hawk that hunts rodents in open scrubland by hovering kite-like in the air. As scary as this bird looks to us, it rarely eats birds so most flocks ignore it.
The majority of white-tailed kites live in Central and South America but their range extends into western California, western Oregon, southeastern Texas and southern Florida. They are not plentiful in North America but they can travel widely.
Cris Hamilton photographed this one at Bosque del Apache, New Mexico last November.
(photo by Cris Hamilton)
About the size of a red-tailed hawk, gyrfalcons are the largest falcon on earth.
They live in the Arctic around the globe in Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland, northern Canada, Alaska and Siberia. Even in darkest winter adult gyrfalcons stay up north, though individual juveniles may winter as far south as the Chesapeake.
Gyrfalcons eat many things but ptarmigan are their favorite prey. Studies have shown that their breeding success is tied to the abundance of ptarmigan in their home territory and that their population fluctuates in synch with the ptarmigan’s 10-year population cycle.
How closely are gyrfalcons tied to ptarmigan? This dramatic video shows a gyrfalcon hunting for ptarmigan, something it’s especially skilled to do. (Don’t watch if you don’t like to see birds hunting birds. The gyr catches a ptarmigan.)
Now the Arctic’s climate is changing. The ice is melting. Ptarmigan peak populations do not rebound as high as before and gyrfalcon breeding success has declined.
What will happen to gyrfalcons and ptarmigan as the arctic warms?
That’s the subject of a three-day conference this week in Boise, Idaho entitled Gyrfalcons and Ptarmigan in a Changing World.
Convened by The Peregrine Fund, Boise State University and the US Geological Survey, the conference will explore the future of an arctic keystone species — the ptarmigan — and an indicator species — the gyrfalcon. When the conference ends, the Peregrine Fund and their partners will develop a strategy for monitoring the gyrfalcon and, if need be, acting to save it.
I hope that saving it won’t be necessary.
Click here for information on the papers to be presented at the conference. Click here to read about The Peregrine Fund and view the excellent video on their home page.
p.s. “Gyr” is pronounced “jerr.”
(video from YouTube)
Everyone knows I love wild birds so I often receive gifts with birds drawn or sculpted on them. Inevitably I try to identify the bird the artist used as a model.
Most products are made overseas nowadays, so the models could be real Chinese birds or inaccurately drawn from photographs of North American or European species. I rarely assume they are totally fictional.
However, if I’d never seen a male painted bunting I’d think the artists invented this bird.
Definitely painted!
Chuck Tague photographed this one at a feeder at Merritt Island, Florida.
(photo by Chuck Tague)
To us a winter field looks empty but there’s food under the snow if you can hear it.
This snowy owl is standing on prey in Kingston, Ontario, caught in the act by Kim Steininger.
Kingston is known for the large number of snowy owls who spend the winter there — but not this year. Kim and Paul found only one.
As Kim writes, “Paul and I went up there hoping to photograph Snowy Owls but we were only able to find one and we weren’t able to find her every day so we didn’t get many shots. One day she was hanging out on the ground about a football field away from us. After a couple hours of waiting for her to do something she flew about 40 feet away from us and caught a vole!!! We were floored!”
Waiting for a great shot like this has got to be an incredibly cold endeavor. I’m in awe of photographers and birders who can do it.
But it’s all a matter of preparation. Snowy owls are well equipped to hunt under harsh conditions with their downy insulation and excellent hearing (they can hear voles moving under the snow!). If I want to see snowy owls doing exciting things, I have to be well equipped too.
Or to put it another way…
“There is no such thing as bad weather; it’s inappropriate gear.”
— words of wisdom from a Tlingit woman in Seward Bay, Alaska, thanks to Dick Martin.
(photo by Kim Steininger)
Quiz!
Whose curly-headed baby bird is this?
Here are some hints:
Do you know who he is? Leave a comment with your answer.
UPDATE at 9:45am: Most of you guessed the family of birds correctly. Can any of you guess the exact species? Hint: This is a tropical island.
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(photo by Deborah Acklin)