Answer: A bird who has two names — the American dipper (Cinclus mexicanus) or water ouzel.
“Dipper” describes his behavior. While looking for prey from the water’s edge, he dips his body up and down as if doing push-ups on his legs. This action gives him two perspectives while looking through the water’s refraction: high view and low view.
“Ouzel” is an Old English word that now means “like a blackbird,” except that the water ouzel is not like any blackbird.
In fact this water-loving species is unlike any songbird in North America.
That’s why I came out west to see him at Glacier National Park.
p.s. Life Bird! I even saw one feeding his young, thanks to Denny Olsen, our Road Scholar birding guide.
Varied thrush (photo by Eleanor Briccetti via Wikimedia Commons)
30 June 2016, Glacier National Park
Spring starts late in the northern Rockies so many birds are still singing here in Glacier National Park. Fortunately the varied thrush is one of them.
In the breeding season the varied thrush (Ixoreus naevius) is a shy bird of mature western forests. He sings from the top of a conifer for 10 to 15 minutes but the trees are so tall that he’s hard to find. If he wasn’t singing we’d never know he’s there.
His song consists of one note that lasts two seconds. He pauses 3 to 20 seconds and then sings again, a different note. The disembodied sound echoes in the canyons.
Like all thrushes his syrinx allows him to blend two sounds so his note has a burry quality. It sounds like this:
Saint Mary Lake at Glacier National Park (photo by NPS via Wikimedia Commons)
29 June 2016
Many National Parks are named for their defining feature. One has a Grand Canyon, another has Great Smoky Mountains, and yet another has Glaciers. The canyon and the mountains won’t disappear but the glaciers are melting so I’m at Glacier National Park this week to see them.
Glacier National Park was the brainchild of George Bird Grinnell who fell in love with the place on his first visit in 1885. Over the next 25 years he returned several times and advocated for the land to become a national park. His dream was realized on May 11, 1910.
The scenery here is breathtaking — a 1,583 square mile wilderness of majestic mountains, U-shaped valleys, gorgeous lakes and (for me) many Life Birds.
In the early 1900’s there were more glaciers than there are today. According to Wikipedia: “Of the estimated 150 glaciers which existed in the park in the mid-19th century, only 25 active glaciers remained by 2010. Scientists studying the glaciers in the park have estimated that all may disappear by 2030 if the current climate patterns persist.”
The glacier named for Grinnell himself is melting, too. In 1850 it filled the entire valley. By 2009 most of the valley contained an iceberg lake. And now …
Grinnell Glacier retreat: 1981 and 2009 with notes extending back to 1850 (photos from Wikimedia Commons)
See it before it melts.
(photos of Glacier National Park from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the images to see the originals)
p.s. Click here for more about the disappearing glaciers.
On Wednesday we had close looks at purple sandpipers (Calidris maritima) at Manasquan Inlet, above, and I finally learned why this brown sandpiper is called “purple.” In good light his slight iridescence produces a pinkish-purple sheen in the middle of each feather. Who knew!
It was a real treat to see the harlequin ducks (Histrionicus histrionicus) at Barnegat Light. They’re fearless in rough water.
Harlequin ducks at Barnegat Light (photo by Anthony Bruno)
American oystercatcher (photo by Anthony Bruno)Long-tailed duck, March 16, 2016, New Jersey (photo by Anthony Bruno)
Coastal New Jersey is a great place to visit in March. Thanks to Margaret and Roger Higbee for a great trip and Tony Bruno for these gorgeous photos of last week’s Best Birds.
Annual average sea surface temperature from 1982-2014 and penguin distribution (black lines). Nearly 70% of Galápagos penguins live where waters are coldest. Map from climate.gov, adapted from the original map by Karnauskas, et al., 2015.
During our strangely warm and “yo-yo” winter it’s interesting to realize we’re not the only ones affected by this year’s El Niño. The Galápagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean, 620 miles west of South America, are having a much wilder time of it.
The Equatorial Undercurrent (also known as the Cromwell Current) is a wide river of cool water moving west to east from Indonesia to South America, 300 feet below the surface. Because the Trade Winds blow east to west they push surface water away from the archipelago’s western shore. When the Equatorial Undercurrent reaches the islands it wells up to fill the surface void and effectively lowers sea surface temperatures west of the islands (see map above).
As proof that cold water is good, the map above shows that Galápagos penguins live where the water’s cold. That’s where the fish are.
Galápagos Penguin, Galápagos Islands, Ecuador (photo from Wikimedia Commons)
El Niño changes everything. The trade winds subside or change direction, the undercurrent no longer wells up and sea surface temperatures rise. The warmth causes a drop in nutrients and the entire food chain suffers. Fish populations drop. Seabirds, mammals and, yes, penguins starve.
This year’s El Niño began forming in mid 2014 and was even then so intense that seabirds were starving off the coast of Chile in June 2014. (see photo on the ABA Blog)
However, something good does comes of El Niño. In the Galápagos there’s a population boom among land-based birds. There, the rainy season is the breeding season and El Niño brings rain, sometimes quite a lot of it. During the strong El Niño of 1982-83, cactus and Fortis finches (Darwin’s finches) bred like crazy, increasing their populations by 400%.
While immensely bad for some species, it’s very good for others.
That’s what El Niño means for the Galápagos.
(map from Climate.gov blog, El Niño and the Galápagos. Photo of Galápagos penguin from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the images to see the originals.)
Here’s a bird I see in Maine that we’ll never see in Pittsburgh.
Northern gannets (Sula bassana) nest in cliff colonies on both sides of the North Atlantic. In the fall the Canadian population visits the Gulf of Maine on their way south for the winter. The adults will spend October to April off the U.S. Atlantic coast while the juveniles may winter as far south as the Gulf coast.
Gannets are large seabirds (6.5 foot wingspan) that catch fish by plunge-diving from 30 to 130 feet above the sea. When the fishing is good a huge flock gathers overhead, diving over and over again. The video shows their amazing fishing technique, both in the air and underwater.
And, yes, these birds are moving fast. They hit the water’s surface at 60 to 75 miles an hour! Gannets can do this safely because they have no external nostrils and their faces and chests have air sacs that cushion their brains and bodies like bubble wrap.
Short-tailed weasel, Mustela erminea (photo from Wikimedia Commons)
16 September 2015
“Best Mammal” on my trip to Maine was an animal with three or four names but I don’t know which ones until I identify him — and that’s mighty hard to do, even for professionals.
While puttering around the South Lubec sand flats looking for shorebirds, I noticed animal prints in the damp sand. They were almost the size of cat prints but the toes showed claws and the prints weren’t using direct register (hind prints stepping into front prints). They looked sort of like this:
I guessed weasel but not necessarily the short-tailed weasel illustrated here. It may have been a long-tailed weasel. (Click here to see his prints.)
On my way out I saw a weasel cross the dirt track ahead of me and disappear into tall weeds. He was a long russet-colored mammal about the size of a red squirrel with short round ears, stubby legs, and a long black-tipped tail. His tail was at least as long as his body.
“Size of red squirrel” says short-tailed weasel. “Long-as-body tail” says long-tailed weasel, shown below(*).
Long-tailed weasel, Mustela frenata (photo from Wikimedia Commons)
With such a short glimpse I can identify him generally but not specifically. His genus is weasel (Mustela), his species is either short-tailed (Mustela erminea) or long-tailed (Mustela frenata). The two are notoriously hard to tell apart. I’ll never know for sure.
No matter what he is he will soon shed his brown fur and turn white to match the winter landscape. If he’s a short-tailed weasel (erminea) you’ll recognize him as the ermine or stoat that’s native to Eurasia and North America. His long-tailed North American cousin is just larger.
I’d like to see this weasel in his winter clothes but I’m not going to Maine in winter to find him.
(photos from Wikimedia Commons. Weasel tracks linked from National Park Service Yellowstone. Click on the image to see the original)
(* I didn’t take his picture — these photos are from Wikimedia Commons — so I had to rely on my memory. Luckily least weasels don’t live in Maine so that narrows it to 2 possibilities.)
The landscape is green from the monsoon rain. South end of the Huachucas, 2 August 2015 (photo by Kate St. John)
To a Pennsylvanian it’s counter intuitive that birding is excellent in southeastern Arizona in early August. It’s hot — especially at the lower elevations (104oF in Tuscon last Monday) — but the birds are active because it’s the breeding season. Breeding? Here’s why.
From late June through September, it’s so hot that rising desert air creates a low pressure zone that sucks in moisture from the south, primarily from the Gulf of California in western Mexico. When the moist air hits Arizona’s sky island mountains it condenses into clouds, isolated thunderstorms, and rain. This annual weather pattern is called the monsoon.
The moisture doesn’t have to travel far. This mountain in Mexico, called Sierra San Jose, is easily visible from Sierra Vista, Arizona, headquarters of the Southwest Wings Festival.
“I can see Mexico from my front porch.” Sierra San Jose peak as seen from Sierra Vista, Arizona (photo by Kate St. John)
While I was at the Festival it thundered every afternoon at 3:00pm and rained somewhere by 4:00pm. “Somewhere” means you can see it raining in the distance but you often don’t get wet. The downpours are intense but you can drive in and out of them, sometimes within a mile. However, watch out for flash floods!
The rain brings cooler temperatures, green leaves and, I quickly learned, bugs. (Don’t ask me about chiggers.)
Bugs are food for baby birds so the monsoon is a second Spring when the birds court, sing and nest. That’s why the Southwest Wings summer festival is held in early August.
I had a great time! The festival offers free seminars and one-day or two-day paid outings with guides. I chose the day-long outings where we hiked in morning, ate lunch in the shade, and watched hummingbirds at feeders in afternoon. In this way I visited Madera, Box, Ash, Miller and Huachuca Canyons, the Sonoita grasslands, and Patagonia.
The guides were excellent! I saw 139 species and 33 Life Birds during my time in Arizona, and that wasn’t my first trip to the area. Did I tell you I saw four elegant trogons? Yes!
The Huachucas from Arizona route 92 (photo by Kate St. John)Mountains to the northeast of Sierra Vista as seen from route 90 (photo by Kate St. John)Carr Peak (photo by Kate St. John)
Cordilleran flycatcher at the nest, Mount Lemmon, AZ, 3 August 2015 (photo by Donna Memon)
Last week, Karyn Delaney reported a northern cardinal using an old robin’s nest outside her window and we joked in email that the mother took this shortcut because it’s so late in the breeding season.
Cardinals rarely reuse nests but some songbirds do. On Monday Donna Memon and I found a Cordillean flycatcher at her(*) nest at the summit of Mount Lemmon. Because her nestlings were too tiny to see and the nest edges and “launch pad” had fecal evidence of active fledglings, we surmised she was reusing the nest.
Birds of North America Online (BNA) reports that Cordillerans in the Santa Catalina Mountains in Arizona — the location of Mount Lemmon — build a “cup of moss, sometimes mixed with bark strips or rootlets, [and] lined with fine grass or rootlets.” Cordillerans often reuse nests, sometimes in the same location for 20 years. Perhaps this nest has been recycled many times because it’s much sloppier than a simple cup.
In the next three photos the flycatcher feeds and watches her tiny nestlings but she has to hurry because …
Cordilleran flycatcher feeding young, Mount Lemmon, AZ, 3 August 2015 (photo by Donna Memon)
… this is a late nesting. Winter comes early to Mount Lemmon and Cordilleran migration begins in mid-August so she’ll have to hurry.
It looks like she’s already saved time by reusing the nest.
(*) A NOTE ABOUT “Cordilleran and “she”: Empidonax flycatchers are notoriously hard to identify but the Cordilleran flycatcher is the Empid species that nests on the summit of Mount Lemmon, a sky island in southeastern Arizona. The Cordilleran’s look-alike relative, the Pacific slope flycatcher, is a low elevation bird. Also, for convenience I’ve called this bird a “she” but the males help feed the nestlings so we may have been watching a “he.” On the subject of “he/she” I am borrowing my husband’s Poetic License.
Did you know you can recognize this tree by the smell of its bark?
After the Southwest Wings Festival I visited with Donna and Razzak Memon in Tuscon, Arizona. On Monday Donna and I went birding on top of Mount Lemmon, one of the few mountains named for a woman (Sara Plummer Lemmon).
The summit is 9,159 feet above sea level and 6,770 feet above Tucson so the air is thinner and cooler, a welcome change from the valley’s heat. That day it was 72oF on the mountain, 104oF in the valley. Because of the thin mountain air we learned something about this tree.
Donna and I were heading downhill when a group of hikers paused near the tree to catch their breath and I overheard one of them say it smelled like vanilla. On our way back up the thin air hit me at the same spot so I paused and sniffed the bark. Yes, the bark smells like vanilla.
The Ponderosa pine (on Mount Lemmon*) is one of the few trees you can identify this way. When the tree is young the bark is black, but when it reaches 100-120 years old it sheds the black and shows a yellow bark that smells like vanilla or butterscotch or baking cookies, depending your point of view.
The unusual bark is also a fire shield. According to this NPR report, when fire hits the tree it flash-boils the sap and blows the bark off the tree, but the tree doesn’t burn.
Ponderosa pine on Mt Lemmon, Arizona (photo by Donna Memon)
In the top photo you can see some snags at left that died in a fire on the mountain.
But not this one. Its vanilla-scented bark protects it.
p.s. Here we are at the top of the mountain. You can see Tucson in the valley below.
Kate St. John and Donna Memon at Mount Lemmon, AZ (photo by Razzak Memon)
(tree photos by Donna Memon; Kate & Donna photo by Razzak Memon; information about Ponderosas from this 2009 NPR article)
(*) In the comments below Nickie explains that in California Jeffrey pines smell like vanilla but Ponderosas do not. However the Jeffrey pine doesn’t grow in Arizona. In Arizona the Ponderosa (and/or the Arizona species/ subspecies) does.
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