Almost every South Texas bird I’ve mentioned this week has a name that describes his song.
The green jay has onomatopoeic Spanish names, the chachalaca calls “cha-cha-lac,” and the great kiskadee (Pitangus sulphuratus), above, is easy to find because he always says his name.
Click here to hear.
(photo from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original)
Watch the video and you’ll hear this bird say his name.
The plain chachalaca (Ortalis vetula) is the same size and shape as a female ring-necked pheasant but unlike the pheasant it lives in forests and scrublands from the Lower Rio Grande Valley to Costa Rica.
The chachalaca’s call has been described as “loud and simply indescribable,” deafening, ear-splitting, and “ranking with the call of the howler monkey” for shear loudness. (*Descriptions are from this link at Birds of North American Online)
The video shows only one bird calling so you might wonder, “What’s the big deal?” To really understand the sound click here to hear a flock calling just after sunrise in Starr County, Texas.
At the beginning of the recording you’ll hear high falsetto calls. The females and immature males have high voices while adult males have deep ones because their tracheas are more than twice as long and wider in diameter. Young males, like human teenagers, have to wait for their voices to change.
Chachalaca’s do their loudest whooping in the spring, so I won’t have to cover my ears when I encounter this bird … But I may have to wait for the rain to stop before he puts in an appearance. (It’s been raining in South Texas for 3 days!)
Cha-cha-lac!
(video posted by Robert Straub on YouTube)
They’re as long as a peregrine but only half their weight. They fly like accipiters or even nighthawks. They hunt cooperatively and can use motorcycles to flush prey.
Aplomado falcons (Falco femoralis) used to nest in savannas, grasslands and shrub-steppe from Arizona to the lower Rio Grande Valley but they disappeared from the U.S. in 1952 due to habitat loss and DDT. They were listed as endangered in 1986.
In 1987 The Peregrine Fund established an aplomado reintroduction program similar to the captive breeding program that restored the peregrine. Since the 1990’s they’ve hacked 1,500 aplomado chicks in South Texas but restoration has been slow and difficult because the young birds face so many dangers in the wild.
The aplomado is still on the Endangered Species list but now breeds again in South Texas. To help the young survive The Peregrine Fund provides special nesting boxes which the adults prefer because the boxes protect their chicks.
Thanks to the reintroduction program I now have the chance to see an aplomado falcon at the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival.
He’s my goal this week. Introduce me!
(photo by Elaine R. Wilson from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original)
p.s. I saw them two days in a row! 5 Nov 2014 on Bill Clark’s Valley Raptors tour and 6 Nov 2014 at Old Port Isabel Road. Yay!
Have you ever seen a green jay? I haven’t yet, but I’ve haven’t been in his native range until today.
While my husband holds the fort at home I’ve flown to the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival in Harlingen, Texas, just inside the northern edge of the green jay’s range. I hope I see this Life Bird. He’s common in Central and South America but you have to be in this corner of Texas to see him in the U.S.
In Texas Cyanocorax yncas is called a green jay but many jays are green in Central and South America so elsewhere he’s called an Inca jay, Querrequerre, Quinquín, Querqués or Carriqui.
The bird in the photo above is a “querrequerre” from Venezuela. His South American population is separated from the Central American group by 900 miles so a querrequerre looks slightly different and uses different habitats than the green jay of Texas. He’s larger, has a crest, and lives in humid forests instead of mesquite thickets and open woodland as they do in Texas.
He also has an attitude that’s given his onomatopoeic Spanish name an additional meaning. In Venezuela querrequerre is slang for a grumpy person with a bad temper who’s easily upset and angered.
An article by Eduardo Lopez for Audubon of Venezuela explains how the jay got this bad name. As an example, he tells the story of a ranger at El Ávila National Park who tried to rescue a trapped querrequerre and was attacked by the querrequerre’s family. The birds drew blood! Obviously it was a big misunderstanding but the ranger swore he would never help those jays again. (If you can’t read Spanish, use Goggle Chrome or Google Translate when you click on this link to Lopez’ article.)
Do green jays in Texas have bad tempers?
I hope to find out in the next five days.
(photo from Wikimedia Commons, taken in Warairarepano National Park, Caracas, Venezuela. Click on the image to see the original.)
p.s. Some day the South American Cyanocorax yncas may be called a separate species.
17 February 2014
I’m back in the ‘Burgh with a fond look back at my time in Minnesota at the Sax Zim Bog Birding Festival.
Though I never found a great gray owl I saw seven Life Birds(*) and learned a lot about cold and snow.
Cold… was not a problem. I didn’t have to cope with the worst of this winter in Minnesota but -13F was a typical morning in the bog. Three to four layers of clothes are indispensable. Toe warmer heat packets inside Sorel boots are the key to warm feet. I was never cold.
Snow… is a way of life. If you’re afraid to drive in snow in Minnesota you’re homebound for half the year. So you just do it.
Minnesota snowplows are awesome, huge, coordinated. I arrived during a Winter Weather Advisory (4”-6”) and left during a Winter Storm Warning (5”-7”). No problem. All the roads and parking lots were plowed, not to bare pavement but quite passable. The Duluth airport was plowed down to bare pavement. My flight home was delayed only by de-icing. Check out this video of clearing the runway.
Birds … are intrepid in Minnesota’s winters. The easiest to find are ravens and black-capped chickadees. The rarest are Carolina wrens and robins. The Canada jay (formerly called gray jay) is the cutest and the most intrepid.
Canada jays (Perisoreus canadensis) look like oversized chickadees but have the typical corvid attitude. They’re bold and curious and willing to eat anything including berries, insects, fungi, other species’ nestlings and small mammals.
Jess Botzan saw this one at Sax Zim Bog during the coldest of the cold weather last month and the bird wasn’t phased by it. Canada jays are so intrepid that they lay eggs in March while temperatures are still below freezing and snow is on the ground. They don’t even bother to nest again in May and June when the weather is easy.
Like everyone else in Minnesota, the Canada jay is intrepid in snow and cold.
(photo by Jessica Botzan)
(*) Life Birds seen: Pine grosbeak, black-billed magpie, boreal chickadee, Canada jay, northern hawk owl, black-backed woodpecker, Bohemian waxwing.
17 February 2014
Yesterday’s Sax-Zim-Festival field trip to Duluth held an unexpected surprise. Every year the birding trip stops at Stoney Point to observe gulls and waterfowl in the open water on Lake Superior. But there is no open water. The lake is 95% frozen. Locals say this hasn’t happened for 20 years.
In the absence of birds we walked down to the lake, and then on it — a moonscape experience.
The inshore ice was flat and walkable but the pressure of offshore ice and wind had left a landscape of broken plates stacked in piles and covered in snow.
Each piece was thick and clear like a pane of glass.
Fifty yards out the pressure was orogenic, so strong that it created a mountain ridge of bluish, broken ice more than 15 feet tall, so high we couldn’t see the lake beyond it. (Later note, 2018: Though I didn’t know it at the time, these pressure ridges are called stamukhi.)
In this video from my cell phone you can see how big and strange it is.
Inevitably, the ice mountain posed an irresistible challenge. Two guys climbed it. Eventually I climbed too. Going up was like climbing a hill of shale but coming down was a butt-slide in an ice cube tray.
So now I have three “Life Lake” experiences: I saw Lake Superior for the first time, I walked on it, and then I climbed it.
(photos and video by Kate St. John)
After two days of birding in northern Minnesota I’ve seen seven Life Birds. This species is one of them.
I’ve tried to find boreal chickadees in Maine in September and come up empty, perhaps because the weather was too pleasant. In Minnesota in the depths of winter they come to the peanut butter feeders at Sax Zim Bog. Life bird at last!
This is one bird you must visit at his home if you want to see him. Boreal chickadees (Poecile hudsonicus) never migrate so you won’t see one passing through in spring or fall. They live exclusively in the “spruce moose” forest where they survive the winter by stashing food at every opportunity.
It’s a harsh landscape in winter. As I have learned from personal experience, a typical birding day may yield only 10 species. The only boreal species I’m missing, and probably won’t see on this trip, is the great gray owl.
Sandy Komito, record holder of the North American Big Year since 1998(*), spoke at the Sax Zim Bog Festival on Friday night. What bird did he miss in northern Minnesota during his Big Year? Great gray owl. So I don’t feel so bad.
To make up for it, I saw a moose.
(photo by Jessica Botzan)
(*) Last December (2013) Neil Hayward beat Sandy Komito’s record by one bird. His record is not official until the local states’ records committees pass judgment on three first ABA records. Click here for a photo of them together.
Yesterday at Sax Zim Bog was bright, both day and night. It began with a full moon at -13F and peaked at 10F with this bird.
My Life Bird northern hawk owl was perched on top of a tree near the road, easy to see. He eyed us with suspicion as we trundled off the bus and stood in the road, staring at him. Do his eyebrows give him that disapproving look?
When he wasn’t staring back at us he scanned the bog for prey. I’ve read that northern hawk owls have perfected the technique of hunting by sight and can identify prey as much as half a mile away.
It helps to be in full sun if you need to see a vole at 2,640 feet.
p.s. Jess Botzan was lucky to capture this one in flight. I have never yet seen one fly.
(photo by Jessica Botzan)
14 February 2014
I am really tired of cold weather and the effort it takes to walk around in heavy clothes and boots. I can hardly wait for spring and yet … I flew north yesterday to the Arrowhead of Minnesota where the high temperatures are lower than Pittsburgh’s lows, the lows have been -30F, and it snowed six inches yesterday. What was I thinking?
Well, I have a list of northern birds I’ve never seen and my best chance to find them is at the Sax Zim Bog Birding Festival this weekend in Meadowlands, Minnesota.
Jess and Brian Botzan were here last month and saw all the birds on my wish list: great gray owl, northern hawk owl, boreal chickadee, black-billed magpie, Canada jay and pine grosbeak. Braving -50F wind chill Jess photographed this great gray owl at the very bog where I’ll be looking for one today. I hope to be so lucky.
So I’ve put on my long johns, corduroys, ski pants, turtleneck, thick wool sweater, polarlite cardigan, parka, Nordic earflap hat, two layers of mittens, wool socks, Sorel boots, face mask, bula and “Hot Hands” heat packets stuffed near my toes and fingers. I look and feel like a purple Pillsbury dough-boy but I am not cold.
My husband, who is too nearsighted to enjoy birding, has wisely stayed home.
Call me crazy. 😉
(photo by Jessica Botzan)
p.s. Thanks to Jess Botzan who’s provided photos from her trip to illustrate my expedition.
Shorebirds are migrating but we’re not likely to see them in Pittsburgh because we don’t have a shore. However there’s an excellent place north of us that does: the harbor at Conneaut, Ohio.
Conneaut’s harbor was formed where Conneaut Creek flows into Lake Erie. The lake’s waves can be rough so the harbor has been sheltered by two breakwaters. These allowed the creek (and probably the harbor dredge) to deposit a sand spit and mud flat so extensive you can park on it.
Visiting shorebirds feed at the water’s edge and rest on the sand. Sometimes they’re so close you have to back up to see them with binoculars!
The harbor is more than two hours away but the trip is well worth it. Steve Gosser photographed this marbled godwit there in July.
Click here for a map and the harbor’s eBird checklist. The best place is called the “sand spit” on the map.
More shorebirds coming. Visit them at Conneaut.
(photo by Steve Gosser)