Stirring up the pigeons in Cleveland, 2017 (photo by Chad+Chris Saladin)
17 November 2023
Can you spot the peregrine?
When peregrines are hungry, the birds they’d like to eat flock tightly and move as fast as they can. The denser the flock the harder it is for the peregrine to pick out a solo bird to catch for dinner.
In the photo above pigeons are flying crosswise to avoid an oncoming peregrine. Can you spot the peregrine in the picture?
Dunlin (Calidris alpina) are masters of tight flocking and evasive maneuvers when threatened from the air. In the video below by Pacificnorthwestkate (@pnwkate) the dunlin move like a murmuration of starlings as a peregrine harasses them. Can you spot the peregrine?
Notice how the dunlin flock winks off and on in the video, dark at one moment then so white they disappear. In winter plumage dunlin have brown-gray backs and white bellies. The flock changes color as the birds turn in unison in the air.
Most people who find discarded bird tracking technology don’t know what they’re looking at and even when they do they don’t usually repurpose it. But every once in a while a transmitter goes roaming.
White storks (Ciconia ciconia) that breed in Poland migrate to eastern and southern Africa for the winter. For some, their final destination is the Blue Nile River valley, circled in yellow on the map below.
That autumn she flew to the Blue Nile River valley in Sudan where she became mysteriously inactive. Eventually she stopped moving altogether and had either died or the transmitter fell off. Researchers couldn’t figure out what happened until they got the phone bill.
Questions were raised when Kajtka lingered in the area for more than eight weeks, only roaming around 25 km [15 miles] in various directions.
In 2018, the mystery was solved when EcoLogic Group received a phone bill for 10,000 Polish zloty, the equivalent of £2,064 [$2,500]. Someone had picked up the tracker in Sudan and taken the opportunity to make 20 hours of phone calls using the SIM card.
Fortunately for cash-starved bird research this sort of episode is rare.
If Kajtka had survived she would have joined her fellow white storks moving north in March, perhaps with a stopover in the Hula Valley shown below. Gorgeous!
Like elephants, albatrosses can hear low frequency sounds below our range of hearing, a skill that’s very useful for their lifestyle.
Wandering albatrosses (Diomedea exulans) spend their lives making incredibly long journeys over the ocean. They are known to circumnavigate the Southern Ocean three times in one year, a distance of more than 75,000 miles (120,000 km).
To do this with the least amount of effort, they have the longest wingspan of any living bird — 8 to 12 feet (2.5 to 3.66m) — and use the wind to glide as much as possible.
The best gliding happens at updrafts over the water and the best updrafts are caused by large waves. So how do wandering albatrosses find those large waves? They hear them from very far away, possibly 1,000 miles.
According to Science Magazine, “Big waves produce a very low frequency sound, below 20 hertz, that can travel thousands of kilometers, particularly when they collide with long distance swells, such as when storms develop.”
Would an albatross approach or avoid these waves in the Southern Ocean?
To figure out how the birds choose where to go, Samantha Patrick of University of Liverpool and her team tagged 89 albatrosses with GPS trackers at their breeding grounds on Crozet Island near Antarctica. When the birds returned a year later to breed again, researchers retrieved the tags and analyzed the data.
Geophysicists on the team combined the biologger recordings with infrasound monitoring data from Kerguelen Island in the Southern Ocean to build “soundscape” maps on the birds’ journeys. …
During their long-distance flights, the birds tended to change course whenever they encountered a loud infrasound, the team reports. The infrasounds often indicate wave turbulence, even storms—though it’s not yet clear how the birds make use of this information. The infrasound clearly impacted the birds’ behavior, although the scientists couldn’t identify a clear pattern of whether they avoided or aimed for these low frequencies.
“Some tea with your river, Sir?” asks the caption on the satellite photo below where Rupert Bay meets James Bay in Quebec, Canada. James Bay’s incoming tide is pushing Rupert Bay’s tea-colored water upstream.
In woodland and wetland settings, tea-colored water indicates that natural plant and water processes are occurring.
Frequently, water in streams and rivers becomes tea-colored from naturally occurring tannins, a chemical found in many plants around the world. The tannins can leach out of plants and plant debris and into groundwater, lakes, rivers, and streams. Although they can make the water more acidic, it’s important to note, tannins are not harmful to fish and wildlife.
This process occurs in many waterways that run through wooded areas and wetlands with high levels of plant mass and organic matter. Because there is always water flowing through these areas, tannins leach out of plants into the water, making it appear tea-colored.
Tannins leach from all kinds of plant debris, especially soaked bark, leaves and pine needles in the north woods. There are tannins in this magnified Woody Dicot Stem: Tannins in Early First Year Tilia. Its caption reads: “Many cells in the periderm, cortex and pith contain dark staining tannins.”
And there are some special lakes on Florida’s Panhandle coast where the tea-colored water flows into the Gulf of Mexico. This video describes the dune lakes of Walton County.
Tannins are OK to drink though they may not taste good. In fact, it’s the tannins in tea leaves that make the beverage tea-colored.
Orange water deposits are bad.
Bright orange deposits are bad, even when the water is clear. In western Pennsylvania the orange color comes from abandoned coal mine drainage. Here the outflow of a polluted culverted stream dumps into Chartiers Creek near Bridgeville. Yuk!
Inflow of abandoned mine drainage into Chartiers Creek near Bridgeville (photo by Kate St. John)
Blacklick Creek in Cambria County, PA is another example.
(credits are in the captions; click the links to see the originals)
p.s. GEOGRAPHY! Though far inland, James Bay is tidal because it is the southern tip of Hudson Bay which connects to the Atlantic Ocean. This watershed map shows Hudson Bay watershed in green. Note the tiny red circle I added for the location of Rupert Bay.
When peregrine falcons migrate down the Pacific Coast in autumn they often pause at Canada’s Fraser River Delta to hunt shorebirds. Pacificnorthwestkate (@pnwkate) filmed one working a sandpiper flock at Roberts Bank.
Peregrines on the hunt hope to separate a single bird from the crowd because they cannot catch anything in such a tight flock. When a lone bird can’t keep up it becomes the peregrine’s dinner.
A new study, published this month in Phys.org, looked at the interaction from the peregrines’ perspective and found that the falcons haze the dunlin flocks to keep them moving. Peregrine hunting success improved at the end of those 3-5 hours of continuous flying because the dunlin had to stop for a rest.
The hunting data showed that dunlins were at greatest risk of predation just before and just after high tide, and spent most of the riskiest period flocking. However, there was a sharp increase in kills two hours after high tide, because the dunlins were not flocking despite elevated risk. [They were resting.]
So the dunlin changed their behavior to avoid peregrine predation and the peregrines changed their behavior to wear out the dunlin. Peregrines have more stamina that dunlin.
For nearly 30 years ultralights have been used to establish safe migration routes for endangered geese and cranes as they are reintroduced to the wild.
In 1993 ultralight pioneer Bill Lishman, along with Joe Duff, conducted the first ever human-led bird migration by guiding a small flock of young Canada geese from Ontario to Virginia. His experiment proved that young geese imprinted on an ultralight will follow the aircraft and learn the migration route. After leading the birds just once, in one direction, the geese knew the route and returned on their own in the spring.
Christian “Birdman” Moullec was the first to do it in Europe when he guided lesser white-fronted geese (Anser erythropus) from their future breeding grounds in Sweden to new wintering grounds in Germany in 1999. He has since led red-breasted geese (Branta ruficollis) and many other species.
The migration spectacle at the Strait of Gibraltar is still underway as thousands of birds stretch their wings and fly to Africa. They can see their goal from the European side but sometimes the wind is a brutal wall that prevents their crossing. On 4 September the wind was right and they didn’t have to flap. Thousands glided south to Morocco.
569 White Stork cruised out to Africa just above us! 570 European Honey Buzzards, as 222 Booted Eagles, increasing numbers of Short-toed Eagles & 274 European Bee-eaters dodged migrating Pallid & Common Swifts! pic.twitter.com/OxrulL3BZ2
Fifty years ago white storks were extinct in most of Western Europe and this spectacle at the Straits died with the absent birds. Reintroduction programs in the late 20th century brought them back to a growing population of now 224,000 to 247,000 European white storks.
For those who lived through the lean years, their tears at the Straits are tears of joy.
(credits are in the captions including links to the sources)
Except for a few rare sightings in Florida, flamingos seen in the U.S. are not from the wild, they’re escapees from a zoo. Then suddenly last week, after Hurricane Idalia, flamingos have been popping up all over.
At top, 16 flamingos visited Fred Howard County Park near Tarpon Springs, FL. Below, 6 flamingos stopped by St. Mark’s National Wildlife Refuge, 30 miles south of Tallahassee.
The groups have often been a mix of pink adults and gray youngsters.
As of Saturday evening the totals were:
100+ in Florida
11 at Pea Island, North Carolina
2 in South Carolina
2 in Virginia
3 in Alabama
5 in Tennessee
UPDATE on 4 Sep 2023: 1 in Kentucky
and 2 in OHIO! at Caesar Creek State Park. These were seen for only a day and then gone.
American flamingos (Phoenicopterus ruber) are native to the northern shore of South America, the Caribbean islands, Cuba, and the Yucatan in Mexico. Hurricane Idalia plowed through a few of those locations.
This WKRG video on 27 August shows Hurricane Idalia gaining strength as it spans the Caribbean, overlaying part of the Yucatan and all of Cuba. The flamingos would have felt it coming and flown north and northeast to get out of its way. Notice the lower speed winds (shades of green) on the edge of the weather map. The green wind track is where most of the flamingos have been found.
Considering the storm track, the flamingos are probably from Cuba and the Yucatan including at least one banded bird.
Given all the discussion about the flamingos now appearing all over Florida (and farther north), this eBird list from Amy Grimm is especially relevant. This afternoon, Grimm documented 8 flamingos at Marathon, in the Florida Keys, and noted that “One has large yellow band on the right leg code DXCL, small silver band on left leg.” Do the bands mean it’s escaped from captivity? No. This combination — yellow PVC band on one leg with 4-letter code in black letters, ordinary band on other leg — has been used for years in the ongoing project to band American Flamingos in the big colony at Rio Lagartos, on the north coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.
Limpkin at Moraine State Park, 16 July 2023 (photo by Steve Gosser)
17 August 2023
After a limpkin was discovered yesterday afternoon in a small cove at Moraine State Park (first ever in Butler County!) western PA’s birding world spun on its axis and quickly went to find it. Many saw the bird yesterday including Steve Gosser who shared his photo above.
Limpkins (Aramus guarauna) are very, very rare this far north. Primarily from South America, these mussel and snail-eating wading birds have extended their range only to Florida where they live year round.
So what is a limpkin doing here? And not just “here.” A limpkin showed up at Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area last month and was still there last weekend. Two limpkins were in opposite corners of Ohio.
In fact, limpkins have been doing this crazy Northern Summer Visit thing for a long time but it appears they’ve ramped up since 2016. On 8 July 2023Tim Healy posted a map of Limpkin Firsts in North America at the ABA Rare Bird Alert on Facebook. (The color descriptors are for the map.) “Hot Limpkin Summer forever! Keep it going! Who’s next? Green: home base Blue: historical first records Orange: 2016-2022 first records Red: 2023 first records”
Is this an irruption of limpkins similar to the winter irruption of snowy owls? Maybe…
Young night-herons often do an out-of-range dispersal at the end of the breeding season when first-year birds explore to the north, then head home or die during their adventure. Perhaps limpkins are doing it, too. Perhaps they’ve had so much breeding success that there are extra limpkins to try it. (This family of 5 was photographed in Florida in 2014.)
As if they are wearing white tie and tails, black-necked stilts look formal in black and white. Their beauty is enhanced by reflections in their watery habitat.
Black-necked stilts (Himantopus mexicanus) are native only to the Americas, mostly South America. Check the map for their breeding zones to see their tiny chicks.
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