Innholdsfortegnelse for November - December 2015 i BirdWatching

The first issue of a new year is a great time for new adventures. The last issue, this one, is perfect for taking stock, for counting. That’s what author Sheryl DeVore did recently. She journeyed up into Minnesota’s icebox to count Pine Grosbeaks, Northern Hawk Owls (the yellow-eyed bird on our cover), and other wind-chill-tolerant northern species near frozen Lake of the Woods during the last Christmas Bird Count. Sheryl writes on page 22 that temperatures barely rose above zero, causing her cell phone to fail and her toes to burn. But, as with any birding adventure, she says, “the discomfort you feel seems to disappear when you see a good bird.” And she saw plenty — enough, even, for her to consider going back this winter. Temperatures were considerably…

It’s been a great year for books about birds and birdwatching. On the pages that follow are five new titles that we can’t recommend highly enough — an identification guide to hummingbirds, a reference guide to owls, a gallery of extraordinary photos of baby birds, a cartoon collection of endangered birds, and, perhaps most important, a how-to guide for raising children who value and enjoy nature. You’ll find reviews of additional new titles on our website — we simply didn’t have room here for everything we like! Go to BirdWatchingDaily.com to read about Better Birding by George Armistead and Brian Sullivan, new state guides from the American Birding Association, a revised edition of a classic from Pete Dunne, guides to offshore sea life from Steve N.G. Howell and Brian Sullivan,…

Visit our website to find reviews of the excellent new books and guides below. The Amazing World of Flyingfish, by Steve N.G. Howell, Princeton University Press, 64 pages, hardcover, $12.95 American Birding Association Field Guide to Birds of California, by Alvaro Jaramillo and Brian E. Small, Scott & Nix, Inc., 352 pages, paperback, $24.95 American Birding Association Field Guide to Birds of Pennsylvania, by George L. Armistead and Brian E. Small, Scott & Nix, Inc., 352 pages, paperback, $24.95 Better Birding: Tips, Tools, and Concepts for the Field, by George L. Armistead and Brian L. Sullivan, Princeton University Press, 360 pages, paperback, $29.95, £20.95 Cornell Lab of Ornithology Waterfowl ID Series: The Basics, Dabbling and Diving Ducks, and Sea Ducks and Others (three foldout guides), by Kevin McGowan, Waterford Press,…

When I bird in the Tanque Verde Wash, the convenience of metropolitan Tucson is close at hand, but I feel like I am far off the beaten path. You won’t find marked trails through the sandy bottom, or signs that indicate this is an excellent place to walk with binoculars and peer into the thick canopy of the cottonwood trees. Yet a quick check of eBird shows that many birders have managed to find this tucked-away gem. Anyone who watches the Southeast Arizona Rare Bird Alert knows the wash has hosted Broad-winged Hawk, Gray Catbird, and Northern Parula — all extremely rare in the Tucson area. In vegetation made lush by seasonal rains, I have watched a female Lesser Goldfinch settle into her snug cup nest. I’ve seen large groups…

Baylands Nature Preserve is one of the largest tracts of undisturbed marshland remaining in the San Francisco Bay region and a favorite yearround spot for birders and photographers. Its 15 miles of multi-use trails provide access to tidal, freshwater, and upland habitats and the birds that depend on them. I’ve been hiking the area for years, and since joining the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory, my appreciation for the preserve has deepened. sites nearby Tablet readers: Tap the links to read more about each site. Charleston Slough 3.1 miles from preserve on Terminal Blvd. Great spot for shorebirds and American White Pelican. Don Edwards NWR-Ravenswood About six miles north of preserve at south end of Dumbarton Bridge. One of the best places on the bay for Western Snowy Plover. The…

Researchers have long known that Common Loons return to the same nesting sites each spring. Now a team from the Biodiversity Research Institute, in Portland, Maine, has found that loons also return to the same locations each winter. Led by James Paruk, a senior scientist in BRI’s Center for Loon Conservation, the group studied birds at four sites: Lake Pateros, a freshwater reservoir on the Columbia River in central Washington; Morro Bay, a coastal estuary on the central California coast; Barataria Bay, in southeastern Louisiana; and three reservoirs in western Maine. In Washington, California, and Louisiana, the researchers surveyed or recaptured banded loons. In Maine, they implanted satellite-tracking devices in six birds. About 85 percent of adult loons returned to the same locations year after year, usually within two kilometers…

Here are fun events in Arizona, Florida, and California to put on your calendar. Wings Over Willcox, Willcox, Arizona Highlights include tours of Muleshoe Ranch, Whitewater Draw, Cave Creek Canyon, and the Chiricahua Mountains, as well as wintering Sandhill Cranes. Keynote speakers Erv Nichols and Sandra Noll will describe the hummingbirds of Sulphur Springs Valley. January 13-17. Everglades Birding Festival, Davie, Florida Attendees will visit Corkscrew Swamp, Stormwater Treatment Area 5, Everglades National Park, and other great South Florida hotspots. James Currie, host of Birding Adventures TV, will deliver the keynote. January 14-18. Morro Bay Winter Bird Festival, Morro Bay, California Festival-goers will explore the bay’s many birding spots on foot and by boat. Keynoter John Marzluff, the crow expert from the University of Washington, will discuss his book Welcome…

Squeezed into a Subaru, layered in warm clothing, and looking like the Michelin Man, we set out. It was before dawn on January 1, 2015, and we were in northern Minnesota, just south of both Canada and sprawling, ice-covered Lake of the Woods. We were beginning the first of three Christmas Bird Counts. Our count circles — in Beltrami Island State Forest, Baudette, and Roseau — are the northernmost of Minnesota’s 76 counts. Surely, they are also among the coldest in the United States. (After all, International Falls, the “Icebox of the Nation,” is only 50 miles to the east.) Tires crunched hard-packed snow, and we could see our breath even inside the vehicle. Soon we would face a day outdoors in below-zero weather, counting birds — and not many…

World-renowned illustrator Ralph Steadman was one of the scores of artists who contributed to the recent “Ghosts of Gone Birds” exhibitions in Great Britain. (We reviewed the book that accompanied the series in our December 2014 issue.) Steadman is best known for illustrating American gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson’s books and magazine articles, including Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. Steadman also provided artwork for editions of Alice in Wonderland and other classic books, postage stamps, album covers, and beer and wine labels. For “Ghosts,” he produced so many images of extinct birds, at the encouragement of documentary filmmaker Ceri Levy, that he and Levy compiled them into a book called Extinct Boids (Bloomsbury, 2012). It showed us Great Auk, Passenger…

Scott Weidensaul is a talented author who writes about subjects we find fascinating — the history of American birding, a trip across the continent in the footsteps of James Fisher and Roger Tory Peterson, a worldwide search for vanishing species, the sweeping story of bird migration. He is also a licensed hummingbird bander with a keen interest in western species that stray east each winter and a co-founder of Project SNOWstorm, the ambitious ongoing study of Snowy Owl, another charismatic species with a tendency to wander. In this book, a welcome addition to the growing Peterson Reference Guide series, he blends his considerable storytelling abilities and wide-ranging research interests to describe what we know, what we’ve just learned, and what we don’t know yet about owls found north of Guatemala.…

My favorite place for winter birding is the Sax-Zim Bog. Its mix of seasonal boreal birds is unmatched by any other North American location. The best areas are easily accessible by road: some paved, some gravel. Regularly maintained feeders dot the roadsides, allowing great birding from your vehicle. (Warmth!) There is a welcome center. (More warmth!) I almost always see certain winter species and can expect to find surprises as well. Northern Hawk Owl will make my day. Or Boreal Chickadee. Or Black-backed Woodpecker. Or Northern Goshawk. Or winter finches. Or Great Gray Owl. tablet extras Tablet readers: tap the links to read more by Jim Williams. Amazing, accessible Alaska: Birding the Kenai Peninsula Minnesota Valley NWR Unbirded Alaska: Yukon Delta NWR No tablet? Find a link to all Tablet…

Conventional wisdom has maintained for years that birds have remarkable special senses, especially vision and hearing. Olfaction, on the other hand, was relegated to the back seat. The thinking was based on the sizes of the lobes of a bird’s brain. The lobe that handles visual signals is large, while the lobe that processes olfactory information is relatively small. The argument goes back to Aristotle and Pliny, who declared that vultures detected dead animals by smell. (They didn’t realize that vision is most important among Old World vultures.) In 1826, Audubon presented a paper “to explode the opinion generally entertained” of the extraordinary sense of smell possessed by the Turkey Vulture. The bird would visit a taxidermy-mounted deer on its back, Audubon stated, but it failed to find a putrid…

YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED BY BIRD BANDER JULIE CRAVES Q Around the holidays, some stores sell seed that is dyed red and green. Is it safe for birds? — Robin Washington, Tulsa, Oklahoma A I’ve seen artificially colored seeds in wild-bird blends, as well as in hanging seed treats shaped like cutesy Christmas trees, candy canes, and toy nutcrackers. The colors don’t add anything beneficial for the birds. Bird seed is colored only to attract human buyers. Even if we presume that the seeds are colored using food-safe dyes, we really have no way of knowing how the chemicals interact with the many other artificial and natural compounds that birds are exposed to, particularly in urban areas. Since the dye appears on seed hulls, which birds discard, it is likely that…

Many birders participate in a Christmas Bird Count, the annual census of mostly wintering birds organized by the National Audubon Society throughout North America, in Central and South America, and on Pacific and Caribbean islands. Not only do the counts serve to monitor bird populations, but they are a social ritual, uniting birders in common purpose and solstice cheer. Unlike Big Days, whose focus is trying to tally as many species as possible in a calendar day, a CBC is a census. All birds are tallied. But it would be less than honest to advance the idea that participants are not motivated to muster as large a list of species as possible. At the very least, we strive to beat last year’s total. So here for you, dedicated CBCers, are…

Articles in our June 2015 issue explained why we adults should encourage the children in our lives to watch birds. Birding, we wrote, improves kids’ physical and mental health, it helps them form community, and, of course, it’s fun. Scott D. Sampson, the host of PBS Kids’ Dinosaur Train and the vice president of research and collections and chief curator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, expands the conversation with his terrific new book, How to Raise a Wild Child. Consider it a followup of sorts to Richard Louv’s bestseller Last Child in the Woods (Algonquin Books, 2005). Louv’s book sparked initiatives to reconnect kids with nature, including the Children & Nature Network, which he co-founded. “Sampson's goal is to turn readers into nature mentors.” “The current children-in-nature…

During a fallout of songbirds or a particularly busy day at a hawk watch, the identification skills of even the most seasoned birders can be taxed. The same can be said about hummingbird feeding stations, especially in the Southwest, where many species occur. The constant blur of wings and color is at once thrilling and overwhelming. Males may be easy to pick out, thanks to their bright gorgets and crowns, but distinguishing females and juveniles is often much more difficult. This new guide is designed to help birders and banders “more easily and accurately identify, age, and sex” hummingbirds in North America north of Mexico. It’s by George C. West, a professor emeritus of zoophysiology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the author of A Birder’s Guide to Alaska…

Within a short drive of Houston lies one of the state’s finest birding locations, where nearly 300 species have been recorded. When I wander through the park’s towering oaks and restored prairie, I frequently forget that I’m in the sixth largest metro area in the United States. Extensive loop roads and several trails provide access to the best spots. I visit almost weekly throughout the year, and the park invariably holds one or two surprises. At low tide in spring, I can scope up to 20 shorebird species in the marsh, and just a few paces away, I can study warblers in the trees. During the colder months, I stand in the same spot and observe rafts of ducks; up to 20 species winter here. Along the edges of brush,…

TABLET EXTRAS Tap the links below to read more by Laura Erickson. AT THEIR OWN PACE Why I’m drawn to Cedar Waxwings. DOGGED LISTING The pleasures of finding life birds for a new puppy. BULLIES AND MAVERICKS Simple chickadees observe a complex social hierarchy. No tablet? Find a link to all Tablet Extras at www.BirdWatchingDaily.com/the-magazine/current-issue Sometime in the 1990s, I got a phone call from a man who had grown up in the house we live in. He had been born in the 1910s and wondered what had become of the place since he had moved away. He was delighted when I told him we bought the house specifically because I’d fallen in love with a huge spruce tree in the backyard. He remembered when his big brother planted it,…