Entries Tagged 'BirdThoughts' ↓

About a month ago we were pontificating the possibilities of an irruption of winter finches. We had come up with a general feeling like this year would be great for birds like grosbeaks, redpolls, crossbills, and more. Then recently on the Illinois Birder’s Forum we read a wonderful post along the same lines as our predictions.

Cedar Waxwing - will it be a big year for his cousin the Bohemian?

Pine Grosbeak
This grosbeak will irrupt south of the breeding range because crops on native mountain-ashes (rowan berries) are generally poor in northeastern Ontario and across the boreal forest.

Common and Hoary Redpolls
There will be a big flight of redpolls into southern Ontario and bordering United States. Seed crops on white birch, yellow birch and alder are very poor in most of Ontario. Expect redpolls at bird feeders this winter.

Pine Siskin
Large southward irruptions occur when cone crop failures span much of Canada.

Evening Grosbeak
This grosbeak will irrupt south of the boreal forest this fall because tree seed crops are generally very poor in northeastern Ontario and western Quebec.

Red-breasted Nuthatch
They have been moving south since mid-June presumably because of the poor cone crop in central Canada. Almost all Red-breasted Nuthatches will depart Ontario’s boreal forest by late fall…

Bohemian Waxwing
The poor crop of native mountain-ash (rowan berries) in much of northern Ontario will cause Bohemians Waxwings to wander south and east this winter. Watch for them eating buckthorn berries and crabapples…

Gray Jay and Boreal Chickadee
They are moving in northeastern Quebec east of Tadoussac along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River. These movements could extend to southern Ontario and northeastern states.

Saw-whet Owl
If red-backed vole numbers decline as they often do in association with deer mice, there will be a strong flight of Northern Saw-whet Owls this fall.

Since we live in northern Illinois, these birds are often hard to come by in our area so it will be interesting to see how true the predictions are. There has been a lot of odd bird activity recently, including a Clark’s Nutcracker, so we will be on the lookout, especially during our Christmas Bird Counts!

We just found a recent article about the famed incident between Texan Jim Stevenson and a feral cat. The Wall Street Journal retells the happenings of when Mr. Stevenson shot and killed a feral cat, a cat stalking endangered Piping Plovers.

Now, if you are a birder, you know how bad feral cats are for birds. But this isn’t why Jim is on trial. He is being charged with killing someone’s “pet” cat. Without getting into Texas law, the basics are that Jim was acting lawfully as long as this cat wasn’t someone’s pet. The debate is that a toll-booth operator had made claims that this cat was his “pet”.
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The Rare Bird Theory (RBT) is a simple concept from observations we’ve had reviewing bird sightings. But before we delve into what the RBT is, we must first define what a rare bird is. A rare bird can be any bird out of their geographical range or a bird out of season. There are different levels of rarities, from overwintering birds to first ABA-area records, but the concept is the same.

The RBT has two main points:

1. The more birders in an area, the more rare birds will be found
2. Rare birds aren’t as rare as they seem but a factor of the number of birders in an area

Two birders can find a rare bird, but wouldn’t ten birders have an easier chance?

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Birding blogs are fun to read (and fun to write!). Birds, birding, birders…a wonderfully huge topic, which means the variety of bird blogs is huge. Many Bird Bloggers have joined Fatbirder’s WebRing. We love Fatbirder’s goal to link birders together, worldwide.

Bird Blogs can’t really get boring because they are always jazzed up with awesome bird photos! Birds are always photogenic, even if the photographer is not a pro!

Our goal here at Birdfreak has been to write about the fun of birding as well as promoting conservation that helps birds so we can continue to be birders in the future. We hope to be Bird Bloggers and conservation promoters for years to come. We haven’t been blogging very long yet and as we learn and grow, we love reading and talking about all the other blogs out there. They are so very different, some with a specific focus and great detail and some with large ranges and just general bird love.

One example we reference quite often is Bird Advocates. They focus on one specific, very real danger our birds face every day all over the country - Feral Cats. — An often overlooked topic.

There are some blogs that focus on a species of bird, such as Ivory-bills LiVE!! and others that use a bird name within their blog such as Antshrike’s Bird Blog who bird on the Texas/Mexican border.

A blog name may not be a sign of a good blog, but with names such as Birdchick and Mon@rch…you can’t go wrong! And they are just more proof that good birders are EVERYWHERE and that is awesome.

Birders know that the coolest thing about birding (and blogging) is that you can do it anywhere. From Swampblog in the south to Birding in Westcliffe, Colorado to Connecticut’s Brownstone Birding Blog to birding inArizona, birders are actively blogging in the United States and we think it is so terrific.

Hondubirding from Honduras, Trevor’s Birding from Australia, The Icelandic Birding Pages, Fraser’s Birding Blog from London, Birding Mongolia, and the Bird Ecology Study Group from Singapore prove that bird blogs are truly international (and so are birders).
It would be great to have a bird blog for every single country.

We even have our own carnival, I and the Bird, created by 10,000 Birds, which is always fun.

But if you want to find links to almost every bird blog out there? Visit Birds Etcetera because he is working on finding every bird blog in the world and the list is HUGE.

Birding is for everyone!

The latest birdJam newsletter came out and there’s a link to a page on the ethics of using birdJam in the field. The site lists two things to remember: be considerate to other birders and treat the birds as you wish to be treated.

Many bird tour operators state in their tour recaps about “calling out a great bird” or some bird “responding to tapes, well”. While we feel this is OK to a point, it can be assumed that some birders (and tour operators) overuse this method for finding birds. There is a special incentive to “get the bird” for your clients.

Our own experience with using birdJam software with a portable speaker has been 100% positive. We’ve used it with a small group of birders to identify a Louisiana Waterthrush. We’ve used it a lot at home to help learn songs and have used it on birding outings to help confirm an odd sound. From our experience, most birds have two responses to sound playback

1. come a little closer to investigate before carrying on normal activities
2. ignore the sound completely

Pete Dunne has an excellent book about sound making called The Art of Pishing. It comes with a CD and in it he explains various ways to call birds without playing back their own sounds. We’ve mastered the Barred and Eastern Screech Owls and often can get responses from “normal” pishing as well.

The bottom line is this: birdJam is a great tool to use to help learn and identify birds by sound. Birds hear all kinds of weird sounds throughout their day - fire trucks, cars unlocking (boop-boop), kids screaming, etc. that a few extra sounds aren’t going to put them in a frenzy that kills them. That said, high traffic areas and places with high profile birds should not allow any tapes or unnatural sounds.

For those not familiar with the ABA area, it is (currently) defined as this:

Specifically, the area encompassed is the 49 continental United States, Canada, the French islands of St. Pierre et Miquelon, and adjacent waters to a distance of 200 miles from land or half the distance to a neighboring country, whichever is less.

Excluded by these boundaries are Bermuda, the Bahamas, Hawaii, and Greenland. -American Birding Association

The Nearctic ecozone covers Greenland, Canada, the U.S. minus southern Florida and a large portion of Mexico (as seen in the map).

Currently the ABA breaks off at the U.S. political border but as the map shows, the ecozone does not follow that rule. Of course, Southern Florida is excluded from this region, something that would not be wise of the ABA.

We propose this to the American Birding Association:

Include all of North America in the ABA There really is no reason that all of Mexico can’t be part of the ABA. It would provide great incentive for U.S. birders to travel into Mexico to add lifebirds. The more demand for birding in Mexico, the safer and better it would be too. Conservation is infectious so if Mexican citizens realize their habitat provides a steady income, they will protect it.
Potential Drawbacks: Borderland birding could decrease - would birders not care to bird the Rio Grande Valley any more? Would southeast Arizona lose some of its appeal when some of the “rare” birds could be much more easily “gotten” a few hundred miles south? We think it would actually be the opposite. Anyone who’s birded along the border do so for one main reason - the birding is AWESOME! This wouldn’t change but would actually improve as the habitat south improved. And for anyone who keeps a state list, why not a U.S. list?

We feel the ABA could be a leading force in promoting bird conservation in Mexico.

Crimson-collared Grosbeak

First, a little background on lumping and splitting, when talking about bird species: lumping is when two once distinct species are put into one; splitting is when one species becomes two. This happens quite frequently and there has been recent talk with crossbills. Cackling Goose was split from the Canada Goose a while back. This article comes from the Wisconsin Birding Listserv (thanks to birder William Mueller for posting this):

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News from the Birding Community E-Bulletin for April of ‘07

“BARCODE SPLITS AND LUMPS:

It was announced in February that genetic testing among North American birds may have revealed as many as 15 potential new species. Revealing the Canadian-led results were scientists from the University of Guelph (the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario) and Rockefeller University, along with colleagues at the Smithsonian Institution, the Canadian Wildlife Service, and the Royal Ontario Museum. The researchers discovered the 15 potential new species among 643 types of birds studied between Arctic Canada and Florida.

No less surprising, the study revealed that a number of birds currently classified as separate species are so genetically similar that they could actually represent varieties of the same species. The study revealed 14 pairs of birds with separate identities that were almost genetic “twins,” a trio of birds representing a DNA “triplet,” and eight gull taxa that were practically identical. The study determined that many of these species are actually indistinguishable to the human eye and ear.

Look-alike taxa representing 15 potential “splits” include Northern Fulmar, Solitary Sandpiper, Western Screech-Owl, Warbling Vireo, Mexican Jay, Western Scrub-Jay, Common Raven, Mountain Chickadee, Bushtit, Winter Wren, Marsh Wren, Bewick’s Wren, Hermit Thrush, Curve-billed Thrasher, and Eastern Meadowlark.

The Birdfreak Team says: Three wrens split yet not the House; the one with an endless amount of sub-species. Would there become a “Midwestern Meadowlark”? It’s surprising that Song Sparrow isn’t on the list. Any others?

The “lumps” of “virtually identical” taxa potentially include: Snow Goose and Ross’s Goose; Black, Mallard and Mottled Duck; Blue-winged and Cinnamon Teal; King and Common Eider; Western and Clark’s Grebe; Laughing and Franklin’s Gull; California, Herring, Thayer’s, Iceland, Lesser Black-backed, Western, Glaucous-winged and Glaucous Gull; Red-naped and Red-breasted Sapsucker; Black-billed and Yellow-billed Magpie; American and Northwestern Crow; Townsend’s and Hermit Warbler; Golden-crowned and White-crowned Sparrow; Dark-eyed and Yellow-eyed Junco; Snow and McKay’s Bunting; Great-tailed and Boat-tailed Grackle; and Common and Hoary Redpoll.

The Birdfreak Team says: The lumps is where we find the oddest findings: EIGHT gull species put into ONE! Blue-winged and Cinnamon Teals? They might hybridize but seem pretty distinct in the field. White- and Golden-crowned Sparrows certainly seem distinct.

DNA barcode sequences are very short, and they can apparently be obtained relatively quickly and inexpensively in the laboratory. These tests reveal what amounts to a genetic “barcode” for each bird that is similar to the black-and-white parallel lines found on food packages at supermarkets. Paul D.N. Hebert from the University of Guelph, maintains that this genetic process may prove to be a “master key for identifying species, one whose power will rise with increased taxon coverage and with faster, cheaper sequencing.”

Current controversy surrounding the DNA bar-coding system derives not so much from the method itself, but from assertions that the process would supersede existing and long-standing taxonomic theories. The technique does suggest that DNA bar-coding in the future should stand alongside other traditional taxonomic tools to combine morphological, behavioral, and genetic investigations in order to more accurately determine exactly what constitutes a species. DNA bar coding will provide an additional tool for more traditional and integrative taxonomy.

Work among the researchers is continuing in an attempt to collect DNA information on the remaining 47 North American bird species, as well as several more species that are considered extinct. The goal is to finish an all-bird DNA inventory by 2011.

Curiously, next month will mark the 300th anniversary of the birth of Linnaeus (i.e., Carl von Linne), the Swedish naturalist who established the conventions for naming living organisms as well as the system of scientific classification that, with a few modifications, is still in use today. How appropriate that a 21st-century DNA bar-coding approach for birds is being discussed at this very time!”

The Birdfreak Team says: All this DNA stuff is great but will it make field identification even harder? Will it render all field guides obsolete? Will sub-species get proper recognition when it comes to conservation issues? When will Yellow-rumped Warblers be split again? This is exciting information but a bit overwhelming. Thoughts, comments? We’d love to hear from you!