Forum birdwatching 2009

Here in NE Ohio, we have a lot of woods. I have a friend who lives near/on the woods. I go there often just to listen and look.
My most amazing sighting was a pair of Pileated Woodpeckers. They are huge! I can not describe how my heart skipped a beat, especially since my dream would be to see an Ivory Billed! A Barred Owl inspires me to fall in love. What a wonderful thread.

There is a large bird feeder station, and of course the usual suspects: Goldfinches, Black Capped Chickadees, Large Sparrows? (the markings are sort of ubiquitous even when I peruse my Bird Book.) A Red Tailed Hawk regularly sweeps through.
 
I hope it isn't cheating to report the same bird this year that I saw last. There's a Rough Legged Hawk, buteo lagopus which seems to own a patch of the area between Sudbury and Whiting, Vermont.

Continuing the "why aren't they migrating, don't they know it's gonna go below zero tonight?" theme, we saw a very big flock of European Starlings, sturnus vulgaris. This is within their winter range, but in past years they've flown south. I guess it's too much to hope they'll fly south and just keep going and forget to come back.
 
I hope it isn't cheating to report someone else's sighting:

Rare 'dinky' bird migrates to US for first time
By MICHELLE ROBERTS – 18 hours ago
CHOKE CANYON, Texas (AP) — Birders with binoculars and cameras are flocking to a remote state park in search of a small yellow-chested bird that apparently crossed the U.S. border for the first time from its high-mountain habitat to the south.
At 5 inches with beige and yellow markings, the pine flycatcher doesn't look like much, but its unprecedented migration from Mexico and Guatemala is exciting birders all over the country.
"It's not a thrilling bird visually. It's thrilling because it's a first U.S. record," said Wes Biggs, who flew to Choke Canyon State Park from Orlando, Fla., to catch a glimpse.
The bird, which appears to be alone, was first spotted last month and as recently as Friday. The sightings have been confirmed by photographs and recordings of its chirping. The bird, with a solitary nature, usually stays at high elevations but made its winter home in the low Texas scrubland about 200 miles north of its usual habitat.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5junxrc9eqKmqCQ4Krk5coaXT79YAD95JSQC80
Click to expand...
 
All the common birds appear to have been bagged already!
I do have Goosander - Mergus merganser to add though. Perth, Scotland. Every day last week.
Also Dipper - Cinclus cinclus, same place on Friday. (9th Jan)
 
Not much new today, though a TWO EAGLE day can't be considered bad! We were passing by where the Snowy Owl and some other interesting birds have been seen, and were treated instead to a pair of bald eagles in a couple of trees a few hundred feet apart. As we were watching, they took flight and joined up and headed off.

One more to add to the "Jeezum crow, guys, don't you know it's winter?" list, however was a Common Flicker, colaptes auratus, which really ought not to be trying to find bugs on a frozen Vermont roadside on a day when the temperature is in the single digits (fahrenheit), but there it was.

By the way, I'm feeling too lzy right now to look them all up, but I've omitted to list some of the commonest birds that we see constantly, including pigeons (rock doves, I guess, actually), mourning doves, blue jays, cardinals, and chipping sparrows.
 
I have some from Hallandia today (no owl-watching yesterday as I had gto teach...):

Shelduck Tadorna tadorna
Mute Swan Cygnus olor
Whooper Swan Cygnus cygnus
Greylag Goose Anser anser
Canadian Goose Branta canadensis
Mallard Anas platyrhynchos
Wigeon Anas penelope
Teal Anas crecca
Pintail Anas acuta
Goldeneye Bucephala clangula
Common Scoter Melanitta nigra
Eider Somateria mollissima
Merganser Mergus merganser
Red-breasted merganser Mergus serrator
Red-necked grebe Podiceps grisagena
Red-thraoted Diver Gavia stellata
Great Cormorant Phalacrocorax carbo
Shag Phalacrocorax aristotelis
Gannet Morus bassanus[/I
Grey heron Ardea cinerea
Peregrine Falcon Falco peregrinus
White-tailed Sea-eagle Haliaeetus albicilla
Rough-legged buzzard Buteo lagopus
Buzzard Buteo buteo
Pheasant Phasianus colchicus
Coot Fulica atra
Moorhen Gallinula chloropus
Mew Gull Larus canus
Black-headed Gull Larus ridibundus
Greater Black-backed Gull Larus marinus
Herring Gull Larus argentatus
Curlew Numenius arquata
Wood Pigeon Columba palumbus
Domestic Pigeon Columba livia domestica
Rock Pipit Anthus petrosus
Meadow Pipit Anthus pratensis
Wheatear OPenanthe oenanthe
Blackbird Turdus merula
Fieldfare Turdus pilaris
Blue Tit Cyanistes caeruleus
Great Tit Parus major
Greenfinch Carduelis chloris
Chaffinch Fringilla coelebs
Tree Sparrow Passer montanus
House Sparrow Passer domesticus
Carrion Crow Corvus corone cornix
Jackdaw Corvus monedula
Rook Corvus frugilegus

Also a Ruddy Shelduck Tadorna ferruginea, but it's an escapee. I also had a pair of auks which I am 95% certain were Puffins Fratercula arctica, but we didn't see then well enough to be able to say for certain.

Also please notice that we're having some kind of guessing competition on how many species were seen in total last year, with a prize for the winner. Please go there and make a guess.
 
10 January 2009

Maui, Hawai'i

Ruddy Turnstone (Arenaria interpres) - Seems early this year
Pacific Golden Plover (Pluvialis fulva)
Wandering Tattler (Heteroscelus incanus)

I also saw some kind of shearwater, but it was too far off to determine which one. Ah well, maybe next weekend.
 
10/01/09 Perth & Kinross, Scotland

European White-fronted Goose Anser albifrons albifrons
Whooper Swan Cygnus cygnus
Greylag Goose Anser anser
Mute Swan Cygnus olor
Barnacle Goose Branta leucopsis
Wigeon Anas penelope
Pintail Anas acuta
Teal Anas crecca
Curlew Numenius arquata
Coot Fulica atra
 
sphenisc said:
10/01/09 Perth & Kinross, Scotland

European White-fronted Goose Anser albifrons albifrons
Whooper Swan Cygnus cygnus
Greylag Goose Anser anser
Mute Swan Cygnus olor
Barnacle Goose Branta leucopsis
Wigeon Anas penelope
Pintail Anas acuta
Teal Anas crecca
Curlew Numenius arquata
Coot Fulica atra
Click to expand...
Where did you see the white-front & barnacle? Loch Leven?
 
Hmmm... over the past few days, not much.

Lots of juncoes, chickadees, a few blue jays, a few robins, a pair of cardinals, one yellow throated vireo (I think). Canada Geese overhead.
 
I can add Green Woodpecker Picus viridis to the Swedish list, as I heard one yesterday.

Also, I can add the story about the banding station now, as I know what policy changes the Yamashina Institute for Ornithology has implemented now.

I visited Fukushimagata Banding station, north of Niigata, for about one week in October last year, during a small migration peak. The bander in charge for most of this time was K-san (1), and there were three other Japanese banders, as well as one French guy with whom I was travelling around, and then me. Between us, we had about 150 nets in reed beds, divided into three sections: "Tape" where there were tape recorders with bird sounds, "Control" which was the standardised capture area, and "Non-control" which was just extra padding to get as much as possible. During some nights, we also had duck nets up to catch ducks.

One day, it was apparent that we had too many nets, and caught too many birds. The first net round (2) was about 5:30, and already then we had more birds in our bags than we could handle until it was time to empty the nets again. We then prolonged the interval between net rounds to one hour, and tried to do as much as possible. The birds we hadn't finished processing (3) were left hanging on a specially built rack until after the next round.

Already then, I commented that we should close some of the "extra padding" nets, as we should try to avoid having birds in these bags longer than necessary. This comment was ignored (4).

The day continued like that. Every single net round we had too many birds to handle, and every processing time was extended from 30 minutes to 45, to 60, and eventually to 90 minutes. Consider, then, that it usually took about 20-30 minutes to empty the nets, and you will arrive at the conclusion that some birds, which are caught just after a particular net is emptied, may be hanging there for as long as 2 hours --- or even more, depending on if the nets are emptied from the same direction every time! Add to this that they may then have to be in a cloth bag indoors for another 90 minutes, unless they are among those that are left for the next round, which means a total of at least 4 hours in captivity during the time when passerines are supposed to eat constantly to be able to survive migration. Indeed, we had a Teal Anas crecca that was caught during the first round but wasn't banded until three in the afternoon, at least nine hours after it was initially caught!

This is bad as it is, but it is about to get worse.

Reed Bunting Emberiza schoeniclus is a species that's usually no problems in Europe. They are quite calm and relaxed in the hand, although not as pleasant as smaller warblers, wrens, or swallows. In Japan, however, they are vicious fighters. The general rule is never to have more than one bird of any kind in a bird bag, unless there are more birds than bags, in which case some birds (particularly Black-faced Bunting Emberiza spodocephala ssp.) may be put in bags where there are already birds. Reed Bunting is never ever to go more than one into the same bag.

However, this day, we used up all bags. This was partly because we had so many birds, but also because an increasing number of bags were locked up inside the lab between rounds every hour. Thus, K-san decided that we were to put more than one bird into bags, as long as we didn't put different species. This included Reed Buntings, which meant that we eventually got bags with three, four, up to eight Reed Buntings.

At about 9 AM, F-san, the French guy, called my attention to the fact that of the Reed Buntings he was banding, approximately 80% were bloody in the face. This is because they fight in the bags, and usually the strongest one pecks the others in the face to establish some kind of hierarchy. I believe mice do the same by barbering the others' whiskers. We were also seeing the small pile of dead birds found in the bags grow with every round. I tried again to tell them to close the nets and focus on the control and tape nets, but no one listened.

At about eleven, maybe half our bags were filled with birds when we left the lab, having extended the last interval between rounds to almost 90 minutes. In the nets, we still had as many birds as we usually get during a whole day on non-peak days, and it was obviously too much, but we all knew that at around noon, the migration usually stops, and we catch less birds in the afternoon. Nevertheless, I had a large argument with Y-san about closing nets and how I was willing to stay behind and do so this time while they processed the other birds. She promised to refer my request to K-san, who would have to take the final decision. K-san ignored it, and this horrible day went on for another hour.

At noon, we had had 13 dead birds in bags. They died a death filled with stress, violence, and pressure. All (or at least most) came from bags which were too filled with birds, birds that were fighting with each other constantly. Add to this that the sheer volume of birds, coupled with the use of pins on a rack to hang the bags from, caused the innermost bird bags to be pressed down by all the other bags, leading to stress, suffocation, and panic.

This was when F-san told me something I hadn't known, as I was working with the tape nets that day: there was a cat in the non-control nets. Now, the nets are usually quite high up, as the banding station is in an urban area where you might expect cats. Nevertheless, cats can be cruel animals, and when they know that there is an easy way to get birds to play with and/or eat, they will try to get them. Every round, the banders at the non-control nets had to pick heads, wings, legs, or half birds from the nets, because cats do not necessarily stop when they don't need to eat any more.

This time, I managed to get K-san alone, and told him that this doesn't work anymore, and that if he doesn't give the order to close the nets, I would do it myself, and simply release everything that was in them. His response was what finally pushed me over the border into pure anger: "But we have more bags...". To K-san, the well-being of the birds was not important; it was the prestige in having caught and banded a lot of birds that was important. I took to shouting at him, showing him the 13 dead birds, and asking how many birds he wanted to kill before he realised that we had to close the nets. This finally sunk in, and at 1 PM, he and I went and closed all the control and non-control nets, leaving only the tape nets open.

Net result:
- 13 dead birds in bags
- An unknown number of birds killed by the cat
- An unknown but likely very high number of birds subsequently killed by stress or by the injuries they obtained from fighting in the bags
- An unknown number of birds killed by being in the bags so long that they didn't have sufficient time to feed
- The realisation in K-san that it is possible to close nets (we did so the other days after that when needed)

Horrible as this was (5), there is more to come. All through this day, and the days that followed it, F-san and I tried to come up with ways to make the whole procedure more efficient and less harmful to the birds. There were some lines in the ceiling where I started putting bags with the more numerous species so they wouldn't be crushed on the rack. We tried to implement throwing the bird bags on the floor when they were empty so that I could more easily see when someone needed new birds. I tried to tell them to sort the birds by the nets, as sorting them in the lab takes about 10 minutes of what is essentially dead time. I tried to convince them to always start with the more numerous birds to get the weight on the rack down as quickly as possible.

All these suggestions were either ignored or declined. This caused me, on my arrival to Thailand when I once again had regular access to the Internet, to send a mail to the Yamashina Institute, expressing my outrage that the banding station where all young banding students go to learn banding could be run in this fashion. I heard nothing, until last week, when I got a mail from the boss of the banding and bird migration study department at Yamashina, O-san, who said that they had had a series of meetings because of this mail, and tried to figure out what had happened and how this could be prevented from happening in the future.

Yesterday, I got the document detailing the changes they are going to implement. It is a very good list of things (even if I had some further suggestions), and I am pleased to say that it is now official policy of the Yamashina Institute, and by extension all banders in Japan, to close nets when there are too many birds to handle. It is also now official policy that "The priority is the safety and well-being of birds", which was not the case before. There are also some other more technical aspects (how to deal with predators, how to handle pneumatization scoring, how to handle some very fragile birds like the Long-tailed Rosefinch Uragus sibiricus, and so on), but I think those two are the most important changes.

I am not against bragging about achievements, so I will say that it feels nice to be ultimately responsible for this policy change. O-san explicitly states in one of his mails that if it were not to my mail and detailing of the situation, these meetings would never have occurred, and, by extension, the policy of the Yamashina Institute would not be that safety and well-being of birds is the foremost priority. So sometimes it can actually pay off to complaint!

So, there: long post over.

---
(1) I will not mention any names.
(2) That is, the time when everyone goes out to empty the nets; usually once every 30 minutes in Japan, but may be once every 15 minutes or once every hour in other places. Personally, I have fluid rounds and empty my nets whenever I am finished with the old catch. This is because I target singing males in their territories, and can expect to get only about 5-10 birds per day.
(3) At Fukushimagata: determine species, band it, age it, sex it, check skull pneumatization, release. Elsewhere, wing length, total length, weight, fat, moult, iris colour, tarsal length (inner and outer), toe length, and photo documentation are used. At Tori-no-Umi, all of these measurements were taken for all caught birds (mainly ducks and waders).
(4) Though, in all fairness, it should be pointed out that of the four, later five, Japanese banders there at the time, only two spoke English, and I don't know to what extent the other two understood very much of it. K-san, who was the bander in charge, and Y-san, who works for the Yamashina Institute, however, both knew English, so this is not a sufficient excuse.
(5) And I know F-san on several occasions felt he needed to leave the room, because the sound of the panicking and fighting birds in the bags was immense, not to mention revolting.
 
Finally a new one, though hardly a rarity: A Ruffed Grouse, bonasa umbellus, by the roadside. I grabbed a blurry drive-by shot of it with my 1.1 mp digital camera, here severely cropped, which does little more than to provide some evidence that grouse-like animals exist:

grouse.jpg

If that had been a bigfoot, though, this would be one of the best pictures ever gotten. Go figger.
 
Today I ahve to teach all day, but tomorrow I'm FINALLY getting time to do some birdwatching together with a Greek guy and his Swedish girlfriend. Hopefully I'll be able to add at least Iceland Gull to the list. This last week has been quite hectic, as I received three boxes of lice from Japan which, ideally, have to be sorted, identified, catalogued, and indexed before next Sunday; it has taken this week to go through the first 90, and there's another 410 to go (roughly), so I have hardly had time to sleep.

Either way, I just wanted to show this link that I got through the Wader Study Group mailing list. It's a picture of Oystercatcher cannibalism in Holland; I didn't know that happened, but then of course there's no reason it shouldn't happen...
 
I've started adding all records to the new list (I didn't start earlier because of disease and being extremely busy at work at the moment). I'll probably be finished tomorrow. Some short notes:

1. Being the only participant, sphenisc won the competition on how many species we saw collectively last year. If you'd send me your address via PM, I'll send the prize as soon as I get it from Japan.

2. I did do some birdwatching yesterday, but seem to have misplaced my notebook. The only thing of significance was Iceland Gull Larus glaucoides, which is a yearly regular in Gothenburg these days. I had some other stuff as well, but I'll add that when I've found my notebook.

3. On Sunday, I go to London for my work at the Natural History Museum. I'll be in London until the 13th of February, so if anyone wants to meet up, I'm almost all yours, within commonly established boundaries of reason. I'll be holding a seminar on my research on the 6th, but I have no idea if it is open to the public or only to museum employees. That weekend I believe some of my friends will come over, and we're planning to see Les Mis, if it is still on. I'll still have internet access where I live in London, so it should be no problem continuing to manage the list this time. However, I am planning trips to Northern Sweden, Canada, Japan, Philadelphia, and Australia for this year, so maybe I'll be away for some periods as well.
 
Another odd sighting the other day. A small hawk, that I would have sworn is a sharp-shinned hawk, largely because it doesn't look like anything else. But it should not be here, or even anywhere near here, at this season. It's so far out of range, and my small hawk spotting skills are so marginal, that I'm not making it an official sighting. But if I saw a light-breasted, dark topped, short tailed, pigeon sized hawk with wings that do not look like those of a falcon, flying over me in January in Vermont, what would I be seeing? I dunno.
 
A few more birds for the list spotted near Denver, Colorado, USA

Jan 16, 2009
Northern Shoveler Anas clypeata
Hooded Merganser Lophodytes cucullatus
American Coot Fulica americana

Jan 19, 2009

Pintail Anas acuta
Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoeniceus
American Goldfinch Carduelis tristis
Dark-eyed Junco Junco hyemalis
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom