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In a world turned upside-down, birds can help restore some sanity

by Beverly Mills Gyllenhaal
written by Beverly Mills Gyllenhaal

Second of two parts

There’s not a lot to be optimistic about during the virus meltdown, but here’s something bird enthusiasts can celebrate: The news is full of suggestions that people take up birdwatching to battle stay-at-home boredom and anxiety.

As birders all know, the more people get interested in birds, the more likely they are to want our state and federal government agencies to protect them.

A Carolina Chickadee among the buds outside our window / Photos by Anders Gyllenhaal

I’m still giddy over the Slate magazine article a few days ago with the headline: “You Have No Choice But to Become a Backyard Birder.”

Slate’s article is a terrific, step-by-step guide on how to morph from a person who sort of likes birds into one who could possibly become a serious birder one day. Click here for the story.

This isn’t the only “Bird Now” headline landing in my Google feed. I’ve seen similar stories from local radio and television stations, newspapers and news websites.

“Riotous Explosion of Life Awaits Birding Newbies in This Stay-at-home Era” proclaims the March 28 headline from NPR station WHYY in Philadelphia.

 “[Birding] is a time-tested way of putting things back in perspective and realizing that life does go on and will go on,” said Jeffrey Gordon, president of the American Birding Association, in the WHYY interview. “It feels like a perfect fit.” Here’s that story. 

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Bird of the WeekBirds storiesPhotography

A Tricolored Heron worthy of the Olympics

by Anders Gyllenhaal
written by Anders Gyllenhaal

It’s a move that seems to defy physics: The Tricolored Heron hovers in midair just above the surface when it dips its neck down and snags its prey from near the surface of the water.

This medium-sized heron is named for its striking collage of blue, purple and white plumage and known for its frenetic feeding dance in shallow water that helps to scare up prey. But if there’s one acrobatic maneuver that tops them all, it’s how the Tricolor will sometimes feed while flying  — a move worthy of the Olympics.

I watched just such a gravity-defying maneuver the other day at a central Florida marsh near Melbourne, where a heavier-than-usual rainfall drew a large flocks to the wetlands. The competition was fierce among hundreds of herons, ducks, gallinules, pelicans and spoonbills.

This young Tricolored Heron was trying out all his tricks.

First it zigged and zagged along the edge of the shore, lunging for prospects as it followed its own obstacle course though the water. Then, apparently unhappy with the results, it lifted off and headed to a new spot. That’s when the heron spotted something near the surface of the water.

It dropped down a few inches until its feet were almost touching the surface. As if walking on the water, the Tricolored reached its long neck down and into the pond and snapped up something for lunch. The show didn’t stop there: The bird never landed, and instead recovered its equilibrium and flew on.

Herons are great fun to watch, particularly the more active Great Blue, Little Blue Heron and Tricolored Heron. As common wading birds that generally don’t mind people, you can study them for hours working the waterways, marshes and sometimes on the beach. The Great Blue can be found all across the U.S. and Central America, and the Little Blue in the Southeast, parts of the Midwest, California and Mexico.

Little Blue Heron

Great Blue Heron

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Tricolored is the hardest of the three to find, more limited to Florida, the Gulf Coast and Central America. But when you do come across one in the midst of its search for food, you may get a performance. This is one bird that deserved a place on the podium.

Here’s a gallery of some of our favorite heron photos, followed by two of Cornell’s range maps of where they can be found. The first shows their range through the year, and the second is an animated version.

 

 

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BirdingBirds storiesMigrationPhotography

How did a Great White Pelican fly around the world? Here are some answers.

by Anders Gyllenhaal
written by Anders Gyllenhaal

How does a huge, lumbering bird like the Great White Pelican fly halfway around the world to reach a place like Florida?

Great White Pelican lands on Merritt Island Refuge/Photos by Anders Gyllenhaal

It’s a question birders and experts alike have been asking in the weeks since one of these striking, exotic pelicans from Africa and Asia arrived on the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge south of Jacksonville. Although birds are always turning up in unexpected places, this visit set off a true kerfuffle as word got around.

Our Flying Lessons post on the Great White Pelican drew thousands of views and 600 shares on our Facebook page. With those came an avalanche of questions:

Did this bird fly all the way – or perhaps escape from a zoo in this hemisphere? Will it stay in the area, or find its way back home? Will it upset the balance of nature the way certain non-native plants and animals do? How does a bird get so far off course in the first place?

“I would love to know what his story is,’’ Linda Boccuti wrote on our Flying Lessons Facebook page.

Most of the answers are guesses, since the bird wasn’t tagged and certainly isn’t talking. But Andrew Farnsworth, a research associate with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology who specializes in migration, said the likely drivers are genetic migration instincts that go off track, lack of food back home and changing weather patterns that are becoming more frequent around the globe.

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Bird of the WeekBirds storiesPhotography

How on earth? Great White Pelican shows up on the other side of the world

by Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal
written by Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal

It wasn’t a Great White Shark, but for Florida’s best birders, it may as well have been. When the first reports hit that a Great White Pelican – usually found in Africa or India – had been spotted in a wildlife refuge near Titusville, well, you can imagine what happened next.

This is one of the largest birds in the world with a wingspan that can reach 12 feet. And even though it has the strength to cross an ocean without stopping, people couldn’t quite believe it had somehow landed in Florida.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves, but here’s a close-up of our Great White Pelican.

The first photo two weeks ago showed a distant bird that looked like the American White Pelican, only much bigger with a striking orange and pinkish tint. There’s also a diamond-shaped patch of day-glow orange over its eyes.

Then came several sporadic sightings around the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, a vast wilderness spanning 140,000 acres with one 7-mile road winding through. More often than not, the reports were of dashed hopes and a flock of regular pelicans seen from afar.

But the spottings persisted, and Florida Facebook birding sites lit up with speculation about the pelican’s whereabouts. So without much to go on, we drove up from our camping spot an hour south of Titusville to see if we could find this guy.

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Bird of the WeekBirds storiesConservationPhotography

Floridians and their Scrub-Jay: Can they coexist?

by Anders Gyllenhaal
written by Anders Gyllenhaal

It’s the height of the birding season in Florida, where some 500 species can be found from the sawgrasses marshes of the Everglades to the North Florida oak hammocks. But if you had to choose a single ambassador for the state’s huge bird population, it would be the Florida Scrub-Jay.

Photos by Anders Gyllenhaal

These beautiful blue and gray birds are so full of personality and appeal that there are on-and-off-again pushes to make them the state bird. The Florida Scrub-Jay is the sole bird found only in Florida. And they’re among the most social creatures you’ll ever encounter.

When we finally found them on a small preserve just west of Titusville midway into our January swing through Florida, this family of jays acted as if we were long lost friends:

They flew back and forth in front of us as if showing us the way. They took up perches just a few yards off and launched into nonstop greetings – (or scolds; it was hard to tell which). They hopped around on the ground as if in charge of entertainment for our party of birders.

In many ways, the Florida Scrub-Jay is the symbol for Florida’s bird story. On the one hand, Florida is near the top of the list of states for its number of resident and migratory species. On the other, it’s struggling to keep from losing several of its most prominent indigenous birds, including the Scrub-Jay.

“The big thing that threatened the Florida Scrub-Jay is that they occur in high dry ridges of land,’’ said Reed Bowman, a research biologist with the Archbold Biological Station and one of the state’s experts on Scrub-Jays. “And that’s also where all the people want to be.”

About 4,000 Florida Scrub-Jays remain in a handful of scattered Central Florida patches of elevated scrub land that sit on sandy soil, with low bushy growth and few trees. As development consumes what’s left of this habitat, state and county researchers are waging a campaign to keep the jays from dwindling further, to the point of moving whole families when their territories are threatened.

“We’re losing land by the minute,’’ said Johnny Baker, a Brevard County land manager who watches over some of the remaining Scrub-Jay families. “We’ve got to preserve what’s left.’’

The story of the legislation to make the Florida Scrub-Jay the state bird helps explain why they’re in trouble in the first place. Opponents in Tallahassee have cited a list of reasons for keeping the common, unexciting Northern Mockingbird in that perch. But the unspoken truth is the powerful development lobby is afraid the special status might get in the way of further construction, say those in the know.

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Birding researchBirds storiesConservation

How an invisible bird is saving the rainforest

by Anders Gyllenhaal
written by Anders Gyllenhaal

In almost every interview with scientists and researchers, a question comes up about why birds are important to people. One of the most compelling answers I’ve ever heard came in an interview for a piece running in the Washington Post this week exploring the powers of bioacoustic research. 

A Puaiohi Thrush (Photo by Lucal Behnke; cover photo by Behnke as well)

The bird in question was the Puaiohi Thrush, the last few hundred of which live so far up in the cliffs on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai it’s almost impossible to see them. To try to save them, a team had to turn to special recording devices placed at the foot of the cliffs to study their range and breeding.

But why is it important to save a bird that you never see in a place people cannot even get to?

Lisa “Cali” Crampton, who manages the Kauai Forest Bird Recovery Project, said while you rarely see the Puaiohi, its work is spread all across the island. That’s because these thrushes are one of the primary fruit eaters, which then in turn spread the around the island.

“I would hate to see us have to save only one bird, but it would be the Puaiohi,’’ she said. “We have no forest without the Puaiohi. Without forests we have no flood control. We have no drinking water. The forest is the backbone of these islands.’’

Not every bird plays such a pivotal roll. But all perform some part of the interlocking operation of nature, from pollination to pest control. 

Many people who study birds will talk about their profound beauty, or how they serve as an indicator of the environment. I love the Puaiohi story because it illustrates in such concrete terms what the impacts would be if species disappear the way many recent studies are predicting.

A bioacoustic recorder in California’s Sierra Nevadas is tracking Snowy Owls. (Photo by Connor Wood)

This week’s story in the Post is about how bioacoustic technology — basically capturing bird songs and calsl and then using technology to analyze the results — has advanced to become a powerful tool for learning about birds. Together with new uses of radar, citizen science and big data, bioacoustics helps uncover more about the complexities and threats to birds than ever before.

That knowledge makes it steadily more obvious that birds are both creatures of miraculous beauty and natural engineers that are fundamental to a healthy and functioning environment. 

That research also provides solutions for how we can keep species like the Puaiohi on the job of building the rainforests. We’ll save the details of that rescue plan — as well as many other breakthroughs from bioacoustics — for the story. Here is a link to both the Washington Post piece and a list of rescue projects using bioacoustics around the globe.

Puaiohi Thrushes (Photo by Patrick Blake)

 

 

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Bird of the WeekBirdingBirds stories

How one squirrelly nuthatch can change your world view

by Beverly Mills Gyllenhaal
written by Beverly Mills Gyllenhaal

Last in a series

If it’s a crisp fall morning, with the sun highlighting the gold and orange of the still-moist leaves, it’s possible that luck could bring you a visit from a nuthatch. And if you get that chance and if you have the time, you’ll want to sit quietly and pay close attention.

My White-breasted Nuthatch

My nuthatch was a White-breasted with a black-and-blue back and an evocative black stripe on its head. He seemed to say watch me. Not only am I good-looking, but I’m smart and industrious, too.

Putting words into the mouth of a bird may be a silly habit, but I can’t seem to help myself. This bird spoke volumes to me.

If I had my way, we’d just give everybody in Congress a pair of binoculars and put them in the woods.

As I sat on a picnic table a couple of weeks ago in a campground near Nashville, I thought the nuthatch was doing his usual thing — creeping up and down the trunk of a tree, probing the bark for something to eat. Then he started hammering away as loudly as a woodpecker.

Hatching a nut

Strange. I’ve seen these birds crack nuts open with their beaks, (thus the name “nut hatch”), but I’d never seen one imitate a woodpecker – or a squirrel for that matter. Suddenly I realized the bird was boring holes in the tree to hide some of his nuts.

 
Here’s a gallery of our White-breasted Nuthatch, ignoring gravity, climbing its tree, hiding food and preparing for the winter:
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Bird of the WeekBirds storiesFledgingPhotography

Birds in training: A couple of young Sapsuckers learning the ropes

by Anders Gyllenhaal
written by Anders Gyllenhaal

The Sapsucker mom trying to teach her fledglings

We were just finishing our morning coffee, dawdling at our campsite in update New York, when we looked up to see something precious: A Yellow-bellied Sapsucker feasting on the fluid of a birch tree not 15 feet away.

As we sat still and watched, we realized there were also two fledglings — one just down the branch from Mom and the second perched two feet in the other direction. It was a family outing that looked a lot like a training session.

Here’s how you find a meal, the mother seemed to be saying as her two uncertain offspring watched, albeit somewhat distractedly. 

The Yellow-bellied Sapsucker is a medium-sized woodpecker that can be found all across the eastern U.S. and much of Canada. Its breeding and nesting is limited to the upper portion of its range, so we were able to witness this captivating gathering thanks to our swing through the northeast toward the end of July.

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Birders love exotic species, but it’s everyday birds that get people talking

by Anders Gyllenhaal
written by Anders Gyllenhaal

When we post photos on Facebook, as we try to do every couple of days, we learn all kinds of things from the thousands of readers following our Flying Lessons page. Some tell birding stories. Others share photos. Together, they let us know which species they like best.

Raptors are the most popular. A close second are the chicks and fledglings that are steadily more visible this time of year.

Here’s the Carolina Wren posted on Facebook that prompted an outpouring of comments and photos

Our followers are fascinated by exotic birds, like the Roseate Spoonbill and the Magnificent Frigatebird. And yet, in something of a surprise, the greatest outpouring of comments often come with the most common bird photos, from Bluebirds to Cardinals, Sparrows to Chickadees.

The other day, we shared a shot of a Carolina Wren, hanging upside-down as they often do. These shy but abundant birds can be found in much of the country every summer, at feeders, in the woods and along trails. And clearly, they are a favorite, like old friends bringing fond memories.

Within an hour, our Flying Lessons Facebook page was peppered with comments about how readers love these Wrens, with their long, curved beaks and tireless singing.

“This beautiful bird has the loudest voice,’’ said Jo Dewar. “Fun to hear and watch,’’ said Rea Pitsnogle. Wrote Elizabeth Strickland: “Love watching Wrens get food for their babies and themselves.’’

By the end of the day, the page had collected a string of stories about delightful and unusual Wren encounters. 

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