Merlin at Tulelake

Merlin, Tulelake, California, 18 February 2012 by Greg Gillson.

 

More photos from the Winter Wings Festival in Klamath Falls, Oregon, last week, February 17-19, 2012. (See previous posts.)

After chasing the Common Redpoll in Tulelake, California, Brian Sullivan and I spotted this Merlin on a fencepost. Using the car as a blind, Brian drove while I photographed out the window.

Did you know that falcons have round nostrils? It's true! See the upper photo.

See a previous post on Merlin (Black Bullet.) The subspecies in this previous post is the Black Merlin (F. c. suckleyi), while the bird in today's photos is the Taiga Merlin (F. c. columbarius). The Prairie Merlin (F. c. richardsonii) is very pale.

Which photo do you like better?

 

Merlin, Tulelake, California, 18 February 2012 by Greg Gillson.

 

The bill: an overview

The bill, or beak, of a bird assists them in eating. Different bills are best used for different kinds of foods and feeding methods. Specific scientific families of birds eat similar foods and have similarly shaped bills. Thus, the shape of the bill is key in beginning to identify a bird correctly.

For instance, Hutton's Vireo is a small green bird with an eyering and two wingbars. In plumage, habitats, and some behaviors, it is very similar to some Empidonax flycatchers, but the bills are quite different!

Again, beginners are sometimes confused by their first Spotted Towhee, thinking it must be related to the somewhat similar-looking American Robin. But one look at the bill and a birder in-the-know will quickly see that the bills are quite different, with the robin having a generalist bill and the towhee a seed eating bill.

Gulls and terns are similar and in the same family. However, the bills of terns are sharp-pointed, the bills of gulls are strongly hooked.

An American Goldfinch--bright yellow with a black cap--has a small conical seed eating bill. Carefully observing that, one would not confuse it with the insect eating bill of the Wilson's Warbler, also bright yellow with a black cap.

Every bill of a bird can be described using standard terminology. A birder should attempt to learn these terms and the correct meaning. In this regard a textbook on ornithology would be of great use.

Characters of the bill:
Long
Short
Hooked
Crossed
Compressed
Depressed
Stout
Terete
Straight
Recurved
Decurved
Bent
Swollen
Acute
Chisel-like
Toothed
Serrate
Gibbous
Spatulate
Notched
Conical
Lamellate

In addition, some birds have other features of the bill such as gular sacs, rictal bristles, nostrils in a fleshy cere or nostrils in a tube.

Here is a web site that may be helpful:
Bird External Anatomy from an ornithology course at Eastern Kentucky University.

Future posts will discuss bill shapes more specifically.
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Artwork of bird beaks used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA). Author: L. Shyamal.

Bird Migration Forecast

A cooperative effort between Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Oregon State University last fall, using a grant from the Nation Science Foundation, created BirdCast. What is BirdCast?

BirdCast is nothing other than a bird migration forecast!

That's right! We now have national weather and its resulting affects upon bird migration. The link in the paragraph above actually goes to the first forecast of this season, predicting a strong migration today and tomorrow in the Great Plains. But that's not all!

This bird migration forecast also tells the predicted species that will be migrating!

Now you can go to bed in the evening and know whether or not you should set your alarm early in the morning to visit your local migration hotspot!

Greg Haworth over at Birds over Portland has been posting radar images of bird migration. His last entry was in October, and he hasn't started yet this spring. I sure hope he is able to compare the BirdCast forecast with actual radar images this spring. It seems that migration in the West is not as dramatic as that in the East. For one, our migrants can fly over land all the way here. Most birds in the East migrate over the Caribbean and can't just set down when winds turn unfavorably on them.

Snow Goose

Snow Geese, Tillamook, Oregon, 24 December 2011 by Greg Gillson.

 

Snow Geese are abundant spring and fall migrants in the Pacific NW. Most birds stay along well-defined flight paths, though. They stage, or rest and feed, at selected locations, usually set aside as wildlife refuges

Growing numbers (several thousand) winter in the Sauvie Island/Ridgefield Refuge area a few miles west of Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington. In fact, I live about 15 miles from Sauvie Island, but rarely see Snow Geese in my area.

They are even less common along the immediate coast, where I photographed this probable family group last December. The adults are white with black wing tips and pink bills. Birds-of-the-year are mottled dusky, as seen in the accompanying photos.

 

Snow Geese, Tillamook, Oregon, 24 December 2011 by Greg Gillson.

 

Field-friendly bird sequencePart Two

In Part One we discussed how bird field guides traditionally have been arranged in taxonomic order--birds are ordered by presumed relationships, even if they don't necessarily look much alike. This order changes as scientists discover new relationships. Thus, the order birds appear in bird books constantly changes.

Veteran bird watchers memorize the taxonomic ordering of birds and keep up with the annual changes. But for beginners this just doesn't make sense.

In the "How to Identify Birds" section of his 1980 A Field Guide to the Birds, Roger Tory Peterson identified "Eight main visual categories" to separate birds. These categories were:
Swimmers
Aerialists
Long-legged waders
Smaller waders
Fowl-like
Birds of prey
Non-passerine land birds
Passerine (perching) birds

An article in Birding magazine in November 2009 basically repeated Peterson's list as a proposed "field-friendly sequence" (The Purpose of Field Guides: Taxonomy vs. Utility? Birding 41(6):44-49, November 2009 by Steve N.G. Howell, Michael O'Brien, Brian L. Sullivan, Christopher L. Wood, Ian Lewington, and Richard Crossley). Richard Crossley used this sequence in his 2011 bird book, The Crossley ID Guide.

The shortfall of the sequence above is that half the birds in the world are Passerines. The proposed sequence does a decent job of categorizing half the birds--the non-Passerines--but doesn't really help with our familiar backyard birds.

Two other bird books took up the challenge of categorizing the Passerines. The 1997 book by Jack L. Griggs, All the Birds of North America, divided up the Passerines based on bill size and shape. It was an interesting concept, but a little complicated. Kenn Kaufman's 2000 Birds of North America did a better job, I think.

Kaufman had the basic categories of Peterson: Aerial waterbirds, Swimming waterbirds, Waders, Fowl, and Raptors. Then he used the following sequence:
Medium-sized Land Birds
Hummingbirds, Swifts, and Swallows
Flycatchers
Typical Songbirds
Warblers
Tanagers and Blackbirds
Sparrows
Finches and Buntings

Of course, there are always some birds that don't seem to fit neatly. I thought Kaufman's "Typical Songbirds" category included too many different-appearing birds. I also felt that most beginners (those for whom this sequence would be most beneficial) could not tell many streaky female finches and buntings from streaked sparrows.

So I propose the following sequence of categories of North American birds:
Swimming Waterbirds
Flying Waterbirds
Wading Waterbirds
Chicken-like Birds
Raptors
Miscellaneous Landbirds
Aerial Landbirds
Flycatcher-like Birds
Thrush-like Songbirds
Chickadee and Wren-like Songbirds
Warbler-like Songbirds
Sparrow and Finch-like Songbirds
Blackbird-like Songbirds

A beginner should be able to quickly place a bird they see into one of these categories, and more quickly identify an unknown bird.

Future posts will discuss each category individually.

More from Winter Wings

Common Redpoll, Tulelake, California, 18 February 2012 by Greg Gillson.

 

The Winter Wings Festival in Klamath Falls, Oregon completed yesterday.

One rarity was nearby at Tulelake, California. Two Common Redpolls were at Winema Lodge. Birders were welcome to view the bird, after checking in with the office. Since the birds were in a bare birch tree right by the front door of the office, they weren't hard to find!

This has been a good year for redpolls. They have irrupted (see What is an "irruption"?) in good numbers this winter. Common Redpoll is a very "good" bird for California (one that is quite rare and hard to find). Amazingly, there is also one right now down in San Diego!

 

Birders looking at Common Redpoll, Tulelake, California, 18 February 2012 by Greg Gillson.

 

Common Redpoll, Tulelake, California, 18 February 2012 by Greg Gillson.

 

More birders lined up to look at the Common Redpolls, Tulelake, California, 18 February 2012 by Greg Gillson.
 

Winter Wings Festival: Day 2

Bald Eagle, Worden, Oregon, 18 February 2012 by Greg Gillson.

 

The Winter Wings Festival climaxed tonight with a banquet, where I shared a pleasant meal with Debra Shearwater, and the keynote address by Kenn Kaufman. The keynote speech was attended by about 350-400 people, if my estimating numbers of people is any good. It was an excellent (and funny) presentation with an overall theme of being proud to be a birder.

Since it's too late tonight to do that topic any justice, I present two photos of raptors from Township Road, near the California border south of Klamath Falls, Oregon. I spent most of the day photographing Rough-legged Hawks with Brian Sullivan, one of the founders of eBird. In one field alone we had 17 Rough-legged Hawks. In another field a mile away were 46 Bald Eagles. Tens-of-thousands of Greater White-fronted Geese flew over, several thousand Tundra Swans, at least a thousand Snow and Ross's Geese,...

 

Rough-legged Hawk, Worden, Oregon, 18 February 2012 by Greg Gillson.