Trees don't really need their bark do they?

Last week I was in Riverview Park and noticed a lot of bark around some of the tree bases. I was thinking they must have some disease to have such diffuse loss of bark, but was quite wrong. I heard a Hairy Woodpecker and was walking towards its calls when I noticed 2 Pileated woodpeckers working much more quietly and closely. They were going to town on the treebark.

Check out the Imperial Woodpecker style re-curved crown that the camera froze the female in.

It looks like she has un-moulted primaries from last year, and might be a 1st winter bird depending on how bright the eye color is (my computer's monitor is still on the fritz, I can't tell).

The male seems to have all black primaries and some color to his eye; he's a full adult.

Here's what I mean by extensive scaling...

I'll be curious to see if the trees seem somewhat stunted in their leaf-out. You'd think Pileated's couldn't possibly have home ranges big enough to routinely kill large trees and not eat themselves out of house and home.

Here's the Hairy Woodpecker (a year bird) that set me in their direction to begin with.

Falling behind

I haven't had a chance to get many decent pics of late between weather, work, and a mal-functioning computer monitor that adds red speckles to all the black and teal streaks through all the white. I'm definitely guessing at the post-processing tweaks of the images.

Here's the Hoodie, still hanging out with the New Buffalo yuck ducks.

This Black Scoter flew by the pier earlier in the month.

This possibly injured Lesser Scaup got me the closest to getting a good shot of the wing stretching exercises they do.

Last week I found 2 Trumpeter Swans on Paw Paw Lake during the snow. Normally they hit Paw Paw in December but the delayed ice-up pushed that off to January.

They didn't impress the coot though, another member of the NB yuck duck club.

I've got more pics of the immature Glaucous x Great Blackback that eventually I'll probably get up, but just didn't feel like a technical post.

bu-bu-bu-bu-bwaaaaaah

A drake Hooded Merganser joined the yuck duck flock at New Buffalo the other day. It was by far the closest I've ever been to one. I started tossing bread scraps at them. I didn't see the merg actually take any bread, but it did charge after mallards that got too close to it.

In the 50 degree January day it was doing some courtship displays (though there was no female at the time). It would start by stretching its neck up and down a few times.

Then it would do one of two things, either flare its crest to the side giving it a Bufflehead-like cotton tuft

Here's the reverse angle of the lemon-pucker pose

or it would rear back and utter a descending low-pitched grunting belching vocalization that I can best describe as bu-bu-bu-bu-bwaaaaaah. Its body would rachet forward with each bu until it reached the horizontal neutral position in time for the drawn out bwaaaaaaaaah note.

The mallards and Canada geese were remarkably unimpressed, though he seemed pretty proud of himself.

One last view of its narrow Mohawk.

natural habitat redpolls

I'm kind of embarrassed to admit this, but I think today was the first time I've ever seen redpolls perched away from a feeder. Certainly it's the first time in the Lower Peninsula. I suppose given that these birds were 75 yards away from Sarett's feeders these hardly count, but since they haven't been seen recently at the feeders I was happy to find them.

I watched a group of a dozen small birds flush siskin-like off the ground into cover but without the siskin trills. A super-slow advance confirmed they were indeed my first solid year bird of 2012, a bird I missed last year (and possibly the year before too).

One of the males (possibly the above bird) was quite pink below, but it didn't come far enough into the open for a good shot. This pic of a female turned out surprisingly well given how deep the shadow was that it was settled in.

GBBG x GLGU and ???

We had a couple interesting gulls this morning at Tiscornia, starting with a presumed adult hybrid between Great black-back and Glaucous. It's not pictured in many books, but is in the Howell and Dunn Gulls book. Basically it's a GBBG but with a white trailing edge to the primaries. For whatever reason I don't have a great close pic of a flying adult GBBG (though 2 posts ago has a marginal one), but suffice it to say it shouldn't have a completely white trailing edge. Tim had this bird back in mid-November (and got vastly better shots then) as well as yesterday. It was the first time I'd seen it.

Also on the beach this morning was this bird.

The size, whitish primaries, and perhaps the bi-colored bill certainly indicate significant Glaucous heritage. I've never seen a Nelson's Gull (GLGU x HEGU) with this white of primaries, though admittedly that's what Sibley shows. (Howell and Dunn jive more with my experience, showing 8 photos of first year presumed GLGU x HEGU and none have white primaries, though one shot of a 2nd cycle does). The fine dark markings in the wing coverts on the perched bird are really reminiscent of a GBBG. The pic of first cycle GLGU x GBBG in Howell and Dunn, however, shows these to be much more extensive (though they make the caveat in most of their discussions of the hybrids that they can all be variable and run through the spectrum of adult appearances).

It flew by the end of the pier a couple times.

This was a very large gull which we thought might support GBBG x GLGU for this bird too, though Brandon Holden has a shot of a really big Nelson's as well. The blotchiness of the underparts is displayed by Glaucous (though usually not this diffusely) in 2nd cycle birds. Given that Nelson's (GLGU x HEGU) is more likely I wonder if this is actually a 2nd cycle Nelson's. It's really frustrating to not be able to solidly age it, but with GLGU starting with a bi-colored bill and skipping the dirty brown bill altogether it's hard to fall back on the bill. Perhaps Tim's shots will show the back a little better to see what feather ages might be there.

270.

As recently as a few years ago Tim and I considered 270 to be a nearly untouchable number for yearbirds in one county. At that time the record was in the mid 260's and 260 had only been reached a couple times. Well, that year Tim went ahead and reached 270, and has gone over that (actually way over that) in each successive year. Last year I ended at 268. Today we re-found the goshawk he photographed yesterday which in addition to being a county lifer was 270 for the year. It flew past us at Sarett displaying the heavily marked underparts, stovepipe tail, really broad secondaries, thick chest, and flight style really different from Coops. He managed a few shots of it as it disappeared through the trees, I just watched with bins. Unfortunately I don't even have any file photos of actual Goshawks, so will just pull out a few shots of Red-morph Goshawks, which are better known as Coops.

Here's a juvie red-morph gos from Tiscornia from the digiscoping days. Note the minimal eye stripe, lean Cooper's body, straight tail banding (Goshawks have irregularly edged bands), and terminal white tail edge.

Another red-morph from the dunes.

This one has the "hangman hood" which they sometimes exhibit (as described by Pete Dunne in Hawks in Flight). Note how on the Coop the belly streaking is narrow giving it a white-bellied look. The dark splotches on a legit Gos really stand out. This bird has the classic "Flying cross" wing shape of a Coop (though the tail is spread a little taking away from the complete effect).

it's still Count-week

I missed the CBC this year, having asked for the wrong day off 2 1/2 months ago when we had to put in our requests. That being said, from Tim's description of yesterday, I didn't miss much.

In fact, we added a handful birds today than didn't appear yesterday. Unfortunately we were up on the dune preparing to leave when the best flew by, a male Harlequin Duck. It flew past the end of the pier, landed, and was gone by the time we got out to the end.

A young Glaucous Gull did pass by, also a Count-week bird.

We were actually able to chum it in with some bread, the first time that's been successful with a Glaucous Gull

While we were fairly satisfied with the first pass it made by the pier no one was going to argue if it decided to go by a few more times...

Ideally I would have stopped the aperture down a notch when it got into the brightest of the sun, but couldn't really pull off the thumb-focus even if that had occurred to me.

We saw several ages of Great Black-backed Gull. Here's a montage of a neatly-plumaged first year bird that was flying with a 3rd or 4th winter bird.

The solid dark bill of the above bird contrasts with the patterned bill of the next bird, probably a 2nd cycle bird with somewhat more ragged upperparts.

Here's a better shot of the 3rd or 4th cycle bird, nearly adult, but with slightly paler browner mantle than an adult would have, and the ring-bill that a lot of gulls display a year or so before they get full adult appearance.

Finally a montage of a distant adult.