A brown gull that wasn't a gull

I checked Tiscornia midday today while trying to transition my schedule back to days.  There was a small group of gulls close to the piers, one of which looked quite brown.  Brown and tall.  Brown and tall with a long thin bill.  Oops.  It's a Marbled Godwit.

It stuck its head back into its scapulars and I took my eye off the bird ... and didn't see the 3 or 4 year-old who was also interested in the gull flock.  And by interested I mean racing into the flock with arms flapping.  Despite his best efforts, the kid didn't take flight.  The birds on the other hand...  I should have had way better flight shots since he ran the bird past me but it was a hundred yards out before I had the camera back out. 

It spent about 30 seconds on South Pier before getting flushed again, circled towards Silver, then back overhead and then out over the lake.  I walked up to Klock (and then Rocky Gap) but it didn't reappear.  A Semipalmated Plover popped up.

Upon returning to Tiscornia the godwit hadn't returned though a Greater Yellowlegs had dropped in.  It still had some of the barred breeding plumage.

 In case you can't tell by the background, there's a ton of algae in the water right now.

There's still a few breeding feathers in the mantle too though it's mostly moulted.

Finally a shot from a less successful shorebird survey, this one from New Buffalo at dawn sometime last week.

Definitely the best way to take Ring-billed Gull shots.

Pronghorns on the Prairie

Custer State Park, in addition to its well-known herd of buffalo, has a solid population of pronghorns.  We saw a number of males near the road.

I think the flowers are blue vervain and sneezeweed (maybe gray coneflower?)

A close look at this (somewhat small) buck (?) ram (?).  Not sure on the correct term...

While Pronghorns are often referred to as antelope, my understanding is that they're actually a kind of goat, if you can believe that.

Apparently an ice age or two ago there was some kind of cheetah that lived on the American plains.  In response, pronghorns evolved into the fastest North American mammal (and I think the 2nd fastest in the world).  Of course surviving whatever ice age wiped out the American cheetahs is probably an even bigger survival advantage.

I think this next one is the largest one we saw.

He was sooo close to posing by the flowers, but turned away from them (after the first one seemed to favor the vervain flowers as browse).

Black Hills Riparian zone

In contrast to the Ponderosa habitat, the (riparian) areas along streams were dominated by fairly thick deciduous forest.  I don't know enough about trees to say for sure how different it was from eastern forests.  It was here that the birds felt to be more paralleling their eastern counterparts.

Lazuli Bunting males followed their females through the low thickets before disappearing much higher.

 

A Black-headed Grosbeak called along a stream.  Its call was lower than our Rose-breasts.

Based on my interpretation of the Sibley plate I would guess this is a one-year-old male.

"Red-shafted" Flickers were very common.

If the above bird is an adult (and it seemed to be the parent of the below bird) then the brown face indicates it's part of the wide intergrade zone in the central west.

This heavily spotted and barred bird struck me as a young bird.  My understanding was that a lot of intergrades will have a mix of yellow and red feathers, this bird seemed pretty even, so I may have been wrong about mixes of feathers being standard.

They acted (and sounded) just like our flickers.

More subtle than the flickers are the different populations of White-breasted Nuthatch.  I'll grant that they did look a little darker than ours (though so did the downy and hairy woodpeckers); you'll have a harder time convincing me that there isn't just steady gradation across the country though.

This bird was photographed on pine, though Red-breasted was more common in that habitat.

Finally one of the hallmark birds of the central west in my mind, Black-billed Magpie.

It's on my top 10 list of birds I'd like to see fly past Tiscornia or the hawkwatching dune for sure.

Birding the Black Hills ... Birds of the Ponderosa

We spent a week in the Black Hills and I enjoyed birds of the central west.  The Black Hills are dominated by Ponderosa Pine; somewhere in some visitor center was the quote that, "The person who knows the Ponderosa forest knows the west," or something like that.  It seemed pretty true though.  I've often thought of a lot of East-West species pairs as simply being separated by distance, but some of it has more to do with the available habitat.  Duh, I guess.

By the time we got out there, the birds were mostly done with singing territorially and were more focused on feeding nestlings and fledglings.  This Western Tanager was an exception, singing vigorously.

There certainly aren't many tanagers in eastern conifers.

You don't see that many bluebirds in our pines either (though I think I remember a few Easterns in southern pine stands).  Mountain Bluebird was common in the Black Hills; we saw multiple birds every day.

 

 

About half the bluebirds I saw had fledglings, I found a couple pairs visiting nests in broken off snags (as well as others using more traditional boxes)

Summer Juncos are always a fun novelty to an easterner.  The Black Hills pinelands have the White-winged subspecies.

The white wing bars were not very prominent; I've seen the occasional bird at Warren Dunes with at least as much white in the fall.  The larger number of white outer tail feathers stood out though.

The juncos had a lot of fledglings about as well.

 Audubon's warbler liked the treetops and didn't come down very often.  Never having been in a place with breeding Myrtles I don't know if that's their preference as well during the summer.

More evidence we weren't in Michigan any more...

Fall migration brings Piping Plovers

I missed the first week of migration along Lake Michigan which is led by large shorebirds with the very good excuse of a family trip to the Black Hills.  On my first morning back I checked the Silver to Lyons and Tiscornia to Jean Klock stretches of beach and found a first fall Piping Plover up at Jean Klock

 

It was hanging out with an adult Semi-palmated as well as more loosely with about 5 Sanderlings.

I sat for a while hoping the flock would work its way back to me but no luck and I slowly started back towards the car at Tiscornia.

Hopefully the new band system will make birds more IDable as individuals than when it was just one silver and 3 colored bands.  I'll see if this is enough to find out the origins of this bird.... (7/22/15 addendum:  It turns out it isn't a Great Lakes bird at all, the band is from North Dakota, banded the first week of June as a hatchling making this bird about 7 weeks old)

Eventually the flock looped back to Jean Klock

Calm water made it a little easier than usual to get flight shots in focus.  After last year's pair of (unrelated) juvenile Piping Plovers, this makes it the first time I've had this species 2 years in a row in Berrien.

Atlantic sunset

I missed any shot at the St Joe frigatebird since my work schedule was pretty dense around already allocated time off when it was present.  As long as I've gone this long without a relevant modern post I may as well finish up pics from earlier this spring given the last few posts were from North Carolina.    I've wanted to try for the sunset silhouette pics for a while, a Willet was the most successful.

Some Dunlins flew by in the same sunset a little earlier

These next Tri-coloreds are actually sunrise.  I didn't understand the Kelvin white balance setting at the time and was limited to the 8 or so pre-sets the camera has.  I tried different ones which leads to different color tones.

Now I understand that you can use the Kelvin white balance setting to customize it to whatever you want; that's something I'm using increasingly when I can predict what lighting the bird will be in.  (Of course if a person shoots in RAW mode instead of .jpg then you can use lightbox/photoshop programs to make the white balance whatever you want afterward; I'd rather keep the post-processing easier and file sizes down with .jpg's).

Finally a flock of Snowy Egrets.

A few good terns

Finishing up North Carolina...

The terns were very different from what I'm used to seeing at Tiscornia.  Least Tern, definitely a bird in my top 10 most wanted for Berrien, was actually pretty common.  (Though not so common that it was in dense discrete flocks; these are montages).

 

 

Juvenile Least Tern is a pretty common PhotoQuiz bird given it doesn't look a lot like other young terns and very little like the adult.

One more of the underwing...

Sandwich Tern was a nice surprise.  I think of them as more of a Gulf Coast bird, but that may be just because that's where I've seen it before. 

I'd never taken pics of Sandwich (or Least) with an SLR, but the next individual is the first Gull-billed Tern that I've ever photographed.

I didn't know until we read the Sibley info that they're a marsh bird that doesn't really forage along the coast the way the others do.  Appropriately this one had caught a dragonfly.

Finally the coastal heavyweight, Royal.

Seaside consolation

We had signed up for 2 days of the pelagic but after day one was 4 hours of the most miserable I'd ever felt in my life, I decided to risk that I'd be miserable for the rest of my life if the others saw an albatross while I chickened out on Day 2.

Seaside Sparrow is a bird that has always eluded me on various trips to the coast and I made a few stops after dropping the others off at the dock looking for one.  Stop number 3 was the marsh behind the lodging where a bird had been earlier in the week but that we had missed the first evening.  Somewhat to my surprise, it was singing away right where it was supposed to be.

 The bird sounded like a cross between a Red-winged Blackbird and a Grasshopper Sparrow.

 It was more cleanly marked that I expected; a lot of the pics I've seen of this species are of very faded drab individuals.

After a while it bailed on singing and flew out to forage on the vegetation that had washed up with the tide.

It flew back to its saltmarsh after a bit, spread-eagling with its long legs for a bit before flying farther back into the grass.

As to what I missed?  The boat got most of the way offshore before getting threatened with approaching 30 knot winds and turned back before they got started chumming...