Red, white and blue in February

You don't really expect that much in the way of bright color in mid-February, but today was the exception.

It started with Andre finding a (presumeably adult or near-adult female) hoary redpoll coming in to his feeders.  This bird is definitely a notch whiter than Tim's bird a few weeks ago.  It seemed to me to be just barely a size larger than the commons it was hanging out with.

Note the stub of a bill, whitish ground color and the very nicely whitening last scapulars:

The bird held its wings closed tightly and I honestly never had a terrific view of the rump end-on, this was my best view of it from the side.   It appears pretty white, I think that the streaking that's visible is pretty lateral.
Here's some views of the undertail coverts.  While on the ground we had to strain to see the very narrow central vein to the final feather.  On its single trip up to a thistle sock (when it landed atop the feeder it drew oohs and aahs it was so white) there's a subtle tint to the central vane of the feathers made invisible on the ground by the bloom of the flank feathers.

The redpoll wasn't the only bird attracted to the feeder set-ups.  A few pine siskins, a female purple finch, a calling red-shouldered hawk, and this very cooperative bluebird (whose initial song fragments my winter-rusted ears recognized as being something different and familiar but didn't click in until I actually saw the bird).

Finally some of the Sarett crew who twitched the redpoll brought news of a new (and fresh) crossbill spot so Tim and I headed over to Shawnee and Cleveland to pick them up for Baroda Twp.  They were pretty quiet, we didn't hear them on our first walk pass the line of conifers.
So, for the day I tallied a handful of Oronoko Twp birds, scored my best piccies of bluebird and WW crossbills, and saw my 4th-(give or take)-ever Hoary Redpoll.  Not bad for mid-February.

Belize part 5 - Crooked Tree Refuge

Day 3 we awakened to the chirping of gecko's from the curtains and corners of our room in the Crooked Tree Resort, definitely the least objectionable of the fauna we shared sleeping quarters with during the trip.  A yellow-throated warbler was flycatching bugs from a streetlight in the pre-dawn.

The water levels were very low due to it being the end of the dry season and we had to drive a couple miles to reach a spot where the lodge launched a boat trip from, seeing another jabiru as well as jacanas and a warmly-plumaged gray-necked wood-rail which sprinted across the plain into cover when we stopped.  We no sooner got out on the water when we came upon a young black-collared hawk and then a tiny but brilliant pygmy kingfisher (which I was about a quarter second away from digi-scoping (from the boat!)) when it flew.  A mangrove vireo shared the water's edge with this little crocodile:

We found boat-billed herons, a couple bare-throated tiger-herons, and ultimately this agami heron whose image I captured (poorly) with the digital camera held up to binoculars:
Apparently the next "easiest" place to see Agami heron is somewhere in Paraguay, a beautiful and rare bird.

A few spoonbills flew over in nice light, and we saw a few of the smaller birds perched up including pale-vented pigeon and this white-necked puffbird:
It was peaceful and warm, but our schedule dictated that we push on, so we drove into the northern part of the country to the Lamanai ruins over impressively pot-holed roads (the road commision was out, their job was basically to pour lime sand into the holes and move on).  We averaged about 25mph I think.

Belize part 4 - Mountain Pine Ridge

This is what we woke up to in our cabana (hut) in the Mountain Pine Ridge on Day 3, a traditional roof made of densely packed palm fronds draped over crossbars.  I have no idea what the life expectancy of such a roof would be.

Birding around the cabanas was quite productive in early morning light.  Melodious blackbirds, rusty sparrows (which were enormous), as well as birds I think of as SE Arizona birds like acorn woodpecker and hepatic tanager were all present.  Yellow-backed and yellow-tailed (below) orioles sang conspicuously:
 We walked a trail into a thicket area encountering an olivaceous woodcreeper as well as a female red-capped manakin (which was plain olive rather than the the stunning black, red, and yellow that a male presumably displays).  This olive-green woodpecker was also cooperative and was one of few birds that crossed over between the jungle habitats we'd previously experienced as well as this higher elevation piney area.

Here's what the terrain looks like.  They had a combination of some non-native beetle and (I think) fire that decimated much of the mature pine so it definitely has a Yellowstone feel with the forest of snags.

A red-lored parrot was more cooperative than the golden-hooded tanagers that appeared (they were an incredible iridescent blue-violet over a black ground color with a contrasting bobolink-like buffy hood):
In the afternoon we drove to the 1000 Foot falls (which actually is 1600 feet tall and is the tallest falls in Central (and North?) America.  Of course we stopped numerous times on the way for black-headed siskens, rufous-capped and Grace's warbler, fork-tailed flycatchers, scaled pigeon, and this laughing falcon.

The falls area (where I again just missed a shot of the above-mentioned tanagers) was utterly devoid of any other tourists.  In America there would have been a hundred people milling around.

Of course a birder wouldn't come here and not hope to see an orange-breasted falcon, perhaps seen more "easily" here than anywhere else in the world, as traditionally there is a nesting pair of these showy peregrine-sized birds.  This one was perched up on a snag on the other side of the gorge.  (The other traditional bird to look for in this area is Stygian owl which a formal tour would almost certainly have had teed up)

I had pipe dreams of heading 30 miles south to the ruins of Caracol which is farther south than we visited and reportedly very good to see raptors (and various canopy birds) from the tops of the pyramids ... definitely next time.  As it was, in the late afternoon we drove back down into the lowlands (seeing blue ground dove, blue-black grassquits, and lineated and pale-billed woodpeckers) to reach Crooked Tree Sanctuary.

Belize part 3 - Guanacaste Nat'l Park

In the afternoon of our 2nd day we returned to Guanacaste Nat'l Park, close to where we started the morning in Belmopan (the parks didn't open until 8am so we went to the farther place to bird along the way).  Supposedly this is one of the better places in the world to see a tody motmot; we didn't see one though.

The parking lot had a good number of birds including a brown jay trying to open a foil-wrapped piece of garbage, as well as an ovenbird and a Northern waterthrush working the periphery.  An ant-tanager popped up on one of the signs.  We had seen them earlier at Blue Hole.  I think this one is a red-throated, but it could be a red-crowned.

A golden-olive woodpecker appeared, it was a much more striking bird than I expected.

Guanacaste trees were apparently a large tropical hardwood that were cut nearly to extinction.  This is one of the few virgin trees that was missed by the original lumber companies (and is the namesake of the park).  Clearly these were immense trees (it seems difficult to believe that turn-of-the-century tools could ever have felled one, though I guess that just shows the power of the dollar).  This one was snapped off (by lightning or a hurricane, can't remember which) not too much above the frame though a remnant branch off the trunk survives.

We heard what would become the familiar song of a spot-breasted woodwren and eventually tracked the songster down (it would be one of the 3 songs I would learn while there).  This clay-colored robin popped up as well.  I was surprised by how dingy it was.
On the way back the call of a summer tanager attracted my attention.  It was joined by a yellow-green vireo and a couple yellow-winged tanagers, my first experience with a bird that appeared essentially lavender-violet in color.

I had various plans on an extremely ambitious itinerary, if we'd had unlimited time we could have spent another night in Belmopan, hit a ferry in the western part of the country and then continued up into the Mountain Pine Ridge.  As we were limited we drove that evening up into the mountains into the pine habitat of the Mountain Pine Ridge.  Dusk was falling as we arrived at our hut (errr cabana) there.  The owner of the collection of huts (errr resort) was tossing some bread to a gray fox.  He said that a jaguar had eaten its mate about a week earlier.  We slept well under the thatched roof.

Birding Belize, part 2 - Blue Hole Nat'l Park

On our first full day in Belize I awoke with the dawn (go figure) and waited outside the doorway of the hotel (where I noted an armed guard with a submachine gun - we eyed each other curiously) for Ginger to finish up getting ready.  A few flyby parrots and a pair of ruddy ground-doves were the only major tropical birds (there were also some of "our" orioles, a golden-fronted woodpecker (the Belize version has a red front though), and a yellow warbler).

We drove the Hummingbird Highway to Blue Hole National Park.  We started stopping for various perched birds including white-lored parrots, a short-billed pigeon, vermilion flycatchers, and some of our migrants - Indigo bunting, rose-breasted grosbeak, magnolia warbler.  Eventually we found a flock of birds which included this social flycatcher, a small kiskadee knock-off:

As I was sorting through the flock (which included magnolia, black-and-white, and black-throated green warbler, along with a catbird and a sulphur-bellied flycatcher), Ginger noticed some vultures in a distant tree and casually announced that some of them were white (!):
This King vulture (whose fabulous portrait I had studied in the Eastern Peterson since I was a kid) was a bird I knew would be possible but didn't really expect to see.

Eventually we made it to the park (seeing fork-tailed flycatchers and white-collared seedeaters on the way) just as the gate opened at 8.  A blue-gray tanager appeared as soon as I got out of the car.  The jungle was fairly impressive:

We made it about 20 yards down the trail when Ginger spotted this black-cheeked woodpecker:

Numerous passerine-type birds such as my first euphonias (a small finch-like tanager), trogons (both citreoline and violaceous), saltators (imagine a cross between a green towhee and a thrasher), various small flycatchers (including yellow-olive and slate-headed tody) all appeared.  This female barred ant-shrike looked at us curiously:

Amidst the birds showy tropical varieties of flower would appear infrequently including this bird-of-paradise looking thing and what looked like some kind of arboreal parasitic orchid:

This, per google, is a banded peacock butterfly:

We then drove a mile or so down the road to get to the actual Blue Hole:
The Blue Hole itself was pretty underwhelming.  We saw a few small fish in the pool which Ginger claimed were piranhas but I somewhat doubted that.  The dark gloomy vegetation surrounding it, however, was anything but underwhelming.  A few of our warblers, Tennessee, Kentucky, and chestnut-sided were joined by such specialties as a white-bellied woodwren, Aztec parakeets, and Northern Bentbill.

By now the heat of the day was well on, but there was still bird activity.  I tracked an odd buzzy  wheee-wheee-wheee call to a thicket where long-tailed hermits were lekking.  These big dark hummingbirds were impressive with their long sickled bills and longer white tails, both of which would be raised and lowered in unison in time with the call.  An ivory-billed woodcreeper appeared (picture a red-bellied woodpecker with a pale bill colored like a brown creeper), my best ever view of a hooded warbler (apparently they don't skulk on their wintering grounds), as well as this Yucatan flycatcher, an endemic of the region: 
It looks like a lot of other myarchis flycatchers, but (per my Howell and Webb) the brownish "wingbars" are fairly unique to this species.  Other marks to note include the plain tail and shorter bill separating it from brown- or great-crested flycatcher.  The whitish rather than cinnamon edged tertials separate it from the Belizean race of dusky-capped flycatcher. 

An entire day could have been spent here, but our limited time left us to push on to Guanacaste Nat'l Park, which is where I'll pick this up next post...

Birding Belize, part I

Having solidly hit the mid-winter blahs I've decided to take up a tried-and-true trick of bloggers everywhere and go with the trip-report-from-a-long-time-ago.

Ginger and I decided to go to Belize in early April of 2005, figuring if we were going to take a trip to the tropics in the near future, we'd best do it without small children (or a pregnancy). I used the Moon guide, a general Belize guidebook and bird trip reports off the internet.  A compass was quite helpful because what roads there are aren't signed all that well.

For a first neo-tropics (or trip away from the U.S./Canada) this was a way to ease into it; English is the major language and the American dollar is accepted at a 2:1 ratio to the Belizean dollar (pay for something in U.S. dollars and you'd get the same amount back in Belize dollars).

We landed in Belize City, on the coast, in the late afternoon and drove inland to Belmopan.  As we drove out of the airport a bat falcon ripped by and I nearly got us rear-ended in the first 5 minutes but just stopping and not pulling over.

The lowlands still held some flooding (this was towards the end of the dry season) and we stopped at some of the puddles.

A jabiru stork flew over the road, a massive bird:

Snail kites batted about the marshlands.  Blue-winged teal skittered out of their way.  This is a first year bird:

We circled one back for one puddle when a yellow spot caught my eye.  Sure enough it was the frontal shield of a jacana.

Darkness was falling as we started reaching the lowland thickets and early jungle.  We saw a couple of roadside hawks, a small buteo that seemed very much in the broad-winged class:
After driving past a lot of rudely constructed plywood-type houses (often complete with some very scrawny cattle in the front yards, but the blue glow of televisions from inside) along the 2 lane "highway," we arrived in Belmopan, a small, but more modern town.  We stayed the night at the Bullfrog Inn, a western-style motel that had a swarm of minute ants on one corner of the coverlet (we chucked that into the corner).

A hoary-type redpoll

At the risk of becoming the patron blogger of hopeless bird ID, here's an issue that David Sibley addressed with no less than 13 posts last winter.  Clearly there's much to be learned.  He made the point that blowing off anything but the palest of pale redpolls as a common was just as significant an error as overcalling pale commons hoaries (though both obviously are errors).

Tim called me while I was fruitlessly searching for WW crossbills in the central part of the county that he had another hoary redpoll at his feeders (he had one at his feeders about 5 years ago that I twitched while visiting Ginger's family around Christmastime).  He noted that this one was darker than the first one.  Here's today's bird:

Here's a zoom of the first photo.  I admit I didn't buy it as a hoary at first.  After studying it for a while though, it became clear that it was definitely frostier in overall color than the other redpolls.  Some of the male common redpolls had less streaked sides, but none of the females did.  Its bill is on the short end of the redpoll spectrum and the culmen does look concave in this pic.  This pic also shows some paler edges of the last scapulars; this was more visible in some of the bird's poses in the field than others.

The amount of black in the face does seem reduced, though this also varied based on pose.  You almost get the sense in the next picture of a little pinkish about the malar region.  I don't think this has much significance for sexing it; both Sibley and Pyle only mention the breast and rump as areas to look for pink.  Tim thought that the bird's flank streaking was more organized than the (male) common redpolls which demonstrated similar degrees of streaking.  I was inclined to agree.
Here's the best view of the rear, of the rump and undertail pattern:
The ground color of the rump is white.  There is dark central streaking to the last uppertail coverts, but only minimal black streaking to the rump itself.  The last undertail covert had a black central streak of medium width.  We really scrutinized the bird for other undertail streaks and had the sense that there might be a very thin one on the left, but were never certain.

For comparison here's an old photo of a female Common Redpoll:
Note the longer bill.  The last undertail covert has a wider shaft streak than our bird (you'll have to take my word for it, due to the angle of the photos that's not really apparent from the pics).  Obviously the undertail streaking is variable from bird to bird, comparison of just 2 photos in this regard is fairly meaningless.  Also I vaguely remember in one of Sibley's redpoll post he made the interesting observation that the degree of undertail streaking in common's doesn't really correlate with how dark or light the bird is overall.

Here's two pics of the adult female Hoary from Tim's house 5 years ago:

Its tail had a thin central shaft streak on the central UT covert and a very faint central shaft on the next feather to the left.

Finally here's a male Hoary from the feeding station in the Dunbar Forest in the eastern UP, one of the sort-of reliable places to look for them (I was REALLY cold, I didn't realize the soles were coming off my boots and when I squatted down to try to search for the birds with my scope I was basically in -10 degree weather with the bottom of my feet just in socks.  It was difficult to take pics as hard as I was shivering):

I think our bird is probably a first year female hoary (though fortunately I don't have to worry too much since I'm not doing a big year.  Really).  This is the age you would "expect" in a non-irruption year.  Using the scoring system on Sibley's site from the Jan 5, 2008 post, I would score today's bird an 11 or a 12 (the one from 5 years ago is probably a 13-14).  An 11 or higher would put a female bird in the Hoary range, with a couple caveats that birds get paler as the winter progresses and that the scale isn't validated to confirm species ID.  

Random redpoll rat fact I noticed while sketching birds at my feeders:  redpolls have much longer primary extension than goldfinches, having P9-P3 typically visible whereas in goldfinches it's usually just P9-P5.  I'm not sure if that's because redpolls have longer primaries or shorter secondaries, or both.  I seem to remember in longspurs that the more migratory ones (Smith's and Lapland) have more visible primaries than the other 2 since their wings are longer to allow for their longer migration.  Sibley mentioned a study that documented a redpoll banded in Michigan being recovered in Siberia (!) so clearly we're dealing with some long distance migrants.  I guess we can also conclude that Siberia is at least one place colder than Michigan in the winter.