fish crow, take 1

Since it took forever to get my computer to take the video I'm just going to post this without any extensive discussion since it's going to take a little bit of time to collect my thoughts. The video is just over 20 seconds long as we saw the bird for the 3rd time. It essentially flies down the road toward the landfill. I pointed the microphone of the (Canon A620) camera at the bird rather than the lens since I wanted to maximize the ability to document the most identifiable aspect (the voice) so it's never visible (the microphone is on top of my camera).

At the 6 second mark you glimpse Tim also videoing the bird. At the 8 second mark you hear me say "ca, ca" trying to stimulate a response as it's directly overhead. At the 17 (almost 18) second mark you hear the bird say "ca-ha." After that I say "Did you get it? It called," and Tim replies "Yep."

It's probably 75 yards away when it calls, just out of sight over the trees as it headed to the landfill.

The brief caveat, my camera doesn't record the very high pitches very well. If you scroll down the margin of the blog you'll see 2 warbler recordings I've made with it. The hooded warbler comes out well, the prairie warbler sounds like it goes down not up even though it was singing a typical song. That being said, when I listened to the recording immediately after hearing the bird I thought it was a pretty good representation of what we heard.

Hopefully others agree on the ID...

The Enemy

I know. It looks so innocent. (file photo from the old Ann Arbor Bot Gardens days).
What possible offense, I can hear you asking, could lead to chipping sparrows becoming The Enemy? They're peaceful enough birds. They don't take over other songbirds' nests. They don't overgraze habitat. They don't allow their pet carnivore to roam freely. They just fly about, nest in our junipers, and sing cheerfully. Oh wait. That's right. They sing. Or to be more exact, they trill away on one pitch from the yard, from the bushes, from the river bottom, from the forest, from the cemetary where pine warblers can some years be found, from the parking lot where maybe a worm-eating warbler lurks. And that's where the problem arises. I awakened at 5am excited to work on scouting for Birdathon this weekend. I started at a cemetary which we usually don't reach until the afternoon where we've had about a 50% success rate with pine warbler. I was hoping to be able to hear it in the dawn chorus and turn it into a night bird. I heard chipping sparrows galore. Chipping sparrows singing fast trills, chipping sparrows singing slightly slower trills, but chipping sparrows one and all.

I tried a few other places, but found little of consequence, and even less that wanted to perch up. This barn swallow at Chikaming Park was the only exception...

I ended the day at Grand Mere SP where I walked about in the pseudo-Oak Openings area hoping for some sweet overshoot (i.e. blue grosbeak, lark sparrow, Bell's vireo, maybe even a pipedream burrowing owl) but found only a crisply marked female blackpoll warbler. On the way out I started hearing a buzzy trill which immediately struck me as not the above mentioned chipping sparrow. It really sounded like a worm-eating warbler, which is to say it basically sounded like a chipping sparrow only a little different. Different enough? Who knows. I watched the trees for movement, I followed the bird somewhat, I scanned blindly with the bins ... and never got a sniff of the bird. Silent Canada, chestnut-sided, magnolia, parula, and Nashville warblers? Sure, lots of them. Not one view of the bird singing at least a couple times a minute for a few minutes, then 15 minutes, then half an hour, and then finally for almost an hour and a half before it finally either flew off or fell silent. So that's what, about 2 1/2 hours of my life spent looking for birds that either were, or could plausibly have been chipping sparrows. Shoot, if every cigarette a person smokes shortens life by 7 minutes then I'm basically a 2 pack a day smoker. All thanks to one little bird. And it's such a nice little bird.

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This tree was in flower and caught my eye as I was staring upward trying to spot Dean Wormer. I don't know what it is, have never seen it before, though I'm going to guess it's some kind of wild plum. If there's any tree people out there I'd be curious to know what it is (I'm somewhat surprised there isn't a common ornamental version of it since just the wild version is pretty striking).

Gray-cheeked thrushes are trash birds

OK not really, but still. For the 2nd straight day a gray-cheeked perched up nicely for me. This one stopped on a log at Floral, allowed me to show it to 2 other people in the Leica and then I proceeded to fire about 10 frames before it finally moved along.
I didn't get to Floral until just past 11:30 since I spent the early part of the morning unsuccessfully trying to locate a mockingbird my wife saw a couple days ago and then had a mid-morning appointment. As it was, there were spots at Floral that were still hopping despite the late hour. I ended up totaling 24 warblers (it would have been 25 if I'd thought it worthwhile to walk up the dunes for prairie), high-lighted by good numbers of black-throated blue, an orange crowned, a couple Canadas and 2 Kentuckies. It felt really early for Canadas. At one point I had a great look at a perched up Canada that was promptly displaced by a golden-winged.

This black-throated green perched about as cooperatively as a warbler will when it paused to sing 2 songs instead of just one. I still barely kept the tail in the frame.

Here's more typical examples of the fruits that attempting to digi-scope warblers will bring:

A thrush safari

I birded today at midday during nappytime at Riverview Park in St Joseph. This is only 4 miles from my house, but a place I haven't visited all that often. Tim and I used to put it on the route in the late afternoon doldrums on big days, but eventually stopped going there as we never seemed to add anything. It became the-place-big-days-go-to-die and we started going down into the river bottom below my house instead, less convenient but more productive. It might get re-added this year though.

Today there were surprising numbers of thrushes in the mowed grass in areas well shaded by large trees, providing decent photo opps despite overcast light (when it wasn't actually sprinkling). This was the only veery I saw:

Here's a gray-cheeked thrush. I used to go years between seeing them in Washtenaw. I find them much less uncommon on this side of the state.

Swainson's thrush was the last of the thrushes to perch up for me today, but decent numbers were present. I heard one give at least a fragment of song.

return of the April Fool

I finally finished a dense stretch of shifts tonight; most of my birding has been from my porch the last few days. The screech owl that I first spotted on Apirl 1st has periodically poked its head out of its box. This was the first time it's stayed in sight when I've left the house. It didn't stay out long.
I haven't heard much in the way of vocalizations. My experience with Cooper's hawks is that when the male has food it usually calls to the female who takes the food to the nestlings. If there is a pair, perhaps screech owls don't do that. I havn't heard any noise from babies either despite sleeping with the windows open a fair amount lately. Hopefully it won't pull the disappearing act the day before Bird-a-thon that a Carolina wren on a nest did 2 years ago.

Rose-breasted grosbeaks, as usual, have become very common in the first week of May, and definitely appreciate my expanded feeders. Here's pics of a first spring male and a female whom I'm not sure is ageable without a lot more detailed study of my Pyle guide than is really warranted...

May flowers ... and yard bird #100

I haven't had a chance to get out much as I've had shift after shift the last few days, but a dark little shape that drew my attention in the brush behind the feeders turned out to be yard bird #100, a Lincoln's sparrow. When I pointed it out to Ginger she said she thought she'd seen it around the last few days. Grrrrrrrrr. This isn't the exact bird, a file photo from Yellowstone NP I think from 2004.
One afternoon a few days ago the sun came out after ongoing rain putting some of the flowers in nice light, here's jack-in-the-pulpit from below the house.

Also prairie trillium, right up there with Dutchman's breeches in the running for my favorite spring wildflower also from the backyard steps.
This is Squirrel-corn, the later blooming relative of Dutchman's breeches from Warren Dunes...

And finally a somewhat understated (and variably colored) flower, blue cohash.

Dowitcher dilemma

It was a sunny morning at last so I figured I'd take one last shot at a decent Smith's longspur shot given that they'll probably be a thousand miles north by my next day off. To make a long story short, I never even saw, much less photographed, one today. The birds weren't moving around very much.

On Avery Road there was, however, a big flock of shorebirds well off the road including about a hundred lesser yellowlegs, about 40 pectorals, and 2 dowitchers. We see this one in nice early morning light, with fairly brick reddish underparts with some difficult-to-characterize patterning to the underparts with dark scapulars with some internal reddish markings and whitish scapular tips:

I don't have much experience with dowitchers in spring. Probably 99% of the dowitchers I've seen are July and August SB dowitchers (of the central Hendersoni subspecies) at Pt Mouillee.

The pics aren't great as the birds were very distant. Between the 60x zoom of the scope, probably 2-3x on the camera (something I don't usually do), plus cropping, these are probably 100-200x. Even with the best of equipment a person would run out of photons.

None of my pics captured the bill that well, though it's accepted that there is a fair amount of overlap. I was not overly-impressed, though, by the length of the bill. LB dowitcher is supposed to be chunkier than SB, "like it swallowed a grapefruit" is the description in the Karlson shorebird guide. I think that would be more helpful if I'd had more recent comparative experience with them. Obviously this character is better evaluated in the field than in single pictures. It looks chunkier in the first pic than the second.

In terms of general plumage, it's considerably darker than the post-breeding adults I'm used to seeing, but that could probably apply nearly as well to a fresh SB than allow us to jump to the conclusion that it's LB, though I think it shades in favor of LB.

Sibley points out LB as having scapulars with rufous bars and white tips whereas SB has bold gold barring. Karlson describes LB's scapulars similarly, notes bright upperparts of SB, and does show photos that are consistent with Sibley's paintings. The Hayman shorebird guide also illustrates this difference in the paintings (though in the descriptions he describes SB as having broad rufous or rusty-buff or pale cinnamon edges to the feathers - but at least says the edging is broad). Kaufman in Advanced Birding emphasizes that the broad edging to SB's scaps make the bird appear very bright (though gives the color to this edging as rusty). My bird's upperparts, dark with rufous marbling with narrow white tips, I think are definitely in the LB camp.

Of my 4 resources, Karlson, Hayman, and Kaufman all emphasise the pattern of the underparts (Sibley is the only one that gives equal weight to the upperparts).

All agree that Hendersoni SB dowitcher should have a clean "fore"neck without patterning whereas LB has streaking in that region. I'm not sure I've ever seen a definition for "fore"neck. I think the first picture shows some streaking in this region, but it's so distant that I think it's hard to draw firm conclusions.

Hayman and Karlson both state that SB had fairly evenly distributed markings from the sides of the breast through the flanks, whereas LB has denser markings along the side of the breast which are more lightly distributed along the flanks. I think distance makes it hard to argue strongly either way. Sibley and Kaufman note that the patterning of the sides of the breast tends toward spotting in SB and barring in LB. Distance makes the bird look somewhat in-between. When I first looked at the photos I thought it showed spotting along the sides of the breast, but when I looke closer, the marks appear more chevron shaped.

I went back and forth earlier in the day on the ID of these birds. My initial gestault impression in the field was that these looked like long-billed dowitchers, though not the longest-billed I've ever seen. I didn't feel totally comfortable with the call initially given that I don't have a ton of experience with the plumage of spring dowitchers, but after having gone through my resources and compared them with my pics, I now feel that these are long-billed's.

Sept 09 Addendum: here's a Jean Irons photoeassy about this same question.