Summer

Well, the sun has officially set on spring this year. It was as exciting as could be expected, though most of the quality rares were in the last half of May; I was starting to get worried in the first 2 weeks of May when I hadn't added any county lifers. Fish crow, Nelson's sharp-tail, and white-faced ibis, however, were all not just county birds but state birds as well (and the Fish crow should be a first state record).

I haven't gotten out that much as you can likely tell, my first few days off this month were spent camping up in Ludington where the photo highlight was this shot of the moon; it was mainly family time. (As was this last weekend when we celebrated Hazel's 3rd (!) birthday).

Today Ginger and I took the kids for a walk in one of the local parks where they most enjoyed the dirt in the path, but this little butterfly caught my eye. It was tiny, probably the smallest butterfly I've ever seen, and turns out to be the (appropriately named) Least Skipper. ID points apparently are the tiny size, fairly dark coloration, relatively smooth gradation between the light and the dark on the upperwing rather than the more typical sharp demarcations of most of the other local skippers, and the rounded lower wing.

Spiderwort is also pretty well in bloom, I adjusted the color on this image somewhat as my camera recorded them as much bluer than they are in reality.

Hopefully tomorrow morning I'll get out really early and see if I can't dash off western meadowlark, dickcissel, worm-eating warbler, and summer tanager for the year list. I'm actually several birds ahead of my 2007 pace when I had a personal-best 260 for the county and that's without having made the efforts after Birdathon this year to find some of the less common migrants, Connecticut warbler, olive-sided and yellow-bellied flycatcher, and Philadelphia vireo that a person definitely ought to have if they were being serious about their year list. Both kids will be in at least half-day school for an entire calendar year starting in 2011, I can feel the countdown for a real attempt (when I won't have to depend on Tim to find most of the good birds) at 270 beginning...

RB grosbeak profile

Rose-breasted grosbeaks are obviously a fairly charismatic member of our avifauna; they're frequently the bird brought up by people at work when they find out I'm a birder.

When they first arrive from their migration at the end of April and the end of May they hit the feeders pretty hard re-fueling before they really work on setting up territories. Many of the first spring birds still show their age with prominent brown edges to the mantle and un-moulted brown feathers in the wings.
This adult male still has scant brown edging to the fresh back feathers yet to wear off but has solidly black coverts and flight feathers.

And the classic full adult male...

Despite being really common we somehow nearly missed this species on a summer big day back in Washtenaw and was seen by only one team member (Lathe if I remember right).

Of course in addition to being a striking bird, it's also a solid songster. Here's sonograms made from a bird I video'd while atlasing back in Washtenaw a few years ago. These are 5 songs from the same male.

The first 3 phrases are essentially the same but after that it's slightly more variable, though the middle 3 songs are fairly similar for the first 3 seconds. There's a general pattern that the phrases alternate between a higher pitch and a lower pitch though as the song progresses the phrases seem to center around a more similar pitch. I'm not sure if there's a pattern to the variation in each phrase as to how many times it changes the pitch in each phrase or not.

"Red"-backed and "Red-breasted" Sandpipers

That finest of alarm clocks, Tim's cell phone, awakened me again this time with news of a red knot at Tiscornia, as well as the "funkiest dunlin you'll ever see."

Apparently Tim was watching 2 dunlin get flushed by a beachwalker then out over the lake they were joined by a white shorebird and a couple others. They circled for a while and ended up on the pier. He scanned the pier intently looking for the white one hoping for a piping plover or phalarope or who knows what and glassed the flock ... dunlin, dunlin, dunlin, red knot, dunlin, where's-the-white-one, wait a second RED KNOT??? By the time I got there they were halfway to Jean Kloch.

If you have an old Peterson dunlin goes by the name of red-backed sandpiper. I guess this one was trying to live up to that name at the very least even if the rest of the bird was screaming peregrine bait.
Here's the knot, aka red-breasted sandpiper. It was the first breeding plumage knot I've ever seen, having encountered 2 fall birds in the past. Except for one row of winter wing coverts it was full breeding. It didn't really hold still.

In the afternoon after meeting up with an old friend Hugo, I followed Ginger around Harbert Park geo-caching. On the way there we passed a Red-headed woodpecker with a hole in a telephone pole and a beautiful cattail marsh I'd never seen before (ITS NEVER TOO EARLY TO START SCOUTING FOR BIRDATHON). This skipper was pretty common. I think it's a Hobomok skipper, but it might be any of at least 4 others...

Ginger spotted this fawn trusting on camouflage and motionless sleep to hide it from predators. I missed it at least.

Warbling vireos were the most common bird still active in the afternoon but this oriole was the only cooperative bird.

Crow sonograms

Well, I think this may be a retro wave of the future. The sonograms in the Golden guide were considered pretty cutting edge technology when published probably 40 years ago. I never had a lot of success interpreting them, and all successive authors to my knowledge, have omitted them. The widespread use of digital cameras in some ways took identification of rarities back to the "shotgun age" of ornithology where precise scapular patterns, etc can now be easily examined with the bird frozen in time. Well, almost all of those digital cameras have video buttons and perhaps sonogram use will allow "feather-by-feather" or should we say "frequency-by-frequency" dissection of vocalizations. If I'd thought to record the possible worm-eating a few weeks ago I probably would have had a definitive answer and saved an hour of scouting time. At any rate, my old Golden guide has been promoted from the barely-reachable top shelf down to the identification reference shelf, not a place I thought it was ever going to go.

Anyway, an old Washtenaw mentor, Lathe Claflin emailed me some of his crow recordings made along Forest Lawn Rd (with a good old fashioned tape recorder). Here's the sonogram (using free Cornell RavenLite software) from one of the American Crows on his recording calling caw-caw-caw-caw (I think there's a chipping sparrow at the very beginning).

Here's another one, maybe of the same bird (there's a yellowthroat starting witchety-witchety where the harmonics over the 3rd and 4th caw, caw would be).

The American Crow's caw shows as a fairly symmetric arc on the sonogram centered in the 1.5 kHz range with harmonics at about 2.25 kHz, 3.25 kHz, and 5 kHz. The lower registers compare very well with the American Crow sonogram on page 212 of my Golden Guide.

In contrast, here's 3 calls Lathe recorded from the Fish Crow, the caa note.

This one is again in the 1.5-2 kHz range between the reeeeeeeeee of a red-winged blackbird's konklareeeeee (2.5-3 kHz plus harmonics) and the blackbird's call (the L at the end).

The Fish Crow's caa note is a little less symmetric. It is arced, but the body of the call consists of closely parallel arcs in the 1.5 - 2 kHz range which seem to slur down somewhat. Caleb Putnam obtained similar sonograms with his recordings of the caa note, as discussed on his blog here. The Golden guide doesn't have a Fish Crow caa note.

Finally, here's the ca-ha call from my video which you can hear in the fish crow post from earlier this month. The ca is composed of 2 short arcs similar to the caa note, though more symmetric, followed by the more pulsed ha note. This compares very favorably with the ca-ha sonogram in the Golden guide. The ca-ha is the call (song?) is supposed to be very specific for Fish Crow and not made by Americans.

Tim is The Man

"Hey honey? I think there's a birder on the phone." I hadn't heard the phone ring at all, completely asleep a few hours after getting home from a night shift. Ginger put the phone to my ear and I heard, "Dude, I've got a Nelson's Sharp-tailed Sparrow in New Buffalo Marsh." For the next 10 seconds I was trying to figure out who was even talking to me (as if anyone but Tim would find that bird there). Then the next 20 seconds I was trying to remember why "Nelson's sharp-tail" sounded familiar. Finally I shook the cobwebs off and realized the magnitude of the situation. I missed these birds last year when Tim found some for a first county record on a day I was working last fall. Tim and I had walked the New Buffalo Marsh (among other places) 2 years ago in the fall trying to kick these up without success, and now he'd found them again.

Unfortunately to get there you need a boat, and Tim's is the only canoe I have access to. I dithered for a bit and after talking again we decided it might be possible to reach the area on foot. Now I felt partially responsible for the birds being found given that 2 years ago I asked for hip waders for Christmas to make searching for this and other birds (i.e. LeConte's or Yellow Rail) easier. The hip waders were inaccessible in the back of the truck at the repair shop. I wondered if I could go Survivorman and tie my boots and binoculars in a garbage bag, attach them to my belt with the binocular strap, and elementary back-stroke my way down the river with the gear on my chest. While it seemed like a bad idea I stuck a couple garbage bags in my pocket on the way out the door just in case...

I drove down and did find a way to wade out through 400-800 yards of ankle t0 shin deep water and cattail marsh and met up with Tim in the higher area we'd walked 2 years ago. As Don Chalfant once told me, to look in grassy stuff next to cattail marsh, the bird was working in about an acre of knee- to thigh-high dense grass surrounded on 2 sides by cattail and on the northern side by the river. We followed it slowly as it would sometimes pop up and most of the time stay hidden. The bird was amazingly orangish to the naked eye and strikingly plumaged through optics:

Tim mentioned something about noting the gray crown stripe for the committee and I absent-mindedly replied, "Oh yeah, these are write-up birds." He practically rolled his eyes saying, "yeah, because you see so many of these." Actually, that was first one I'd ever seen, though after the fish crow all non first-state records are just different flavors of dross. We had probably an hour or so of sporadic looks and mostly glimpses of the bird before we went in separate directions, Tim to his kayak and me to slog back through the marsh in the opposite direction. I considered checking 3 Oaks ponds on the way home since it'd be only a 20 minute detour or so, but since my mom had just arrived to visit and Ginger and I had tickets to listen to Dubya Bush speak at the Mendel Center I figured I'd best just head home.

I was literally 30 seconds from my driveway when the phone rings again. It was Tim. "You're going to hate me, but there's a white-faced ibis at Three Oaks." DOH!! Actually more correctly it would be Ginger who is going to hate him but again, who's counting. Ginger saw the look on my face when I hit the driveway. "NOW what??" "We-ell, honey, now there's a white-faced ibis at 3 Oaks." Now it was her turn to roll her eyes. "Make it quick," were her instructions. I blazed back down I-94, pushed it along US-12, and rolled up on Tim about 25 minutes later. I arrived just in time to see a Great Blue flush the bird. Fortunately it circled twice and landed again:

I blasted a quick burst of photos, checked the images to see that at least a couple were crisp enough for documentation purposes, glanced quickly at the turnstone and a white-rumped sandpiper in amongst the dunlin and semi sandpipers and blistered back for home. That would be 2 state birds (one a lifer) in my home county in one day (and both found by one Tim Baerwald, who else).

And for the record, I even had time to take a shower to wash the marsh grime off before we went to listen to former President Bush's remarks at the Economics Club.

eye candy

If ever there was bird eye candy it would be a scarlet tanager. I found this bird earlier in the week next to Forest Lawn Landfill in nice morning light. It was so red the camera had trouble focusing on it and it read some of the the red as greeen
This bird isn't in full adult alternate plumage given the paler brown-black secondaries and primaries. I think that would make it a second year male per the Pyle guide. Note also the very thin red tips to the fresh tertials. Pyle says this can occur in the wing coverts of after-second year birds but doesn't comment on them in the tertials as far as I can tell.

Here's the bird less over-exposed, you can see that the back and head is wholly red, not the artifactual green as above.

I had hoped to chase a white-faced ibis in Washtenaw today which, had I been able to leave immediately for yesterday when I was called about it, I probably would have had. Unfortunately I was on my way to work when the bird was discovered and as far as I can tell not re-found today. I'm finding it much harder than I expected to meet my original goal to add a bird a year in Washtenaw from Berrien. I succeeded on a chase for pacific loon, but missed on chases for golden eagle and black-throated gray warbler, and couldn't leave immediately for this bird (which would have been a state bird). I also didn't chase Franklin's gulls or a varied thrush that didn't seem all that pinned down.

I've been working a lot on the Fish Crow write-up, it took me some time to download the stuff I needed to analyze the video, and there's some more stuff I'd like to do but I think I'm starting to wrap it up.

Birdathon wrap-up

Tim and I were joined for the second year in a row by Craig/Kreg/"unknown birder" Bateman for a successful Birdathon effort. Going into the day we were somewhat pessimistic given predicted wind and rain during the night and predicted winds during the day. Fortunately it rained only for a little over an hour or so with the exception of some occasional sprinkles and the wind was much less than predicted.

Last year we had only one owl, this year we had all 3 in the first couple hours. A distantly singing yellow-billed cuckoo gave our team, the Fanatical Cuckoos, our first cuckoo in the 3 years I've been on the team. A mockingbird was kind enough to answer our whip-poor-will whistles outside Coloma which we thought might just be our best bird of the day. That was until a least bittern started calling within seconds of getting out of the car at Big Smith Lake in a period of relative calm. We blundered into a chat somewhere in the eastern county when we stopped to unsuccessfully listen at one of Tim's potential sedge wren possible spots (we blanked on all of mine too during the night). Our luck held through our first stop at the Jones/True Rd block where we stopped behind another team who had just whistled up a whip-poor-will. We spent the better part of the next hour and a half hoping for chuckie but joined the great majority in not hearing him.

The day took a truly surreal turn at Forest Lawn Rd. We had walked along it to pick up yellow-throated warbler (as usual it took me 3 times as long to hear the bird as my younger teammates, that after it took me 3 times as long to hear the Louisiana waterthrush until it took pity and flew closer to the road, and 3 times as long to hear the white-eyed vireo, but really, I wasn't getting frustrated. not at all. ok actually I hate those yellow-throateds. Thank goodness last year when I led a tour for Washtenaw Audobon one was singing close to the road) when we started hearing strange calling from a treetop next to the road, cawing but only with "soft a" sounds, no "aw". We stopped. It sounded like a fish crow. We waited. Then the crow flew out calling "ca-ha." We ran to alert the other team present on the road. The bird was nice enough to fly over twice again, the final time both Tim and I recorded the "ca-ha," giving us far better hopes of documenting the bird than the experience we've talked about one of us probably eventually having sometime of a flyby bird at Tiscornia. After making a bunch of phone calls we reached no one who could come chasing after it immediately and since we weren't seeing it anymore, we continued on. For the next hour we were pretty high. We managed to walk through Warren Woods and add exactly 0 birds, some of which was probably due to the storm front that had been south of us all night undoubtedly blocking migrants, and some of which was probably on us.

When we reached Floral we actually were quite close to the number we arrived there with last year, though were half an hour later arriving. We knew, however, that we probably weren't going to pick up all the migrants we needed to keep pace. We found a lot of redstarts, as Jan said, probably 70% of the birds. I'd say 70% of the rest were magnolia, leaving about 10% of the birds with potential. We picked up some birds, Wilson's, Canada, a couple of orange-crowned, a yellow-rumped, a couple kinglets, a beautiful golden-winged, as well as resident hooded warbler and hairy (and downy!) woodpecker and a few others but left well off last year's pace.

For the second straight year we blundered into a woodcock on the ground, this one 6 feet off the trail at Lincoln Twp Beach:
From there it was up and down the county picking up specific birds at specific spots, most of which turned up quickly like prothonotory warbler, red-headed woodpecker, grasshopper sparrow, some of which turned up with difficulty like sedge wren and blue-winged warbler, and some of which did not show up at all like Carolina wren. We were surprised to find gadwall at Brown and a peregrine over the old black rail field in Royalton Twp. A SB dowitcher at Rocky Weed pond was also a Royalton Twp bird for me.

We ended with 158 birds (155 unanimous) while driving about 275 miles (our least yet, and just one tank of gas), a much better total than we expected given the near utter lack of waterfowl, the windy predicted weather and our inability to comfortably stake out some of the just-returned birds (i.e. chat, orchard oriole though we did end up finding these). Of course the (potential) first state record Fish Crow was a bit of gravy we couldn't possibly have hoped for. And with news yesterday that the bird was re-seen and re-heard by other observers who were reportedly much more in our camp than some of the other people who also heard the bird originally, along with photographs Tim got of it yesterday showing an apparently diagnostic primary pattern, I'm much more optimistic that it will be acceptable. Tim's pic is viewable here.