right and wrong terns

I don't think I have any group of pics that I've labeled and re-labeled than medium sized terns. I went back to the beach with the family again yesterday. There were 2 avocets and a turnstone in addition to the more usual stuff, but terns are starting to accumulate.

This Common Tern allowed a close approach and is still in pretty full breeding plumage though the bare parts colors are starting to fade.

This next one is well into the moult, with a white forehead and some darker gray in the carpal bar area. It obviously has lost a lot of color from the bill.

Finally a juvenile Forster's Tern; they're easy with the big black cheek patch. He's kind of overexposed, the Commons are easier to photograph with their grayer breasts.

There is still some dark in the wings of the juvie Forster's at least.

Finally, a Black-bellied Plover that did a fly-by as well.

everyone likes beach toys

Even juvie Black Terns. These ones are resting on one of plastic tubings that kids use to beat each other with in the water (maybe that's just my kids).

Black Terns don't plunge into the water, this one is flaring up to dip down for some surface item. This behaviour can be pretty helpful on those usual occasions when they're flying past a mile out from Tiscornia.

From beneath the birds don't look that black, this is a montage of 2 of Tim's shots.

HUGO the Hudwit

I took the family to Tiscornia in the afternoon, went swimming with the kids, built a sand castle, saw a dozen or so Willets fly by. All in all a very pleasant afternoon. And I just happened to take bins and the camera too. You know, just in case. Just in case I was scanning up the beach and noticed a scope on a tripod and Tim a little ways farther photographing something. Just to be safe I wandered up to make sure they were just willets. They were. Except for the slightly heavier browner one with the longer bill.

A moulting adult Hudsonian Godwit had settled in with 4 juvie Willets, probably only the 5th one I've ever seen and my first at Tiscornia.

Note the remnants of barred brick underparts and a few winter gray coverts in the wings matching the winter back.

It was pretty tame.

I managed to restrict myself to less than 500 frames.

I liked the contrast between the thick black legs of the godwit and the thinner greener legs of the young Willets.

The bird was pretty striking in flight too.

back to the beach

Maybe I should title it "back to birding." I've had 2 major projects that are really eating up my free time, re-doing a deck and another more bird-related one that isn't yet producing results (give it a month). In the last few days though I started getting back to Tiscornia. Nothing really to write home about, but good to be out again.

This Willet was semi-cooperative.

It's a relatively worn adult.

It seemed like it had darker underwings than I remembered.

The juvie Semi Sandpipers are starting to appear in their crisp plumage, there should be Baird's in another week. You know it's good photo light when a 3-4 inch tall bird casts a shadow that leaves the frame.

You can somewhat get a sense of the semi-palmation of the lifted left foot here.

Like the Willet, the sanderlings are also worn adults well into body moult but not really starting in on the wings yet.

Continuing to flip-flop between adults and juvies, here's a composite of a young Cliff Swallow. It doesn't have much color in the throat or face at all, and the rump is white rather than tan.

Finally a Question Mark butterfly, common enough around my house, but I don't recall seeing one at Tiscornia before.

the Crossley Guide

With the fall waterbird migration due to start accelerating hopefully my schedule will allow me to get out a little more. Now's probably a good time to squeeze in one more book review:

I have to admit, my first impression flipping through this book was "wow." There are a ton of high quality photos. My next thought was disappointment that the book only covered Eastern birds. As I flipped farther through, while the coverage map shows a Peterson-like definition of the Eastern U.S., the book really covers any place north of Arizona/New Mexico and east of the Rocky Mountains. Black Rosy-finch and Timberline Sparrow are probably the first Westerners to get dropped, though a lot of more western birds with regular vagrancy potential (e.g. Lewis's Woodpecker, Varied Thrush, etc) and even a good number of the Rio Grande rarities (e.g. Crimson-collared Grosbeak, Varied Bunting) are included as well. I think every bird on the Michigan checklist (including White-collared Swift!) is included.

The plates are photo essays of various images photo-shopped together. Here's the book fully opened to the teal (again don't take my photo of the photo as representative of the photo quality, this is to show the lay-out).

Crossley has attempted to depict the birds in usual postures in their habitat. My wife was particularly impressed by this, saying that this book would have been very helpful when she was starting out before she realized how tied down a bird was to its habitat. Some of these are really excellent, for example the Nelson's sparrow is in exactly one of the grasses we have found them in here in Berrien. Similarly the Common Goldeneye, Common Merg, and Bufflehead plate could just as easily have been taken at Tiscornia. The Phoebe plate could be a pic of my in-laws garden where they nest. Usually the backgrounds complement the pictures; there's some light-houses behind some and even a rainbow behind frozen Niagara for the Glaucous Gull. Occasionally the backgrounds can be distracting however (the phoebe plate for example has a random gentleman looking at the camera - unless that's the author's father I would have photo-shopped him out). I'm not sure I would have put the Ovenbird in a shady backyard or the Orchard Oriole in suburbia, but this may just reflect differences between New Jersey and Michigan, and for every plate where a person might quibble somewhat, there's many more that really look bang-on for habitat.

The descriptions are short but generally good, including some pearls on finding Saw-whets or fall Connecticuts that I've not seen published before. They tend to be informal (describing anis as having a "whacking" big bill) though sometimes a bit over the top (do I need to read that a Swallow-tailed Kite could fit in the movie Avatar?). I think my reviewer when I was writing ID features for MBNH would have objected to me saying that Indigo Buntings "lack any purple tones," or that Eastern Meadowlarks "rarely" form roadside flocks in winter. In my experience, Indigo Buntings in some lights can have purple head gloss and if the roadsides are the only areas that have some exposed grass, then that's where the meadowlarks will gather (and I've made efforts to photograph the spread tail on these to try to make sure I'm not missing Westerns).

The Photo-shopping is generally very good, though initially when I was looking at the plates it took a little getting used to seeing birds in focus in multiple focal planes. Crossley writes in his intro that he tries to show all or nearly all plumages of a bird and indeed, there is a transitional plumage of late summer/early fall Black Tern that I hadn't seen photos of before. That being said, this book won't replace Sibley since there are plumages that aren't covered well. For example, there's an excellent photo of a juvenile Gull-billed Tern that led me to look over to the next plate, Sandwich Tern, to see what its juvie looks like. There isn't one pictured. Similarly, for Little Gull, there's no juvenile illustrated, and only a couple very distant shots of a full adult. Granted, sub-adults are what we encounter most frequently at Tiscornia, but I have seen both full juvie and full adult there as well.

I think I would have taken a somewhat different tack for the flight shots of the ducks. They really blend into the background. Crossley explains that he feels this is how things appear in real life. I would disagree. You generally see ducks flying either against the sky, or against the water. They don't spend a ton of time flying at an altitude with trees directly behind them, and if they are, then they're close enough to see well. I would have put more of the duck flight shots wing-on with a cleaner background. I like what he's done with shorebird flight shots, frequently the flock shape is pictured; these generally jive well with my experience of them, though I don't usually see 5 sanderling lined up perfectly in a row. I would have included more pics of the grassland birds, especially the Ammodramid sparrows, flying away. Some of this may have to do with the fact that the overwhelming majority of the (10,000??!!) images in the book are the author's own, very few are the work of other photographers. Soliciting a few more photos of specific species could have been helpful, to my eyes the 3 images of Baird's Sparrow are of the same individual.

In the frontpiece is about 14 pages of thumbnail sized pics of the regularly occurring birds that indexes to the full plates. A lot of these pics could have stood to be brightened.

Overall, though, this is an excellent and fun book. It is likely too big to be a field guide though. I think Crossley also could have departed slightly more often than he does from phylogenetic order to put more similar species together. He already departs from phylogenetic order since the rarities are grouped 2 or 4 to a page rather than having a full plate. Why not then make other subtle tweaks like re-ordering the swans to put Tundra and Trumpeter facing each other, move the mergansers to allow the eiders to face each other, etc?

I think that the person who will most benefit from it is a birder who is past the beginning stages who wants to look at a book at night to improve his/her pattern recognition; having the habitats behind the bird will certainly help this process to put a bird into context. There is, though, something for everyone. I would, for example, ask that whichever of the bird committee members who objected to my description of a putative Ross's goose's bill base as "irregularly vertical" to describe the close-up of the bird in the lower left hand corner.

I certainly enjoy flipping through the pages and if Crossley can help inspire my kids to pick up the hobby this book will be a real coup. Five-year-old Hazel immediately wanted to color some of the birds on the page I was looking at (and it isn't even a really super-colorful page either), but here's her interpretation of the Connecticut Warbler (I drew the outline for her):

A challenge for photographers would be to flip through their folders and see how many birds they could put together a plate for, might be fun to try on some cold February night...

How photos can lie

The old mantra for rare birds is "photograph it or forget it," something that anyone who submits birds to committees or seasonal compilers is reminded of over and over. That being said, photos don't always tell the whole story. The next photo (a montage of 2 pics of the same bird Tim sent me a while ago taken I think in April 2010) is a good example. Which loon do you think it is?

The shape is obviously wrong for Common Loon. Red-throated is very common in migration here. This bird is transitioning into more adult plumage which throws off the appearance, but the neck seems much shorter and thicker than Red-throats display. A Pacific? The hallmark of Pacific loon in flight is a thick black strap at the base of the wings extending into the stern. I don't have a flight shot of Pacific (that should change this fall), but here's an old shot of the Portage Lake bird from Washtenaw showing the effect:

The mystery bird isn't a Pacific Loon. Comparing the mystery bird with more traditionally plumaged Red-throats we see that these birds also appear shorter necked as well.

Here's a comparison montage

The top row is Tim's loon sandwiched between my two. Below them are Sibley's drawings of Pacific on the left and Red-throated on the right (used seeking permission). Note how Sibley depicts a much longer necked bird with Red-throated, longer necked than the pics show. Does that mean that the shape of the mystery bird does in fact support Pacific? (Or that Sibley's drawings are off?) The answer is no to both questions. I would guess based on this that Sibley based his illustrations on field sketches of the birds in flight. In real life, with the bird in motion, Red-throated loons appear longer-necked than they do in the photographs, as they're depicted by Sibley. While freeze-frame photos of birds in flight are some of the pics I'm proudest of, they don't necessarily reflect what the bird looks like in real life in motion.

A change of pace

Presenting, a new feature to this blog, Book Reviews! In a new marketing device, Princeton Press is sending free copies of some of their books to bloggers with the agreement we'll review them. I'll leave it for you to decide if that has affected my objectivity. That being said, I think that Liguori's Hawks at a Distance is an excellent book.

The introduction is well done overall, I think that one of his primary points is to emphasize shape rather than exact plumage marks since he points out that it's easy to get hung up in minutiae and apply field marks to ages or color morphs to which they do not apply. One of the follow-up concepts is to spend more time watching the bird with bins and less time with the scope. In the introduction I would have been more specific in the photography sub-section about how settings need to be tweaked for photography of distant raptors. Specifically, an image needs to be over-exposed to avoid the camera's computer from reducing the image to a black dot on a pretty medium blue field. Doing this requires some combination of increasing the ISO, reducing shutter speed, and lowering the F stop (the trade-offs of these being increased graininess, possibly decreased clarity, and decreased depth of field respectively).

The species focused upon are migrants, generally those expected regularly (or at least annually) at Eastern hawkwatches. Therefore, the species with full accounts are the 3 accipiters; the common Eastern buteos plus regular rarities Swainson's and Ferruginous; Harrier; the 3 common falcons plus Prairie; as well as Osprey, the 2 eagles and the 2 vultures. Gyrfalcon, Mississippi Kite, and California Condor (!) are treated more briefly with even briefer discussions of Short-tailed Hawk, Zone-tailed Hawk, White-tailed Hawk, White-tailed and Hook-billed Kite, and Caracara. Personally I would have liked a little more info on Short-tailed Hawk. If you're going to include Zone-tailed Hawk and Condor I'm not sure why you wouldn't throw in a little bit on Black-hawks as well. Since this book focuses on birds encountered at hawkwatches, I probably would have added additional shots of Short-eared Owl (there's one along with 2 Hawk Owl shots).

There are no illustrations of perched hawks.

The full-frame eye-candy shots that lead each section range from decent to stunning. Ironically while an excellent shot of Red-shouldered is the cover bird, the Red-shouldered image that leads the species account is to me clearly the weakest of this format. I was disappointed when I reached the Gyrfalcon section to find it missing the lead-off portrait like the swooping immature Goshawk or dramatic young Swainson's that lead their respective accounts.

The (usually) one page section of prose describing each species is well written and is far closer to the conversational style of Pete Dunne in the classic "Hawks in Flight" than the highly dry, densely technical flavor of Wheeler's "Raptors." It comes pre-highlighted with key points in bold. I found it interesting that he bold-faces (on page 25) that "the underside plumage is often not useful in identifying distant juvenile accipiters." Dunne, in Hawks in Flight (page 72) italicizes that "if an immature accipiter appears white below, it can safely be called a Cooper's" in his section summarizing accipiter separation.

The meat and potatoes of this book follow the one page description with plates featuring (usually) 6 photos per page of distant hawks in flight. Here's one of the 6 photos on one of the gyrfalcon plates (please don't take these photos I took of the photos to be illustrative of the photo quality in the book, rather examples of the style) that caught my eye as familiar:

The same photo is used in Wheeler's "Raptors," cropped very differently (his book is laid out 4 photos to the page):

Ligouri emphasizes that he wants to show the photographs as you would see the birds in the field through binoculars so isn't showing close-up views. That being said, I would have cropped them in by at least 10-20%, but I tend to over-crop my photos. This was the only photo that stood out to me as looking familiar. Over 95% of the (~550) color photos are Ligouri's own. I haven't studied every species account, but did look over a couple of them fairly closely. I am not very familiar with Goshawk, having seen only about 4 birds flying by briefly so I studied those plates fairly closely. It does definitely give a sense of a different bird, with much broader secondaries than a Coop and a much shorter hand than a buteo; the proof will be this fall if one jumps out at me more quickly. The Red-tailed Hawk section is the longest (expectedly so with the number of subspecies). In this section there are 6 shots of Eastern, 23 of Western, 27 of Harlan's, 4 of Kriders, and 18 unidentified to subspecies. The number of un-ID'd birds goes along with a lot of the cautions in the text that a lot of distant birds need to be left as Redtails. Many of the un-ID'd photos make general points about the substantial effects of lighting, age, or both, on appearance.

The final section of the book contains montage plates of hawks cruising and soaring to and fro from different angles, here's the Swainson's plate, you can compare it to the Swainson's photos from this spring.

I like this section a lot, it allows close comparison of subtle differences in shape among age classes of a species and just a good gestault of the bird. I would have liked to have seen Mississippi Kite included as well though.

Overall, this is an excellent book. The technological improvements in photography and printing made since Hawks in Flight was written 20+years ago allows the photos of Liguori's Hawks at a Distance book to blow the doors off of those in Hawks in Flight (not that the classic isn't still a good read or that Sibley's illustrations aren't still superb). At about $20 with tax I think this book is well worth the money to someone looking to spend time at hawkwatches, or someone who has spent reasonable amounts of time, but would like to improve their ability to pull out one of the rarer species.

Want another opinion and some more info on the book? Here's what Cory Gregory wrote about the book.