I was planning to use this photo to blog about them when I showed it to my husband and we started to laugh.  These crows look so much like a gang that my husband started to quote the lyrics from the song When You’re A Jet from West Side Story.  He knows all these songs because his parents were really into Broadway musicals.  Soon he was inventing crow lyrics.  Soon he had written a crow version of the song.  And so was born…

South Side Story

Coal: Hey, Biff, getta load on what them filthy pigeons are doin’…

Biff:  Them?  With their stupid green heads and silly pink galoshes?  We’ve already laughed ‘em off the street…

Coal:  Oh yeah? Well they’ve moved into the parking lot down at the Giant Eagle.

Midnight:  Yeah, they’re takin’ over OUR dumpsters.

Sulfur:  [chiming in timidly] One of ‘em swiped a cheeto I had my dibs on…

Biff:  Well, don’t worry, we’ll take care of them – because we’re CROWS!

When you’re a Crow
You’re as black as the night.
You’re as sleek as cold steel
and you’re ready for flight.

When you’re a Crow
You are sure of respect.
You’ve got boys in your roost.
You’ve got cards in your deck.

          The Crows are in gear,
          our cylinders are clickin’.
          You Pigeons stay clear –
          cause once you’re in the pot
          you know you taste like chicken!   
   
When you’re a Crow
well, you’ve been to Crow school.
You can poke open bags.
You can even make tools.

You can steal a gold ring.
You can gang up on cats. 
You can count up to five.
You’re a bird and a half!

When you’re a Crow
You’re an Army of One
You make plans for the day
and your plans all get done.

          Here come the Crows,
          we are cruisin’ your way!
          We are takin’ the mirror
          from that new Chevrolet.
          We are climbing the curbs
          and we’re eating old meat.
          We are chasing the rats.
          We are claiming this street!
 
Once you’ve been marked
With a capital C
You’re the top-perching bird
any pole, any tree.

When you’re a Crow
You can chortle and caw
You don’t “sing,” man, you SHOUT
And your word is the law.

          You Pigeons watch out
          Cause we’re namin’ your name.
          We’re not takin’ crap,
          you are outta this game.

          You’ll be feeling our heat.
          You’ll be tasting our juice.
          So, get off of our wires…
          Cause
                 We
                        Rule
                                The Roost!

– by Richard St. John with a huge tip of the hat to Stephen Sondheim and West Side Story.  Here are the original lyrics.  Photo by Marcy Cunkelman.

With a look that strikes terror in the hearts of small birds, this sharp-shinned hawk hunted at Kim Steininger’s backyard feeders on a snowy winter day.

Kim was lucky to see him.  Though they’re present year-round in Pennsylvania and are the most numerous raptor at hawk watches this month, sharp-shins are very unusual in my Pittsburgh neighborhood in winter.

The last time I saw a sharp-shinned hawk was quite recent, though.  Last Monday I sat on top of a cliff called Giant Ledge in the Slide Mountain Wilderness of the Catskill Mountains and gazed to the east.  It was a chilly overcast day with no bird activity.  The maple and beech forest below me was clad in reds and yellows.  I could see for miles.  No birds.

Then one small hawk rose from the valley floor 1,000 feet below.  He circled to gain altitude and in a matter of minutes rose past my line of sight until he was above all the mountains.  Then he set his course and disappeared to the south.  Flap, flap, glide.

(photo by Kim Steininger)

Some of you may know John – he grew up in Pittsburgh.  He’s an excellent birder, has a natural ear for bird song and can identify all our birds by sound.  He’s also a great teacher and it shows when he’s with kids.

John stands out in the birding community for another reason and it began to trouble him.  John is African-American and is usually the only person of color he encounters while birding.  Why are there so few minorities involved in birding?  Why hasn’t this changed in the last 40 years when African-American and Hispanic involvement in other areas has increased?  Even more troubling, in a few decades this gap will affect U.S. attitudes toward the environment.  Minorities are a growing percentage of the U.S. population and the greater the percentage of people who know nothing about birds, the less care will be shown to them.

A few years ago John decided to do something about this.  More people needed to understand this gap as a problem, more people needed to encourage minorities to go birding, and young birders, no matter what their background, needed mentors.  And so John wrote Birding For Everyone: Encouraging People of Color to Become Birdwatchers to urge us all to get involved.

Next week you can meet John Robinson and learn about his passion for birds and bird watching on OnQ, Monday October 5 at 7:30pm.  And you can buy his book here at ShopWQED.

(cover of Birding For Everyone: Encouraging People of Color to Become Birdwatchers, courtesy, John C. Robinson)

Here’s a flower that I look for in September at Moraine State Park.  Closed or Bottle Gentian (Gentiana andrewsii) likes to grow in damp soil so I risk getting my feet wet when I look for it.  It’s always a pleasant surprise to find it.

The petals of Bottle Gentians never open but a bumblebee can force its way into the flower at the top.  In fact, bumblebees are just about the only insect who wants to – and can – collect the nectar. 

It seems to me this is a lot of trouble to go to for each flower.  It must be worth it.

(photo by Dianne Machesney)

Here’s a flower that blooms in Pennsylvania – and in Acadia National Park in September.  

Pearly Everlasting (Anaphalis margaritaceae) probably got its “everlasting” name because it dries well for use in winter flower arrangements.  It’s a member of the Aster family.

(photo by Dianne Machesney)

Crows and ravens are both corvids but they aren’t friends.  Crows are smaller and can be preyed upon by the smarter and much more powerful ravens.  So crows raise the alarm – if appropriate – when they see a raven.

I say “if appropriate” because crows are careful.  If they think they can’t safely make a ruckus they show great respect and quietly leave the scene.  But if the raven is at a disadvantage, watch out!

That’s how I found a young raven one morning at Acadia National Park.  I heard two ravens calling at dawn and had seen an adult with a youngster the evening before, so I assumed it was them.  One of the ravens landed in a tree near the road, the other flew away.  About ten minutes later six crows showed up.

The raven cawed like a crow as the crows approached but they weren’t fooled and started shouting at the raven.  They surrounded him and scolded him loudly.  They were really annoyed by his attempt to speak “crow.”

The raven changed his tune and made a noise that sounded like a girl shouting “Ho!”  If I hadn’t seen the raven do it I would have thought it was a girl calling to her companions from the hiking trail. 

Ravens are great mimics so perhaps this one learned by example.  He called again and the other raven returned.  The crows quickly dispersed.  His call for help worked, even though it was the sound of a human voice.

(photo by M.I.K.E. via Shutterstock)

The gulls wheeled and dipped above the bayside trees.  They were traveling in circles, swooping up, dropping down, zigging left, zagging right.

As I watched them a passerby asked, “What kind of gulls are those and what are they doing?”

They were ring-billed gulls on fall migration from their inland nesting grounds to their coastal winter zone, and they were hawking insects - some kind of flying ants.

I think of gulls as crab and trash eaters so it was fascinating to see them eating flying bugs.  Then I remembered the story of their relatives, the California gulls, in Utah.

The Mormons arrived in Utah in 1847 to establish a religious community near the Great Salt Lake.  Their first crops were nearly ready to harvest the next summer when thousands of “Mormon crickets” (actually a flightless relative of the katydid, Anabrus simplex) swarmed across the countryside.  These insects eat everything in their path – even their fallen comrades – so the Mormons thought their crops would be lost.  But a flock of California gulls arrived and ate the insects.  The Mormons called this the Miracle of the Gulls and named the California gull the state bird of Utah.

Ring-billed gulls haven’t done enough to be named a state bird but I am grateful they eat flying ants.  Now that I know to what to look for, I see them hawking insects every fall in Maine.  The flying ants swarm and the gulls do what comes naturally.  They eat them.

(photo by Chuck Tague)

September isn’t the best time of year to hear wildlife.  The birds have stopped singing and a lot of animals are quiet as they prepare for winter. 

Not this guy, though.  He’s as loud as can be when he’s worried and my presence in his woods worries him. 

I’m out on a peaceful hike.  There’s no noise in the woods.  I’m looking at the ground, watching my step over roots and rocks when, Yikes!   A red squirrel shouts right above me and I nearly jump out of my skin.  As soon as he’s startled me, he subsides into a long, scolding chatter.   He flicks his tail and stamps his feet.  He is mad!

Red squirrels are highly territorial – even aggressive.  They scold other red squirrels just as much as they scold me.  I’ve even heard one scold a goshawk - a dangerous feat if there ever was one!  I’m not sure what advantage it gives these guys to be noisy around danger, but maybe they just have so much attitude that they don’t know how to shut it off.

This red squirrel sure “got” me.  He had my heart pounding until I figured out what he was.  There might be a louder animal in Maine at another time of year but for an all-around noisy, brash animal you can’t beat this tyke.  I give him the Loudest Animal award.

(photo by Chuck Tague)

The cool thing about going to Maine is that I get to see birds I would never see at home.  This northern gannet is a perfect example.  There’s no way this huge sea bird with a six and a half foot wingspan would be found taking a nose dive in the Monongahela River.  He needs deep saltwater for his livelihood.

I’ve seen northern gannets from the shores of Virginia and Florida in the winter but they’re far away and look like tiny arrowheads.  To get a closeup like this and to see a host of birds who never come near shore, I have to travel far off the coast on a pelagic tour.

Maine Audubon has an annual pelagic tour in October that goes 40 miles off the coast of Bar Harbor, but I’ll be in Pittsburgh then.  What to do?  A Maine birder gave me a tip:  You can see pelagic birds on the Whale Watch.  The goals of these two boat trips are different but the whale watch looks for whales up to 20 miles offshore and pelagic birds are often in the vicinity of whales because both are looking for food-filled patches of ocean.  He also said that if you can pick any day to make the trip, go when the wind is light - otherwise the wave action hides the loafing birds. 

So I went on the whale watch Wednesday morning when the waves were less than a foot high.  The weather was great and I met another birder, Andy Block, who leads birding tours to Costa Rica for Tico Tours.  For a landlubber like me sea birds are often confusing so I was really glad Andy was there to tell me what they were: 

• Sooty shearwaters (life bird!) and greater shearwaters.   
• Pomarine and parasitic jaegars.  New to me: the Pomarine’s tail feathers look twisted.
• Wilson’s storm-petrels, the size of starlings.  They patter the water with their feet.
• Black guillemots, razorbills (wish I’d seen them better) and possibly a puffin (another life bird, riding the waves and very hard to see). 
• Huge rafts of common eiders, mostly brown females and immatures, 
• And my very favorites, the northern gannets, taking nose dives into the sea.

I do enjoy these trips!  And now you see why I was thinking about waves this week.

p.s.  I nearly forgot to mention we did see a whale – one finback – plus harbor seals and harbor porpoises.

(photo by Kim Steininger.  Click on the photo to read Kim’s blog describing how she captured it.)

I studied those pages many times but it was hopeless.  The birds in the pictures were females or juveniles.  Some had wing bars, some did not.  Much as I tried I couldn’t identify those tiny, olive-green and yellow birds. 

For many years I was cowed.  Finally I bought a field guide that didn’t have those pages and solved my problem by avoiding it.

Years later I’m able to identify many fall warblers and I didn’t do it by paying attention to them.  Instead I spent May after May looking at spring warblers.  I got used to identifying the adults, noticing their body shapes, bill sizes and whether they had eye stripes, wings bars or beady eyes. 

Eventually I realized that young warblers have the same traits.  A long, thin-bodied warbler is still long and thin-bodied whether it’s young or old.  An adult warbler who feeds by poking under bark will have babies who do the same.  A warbler with a beady black eye, like this female yellow warbler, has a beady black eye at every age.

I’m still confused by most fall warblers – and a couple of spring ones too – but I enjoy them more since I gave up trying so hard.

(photo of a female yellow warbler by Chuck Tague)