Sandhill cranes and snow geese at Bosque del Apache.

A beautiful reason to visit New Mexico in the winter.

(photo by Kim Steininger)

This amazing block of ice floated to the sea in Iceland.

Its beauty tempted two photographers to try to capture its image.   Click here to see what happened when they set up their tripods.

(photo by Andreas Tille, a featured picture on Wikimedia Commons)

Here’s a bird that surprised everyone.

White ibises usually live along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts from North Carolina through Florida, south to Central and South America.  They also breed in Louisiana and southern Arkansas but in winter they move further south.

Not all of them do.  This immature white ibis showed up at Kaercher Lake in Hamburg, Pennsylvania on November 11 and has spent the early winter there.

Though surprising, this out of range behavior is not unheard of.  Cornell’s Birds of North American Online says that white ibises are highly nomadic.  Their “postbreeding dispersals often take individuals outside normal nonbreeding range” as far north as New York, Vermont and Quebec, as far west as Wyoming, Colorado and North Dakota.

Young birds are more likely to go north and inland.  Banded individuals have been found as much as 1,540 miles from home.  That’s the distance from Altoona, PA to Denver, CO.  These birds really travel!

Interestingly, white ibises don’t nest until they’re three years old so immature birds have a couple of years in which to wander.

Who knows where this ibis came from or where he’ll end up?  For now he’s unusual.  As of Tuesday (Dec 27) he’s still at Kaercher Creek Park.

(photo by Charlie Hickey)

Grandidieri’s baobab (Adansonia grandidieri) grows only in the western part of Madagascar, an island off the coast of Africa.   As is typical for baobabs it has a very wide trunk compared to its crown.  Of the eight baobab species on earth, six are endemic to Madagascar.

If surrounded by a forest this tree would not stand out.  At 80 feet tall it’s about the height of a red oak and would blend in from a distance.  But its trunk is 10 feet wide, three times the diameter of a red oak.  This is one fat tree!

The IUCN says that Grandidieri’s baobab probably occurred in dry deciduous forests close to water but is now found in degraded agricultural land.  Sadly this is typical of Madagascar where deforestation is a huge problem.

That’s why this baobab is endangered … and more unusual than it ought to be.

(photo by Bernard Gagnon on Wikimedia Commons.  Click on the photo to see the original.)

He’s related to our wood ducks.  Can you see the resemblance?

Mandarins are originally from Asia but so beautiful that they’re often raised in captivity.  Escapees sometimes form a wild population, as they have in Britain, Ireland and a few places in the U.S.

This one is swimming through the reflection of the Jungle Place at the Hanover Zoo, Hanover, Germany.

(photo by Michael Gäbler on Wikimedia Commons, selected as picture of the day for 3 September 2010.  Click on the image to see the original.)

As the sunlight shines through this leaf, each vein is illuminated.

Alocasia sanderiana is beautiful up close and from afar.

Its leaves are arrow-shaped, dark green, and very shiny with prominent pale green veins.  The leaf edges are so amazingly wavy that in English it’s called the kris plant, named for the kalis (or kris) daggers of its homeland.

Here’s what the whole leaf looks like:

Alocasia sanderiana is native to the Philippines but is critically endangered in the wild.  It grows in only two locations, both legally protected, but the protection is not enforced.  It’s existence is threatened by logging and by being collected as a house plant.

Ironically, if the kris plant disappears from the wild, its beauty will save it from extinction because it’s been propagated “in captivity” for many, many years.

(close-up of an Alocasia leaf by Joan Guerin; whole-leaf photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Jungle Eagle follows filmmaker Fergus Beeley as he monitors a harpy eagle nest in Venezuela’s Orinoco River valley.  Over a period of nine months he shows us the life of an eaglet and his family, from newly hatched chick to young adulthood.  The story is dramatic.  The lifestyle of these eagles makes it dangerous.

Harpy eagles live in the South American rainforest and are the largest eagle in the western hemisphere.  They dwell at the top of the canopy and eat monkeys and sloths from the trees. They kill by surprise.

The adults are top predators but the young are vulnerable.  When the chick is small his mother must guard him.  Even the monkeys that become his food could eat him.

Fergus Beeley shows this by filming from a tree stand and using a nestcam.  Peregrine nest watchers will see parallels between the harpy eagles and our favorite raptor:

• The mother bird guards the chick and won’t leave him while he’s small.
• She calls her mate to bring food.  “Come NOW!”
• When he delivers a meal, she snatches it and barely says thank you.
• Though a powerful raptor, she is very tender with her chick.
• The baby grows into a fully feathered teenager who begs from his parents.

Inevitably there are nestcam problems, but they’re more dangerous to fix than anything we ever encounter.  Peregrines fiercely defend their nests and harpy eagles do, too.  But harpy eagles are huge and they’re skilled at killing primates.  And what are humans?  Large primates!

In the end the eaglet reaches adulthood and starts to hunt on his own.  As adults, harpy eagles are powerful, self sufficient birds.  The real danger they face is extinction because people cut down the rainforest these birds require for life.

Watch Jungle Eagle on PBS Nature on Wednesday, November 9 to see beautiful footage of our hemisphere’s most powerful bird.  On WQED the show is at 8:00pm EST.

(photo of a harpy eagle from PBS Nature)

The forest canary (Serinus scotops) is a seed eater who can be attracted to backyard bird feeders.

Right now it’s spring where he lives. Time to lay eggs.

After yesterday’s snow it’s hard to imagine this is possible — even on the other side of the world.

(photo by Alan Manson from Wikimedia Commons.  Click on the image to see the original.)

After Scott Kinsey reported an American white pelican at Pymatuning last Monday, curious birders have made the trip to see it.

If you who live in Florida or west of the Mississippi this may seem strange.  What’s the big deal about a pelican?  To Pittsburghers, pelicans are rare.

American white pelicans are inland birds who breed at brackish or freshwater lakes in western North America and winter on the Gulf and Pacific coasts.  Even in winter they avoid the open ocean.  Their migration route takes them through the Great Plains and intermountain West but their range map indicates no overland path to Florida.

How do they get there?

On very rare occasions they fly over southwestern Pennsylvania.

My only sighting in Pittsburgh occurred in June 2003.  While looking for the Pitt peregrines I saw a dot in the sky heading south.  It was a very large white bird with black primaries and a pale point where its head should be.  PABIRDS helped me with the identification:  American white pelican.

What was that pale point where its head should have been?  Pelicans fly with their heads tucked in (shown above).  All I could see from the ground was its beak!

Moral of the story:  Keep looking up.

(photo by Chuck Tague)

Whooping cranes are so rare that there are less than 600 of them on earth: 162 are in captivity, 44 are non-migratory and approximately 278 nest in Wood Buffalo National Park, Canada and migrate to Aransas National Wildlife Refuge (NWR), Texas. The rest spend the summer in Wisconsin and migrate to Florida on a route they learned from ultralite aircraft.

Back in 1941 whooping cranes nearly went extinct. In the wild their population had dwindled to only 15 migratory birds (21 total) so scientists and crane lovers began a captive breeding program to bring them back.  The Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership (WCEP) works to reintroduce them to their eastern range.

Like many animals, whooping cranes imprint on the creature that raises them from babyhood.  In the wild that would be their parents, but in a captive breeding program where adult birds are unavailable humans must dress in crane costumes and use mute gestures so the young birds learn to be cranes.

Thankfully the program increased the eastern whooping crane population but the new birds were non-migratory.  Since cranes learn to migrate from their parents who would teach them?  Enter the ultralite.

Ultralite aircraft are like kites with motors, just a little larger than the humans who fly them.  The first ever whooper-ultralite migration occurred in Idaho in 1997.  Before leading endangered eastern whoopers, pilots Bill Lishman and Joe Duff practiced by leading young Canada geese and sandhill cranes.  In 2001 Operation Migration they led the first group of young whoopers from Necedah NWR, Wisconsin to Chassahowitza NWR, Florida.

The young cranes memorize the route on their way south and fly back to Wisconsin on their own in the spring.  By now there are adult cranes who know the route so WCEP has a Direct Autumn Release project which releases some of each year’s young with the Wisconsin adults so they learn to migrate by following them.

The video above from the mid-2000′s tells the whoopers’ migration story.  Shortly after this video was made, 17 of the 18 whoopers from the 2006 fall migration were killed by violent storms that hit the wildlife refuge one night in February 2007.  The 18th died three months later.  Fortunately this was the only tragedy of its kind but it underscores how vulnerable small populations can be.

This year’s cohort of 10 young cranes began their journey on October 9 at White River Marsh Wildlife Area, Wisconsin and are headed for St. Marks National Wildlife Reserve, Florida.  So far they’ve made little progress because strong gusty winds have kept them grounded for days.  This week they were still at stopover #1!

Follow their journey here on the Operation Migration field journal.  Click here for a video from the ultralite’s perspective.  (You may want to turn the sound down; the ultralite motor is loud.)

Learn more at Journey North’s Whooper page.

(video from Assignment Earth via YouTube)