Outside My Window

While the warblers are gone in the winter, where do they live?

Black-throated blue warblers live in the Caribbean: Puerto Rico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Jamaica, and the Bahamas.  Some are at Trinidad.  Some are on the Caribbean coast of the Yucatan, Belize, and Honduras.

In three months, they’ll be back.

Think Spring.

(photo by Cris Hamilton)

It’s been an unusually warm winter with lots of rain and temperatures reaching the 60′s last week.

Because of the weather, the lakes are ice free so the northern birds we’d expect to see aren’t here.

On the other hand, there’s a hotspot of unusual birds in south central Pennsylvania.  The most amazing is this Townsend’s warbler in Cumberland County.

Townsend’s warblers breed in the Pacific Northwest and winter in Mexico.  This one must have had a compass error, so it flew the correct distance to reach Mexico but it went the wrong direction.

It ended up in Carlisle, PA where Meredith Lombard took its picture.

(photo by Meredith Lombard)

Just a little reminder that spring will come and with it pale green leaves and chestnut-sided warblers.

(photo by Bob Greene)

Just when you’ve figured out purple and house finches, an orange finch shows up.  Is it a new species?

No.  It’s a house finch whose diet shows in his feathers.

Many birds acquire their intense red color from carotenoids in their diet.  Flamingoes are pink because their favored food, brine shrimp, is rich in carotene.  Northern cardinals are brighter red when they eat red fruits.  This is true of house finches too.

The key is what they eat and when they eat it.  A house finch can eat red carotenoid food all year, but if he skips it during his molt his new feathers won’t be as red.  House finches molt in July and August.  Back then the orange-colored finch was eating food containing beta carotene, which makes yellow or orange feathers, but not enough red.

Here’s a side view of Mr. Orange and Mr. Red.

Pretty as he is, Mr. Orange will have a poorer selection of ladies this spring.  Female house finches prefer the brightest red males as mates so he’ll end up with a less favored female.

Fortunately he doesn’t have to be orange the rest of his life.  If he eats red carotenoids next summer he’ll be much redder next winter.  It will surely improve his love life.

(photos by Marcy Cunkelman)

Did you ever wonder if it’s the same chickadee visiting your feeder time after time … or one of his relatives?  How many trips does he make every day?  Does he stay away longer when the weather’s nice?  How long?

These questions puzzled the Cornell Lab of Ornithology so Dr. David Bonter of Project Feeder Watch and a team of students to set up special bird feeders and banded the local feeder birds with radio frequency identification tags.

First invented in the 1970′s RFID tags are tiny chips that broadcast unique numbers, one number per chip.  Anyone with a scanner can read the chip’s code.  The chips are so small they can be used to catalog merchandise or be inserted just under the skin of pets to identify them if lost.  My cat got her “chip” at the animal shelter before I adopted her.  If she’s ever lost a shelter can scan her chip, look her up in the cat database, and reunite us.

Cornell Lab taped RFID chips to the birds’ bands, then replaced the perches on their feeders with a coil of wire that can “read” the chips and record the date, time and chip code of each banded bird.  When they download the data they find out who visited the feeder and how often.

They know their feeder birds as individuals now and have the answers to those puzzling questions I asked above.

Watch the video and see.

(video from Cornell Lab of Ornithology)

On Saturday I counted my feeder birds for the Pittsburgh Christmas Bird Count.  I had two goldfinches and a house finch (it was a gloomy day with few birds!) but none of the purple finches I described last week.

And no pine siskins.

No surprise.  Pine siskins are winter visitors from Canada rarely seen in the City of Pittsburgh.  Back home they feast on insects and the buds and seeds of pines, birches and alders but in winter they’re nomadic and irruptive, traveling in flocks whose numbers and location vary from year to year.

Pine siskins are the same size as American goldfinches and often flock with them but they really don’t look the same.

Siskins are heavily streaked in brown and have slender bills.  Sometimes you can see the patch of bright yellow on the edge of their folded wings.

In winter American goldfinches are drab.  They still show their wing bars and the males have faint splashes of yellow on their throats but overall they’re drab yellow-brown with pale bellies and no stripes.

Here’s a photo showing one pine siskin surrounded by three American goldfinches.  The stripes give him away.

My favorite thing about siskins is their call that sounds like a fingernail run along a comb. If you hear the “zzzzzzeet” you know a pine siskin is nearby.

In my limited experience, siskins have bolder personalities than goldfinches.  I’ve seen individual siskins bully goldfinches away from the feeder until they’ve eaten their fill.  Sometimes this behavior attracts your attention to these visiting birds.

Pine siskins aren’t visiting yet — none were seen during the Pittsburgh Christmas Bird Count — but as the weather gets colder they may move into our area.  Watch your feeders this month and you might find a “stripey goldfinch.”

(photos by Marcy Cunkelman)

In the winter we’re sometimes presented with an identification challenge at the bird feeder.  Most of us see house finches on a regular basis because they’re resident throughout the U.S. but now we may see a similar northern visitor:  the purple finch.

Purple finches (Carpodacus purpureus) breed in the coniferous forests of Canada and the northeastern U.S. and move south in winter, sometimes irrupting as far south as Florida.  Unfortunately they’re less common than they used to be.  In eastern North America their population declined from 1966 to 1994 as the house finch population moved west.  Partners In Flight estimates there are about 3 million purple finches in North America.

The house finch (Carpodacus mexicanus) was originally from the western U.S. and Mexico but bird sellers illegally captured and sold them as “Hollywood Finches” in New York City.  In 1940, with law enforcement in pursuit, the dealers released their birds in Central Park.  Since then the eastern population has expanded westward, out-competing purple finches as they go.  House finches are very successful birds.  Partners In Flight estimates there are about 16 million of them.

Purple and house finches look alike but they’re different.

For starters, purple finches are slightly misnamed.  Instead of dark purple the males look as if they were dipped headfirst in rose-colored berry juice (a description attributed to Roger Tory Petersen).  Their heads, necks, backs and wing coverts are rosy-over-brown, their rumps are pure rose-color and their breasts are striped and dotted with rose.

Male house finches are mostly brown with pale red or orange-red painted on their heads, breasts and rumps. Their backs are brown and though their chests are red at the top their flanks are striped with brown.  They look a bit daintier than purple finches with a thinner neck and smaller beak with curved culmen.  In my experience house finches have small beady eyes compared to purple finches, though this may be a regional trait in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Here are some comparison photos of male finches — purple on the left, house on the right.

From above:  The male purple finch on the left has a rosy back, head and neck.  The male house finch has red accents but is overall much browner with a brown back and neck.  NOTE!  If you see a male that’s orange-red, it’s a house finch.  The orange variant is very rare in purple finches.

From the front:  The male purple finch has a rosy breast and sides with rosy stripes or dots of color on his flanks.  The male house finch has brown stripes on his flanks.  The flanks are the clincher.

The females are a little harder to tell apart because they’re simply brown and white.  Again there’s a difference in body shape.  The purple finch has a chunkier neck, larger beak with straight culmen, longer wings. The main difference though is in their markings.

Here’s a comparison photo: female purple finch on the left, female house finch on the right.  The purple finch has white areas at her eyebrow and cheek and sharp brown lines or dots on her breast and flanks.  The house finch is gray-brown overall and blurry:  plain gray-brown head, blurry stripes on her chest and flanks.  NOTE: The colors appear very different in these photos mostly because the lighting was different.

So when you’re presented with purple and house, here’s what to remember.  For the males, look at their flanks. If the flank stripes/dots are rosy it’s a purple finch.  For the females, get an overall impression.  Is she blurry?  She’s probably a house finch.

(all photos by Marcy Cunkelman except the side views of the male and female purple finches are by Chuck Tague)

During the December festival of Saturnalia, Romans threw their social norms out the window.  They partied, gave gifts, ate, drank and gambled.  They also engaged in role reversals in which masters served food to their slaves and the slaves could disregard their masters.

According to Wikipedia, “Romans of citizen status normally went about bare-headed, but for the Saturnalia donned the pileus, the conical felt cap that was the usual mark of a freedman. Slaves, who ordinarily were not entitled to wear the pileus, wore it as well, so that everyone was “pileated” without distinction.”

Just like this woodpecker.

(photo by Dick Martin)

Peace on earth.

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(photo by Steve Gosser)

Now that the leaves are off the trees you can see birds’ nests that were used last summer.  The nests are abandoned now because most birds don’t use them outside the breeding season. 

The cactus wren is an exception.  The male and female build a selection of domed stick nests in the cactuses in their territory, usually in prickly pear or cholla.  You can see a nest hole in the middle of this photo of an old-man cactus.

The nests provide good protection from weather and predators so after the breeding season is over the wrens continue to roost in them.  Most of the time the cactus spines keep the birds safe, though some very careful climbing snakes can successfully raid the nests.

Here’s what the owner of such a nest looks like.  This cactus wren appears to be taking a dim view of the photographer.

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Roosting in one’s nest may be a wren trait.  On Sunday Marcy Cunkelman told me that a Carolina wren is again roosting in the woven nest on her front porch. 

Have you noticed this among wrens in your area?

(photo of nest in the public domain on Wikimedia Commons;  photo of cactus wren by Mark Wagner from Wikimedia Commons.  Click on each photo to see its original.)