Outside My Window

Tundra swans are on the move.

Last Sunday at the Allegheny Front we heard three flocks whoo-ing overhead before we saw them very high above us, heading southeast to the Chesapeake.  That night I heard another flock pass over my house though I couldn’t see them in the dark.  As their voices faded in the distance I heard a lone swan following them.  He had fallen behind.

Swans and geese fly in V formation because it cuts down on wind resistance.  The lead bird takes the brunt of the wind and expends the most energy.  The birds who follow fly just above the wing of the bird ahead of them and ride a cushion of air created by the previous bird’s wing.  Eventually the lead bird tires, falls back in the flock and lets another bird take the point position.  In this way the entire flock shares the burden and is able to fly further without becoming exhausted.

A lone bird gets no benefit from the V formation and, if he’s trying to rejoin the flock, he must fly faster than they do.  If they don’t slow down, how can he ever catch up?

Tundra swans travel in family groups and pause more often during fall migration so their young can regain energy and keep up with the flock.  Juvenile swans are especially vulnerable if they fall behind because they don’t know the migration route.  They learn it from their elders on their first trip south.   If a juvenile becomes separated from the flock, he’s lost.

It’s poignant to see a lone juvenile tundra swan in November.  When I do I always hope another flock will come along to take him in.

(photo by Steve Gosser)

(p.s.  How to recognize juvenile tundra swans:  In this picture there are three adults and four juveniles.  The adults have bright white heads, the juveniles have grey heads that gradually lighten to white on their necks.  Sometimes the juveniles have pink on their bills.)

Because I like birds, people often describe a bird they couldn’t identify and ask me if I can tell them what it was.  This week a request from my sister had me stumped for a while. 

My sister’s house overlooks a salt marsh in coastal Virginia.  From her back windows she can see a host of birds I never see at home:  bald eagles, osprey and great egrets, to name a few.  Mary isn’t a bird watcher but sometimes she sees something unusual and asks me what it is.  This week she wrote:  “A large bird – like a goose - I don’t know – has been hanging out at our marsh for the past 4 weeks by himself and he is all black except for under his tail or wing.  Mom and Dad saw it yesterday and didn’t know what it was either.”

Based on that description I sent her some photo links of brants and greater white-fronted geese.  She wrote back, “Nope isn’t that…I looked again with binoculars (wish they were stronger but they are not).  It has a long neck like a swan.  Black except white under its wings.  Beak is reddish.”

There are no black swans native to North America but they do exist in southern Australia.  I wouldn’t even know about them except that they’re sometimes imported to adorn man-made ponds and I’m familiar with a small flock at the water hazards of the Ponderosa Golf Course in Hookstown, PA.  Google and Wikimedia came up with this picture.  I sent it to my sister and she replied, “100% YES!”

What will happen to this bird?  Who can say?  He’s alone, imported from a remote place, and probably escaped from his former life as a pond ornament.  His large size protects him.  A salt marsh in southern Virginia where it rarely snows is probably just fine for the winter. 

And for me?  Another victory in Remote Bird Identification.

(photo from Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain.  Click on the image to see the original)

That’s the question I ask of all the shorebirds I see.

This year I’m making a new effort to study shorebirds because I’m so bad at identifying them.  My task is made harder by living in Pittsburgh where we have no breeding habitat and no ocean.  My best bet is to visit the places they stop on migration – at least an hour’s drive away. 

Last Sunday at Pymatuning I heard there were dunlin and pectoral sandpipers in the first empty pond at the Fish Hatchery so I went there to see them.  My method is to sit down and watch for a while because they all look the same to me.  Were they really the same species? 

I looked for the standard fieldmarks to separate the sheep from the goats: 

1)  Did they have fancy or colorful plumage?  No.  They were all the color of sand and very dull in their basic (winter) plumage.  I couldn’t see any distinct bibs on these birds as I expected to find on pectoral sandpipers.  Had the pectorals left or was I just really bad at this?

2)  What color were their legs?  Most had dark legs but a few seemed to have yellowish legs like pectoral sandpipers.  Was the yellow a trick of the light or were the pectorals still there?  Were there other species I hadn’t heard about?  Or was I just incredibly bad at this?? 

3)  What color and shape were their bills?  Black bills from face to tip!   Their bills were ‘fat’ at their faces and slightly droopy at the tip.  (Dunlin.)  But some of the bills were a little different and some of the birds would not show me their bills – like the bird in this picture.  Sneaky!

So you see, I still have challenges (one being that I don’t own a scope) and am probably missing some key fieldmarks that would have helped. 

In the end I figured out that all the birds were dunlin.  The pectorals had left.  Whew! 

(photo of a Dunlin by Chuck Tague)

Canada Geese have been moving south for several weeks now.  Yesterday morning I saw hundreds of them resting near Millers Ponds at Pymatuning.  These geese are true migrants, probably just arrived from their breeding grounds in the southern James Bay region of Canada.

I mention them as migrants because in Pennsylvania we have plenty of resident geese.  It seems hard to believe but the subspecies Branta canadensis maxima (Giant Canada Goose) was nearly extinct in 1900 due to overhunting and habitat change.  Many states conducted reintroduction programs to help the geese along.  The birds so did well that there are now nearly 290,000 resident maxima Canada geese in Pennsylvania and their population keeps growing despite a special hunting season instituted in 1992.

Why don’t our resident Canada geese migrate? 

Geese travel in family groups which collect at staging areas to join larger flocks.  The young geese learn their migratory paths from their parents.  If their parents don’t migrate the whole family stays put.  I’ll bet the geese that were reintroduced had no one to teach them to migrate so they and their descendants became residents.

Not so with the geese at Pymantuning.  By 5:00pm when I left Linesville all the migrant geese were gone.

(photo by Cris Hamilton)

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)

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.)

This is no news to people who live by the sea but to those who are landlocked or work indoors the ocean looks powerful but benign when you’re standing on high ground.

Though it’s been 10 days since it happened, all the talk among the tourists at Acadia National Park is about the killer wave from Hurricane Bill on August 23 which swept over spectators near Thunder Hole, injuring more than a dozen people, dragging three into the sea and killing one of them, a seven-year-old girl. 

This picture, linked from Bangor Daily News‘ Maineville, shows the people who survived the wave crouching and trying to get back to dry land.  More spectators had been sitting on the rocks where you see foam churning – but they’re gone.  (Click on the picture to see the original photo and article.)

Tropical Storm Danny was threatening the coast with similar weather when we arrived in New England on Saturday.  We spent a very wet, windy, gray day in New Hampshire and have had beautiful weather ever since.  We’ve had no desire to look at waves.  We hear they’re 1-2 feet high today.  Good!

(photo by Paul Colby linked from Bangor Daily News’ Maineville)

…but not time to migrate yet.

With their head feathers raised, these great blue heron chicks look quite alarmed.  Were they begging for food?  Worried about an intruder?  Thinking of leaving the nest?   They’re certainly old enough to do all three. 

Great blue heron chicks fledge when they’re 11 to 12 weeks old.  By this time of year they’ve left the nest and are independent of their parents.  The juveniles disperse widely and may even move north beyond the great blues’ nesting range.  They won’t fly south until September so you may see them in some unusual places at this point.

The juveniles are the same size as the adults so how do you tell the difference?  Look at their heads.  Juveniles have all black feathers on the tops of their heads, the adults have white feathers at the very top.  Another hint is that juveniles have very stripey bellies.  This field mark doesn’t always work because great blue herons take three years to mature.  I’ll bet a two-year-old doesn’t look so stripey.

And I’ll bet a two-year-old doesn’t looks as “juvenile” as these guys.

(photo by Kim Steininger)

It’s vacation time and many of you are heading for the beach.  Some of you have a favorite shoreline you visit every year.  So do these guys.

These are lesser yellowlegs, some of the first birds to migrate in the fall.  They’re already on the move, passing through western Pennsylvania right now.

Fall migration in July?  That’s right.  These birds are full of surprises.

• Lesser yellowlegs are shorebirds but you won’t find them on the sand.  The shores they look for must be muddy.
• They spend the winter at wetlands and salt marshes along the U.S. coast and throughout Central and South America, but they nest in boreal forest wetlands in Alaska and northwest Canada.
• They hide their nests on the ground under dense, low vegetation.  They’re not out in the open.
• Their young are precocial and walk off the nest as soon as all of them have hatched and dried.
• The first birds we see on migration – in mid-July – are likely to be female.  Mother yellowlegs leave the breeding grounds only a few days after their babies have walked off the nest.  It’s up to dad to protect and guide the young until they fledge 22-23 days after hatching.
• Dad leaves them too.  Only a few days after they fledge their fathers depart on migration, so only juvenile birds are on the breeding grounds at the end of the season.  The young gather at staging areas until they get the urge to leave.

If you live far from the ocean, as I do in western Pennsylvania, it’s a treat to see these shorebirds near home.  And if you’re on your way to a sandy beach, keep in mind you’ll have to find a muddy one if you want to see the lesser yellowlegs.

(photo by Chuck Tague)

That’s a pretty good translation of what this bird is saying.

He’s 5-11 days old and spends a lot of time shouting for food. 

His noise would be a life-threatening disadvantage except that his nest is part of a community, so even if his parents are away collecting food there are other adults around to keep the colony safe.

At this age he looks wild and crazy.  His juvenal pin feathers are tipped with white down and his head is covered with rusty feathers.  At 24 days he’ll look a little less crazy and be walking so well that he won’t stay in his nest at all.  At that point he’ll be a few days away from fledging – and he’ll still be shouting.  

Fledging doesn’t shut him up.  He has to learn how to feed himself and will be almost 60 days old before he can do that on his own.  Two and a half months from egg to independence is a long time in the bird world.  Compare that to 25 days for a robin and his parents’ commitment is truly amazing.

So what bird is this?  He’s a tricolored heron. 

You won’t see this chick in Pennsylvania – they nest in Florida and along the Gulf Coast – but after the breeding season some birds fly north as far as Canada.  Tricolored herons hunt small fish by stealth so they have to leave before the ice comes. 

Pennsylvania is just a lark for a kid like him.  Yo!

(photo by Kim Steininger)