Outside My Window

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been to Wakodahatchee Wetlands so often in late December that it’s pretty hard for me to see a Life Bird(*) there, but bad weather did me a favor.

Our Florida vacation was supposed to end on the day after Christmas but if you remember the weather on December 26 a winter storm was wreaking havoc on everyone’s travel plans in Pittsburgh.  Our flight was canceled.  We were forced to stay in Florida one more day.

Of course I went birding.  I tried to find razorbills at Boynton Beach Inlet but the big flocks had already left for the Gulf Coast.  (Read here about the razorbills’ amazing invasion in Florida.)

On the 27th I had just a few hours to absorb birds so I went to Wakodahatchee.

Among the flocks of adult and juvenile black-bellied whistling ducks there was a bird that didn’t match.  I checked my field guide and behold!  A Life Bird!  A fulvous whistling-duck.

If I hadn’t been there that morning I wouldn’t have seen him.  Too bad I had to spend an extra day in sunny Florida. 

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

p.s. Some definitions:
A “Life Bird” is a species I’ve never seen before in my whole life.
Fulvous is a color — the color of this duck.

I missed him the first time.

Over the Christmas holiday my family had a mini reunion in Boca Raton, Florida.  Between bouts of happy socializing and overeating I went birding at one of my favorite places, Wakodahatchee Wetlands.

On December 23 I spent five hours there and didn’t even notice a very special bird.  Perhaps that’s because he was trying to fit in and, to my untrained eye, he succeeded.

The next day I read the Florida “Birdbrains” bird reports and found out I’d missed a neotropic cormorant hanging out on the double-crested cormorants’ nesting island.  He’d been there a while, had a predictable perch, and was easy to see.  I just hadn’t noticed him.

What a disappointment!  He would have been a Life Bird (a species I’d never seen before).  I went back to Wakodahatchee at my next opportunity and this time I knew what to look for.

Neotropic cormorants (Phalacrocorax brasilianus) range from South America to Texas and Louisiana but are rare in Florida.  They’re very similar to double-crested cormorants except they’re slightly smaller, sometimes paler, and have a white line where the lower beak meets the chin.  You can see this in Dan Irizarry’s photo above (double-crested on left, neotropic on right) but it’s not particularly noticeable when he’s one bird preening on a crowded island of similar birds.

On my next visit I found him.  He was blending in with the larger birds and able to regain his favorite perch even when a double-crested cormorant used it in his absence.

As a bird out of place, he was trying to fit in.  In my opinion he did a pretty good job of it.

(photo of double-crested and neotropic cormorants at Apopka, Florida by Dan Irizarry)

If you were looking for the flamingo’s closest living relative it’s unlikely that you’d ever pick a grebe, but it’s true.

As DNA testing became perfected in the late 20th century, scientists naturally turned their attention to birds.  What does bird DNA show about their relationships?  The studies told us more than we bargained for.

Pictured above are a pied-billed grebe (Podilymbus podiceps) and an American flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber).   Based on DNA research (van Tuinen, et al, 2001) the families of grebes (Podicipediformes) and flamingoes (Phoenicopteriformes) are each other’s closest living relatives.  Studies indicate they have a common ancient ancestor which is now extinct.

This finding was only the tip of the iceberg.  In many cases DNA testing confirmed previous taxa but in some cases unrelated birds were shown to be related, previously related birds were pulled asunder, taxonomic order had to be revised and scientific names were changed.

This makes for an ever-changing array of new field guides with new names and new orders.  The black-bellied whistling duck is now the first bird on the ABA Checklist.  Years ago the common loon came first.

I love all this new information but renaming the warblers was more than I could bear.  I wish they’d tossed out Setophaga and named them all Dendrioca.

(Inspiration for this Tenth Page is from page 70-73 of Ornithology by Frank B. Gill.    Pied-billed grebe photo by Chuck Tague.  Flamingo photo by Aaron Logan on Wikimedia Commons)

This gorgeous video of a nighttime coral reef was shot by Steffen Beyer of Five Dive Gear using specially filtered blue lights.

The creatures are spectacular.  The music is soothing.

Enjoy.

(video by Steffen Beyer of Five Dive Gear)

p.s. If you don’t have 9 minutes to watch it, click at 5:55 to see the fantastic creatures that appear at minute 6.

For more information on how and why these animals glow click here or here.  To explore more photos and the gear that made the video possible visit fivedivegear.com.

p.p.s. Thanks to Wanderin’ Weeta for pointing out this video.

Birds molt at least once a year to replace worn out feathers.  This process permits them to wear different plumages.

Some birds, like the American robin, look the same before and after.  Others radically change their appearance by replacing their fancy breeding feathers with plainer plumes.  Male scarlet tanagers are an extreme example:  They’re red while breeding and green while not.

Molt and plumage terminology was standardized in 1959 by Humphrey and Parkes who divided plumage names into three main types. (*)

• Juvenal plumage is worn by young fledged birds.
• Basic plumage is what birds acquire during their annual post-breeding molt.  We often call this “non-breeding” or “winter” plumage but these terms are inaccurate.  Adult robins are always in basic plumage even when they’re breeding, and “winter” describes the weather North America is experiencing while the bird is away.  To South American birders, a green scarlet tanager is in summer plumage.
• Alternate plumage is optional.  Some birds don’t undergo a second molt but those who do put on their finest feathers in time for the breeding season.  This is often called breeding plumage.

In some species it takes several years for the young to mature so they progress through as many plumage cycles as it takes to become adults.  Young ring-billed gulls go through three cycles:  Basic 1, Alternate 1, Basic 2, Alternate 2, Basic 3, Alternate 3. Gulls are complicated.

American avocets aren’t quite so complex.  They molt their wing feathers once a year but change out their head and neck feathers twice a year from basic plumage (white) to alternate plumage (ochre) for the breeding season.

The avocets above are lined up in perfect sequence during their post-breeding molt in August.  The bird standing on the left is closest to basic plumage, the bird on the right is closest to alternate plumage, and the bird in the middle is halfway between.

Below, another flock has the lead bird closest to alternate plumage and the trailing bird closest to basic.

Look closely at each bird and you can see that the wings of the 1st, 3rd and 4th birds have ragged trailing edges because they’re molting their wing feathers.  The 2nd and last birds have perfect wings, so my guess is that they’re juveniles.  Juveniles don’t molt their fresh new wing feathers until they’re a year old.

When avocets have completed their molt into basic plumage their heads and necks are gray-white like this bird photographed in September.

Experts in molt and plumage can probably tell the age of these birds by their appearance.

Not I.  Aging shorebirds by plumage is my final frontier.

(Inspiration for this Tenth Page is from page 110 of Ornithology by Frank B. Gill.
All photos by Bobby Greene)

(*) If you’re a plumage expert, please feel free to correct me.  I’m still learning!

P.S. TO PEREGRINE FANS:  Molting is a wonderful thing.  Last May the male peregrine at Pitt, E2, chased off an intruder but not before this opponent damaged one of his primary feathers.  This gave him a “hole” in his wing.  Over the summer he completed his annual pre-basic molt and grew all new feathers.  Now his wings are perfect.  No gap.

Yesterday I wrote about copepods and polynyas so I could introduce this bird, the dovekie.

Though I visit Maine every September and even take pelagic trips in the Gulf of Maine, I have never seen a dovekie.  That’s because they breed on islands in the High Arctic (Baffin Island, Greenland, Iceland, etc) and don’t leave their breeding grounds until late August.  At that point they’re molting and flightless so they drift on the southbound current to spend the winter in the North Atlantic.  They usually aren’t seen off the coast of Maine until November.

Dovekies (Alle alle), also called little auks, are cute little seabirds the size of starlings but much fatter — two to three times the weight of a starling.  They are so numerous that there are tens of millions of them in the North Atlantic in winter.

The two shown above are in breeding plumage at Svalbard.  Their eyes are black but look white in this photo because they’re half closed.  Perhaps they’re whispering sweet nothings to each other.

In the U.S. we only see dovekies in winter plumage.  Here’s a video of one off the coast of North Carolina in January that gives you a sense of how tiny these birds are.

In the breeding season dovekies depend on cold water and ice.  Copepods are their favorite food — sometimes their only food — so they locate their breeding colonies near polynyas where copepods are plentiful.   In a curious way they’re an edge species, preferring the fertile edge where ice meets open water.

Dovekies are so numerous that you’d think that nothing could threaten their survival.  Unfortunately they are easy to hunt at their breeding colonies and global climate change may lower their breeding success.

But who knows?  Maybe The Big Melt will help dovekies for a while.

(photo by Michael Haferkamp on Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original)

There’s a bird I want to tell you about but his lifestyle involves words so unusual that we have to learn a new vocabulary before I can introduce him.

The bird eats copepods and is fond of polynyas.

What the heck is a copepod?

The word “copepod” actually describes the animal it names.  “Cope” is from the Greek word for “oar” and “pod” is Greek for foot.  So a copepod is literally an Oar-Foot.

Copepods are tiny, usually transparent, crustaceans with oar-like antennae. They live in wet places:  oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, swamps, bogs, and even in the water in caves.  They are very small, often microscopic, and very numerous.  There are 13,000 known species.  The vast majority live in the ocean.

And, yes, they are small, typically only 1-2 millimeters long (0.04 to 0.08 inches).  Living at the bottom of the animal food chain, they ultimately support creatures as big as whales and are the primary food source of the bird who spawned this thread.

In the Arctic, copepods are especially plentiful in polynyas, which is why the bird is fond of polynyas.

A polynya is a big hole of open water surrounded by ice.  The word comes from the Russian word for hollow.  (Click here to see two polynyas in Antarctica and a photo of their green, algae-laden water.)

Some polynyas are permanent, others are seasonal.  Off the coast of Canada, the North Water Polynya opens every spring between Ellesmere Island and Greenland.  When it does, new sunlight entering the water causes a microalgae bloom, the copepods swarm to eat it, and our mystery bird arrives to eat the copepods.

But more about him later.

(copepod photo by Ume Kils on Wikimedia Commons.  Click on the image to see the original)

Dear Readers,

A question has been puzzling me for a long time and the answers I’ve found on the Internet are unsatisfactory, so I’m asking you.

What is the difference between a duck and a goose?

Is a duck smaller than a goose?  Not always.  The Muscovy duck is much larger than a Ross’s goose.

Does a goose have a longer neck or legs?  Not always.  Consider these black-bellied whistling ducks.

When we see a duck or a goose, intuitively we are able to say, “That’s a duck” or “That’s a goose.”

But how do we know the difference?

Please let me know by posting a comment.

(Credits:  mallard silhouette by Vlado on Freedigitalphotos.net, goose silhouette from Shutterstock,  Muscovy duck by B.Walker on Wikimedia Commons, Ross’s goose by Alan Vernon on Wikimedia Commons, Black-bellied whistling ducks by Sultry on Wikimedia Commons)

p.s. See the comments! The answer is there!

Ice has been in the news lately from its stunning disappearance in the Arctic Ocean this summer to it’s dramatic melting around the world chronicled in the new documentary Chasing Ice.

What will we lose when the ice disappears?  What birds depend on the Arctic climate?

I don’t know if this bird will suffer but I can tell you it depends on the tundra and tundra depends on ice.

The long-tailed jaeger (Stercorarius longicaudus) is a holarctic bird who spends the winter over the open ocean in the southern hemisphere, often at the edge of the continental shelf.  Because they migrate over the ocean, long-tailed jaegers are exceedingly rare in Pennsylvania having been documented only three times.

Long-tailed jaegers nest in the Arctic where their breeding success depends on an abundance of lemmings and voles.  In the High Arctic of North America they depend on a single species: the collared lemming.  If there aren’t enough lemmings, long-tailed jaegers don’t even bother to breed.

As the ice melts, the tundra will change and eventually be overtaken by woody plants. Will this reduce the population of lemmings?

If it does, long-tailed jaegers will stop breeding and eventually disappear … with the ice.

(photo by Jerzy Strzelecki on Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original)

Belted kingfishers don’t nest in Schenley Park but they do visit during migration.  Panther Hollow stream and lake are their favorite haunts.

Visiting kingfishers shuttle up and down the valley to find favorable fishing spots.  They perch above the man-made lake and stare at the cloudy water.  The fish are hard to see.  If they don’t catch a meal at the lake the birds head down Junction Hollow to the Monongahela River.

Junction Hollow must be amazing to kingfishers because it’s a waterless valley.  Four Mile Run was there but it’s buried beneath the playing fields and bike trail.  Those amenities are making the best of an unnatural situation.

The Run was buried long ago but any hope of daylighting it was dashed in 1989 when Sol Gross bought 28 acres of Junction Hollow and further buried the valley under construction debris generated by his demolition company.  The City stopped his dumping and everyone ended up in court, but the damage was done.  The creek is so far underground now that it’s way too expensive to remove the debris.  Hence the fields.

Kingfishers come and go through Schenley Park in the fall.  Gregory Diskin found this female at the lake on September 30, then saw none until last week.

When the lake freezes this bird will leave for a site with open water.  Until then, keep your ears open for the rattling call of an occasional fisher.

(photo by Gregory Diskin)

p.s.  Want to see a kingfisher soon?  Check Duck Hollow where Nine Mile Run empties into the Monongahela River.

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