12/26/11
We were stuck at 19 species and getting towards
the end of the walk when I mentioned that the
difference between respectable and not for a
winter walk was 20 species, absent major
meteorological constraints. As if stung by the
concept that such a Pastorale could possibly lack
in respectability, Alan suddenly peels off the
standard route, strides into the Red door seating
area, not a common action for him, and conjures
up a classic looking downy woodpecker on one of
the sycamores. Then, just to insure against a
miscount, he picks up a house sparrow foraging
under one of the tables. We were at 21! We
added our Millikan pond common yellowthroat after
an extensive search through the adjacent bushes
and this brought us to our final tally of 22. It
could have been even better as we didn't get any
hawks. I saw a regally perching red-tailed hawk
at the corner of Wilson and California as I was
leaving campus. It was just after the walk but
was, unfortunately, not a legitimate sighting
because I had stopped off at my office before
heading out. Although twenty-two is well below
the record of 28 for week 52, it was also safely
above the median of 19. We were respectable!
See the plots at
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/species_time.html
and
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/two_plots.htm
We ended the year with a new walker, Chip
O'Connor. Chip is the 130th walker to
participate in the bird walk and he brought the
added filip of stories from his childhood on
Midway Island. My favorite was the biking on asphalt
story. If you were a kid biking on one of the
few asphalt roadways that Midway had at the time
and you heard a clop, clop, clop from behind, you
had to get out of the way in a big hurry. An
albatross, which has a ten-foot wingspan (or more
depending on species), was using the road as a
runway and, having invested a lot of energy into
building lift-off speed, he was not about to stop
for anything as puny as a young cyclist. The
only thing remotely like it in California would
be asking your six year old to stand in the way
of a California condor taking off. It's just not
something you want to get tangled up in and you
definitely wouldn't try it more than once.
We had several interesting sightings in
addition to the common yellowthroat. We saw a
Cassin's vireo foraging in the Morrisroe trees,
likely the same bird we picked up across the
street from Morrisroe a couple of weeks ago.
Perhaps more surprisingly, we also saw a hermit
thrush up in mid-canopy, in the same area.
Hermit thrushes are predominately frugivores but
this bird seemed to be gleaning (i.e., acting
more like a warbler than a hermit thrush). Also,
we usually capture hermit thrushes on or near the
ground. We got a second, more normal acting,
hermit thrush at the north end of campus behind
the tree with the active bee hive. Hermit
thrushes have fairly small winter territories if
they decide to take one (some are floaters), half
an acre or so. A double sighting potentially
indicates that we will have some enhanced chances
for this species over the next few weeks.
The Cassin's vireo was exciting but the birds of
the week are the three dark-eyed juncos we saw
along Holliston foraging under Indian hawthorns.
This was the tenth junco sighting for the year,
which is the best ever (previous record of 8 in
2007 and 2009; only 3 last year). The
distribution of sightings for the year was
similar to what you might have expected simply
based on Alan's probability distribution for this
species. They made their last appearance of
Spring in week 13 of this year and their first
appearance in the Fall in week 46. Dark eyed
juncos used to be a fairly rare sighting and, in
some years, we had no sightings at all. Over the
last four years, however, dark eyed juncos have
been a 30-50% probability bird between
mid-November and late March. The Oregon junco,
the subspecies of interest for Caltech (I have
seen pink sided juncos in the local hills but
never on campus), is such a distinctive little
bird that it seems likely that the recent
increase in sightings reflect a real increase in
the wintering population at Caltech.
Classically, dark-eyed juncos were viewed as textbook examples of
seasonally monogamous birds but the fact that a
male junco will often go out of his way to roost
inside the territory of another male rather than
in his own, sneaking in near dusk to avoid a
challenge, suggested that the standard Ozzie and
Harriet scenario for this species might not be as
robust as people thought. Those males knew what
they are doing even if we didn't. DNA tests
suggest that about 20% of dark eyed junco
offspring arise from extra-pair fertilization
(aka affairs). We probably see mostly females
and juveniles as the males tend to winter further
north than the females, at least east of the
Rockies. There are, however, also breeding
populations in the local mountains that, like
chickadees, may migrate down to Caltech for the
winter.
So, it's the end of the year. One element that
stands out for me is nine weeks of mountain
chickadee sightings, a total matching the sum of
all previous chickadee sightings drawn from two
dozen years of walks. This was not some
individual, like our common yellowthroat, who
decides to winter at Caltech, thereby providing
an anomalous, individually driven, collection of
sightings (our yellowthroat has, incidentally,
doubled our total of common yellowthroat
sightings). The chickadees were a singular
feature of multiple birds visiting the campus
over an extended period of time, a true oddity.
2011 was the year of the chickadee. We
admittedly also had some rare for Caltech bird
sightings like an American pipit and a great blue
heron. We had a summer resident orange-crowned
warbler who gifted Hannah and myself with a
wonderful song, perhaps a personal favorite. We
also had the nonsighting of a whimbrel who spent
a few days on campus but, unfortunately, not over
the Monday we needed to bring in a 121st Caltech
bird walk species.
The above events are all notable but, for me, the
major salient of the year was neither bird nor
beast. It was a moment as arbitrary as a whim
and as subtle as a baby's breath, with no more
meaning than a period might leave a sentence. It
was a marking end in a flowing dream. If you
would like to see the ghost of it, go to the
individual walker portion on the Caltech birding
site and check the summary column for total walks
under Alan Cummings. You will see that Alan's
walk total has just passed 1000. A thousand! As
I said, I focus on the mote of a nothing, an
arbitrary number, less than, hopefully much less
than, whatever might come and a merest jaunt
beyond 999 or before 1001. So why would
somebody like myself, who refuses to make a life
list for birds, find something as mundane as the
number of times somebody has wandered around the
campus so intriguing? It is the time that calls
to me and the dedication and determination. It
is, in a simple act, an affirmation and an
incubation. Had he just started walking east,
Alan would be somewhere around Atlanta by now, a
kind of Lummis in reverse.
Only Alan can tell you what the walk means to him
but I can say a little about what it means to me
and what I think some of the implications for
others might be. Personally, I find it curiously
soothing. It moves my mind out of whatever
morning rut I'm stuck in. There is always, well
almost always, a highlight of some sort, whether
it be a rare bird or an unusually good look or an
interesting comment and this carries me through
the day like a loamy soil. If you are open to an
experience like this, you can never be jaded by
it. In many ways, it's not even about the
birding. A great bird walk at Caltech will yield
thirty or so species, which would be a poor
winter day at Hahamonga or Eaton Canyon and a
terrible, the sky is falling, kind of day at
Bolsa Chica. Instead, I see the Caltech bird
walk as an incubator for birders. Enough strong
enough birders go on the walk so that, if you are
new to birding but interested in learning about
the birds around you, this is an easy, low-key
way to start. That bewildering array of feeder
birds in your back yard will sort itself out and
you will better appreciate the oddities in type
and behavior. Also, given some Caltech bird
walks as a base, the new birds you see in a
birding hotspot, or on a local Audubon trip, or
even on a trip to Arizona, are not so
overwhelming. You will already know many of the
species you see and you will have developed
techniques, beyond asking the resident expert,
for pinning down birds you don't know. It makes
the experience more pleasurable.
The number of walkers on the Caltech birding walk
has been increasing but many walkers over the
years have "graduated" to more formal species
intensive walks with more formal birding
organizations. They gradually stop coming to the
Caltech bird walk because, at least from a purely
birding perspective, you can bag many more
species in less time elsewhere. The Caltech walk
becomes an inefficient time sink. This
phenomenon reminds me a lot of graduate students.
They barely get to the point where they are
becoming useful and then they leave. I guess you
could say that they fledge. To me, this is an
important part of Alan's legacy. He has fledged
a lot of birders. If I see leaves grown and
growing, known and knowing, in a game or seeking
solitude. If some have drawn their own essential
urns of light, are they still not the children of
nurture. This is Alan as an incubator.
I have a special privilege in that I get to write
up the bird reports for walks that I go on. It
provides me with an excuse to acquire some depth
of knowledge about a particular species (the bird
of the week) and allows me to engage in a form of
writing that I had almost forgotten. When I was
younger, I thought seriously about going down the
creative writing track but chose a scientific
path instead. My writing became tight and
accurate. My writing vocabulary, exclusive of
scientific terms, became simpler. The vigias
were lost, my inner poet quiescent. With the
bird walk reports, I get to write in a free
flowing form. I don't have to worry about being
overly precise. If I happen to feel poetic, I
can just let it fly as it comes to me rather than
suppressing the urge or later excising the
verbiage. My inner poet may still be groggy but
I sense that he has become a little happier.
So, in the end, the walk is the relationship you
want it to be and every person derives a
different form of pleasure from the fruit it
chooses to bear for you. It may be exercise, a
social interaction, a break, an opportunity for
solitude or contemplation, a game, or a twining
bit of nature. Regardless of what you get out of
the walk, the catalyst is Alan. We have a
thousand and one catalysts of Alan.
The date: 12/26/11
The week number: 52
The walk number: 1123
The weather: 72°F, sunny
The walkers: Alan Cummings, Jim Carlblom, Travis
Cummings, Chip O'Connor, John Beckett
The birds (22):
Scrub Jay
Northern Mockingbird
House Sparrow
Mourning Dove
House Finch
Anna's Hummingbird
American Crow
European Starling
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Red-masked Parakeet
Spotted Towhee
Black Phoebe
Hermit Thrush
Cassin's Vireo
Lesser Goldfinch
American Goldfinch
Dark-eyed Junco
Bushtit
American Robin
Cedar Waxwing
Downy Woodpecker
Common Yellowthroat
-- John Beckett
Respectfully submitted,
Alan Cummings
12/31/11
Happy New Year to all!
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/index.html
12/19/11
It was a cold walk at 55 F but the birds were pretty hot.
We got 26 species, just one short of the record
of 27. So, not half bad.
See the plots at
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/species_time.html
and
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/two_plots.htm
We had a number of highlight birds and one
highlight moment. The highlight birds were the Snowy Egret, Say's Phoebe,
Mountain Chickadee, and Common Yellowthroat.
The Common Yellowthroat was seen on the way back to Cahill by
Darren (who first heard it), Travis, and me. Darren
has a world-class ear for birding. He first heard it
and then we all did. To me it was kind of like a wren
call and actually at one point Darren said it might be a wren,
but finally he and Travis got enough of a look to see
the yellow -- it was a juvenile Common Yellowthroat. It was
over by the Mallard ponds. The Mallards were there too,
in the lower pond. They have been gone for a good while.
The Snowy Egret was absent the latter part of last week but was
back on station at the pond in front of the Beckman Behavioral Labs.
The Say's Phoebe was on a hurdle on the track, south of Brown gym.
The Mountain Chickadee was a heard bird. Darren first detected
one in the far distance in the maintenance yard, which I don't think
anyone else heard. But later, on the backside of the walk, he heard
another one and this time several of us heard it too.
Darren's ability to identify a bird by sound is amazing to me.
Another example on today's walk was in Tournament Park,
when he heard a chirp or two and decided it was an
Orange-crowned Warbler. And he walked on. The rest of us
felt like we'd like to see the bird. I held out
hope that he'd missed the call and it was a Black-throated Gray Warbler, or
an Townsend's Warbler, or a MacGillivray's Warbler, all
of which sound kind of similar to me. I am able to tell
the difference between a Yellow-rumped chirp and one of these but
distinguishing amonst those is tough for me. Not so tough
for Darren. He walked on and left trying to find the bird in the dense
foliage of the tree to those of us who didn't care about the health
of our necks. We strained and strained and finally saw
the bird -- an Orange-crowned Warbler, of course.
But, if we hadn't stayed back to do that
we would have missed the highlight moment of the walk.
While we were staring up at the tree, a Red-tailed Hawk came
flying so low over our heads that
I was glad I had my hat screwed on tight! Wow, that
was a close one. It sailed on through and went way up
and landed on a nearby telephone pole. It was a spectacular moment.
I will lead the walk next week. even though it's a Caltech holiday.
I hope several of you will join me.
The date: 12/19/11
The week number: 51
The walk number: 1122
The weather: 55F, cloudy
The walkers: Alan Cummings, Viveca Sapin-Areeda, Carole Worra,
Travis Cummings, Darren Dowell, Kent Potter, Vicky Brennan, Tom Palfrey
The birds (26):
Northern Mockingbird
Mourning Dove
House Finch
Anna's Hummingbird
Acorn Woodpecker
American Crow
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Yellow-chevroned Parakeet
Nuttall's Woodpecker
American Robin
Lesser Goldfinch
Black Phoebe
Snowy Egret
Mountain Chickadee
Orange-crowned Warbler
American Goldfinch
Western Bluebird
Say's Phoebe
Ruby-crowned Kinglet
Red-tailed Hawk
Hummingbird, Selasphorus
Band-tailed Pigeon
Cedar Waxwing
Bushtit
Mallard
Common Yellowthroat
Respectfully submitted,
Alan Cummings
12/20/11
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/index.html
12/13/11
It was an oddly flavored walk. The walk was
postponed to Tuesday due to rain but we had a
report from Hannah that there was a snowy egret
in Baxter pond on Monday and we could only hope
that the bird would stick around until the
following day, which it did. If you exclude 2002
(nine sightings), snowy egrets are a rare
sighting on the walk (previous sightings in 1988,
2002, 2003, 2007, 2010, and 2011). Travis and
Alan notched up a Townsend's warbler but we
didn't get an orange-crowned, so it was another
two-warbler day. We did get another mountain
chickadee, the eighth sighting for the year. The
chickadees are becoming almost ho-hum but they
are actually historically rare. If we can manage
to pick up one more, the chickadee sightings
total for 2011 will equal the sum of all sightings
from all previous years. We also picked up an
even rarer bird for us, a Cassin's vireo (more
about that bird later). Overall, we obtained 23
species, which is certainly respectable (the
median is 17) but well below the record of 28 for
the week but with an extremely high rare bird
quotient.
See the plots at
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/species_time.html
and
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/two_plots.htm
It's hard to pass on a snowy egret. They are
elegant birds, especially in breeding season and
very showy when they flush or get excited and
their plumes flare out. In only six years has
the walk been graced by snowy sightings, so they
are quite uncommon for us. However, we tend to
get multiple sightings in those years that we
get them and this year (now four sightings) has
been no exception.
However, the bird of the week has to
be the even rarer Cassin's vireo that Darren
first noticed across the street from Morrisroe.
It was a particularly good capture because there
initially was a ruby-crowned kinglet in the same
area, so that the differences in foraging
technique and speed were in full display and
because our bird was providing sporadic but very
clear views. It moved among three small oaks at
relatively low levels in the canopy, typical of a
Cassin's, and, if you were patient, you got a
textbook quality look. All of the classic field
markings were visible. Tom Palfrey, who didn't
happen to come with us on this walk, happened by
at just the right moment and was able to join the
fray. The Cassin's was a lifer for at least two
of us.
Cassin's vireos used to be a subspecies of
solitary vireos and if you look at Alan's log,
possible Cassin's sightings in 1989 and 1997 are
listed, as they should be, under solitary vireos.
However, DNA studies from the mid-nineties made
it quite clear that the Cassin's deserved species
status and the American Ornithological Union made
it official in 1997. The solitary vireo complex
became one of plumbeous, Cassin's, or
blue-headed. Since we can also (rarely) see
plumbeous vireos on campus, it's uncertain
whether the 1989 and 1997 sightings of solitary
vireos were Cassin's or plumbeous unless Alan
remembers them well enough to distinguish. Maybe
we had a couple of Cassin's pre-1997 and maybe
not. We did get Cassin's vireos, for sure, in
2007 and 2010 and we now have a record two
sightings in 2011. This week's sighting is
facially unusual because Cassin's vireos are
mostly migratory in our area with a Spring
(mostly March-April) and Fall (mostly
September-October) concentration of numbers.
This could be a migrating laggard, as they have
been reported as late as December. An
alternative is that we have the odd overwintering
bird, although the vast majority of Cassin's
vireos winter in Mexico.
We had another highlight bird of sorts at the
campus ticket office. This was an accipiter
sitting in a small tree that Darren first noticed.
It took off almost immediately, landed in a
nearby tree, though out of view, then decided
that there was too much commotion going on below,
as a gaggle of birders tried to locate it, and
took off again, leaving our field of view. We
didn't have much to go on and distinguishing
among accipiters can be a chancy business.
Kaufman's book on Advanced Birding, essentially a
collection of essays on distinguishing among
species that are hard to tell apart, has a
chapter on accipiters, so this is a classic
birding problem. As with anything, the better
the look, the better your chances of locking in
on the right species but part of this is
maximizing the information per unit time. So,
what should we have been looking for? Accipiters
are sexually dimorphic with the females larger
than the males and this leads to a wide range in
size within the species. Male Cooper's hawks at
the small end are about the same size as the
larger female sharp-shinned hawks and this makes
using size dangerous unless you have good scaling
and the bird is not in that nether region in the
middle, which this bird was. So, size was
problematic. Adults of both species have barring
on the chest. No good news for us there. It was
an adult. There is a distinct difference in the
legs and claws. The legs of a sharp-shinned hawk
will come across as kind of spindly. The claws
of a Cooper's hawk are something you would not
want to meet in a dark alley. However, we didn't
pick up on the claws because they were occupied.
My impression of the legs was that they were on
the thin side but I could be easily talked into
not pushing very hard on that. Our hawk had a
bird that it carried away but we weren't sure of
identity. Had it been big like an acorn
woodpecker or a mourning dove, this would have
been a definite vote for a Cooper's hawk and had
it been small like a house finch or a kinglet,
this would have been more favorable for a sharp
shin. I have, however, seen a Cooper's hawk
with a sparrow and I have seen a sharp shin with
a mourning dove (almost pulled him, and I'm
pretty sure that one was a him, off the branch).
The wing beat rate seemed relatively slow to me
as the bird flushed the second time and this
seems more Coopery but it could have been a
function of the bird it was carrying. The shape,
however, was decidedly bulbous (short wing to
body ratio and slung down) and this suggested
sharp shin. Since the bird was almost in line
with my line of sight, I got nothing on the tail
or other details of body shape. Shape on sitting
or from underneath, if relatively close (or with
high power), can be very helpful. Seen from the
front, the body of a sharp shinned hawk appears
to narrow as you move down from the shoulders,
whereas the Cooper's doesn't (often referred to
as barrel-shaped). If it's cold and the bird is
fluffed out, the head of a Cooper's will appear
flat, whereas the sharp shinned will have a
distinct slope. If you see the bird from behind
or sometimes from the side, you can get a two
toned impression of the head and neck in a
Cooper's such that the bird appears to have a
dark charcoal cap. The sharp shinned head and
nape will show an even continuous gray. From the
front, the eyes of a sharp shinned will appear
further back in the head than a Cooper's. The
tail can be distinctive but nobody got a look at
the tail and it wasn't soaring, so field markings
like white trim at the base of the tail, a more
(Cooper's) or less prominent extension of the
head beyond the wings, or fluttering (sharp shin)
versus smooth wing strokes, couldn't be used. We
couldn't call it. I bounced around between
Cooper's and sharp-shinned. I'm inclined, after
thinking about it for a while, to see this as a
big female sharp-shinned and not a small male
Cooper's but I wouldn't want to bet more than a
cold cup of coffee on it. You will see this bird
below listed officially as "hawk species". It
was unquestionably an accipiter (hence not a
red-tailed hawk) and that's about where we have
to leave it.
The date: 12/13/11
The week number: 50
The walk number: 1121
The weather: 60F, partly cloudy
The walkers: Alan Cummings, John Beckett, Travis
Cummings, Viveca Sapin-Areeda, Darren Dowell,
Melanie Channon, Vicky Brennan.
The birds (23):
House Sparrow
Mourning Dove
House Finch
Anna's Hummingbird
American Crow
Cedar Waxwing
Snowy Egret
Common Raven
Black Phoebe
Yellow-rumped Warbler
European Starling
Lesser Goldfinch
Nuttall's Woodpecker
American Goldfinch
Ruby-crowned Kinglet
Mountain Chickadee
Bewick's Wren
Townsend's Warbler
Cassin's Vireo
Hummingbird, Selasphorus
Hawk, species
Red-Tailed Hawk
Bushtit
--- John Beckett
Respectfully submitted,
Alan Cummings
12/18/11
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/index.html
12/5/11
The prospects are not good. Alan isn't coming,
which means that his hip hugging bird library
isn't coming either. Usually, I bring in my
Sibley Guide from home for these occasions but
this time I forgot. Fortunately, George Rossman
was able to lend me an old Peterson Guide he
keeps in his desk. It's dated but more than
serviceable, so I am now armored with lore. I
venture out of Arms and walk into the open area
between Millikan and Bridge and am greeted with a
curious blend of devastation and nonchalance.
People are staring. People are noticing nothing
but the destination they seek or the sandwich
they eat. The roses in the west planter are
stripped of leaves but long limbed. They become
the crooked bony arms of supplicant crones
angling towards an unforgiving sky and spelling
their shriven lives in a silent wooden shriek but
for one yellow petal timidly sliding to a youth
unfurled. It would have been lost to a normal
day but now the crones are assuaged in the
promise of hundreds of leaf buds. The great
Engelmann next to Parsons Gates has seen dozens
of storms like this and laughed at some and,
perhaps, nearly died in others. This time a
couple of branches are cast to time. There are
logs in the reflecting pond and casting a baleful
eye, nearly smothered in dying leaves is the
white iris of a bottle cap. I walk to the edge
of the path that winds around the ponds, hoping
for a common yellowthroat or a duck. I see
neither but there are the shattered trunks of
trees and shredded limbs. The entire area is
taped off. At first, I simply take in the losses
and then I slowly realize that the quality and
intensity of the light has changed. This is the
most natural, brambly, and unmanicured I have
ever seen these ponds. It is an odd sensation
and the walk has not even started.
I arrive at the starting point for the walk
several minutes early. There is nobody there
yet, so I amuse myself looking for birds and
birders. I pick up a couple of the former but
none of the latter. It is as if birders were
lost to the storm as much as any bird. It's a
couple of minutes after noon and there is still
nobody coming, so I meander along the path around
the tennis courts. I'm looking at a solo Caltech
birdwalk. So, what's a half blind half deaf
birder do? Move slowly. Scan carefully. Stand
and look in different directions and give birds a
chance to move or be seen. Listen deeply for
those birds you can hear. This works reasonably
well. By the time I get to the containers at the
corner of the Maintenance yard, the "group" is up
to six species, which is not atypical of totals
for this time of year and point in the walk
(unless Beth Moore is involved) but I'm probably
also looking at a 3 hour trip if I were to
maintain this pace over the rest of the walk. I
decide that I'm going to go very slow, at least
through Tournament Park. As I walk out from the
corner, however, I see a shadow and then Ashish.
"Fantastic", I think. We now have a pair of ears
and an extra pair of eyes. Even better, they
bring a black phoebe. We were off. The playing
field didn't yield anything but as we get to the
gym, Viveca arrives, looking rather flustered.
She had glanced into the Maintenance yard and not
seen us, so she dashed through Tournament Park,
out to Wilson and then back around to the gym.
She was in such a hurry that she didn't get any
birds at all in spite of having completed most of
the first half of the walk and passing through
much of the best birding territory. It didn't
matter. We had another pair of eyes and ears.
Tournament Park, as is its wont, yielded a number
of interesting birds. We got another mountain
chickadee, the seventh such sighting of the year,
and a dark eyed junco, which is a pretty spotty
species for us. The prize, however, goes to
Ashish, who picked up on a rapidly foraging bird.
It dashes in and out of sight, mostly out, but we
got a number of good, albeit brief glimpses. It
was a Townsend's warbler! We haven't seen a
Townsends since early October and I was beginning
to believe that I wasn't going to be seeing one
for another couple of months but strange winds
bring odd companions and perhaps this bird will
decide to stick around for a while. Many of the
Tournament Park trees still have most of their
leaves.
You might think that the Townsend's would be a
likely candidate for bird of the week, if not the
mountain chickadee, if not the dark eyed junco
but I have a different vision. Towards the end
of the walk, there is a tree on the other side of
Holliston that occasionally houses a few
band-tailed pigeons, typically three or four.
This time, the tree, which was virtually
leafless, holds 22 band-tailed pigeons. I had
never seen that many band-tailed pigeons on
campus in one place at one time before. These
kinds of concentrations are not that uncommon
during migration or at foraging hotspots but I
think neither applied here. This seemed to be a
socialization event in the face of a momentous
storm. It's possible that one or more of these
birds was old enough to have experienced
something similar (band-tailed pigeons can be
fairly long-lived - 22 years is the longest I've
seen) but I don't know what kind of memory
retention they have.
Overall, the population of band-tailed pigeons
appears to be in decline but they are lucky to
have the opportunity. In the nineteenth century,
we had two native pigeons, the passenger pigeon
in the east and the band-tailed pigeon of the
west. There were no substantive constraints on
the hunting of either species but the passenger
pigeons tended to migrate in huge dense flocks
and this made them extremely vulnerable to even
the most incompetent of hunting techniques. Take
a shotgun, point up and pull the trigger. With
no management of the resource, passenger pigeons
were hunted to virtual extinction by ~1890. In
the winter of 1911, when there was only Martha at
the Cincinatti zoo (she died in 1914), there was
an unusually abundant acorn crop in the interior
valleys of Santa Barbara and San Louis Obisbo
counties and a failure elsewhere in the state, so
band-tailed pigeons, which generally migrate in
small flocks and are dispersed in the winter
throughout the southern half of California, were
concentrated in the hundreds of thousands,
perhaps millions. "The wild pigeon of the east
had unexpectedly turned up in the west" and
massive quantities of "hunters" from all over the
country, some with eyes still glazed over from
fond memories of killing passenger pigeons,
poured into Santa Barbara. The resulting
slaughter was such an abuse of this game bird
resource in light of the recent extinction of
passenger pigeons, that a lot of people,
including hunters, became highly agitated. When
the masses rise, the government listens. The
state declared a five-year closed season on
band-tailed pigeons and instituted a serious
study on the behavior, food and nutrition
requirements, migration, range, and breeding
habits of the bird. Restricted hunting was
eventually reinstituted (it's still allowed in
Mexico and six western states, including
California) but with conservation firmly in mind.
Now, you might think the above to be a diatribe
against hunting but I actually view this as the
opposite. The 1911-1912 band-tailed pigeon
slaughter was a significant marker in the
emergence of an environmentally conscious wing of
sport hunting. Many hunters can't see beyond the
barrel of the gun they are using but others
realized that, if you don't restrict the ability
of that type of hunter to kill everything, there
would be nothing for you to shoot next year. The
environmentalist hunter realized that if you
didn't preserve ecosystems in breeding areas,
along migration routes, and at wintering sites,
there wouldn't be anything for you to shoot at
later. The environmentalist hunter realized that
you had to keep that idiot from shooting a duck
sitting on a nest or there wouldn't be any
chicks, hence restrictive timing on hunting
seasons. He (and they were almost all he's) also
realized that the duck had to have a place to
build that nest and feed the ducklings. He might
find himself fighting a developer over filling a
swamp or outbidding him to preserve it. Hunters
were effective environmentalists long before
environmentalists had a clue. They were serious,
relentless, had money and political influence and
knew how to use both. A lot of species,
including the band-tailed pigeon, might be gone
by now were it not for the sports hunters of the
twentieth century.
See the plots at
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/species_time.html
and
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/two_plots.htm
The date: 12/05/11
The week number: 49
The walk number: 1120
The weather: 60°F, sunny
The walkers: John Beckett, Viveca Sapin-Areeda, Ashish Mahabal
The birds (19):
Mourning Dove
House Finch
Anna's Hummingbird
Acorn Woodpecker
Crow
Yellow-rumped Warbler
European Starling
Black Phoebe
Common Raven
Red-tailed Hawk
American Goldfinch
Wren, species
Townsend's Warbler
Mountain Chickadee
Dark-eyed Junco
Ruby-crowned Kinglet
Bushtit
Lesser Goldfinch
Band Tailed Pigeon
--- John Beckett
Respectfully submitted,
Alan Cummings
12/9/11
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/index.html