2/27/13
So much for being just a little better luck away from a 30 bird walk.
Relative to last week, we lost some ground in raw numbers, even as
the record highs rose. The problem lay in the second half of the
walk. We saw a lot of birds in the second half but picked up just
one new species, a mountain chickadee by the childcare center next to
Avery. Last week, we acquired nearly a dozen new species in the
second half of the walk and that was the key to a fine score. This
week, sparrows continued to be tough captures. We saw no pelicans,
bluebirds, or vultures but we did get three hawks and a sapsucker and
our total of 22 species was right on the median.
See the plots at
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/species_time.html
and
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/two_plots.htm
Today's bird of the week is a testament to string theory, which
states that, if you string out the birders, good things will happen.
Ah, you want a proof. OK. We aren't talking physics, here. A proof
is in fact possible. Consider a typical walk. Alan is leading and,
as happens on every walk that Alan leads, he pauses at the sapsucker
tree in Tournament Park and scans for sapsuckers. This is Alan as a
cat who, having once caught a lizard napping under a rose, always
checks the spot on his daily hunting rounds. If a lizard appeared
there once, it just might happen again and, even if it never does,
you get to relive the triumph of the capture and the response of your
owner to a reptilian Fu Manchu. Every day is a glorious day on a
hunting walk and every walk is a triumph. So, Alan scans and sees no
sapsuckers in the sapsucker tree, although an inner feline sees them
all, and, seeing none, he turns, with a soft mental sigh as he sifts
through a multi-decadal collection of foraging birds, and walks
towards the cluster of oak trees at the end of the park. "Perhaps,"
he thinks, "there will be a Townsend's warbler there or even a
black-throated gray, gleaning in the middle foliage like the one we
saw last year." So, where is the proof of birding string theory in
this? Patience. The proof is Melissa. She walks up to the
sapsucker tree after Alan has left and, scanning up en echelon rows
of sapsucker seep wells, she sees a sapsucker. The sapsucker ignores
her but we now have an attractive force that snaps Darren to
attention and then Alan and, soon, birder on birder is clustering
around a Melissa find. Now, you might say that Melissa was lucky and
you would be right but string theory says that the essence of good
luck in birding is putting yourself in a position to be lucky and
that's exactly what Melissa did. We move beyond good fortune and
into skill and it brings me to the question of the day. Is Melissa a
cat?
I haven't actually mentioned what the bird of the week is beyond
being a sapsucker because I thought it appropriate to say a little
bit about identifying characteristics given the confusion that
reigned in the group. I start by saying that sapsuckers are a mess
but I'm going to ignore some of the complications by assuming that we
have already decided that the bird is some sort of sapsucker (for one
thing, most sapsuckers have a prominent white slash on the upper part
of the wing) and by ejecting two of the four possible sapsuckers,
Williamson and yellow-bellied, from consideration. Both of those
species occur occasionally in southern California but they are rare.
I am also going to ignore juveniles because sapsuckers are winter
residents for us and, by the time we see them, the juveniles have
generally already molted. That leaves me with adult plumage
red-naped and red-breasted sapsuckers and, alas, hybrids. So, having
reduced the problem to a somewhat manageable level, let's pin up a
classic male red-naped sapsucker as a standard for comparison. He
will have three major red patches, a red cap on top of the head,
another on the back of the neck (the "red-nape"), and a third under
the chin. These are distinct and separate patches. There may be
some flecks of red in bordering black areas but the red patches will
not blur together and, in particular, the red will not bleed across
adjacent white regions. If the bird gives you a head view from the side,
you will have a sense of three reds. Now, look for white stripes.
There will be a white auricular stripe over the eye that is truncated
by black above, below, and in front of the eye, and by the red-nape
in back. A second white stripe loops around the bill, across the
cheek to the shoulder where it may or may not start taking on a
yellowish or even taupe hue. The key is two clean white stripes
across the face. Black separates the red cap from the red-nape and
the two white stripes from each other. There is also an important,
for identification purposes, black badge on the breast that separates
the red chin patch from the belly and breast. You may see some red
in that black breast badge if you get a close look but you won't be
seeing red extending past the black region down into lower portions
of the breast. An adult female red-naped sapsucker will be similar
but she will usually have a white chin patch above the red under the
bill and the red nape may be fuzzy or even white. If you get a
decent view of the head, you will have a sense of two or three
cleanly separated red patches and, more importantly, two prominent
white stripes. If you can see two prominent clean white stripes on
the face, think red-naped.
For the competition, we have an ideal
red-breasted sapsucker, southern California style. Where the
red-naped sapsucker has a separate red cap and patch on the back of
the neck, the red-breasted sapsucker will have a continuous red
helmet. Where the red-naped sapsucker has two clean white stripes on
the face with no crossing red, with the red-breasted sapsucker, you
may have some clean white, especially around the bill and you may be
able to distinguish two light stripes, but there will be a lot of red
bleeding through them, so much so that you may end up with a sense of
continuous red. Where you see a black breast badge on a red-naped
sapsucker, you will see only red on the breast and there may be red
flecking extending well beyond the solid red patch. There will be no
black badge separating the red chin from lighter colors below.
Generally, the female will have more white than the male (after all,
the females are selecting for red in mates, not for themselves).
Hybrids? Well, blend any of the above in any proportions and you can
make a hybrid out of it. Look in particular for patchy black
flecking in the red on the breast of what otherwise looks like a
red-breasted sapsucker and look for red flecking well down the breast
on what otherwise looks like a red-naped sapsucker.
So, how does Melissa's bird do? The top of the head is solid red,
reminiscent of the leather football caps of the 1930s. There are two
light stripes on the face but the top one has so much red in it that
it would be better described as a light red strip rather than white.
The lower light colored stripe has some strong white but also has a
broad red patch passing through it and connecting to the red patch
under the chin (giving the overall impression of a bird wearing a red
cap with a red chin strap). I didn't get a good look at the breast
but I saw enough to say that the red extended far down the breast and
that there was no black badge. Melissa's sapsucker is a red-breasted
sapsucker and, given all the white, probably a female.
The date: 2/27/2013
The week number: 9
The walk number: 1185
The weather: 71 F, sunny
The walkers: Alan Cummings, John Beckett, Sarah Lambart, Darren
Dowell, Viveca Sapin-Areeda, Melissa Ray
The birds (22):
3 Mourning Dove
2 House Finch
6 Anna's Hummingbird
6 American Crow
7 Black Phoebe
2 Mallard
4 Lesser Goldfinch
2 Orange-crowned Warbler
15 Yellow-rumped Warbler
36 Cedar Waxwing
1 Red-shouldered Hawk
40 Bushtit
2 Red-tailed Hawk
4 Ruby-crowned Kinglet
1 Common Raven
1 Bewick's Wren
2 Hummingbird, Selasphorus
2 Cooper's Hawk
1 Red-breasted Sapsucker
3 Band-tailed Pigeon
2 Swallow, Species
1 Mountain Chickadee
--- John Beckett
Respectfully submitted,
Alan Cummings
3/4/13
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/index.html
2/20/13
On most Caltech bird walks, the bulk of the species total is acquired
by the time we get to Wilson Avenue. This week, we had only 15
species and Alan is getting a bit anxious. "We need to step it up,"
he says. Alan needn't have worried. The second half of the walk was
productive and by the end, we had acquired 26 species. This is an
excellent total for a February walk but it is two shy of the record
28 for week 8 set in 1990 (and matched three times, in 2007, 2010,
and 2011) but four above the median of 22. It is, I hope, a
harbinger of the future. We are about to encounter the Spring
migration as numerous birds pass by us on the way to breeding grounds
to the north and this is reflected in the record highs. For the next
five weeks, the records are all 30 or above.
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 variety of potential highlights. We haven't seen a rock
pigeon since the first walk of the year, believe it or not, and we
picked up our first western bluebird of the year. These birds seem
worthy of note and, on another day, one or both of them might have
been anointed as a bird of the week. However, neither of these
prospects commands three meters of sail. Our official bird of the
week was, in spite of massive canvas, something of a speck. Usually,
specks are the purview of Viveca but this time it is Darren who, upon
scanning the skies to the north of Avery garden, announces the
presence of a pelican. The bird is high and far away, working up a
thermal, but each time he makes a turn, the characteristic bands of
black feathers along the edges of the wings are on display. There's
nothing else like it in our area. We had an American white pelican,
only the fifth ever for the Caltech bird walk and the first since
2005.
Now, high in the sky American white pelicans on migration are not
that unusual and, when they butt into the San Gabriels, they have to
soar up to great heights to get over the mountains. They typically
travel in flocks of dozens to hundreds and you can sometimes see
great swirls of them in the Spring, rising up the local thermals at
the base of the foothills. Were we seeing a hint of migration? It's
early in the year for migration but it is not too early. White
pelicans breeding in Canada get there in April or May. In Utah, it's
March and, in Nevada and northern California, it's late February.
Our bird is likely heading to Vegas, baby. Actually, I lie (I just
couldn't resist the phrase). If our bird is on migration rather than
moving between foraging sites, he is probably headed to Anaho Island
in Pyramid Lake, which is north of Reno and one of the biggest
breeding colonies for American white pelicans in the country (betting
the best odds) or, perhaps, he is heading for one of the lakes in the
Klamath basin of northern California and southern Oregon, where
smaller numbers of pelicans breed. Maybe our bird is a laggard, with
the rest of the flock, too high to be seen or having already peeled
off the top of the thermal and out of any line of sight we might have
had. Maybe, he's the avian equivalent of an iconoclast and going it
alone but, given the cooperative foraging techniques used by American
white pelicans and their propensity to flock on migration, this seems
unlikely.
American white pelicans have a lot of interesting natural features
but it is the supernatural pelican that I want to focus on, here.
Pelicans are a source of allusion and metaphor through an oddity of
form and this yields an abiding presence in writing and art. In the
first millenium A.D., literature was often overtly religious in
covenant but there was also a great yearning for understanding of the
natural world and its significance in religious precepts for,
"Surely," the people would tell you, "there is the imprint of god [or
gods] in everything around you." It is a matter of insight that
bends to a purpose and it is personified in one of the most
influential books of all time, the Physiologus, which you can loosely
translate as "the naturalist." The author is unknown but it was
probably written sometime in the second century A.D. (before the
fourth century if you want to include all views) in the Middle East,
most likely in Egypt (but maybe Syria) and almost certainly in Greek.
The original version is lost but, by the fifth century, it was being
expanded and translated into Latin and many middle eastern languages.
By the eleventh century, it was a staple from France to Russia. It
was still seeing heavy use throughout the western world in the
fourteenth century and there are echoes, even today. For example,
the story of the phoenix rising from the ashes, a recent incarnation
of which occurs in one of Harry Potter's adventures, comes from the
Physiologus. So, what could keep a star rising in the heavens for
more than a thousand years? The Physiologus is an early Christian
compilation of anecdotes about animals, plants, and minerals used to
support Christian moral structures. In essence, the book and its
successors are often charming tools of indoctrination, propaganda,
rationalization, and, occasionally, general edification. These
facets are all mixed together but moralization is the driver. So, I
come, finally, to my pelican nub carrying one of the more popular
motifs of Medieval and early Renaissance literature and art. The
story begins with an assertion that pelicans have a greater bond of
love between parent and young than any other bird and we are then
presented with a righteous family of pelicans. The parents love
their offspring, as is the wont of their species, and all is right in
the pelican world until, one day, the young (there are usually three
of four of them) strike out at the parents and the parents, in their
fury, kill all of the children. The female (but sometimes the male)
feels a deep sense of grief and regret as the young lie dead beneath
her and, piercing her own breast, she pours her blood over their
still, cold bodies and they live again. We have a thinly veiled
allusion to sin (striking at a parent), damnation because of the sin
(death) and salvation (living again) through a Savior's sacrifice
(the blood of Christ). This theme is repeatedly found in the
Medieval and early Renaissance art of Western Europe. It is clear
that most of the artists had never seen a pelican, as the birds are
generally depicted as raptor-like, but you can tell that they are
supposed to be pelicans from the context. So, how does it work in
the real pelican world? American white pelicans are obligate brood
reducers (as are the great white pelicans presumably being referred
to in the Physiologus) and they almost invariably hatch two eggs (not
three plus), one a few days before the other. If you are the second
born, your chances of survival are about one in ten. The first-born
has about a nine in ten chance of making it through your first week
out of the egg and, if he does, he will either kill you or you will
starve to death. Why is this done? As the second born you are
insurance against the possibility that the first egg fails to hatch
or the first-born chick dies soon after birth. If that happens, the
parents can still have a successful breeding season by fledging you,
the insurance chick. Eventually, however, there is a tipping point
for resource allocation, whereby raising both chicks leads to
fledging no chicks. So, once the insurance policy starts to cost too
much, you will be discarded, probably in your second week of life.
I'm not sure what, if any, anthropomorphizing moral should be
extracted from this approach to maximizing fecundity (one might
perhaps be drawn to building some metaphor regarding the production
of multiple heirs in noble houses) but I doubt that it's one the
Physiologus had in mind.
The date: 2/20/2013
The week number: 8
The walk number: 1184
The weather: 61 F, sunny
The walkers: Alan Cummings, Darren Dowell, John Beckett, Viveca
Sapin-Areeda, Vicky Brennan
The birds (26):
1 Rock Pigeon
1 House Sparrow
1 Mourning Dove
9 House Finch
4 Anna's Hummingbird
10 American Crow
20 Lesser Goldfinch
3 Bewick's Wren
15 Yellow-rumped Warbler
2 Mallard
30 Bushtit
17 Cedar Waxwing
10 Band-tailed Pigeon
5 Swallow, Species
6 Hummingbird, Selasphorus
4 Ruby-crowned Kinglet
1 Yellow-chevroned Parakeet
4 Black Phoebe
2 American Goldfinch
1 Western Bluebird
2 Turkey Vulture
1 American White Pelican
1 Red-tailed Hawk
1 Common Raven
1 Townsend's Warbler
1 Orange-crowned Warbler
--- John Beckett
Respectfully submitted,
Alan Cummings
2/25/13
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/index.html
2/13/13
It looks like we are only good for setting two records in a row
(weeks 5 and 6) and this week (week 7) marked a descent back into a
less than stellar species compilation. We acquired 19 species,
precisely matching the median for the week but well below the record
26 set back in the distant past of 1990. Incidentally, next week has
a record of 28 species, also set in 1990. Weeks seven and eight hold
the oldest standing record counts for the Caltech bird walk, which
suggests that it must have been a freaky pair of weeks.
See the plots at
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/species_time.html
and
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/two_plots.htm
I have been more struck by the general lack of scrub jays recently
than by the quality of any of our sightings, so, I suppose, you might
call this an anti-highlight of the week. It is a mystery driven by a
little factoid. If you have been on the Caltech bird walk, you have
probably also seen Alan scribbling on his log sheet, recording some
sighting for the day. For the most common birds, he has the species
already listed and he just needs to check it off. For everything
else, there are open lines. Scrub jays are number two among the
common birds and, indeed, it is species #2 on the life list for the
Caltech bird walk. Today, we hear a scrub jay and Alan checks it off
on his list. Now, you might think "So, what? It's a common bird.
Why should this be noteworthy? Was it an unusually close encounter?
Was he doing something odd?" The answer to all of these queries
would be no. The worthiness lies in frequency. This was only the
second time Alan has been able to check off a scrub jay this year
(out of seven chances). That's not the hallmark of a dirt common
bird. Is this a scrub jay power outage? Maybe. We only had 11
sightings in 2012, 18 sightings in 2011 and 26 in 2010, suggesting a
downward trajectory with time and this is reinforced as you go back
even further. Before 2003, the probability of seeing a scrub jay was
generally better than 90 % and, often, 100% but, in 2003, we only saw
a scrub jay on 41 of 50 weeks (82%). The number of sightings has been
generally declining ever since, with only a 21% occurrence in 2012.
It's a striking and, in some ways, disturbing trend. So, what
happened? Scrub jay populations are stressed in urban areas with
large crow populations because the chances that one of those
dedicated egg stealers will detect your nest increases with the
number of crow eyes per unit area. In parts of the San Gabriel
Valley in the 90s, local extirpation of scrub jays almost certainly
occurred because of this style of competition but our campus birds
appear to have been holding their own against the onslaught. Nor is
it a problem of shifting food resources because scrub jays are
omnivorous, highly opportunistic (they are also egg stealers among
other things), adaptable, and smart, so smart, you almost expect
little hands to start reaching out from under those feather jackets.
Something more nefarious than lunch is likely to be at the root of
the scrub jay's decline around campus and it comes in a small
package. The campus scrub jay decline began in earnest in 2003,
which just happens to be the first year that the West Nile virus
became endemic to southern California. The West Nile virus is a
general avian killer but it is especially nasty for corvids, members
of the crow family. The crow population in the San Gabriel Valley
was devastated by West Nile and, if that were all, you would have
expected scrub jays, like mourning doves, to be major beneficiaries.
However, scrub jays, like crows, ravens and magpies, are members of
the corvid family and they share the great corvid vulnerability to
West Nile. So, the southern California scrub jay population took a
beating in the West Nile pandemic, along with the crows, and the
campus population has, thus far, shown only glimmering hints of a
recovery. Even worse for the scrub jays, reproductive success is
sensitive to the presence of helpers and, if there aren't a lot of
helpers to be had, you can get an accelerated decline. I have a
feeling that this will be a telling year for Caltech scrub jays.
Scrub jays are intriguing in absence but the highlight bird is an
example of an opposing trend of increased sightings, reflecting the
establishment of an active but, naturally, vulnerable breeding
population near campus. So, for a positive highlight I offer a jewel
in white and black that comes to us on Wilson Avenue across from the
Beckman Institute. As we are wandering up the east side of the
street, Viveca and I cross over to reconnoiter the Wilson garden
while Alan and Kent continue north. The Wilson garden is usually
best for goldfinches and house finches, along with the occasional
warbler but, today, we already had the finches, both Cardeuline and
Carpodacanus, and we didn't see any warblers. We did, however,
garner a net yield with a suite of mourning doves before returning to
rejoin Alan and Kent, who seemed to be camped out next to a small
oak. This was very unusual behavior for Alan. He usually keeps
going, unless overheated, leaving it to the laggards to catch up.
So, was Alan being unusually accommodating? Not a chance. The day
was too nice. Alan and Kent had come upon a female Nuttall's
woodpecker at head level and only six feet away. She was actively
boring probe holes in the oak and ignoring the birder audience.
Slowly, she works her way up the tree and, by the time Viveca and I
get there, she is perhaps twenty feet up. Even then, I can attest to
a very nice view. She did not represent a new species but she, even
then a composing highlight.
I mentioned that Caltech Nuttall's sightings were on the rise on the
Caltech bird walk. This was not always the case. We didn't see a
Nuttall's at all before 2000 and, up until 2010, we were getting one
to four sightings a year with no obvious trend up or down. Then, in
2010, we doubled up on the previous best with eight sightings. In
2011, it was 15 and last year, it was 17. This appears to be caused
largely by a male, who owns a swath of territory including Tournament
Park and the south side of the driveway out to Morrisroe on Wilson
Ave. Last year, we found his nesting hole, which was readily
observable from the Tournament Park driveway, and we saw one or both
of the male and his mate entering the hole on multiple walks (he
won't be using the same hole this year but we may be lucky and pick
up a secondary hole nester this Spring). Our Wilson female has to
know where the male is and she may be interested in pair bonding with
him. It is, after all, that time of year. Nuttall's woodpeckers
start pair bonding in February and she is within hearing distance of
our male, so stay tuned. Love may be in the air and a new batch of
Nuttall's woodpeckers may be in the offing. If you'd like a
calendar, here's the way our woodpecker events will hopefully unfurl.
Pair bonding is happening now. Sometime in late March or early
April, the male will excavate a nesting hole (actually, he usually
makes a couple and the female chooses a winner). There will be eggs
around mid- to late-April and the nest will be in use until late May
or early June when the young woodpeckers fledge. The parents will
continue to feed them for about a month and then kick them out of the
territory, leading to a juvenile dispersal in July throughout the
region. This year, we are off to a good start with two sightings
through week 7, which is the same number we had by this time in 2012.
The date: 2/13/2013
The week number: 7
The walk number: 1183
The weather: 66 F, sunny
The walkers: Alan Cummings, John Beckett, Vicky Brennan, Carole
Worra, Melissa Ray, Tom Palfrey, Viveca Sapin-Areeda, Kent Potter
The birds (19):
1 Scrub Jay
4 Mourning Dove
6 House Finch
2 Anna's Hummingbird
2 American Crow
3 Black Phoebe
15 Yellow-rumped Warbler
35 Lesser Goldfinch
10 American Goldfinch
3 Common Raven
2 Red-shouldered Hawk
2 Nuttall's Woodpecker
2 Band-tailed Pigeon
1 White-crowned Sparrow
1 Bewick's Wren
1 Ruby-crowned Kinglet
1 Hummingbird, Selasphorus
1 Gull, Species
1 House Wren
--- John Beckett
Respectfully submitted,
Alan Cummings
2/19/13
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/index.html
2/6/13
For the second week in a row, we find ourselves with a new record for
the total species count. We ended with 28 species, supplanting the
previous record of 27 set in 2010 and doubling up on the low of 14.
See the plots at
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/species_time.html
and
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/two_plots.htm
We also had a new birder, Sarah Lambart, who is a post doc in the
Geology Division and our 136th walker. So, what's a French birder
like Sarah Lambart going to find exciting? Hummingbirds!!! Europe
has no native hummingbirds at all. They do get the odd sighting but
this almost certainly reflects the odd escapee. Some hummingbirds
cross the Gulf of Mexico on migration and that is an amazing flight
but it is pretty much at the stamina limit of a humminbird. Getting
across the Atlantic in something other than a cage is just not
plausible. There may be a certain wonder to watching a hummingbird
for the rest of us but this is muted by the fact that we probably
don't remember our first hummingbirds. Familiarity may not breed
contempt but it can dampen the excitement.
The snowy egret is gone. We saw it, usually in the Ramo or Beckman
ponds, for a running month (weeks 2-5) and for six of the last seven
walks. There are two likely drivers for the loss. One is that our
egret may have reduced the population of small fish and crayfish to
the point that getting food was getting hard. The other option is
all about sex. We are near the beginning of the breeding season for
snowy egrets, which starts in late February and early March. Our
bird may have decided that getting into one of those loose flocks on
the coast would improve his/her chances of catching a high quality
mate. This was more important than a continued depletion of the
Caltech fisheries, however tasty. Of course, maybe, it was just time
to leave.
That's as much of an in absentia discussion as I care to engage in
for the moment. Let's look at what we actually saw. The Say's
phoebe is still in control of the baseball field and that meant
another easy capture. An early highlight was a house wren foraging
in bushes at the south end of the tennis courts. He pops up to a
crossbar providing a full view of his cocked tail and barring (but no
flamboyant eyebrows) and then he drops down to the tennis player side
of the fence where he proceeds to ignore the flying balls and panting
tennis players. We also got our first turkey vulture of the year.
We initially picked this bird up from the Maintenance yard but, when
we were in Tournament Park near the bathrooms, it flew directly
overhead and circled, not more than twenty or thirty meters up. I
would say that was the nicest view of a turkey vulture I've
experienced on the Caltech bird walk. Naturally, those of us who
were seduced by the vulture missed out on the orange-crowned and
Townsend's warblers frolicking in a bush in the hummingbird lady's
yard. The dark-eyed junco was robust verbalization id from Darren
(of course). He hears the bird clearly across from Morrisroe but,
for a visualization, we had to be content with a few ghostly motions
on the wrong side of the fence.
Normally, the back half of the Caltech bird walk is less birdy than
the front half but, sometimes, it makes up for it in quality. This
time, Avery garden yields a pair of highlights. On the way in, we
see a small flock of cedar waxwings, perhaps twenty birds, flying
away from us. This gives us a species for Alan's sheet but the birds
are moving fast and not well exposed. Once in Avery, however, Alan
notices a northern flicker hugging a small tree. We start looking at
the flicker, who is, after all, a significant find, but we notice
that the big oak seems to be shredding cedar waxwings like bushtits,
perhaps three dozen in all. They fly over to the flicker tree, which
is fortuitously overlooking a toyon bush loaded with berries. Their
sentinels eye us with some concern but we are apparently not
threatening and waxwings start dropping into the bushes for the
berries. In the meantime the flicker in the tree is motionless but
we then see an explosion in a russet flash and a northern flicker,
not the one we had been watching, flies over the roof of Avery and out
of sight. Our northern flickers are "red-shafted", so that when they
fly away from you, there is a diagnostic flash of red. In the east,
northern flickers are "yellow-shafted" and your sense of color flash
would be yellow or gold, not red. So, we are on the West coast and
we see a red flash. A northern flicker is gone. We swing back to
the flicker tree and see the original flicker still there but so is a
second and a third. There are three northern flickers still on the
tree. Counting the one that flew over the roof, we had four northern
flickers. We usually get northern flickers in solitary sightings.
However, during the second half of the winter and on migration,
flickers band together in small flocks. We were lucky enough to
intersect one.
When it comes, there is always a pattern to be seen. It may be in
the weaving grace of a daughter or a few coins scattered in the
sawdust of a Lander bar, rocking country to the great amusement of
the local drunks, the ones who lost their grinning nights in the
morning. They contour the need in a flushing face, smiling, bare
knees, checkered blue and white blouse, and sawdust. It comes in
scalloped curls of wood, lining green eyes that key the holding step
and a nascent memory. How I could have missed them in their wondering
hold? I see green eyes and in the memory slicing, there is power and
life. Die and the memory is gone. Talent is gone. Knowledge is
gifted or lost to a last breath and it comes to this: Can you make a
Cerulean warbler in a single chip? Do you know where to see a
nighthawk gobbling moths? Have you ever seen an olive-sided
flycatcher? These are in patterns and they are gifts. For many,
they are Starr Saphir's gifts. Starr Saphir died last week. She
had a California life list of 504 birds, which is not too shabby, but
she was a mostly Central Park birder (273 species) who ran bird walks
during the migration seasons for more than thirty years. She worked
hard at it and diffused her life from a small forum into the memories
and developed talents of many birders.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/nyregion/starr-saphir-bird-watching-guide-in-central-park-dies-at-73.html?_r=0
The date: 2/6/2013
The week number: 6
The walk number: 1182
The weather: 61 F, partly cloudy
The walkers: Alan Cummings, John Beckett, Sarah Lambart, Carole Worra, Darren
Dowell, Viveca Sapin-Areeda, Vicky Brennan, Melissa Ray, Kent Potter
The birds (28):
House Finch
Anna's Hummingbird
American Crow
Mallard
European Starling
Lesser Goldfinch
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Common Raven
American Goldfinch
Yellow-chevroned Parakeet
Turkey Vulture
Hummingbird, Selasphorus
Say's Phoebe
House Wren
Ruby-crowned Kinglet
Bushtit
Band-tailed Pigeon
Orange-crowned Warbler
Townsend's Warbler
Black Phoebe
Dark-eyed Junco
Red-whiskered Bulbul
California Gull
Red-tailed Hawk
White-crowned Sparrow
Cedar Waxwing
Northern Flicker
Red-masked Parakeet
--- John Beckett
Respectfully submitted,
Alan Cummings
2/15/13
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/index.html