1/30/13
I begin near the end with the last bird of the
walk. This was Viveca seeing a brownish
something moving around in a camellia outside
Human Resources building off Holliston. We spent
a couple of minutes trying to see the bird but
this wasn't working, so, not realizing what I was
offering, I wander over to the south end of the
wall where the row of these foundation plants
began and then started moving north. The bird
was slowly moving ahead of me, staying out of any
line of sight I might have but giving Viveca a
suite of tantalizing but insufficient glimpses.
Finally, the bird pokes around to my side of the
camellias, giving me an excellent diagnostic
view. We had a hermit thrush and I was covered
in spider webs and other debris. I think I took
out several year's worth of dry deposition.
Apparently it never rains on Human Resources.
We were rather proud of our thrush but it was
Ashish who brought us the most important bird.
Ashish can usually make only half the walk, and
he splits off from the main group at California
(we also lost Darren at that point but gained
Kent, who came for the second half of the walk).
On his way back to his office from the walk,
however, Ashish sees a European starling
(actually four or five of them) and he happens to
run into at the end of the walk, where he reports
the find to Alan. Now, if you spend a lot of
time on campus, you might be inclined to think of
starlings as a fairly common bird, and it
generally is, early in the morning and around
dusk. Starlings are, however, often a tough
capture for us at lunchtime because their
foraging sites are generally off campus. We had
neither seen nor heard any starlings by the time
we broached the end of the walk and this made
Ashish's starlings a new bird. So, with Ashish's
post-walk contribution, we were at a final tally
of 27 species, one better than the previous
record for week 5 of 26 set in 2007 and,
obviously three less than what we needed to give
us our twelfth thirty bird walk. We were, of
course, way beyond the minimum for a week 5 walk
of 10.
See the plots at
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/species_time.html
and
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/two_plots.htm
Big totals often come with a lot of minor
highlights and the occasional major talking
point. I discussed the hermit thrush and
Ashish's all-important starlings above. Another
significant species was the Say's phoebe. As I
had hoped, the unusually aggressive Say's phoebe
on the baseball field last week meant that the
Say's had decided that he owned the baseball
field. Defending a territory is an investment.
You don't do it unless you plan to get something
out of it, so it suggested that the Say's wanted
to stay on campus for a while where and when we
can see him. This time we get an easy capture on
the fencing. Let's hope there are enough midges
to keep him hawking for another few weeks (our
Say's phoebes will be heading back into the
desert to our east in late February or early
March; last sightings for the season do not come
after weeks 8-10).
The north end of Tournament Park has been low
yield lately but the oaks above bathrooms bring a
Townsend's warbler. We have now picked up a
Townsend's in this area on two occasions this
season, bringing our total for all Townsend's
this year to two and the total for the season to
five, which means that we are guaranteed at least
a mediocre Townsend's season from an historical
averages perspective (best seasonal total was 13
set in the winter of 1993-94). We have seen at
least five Townsend's warblers in every season
since 2003-04 but the last sighting of the season
has been rather variable, anything from week 6 to
week 19. Whether or not this turns out to be a
good Townsend's year is going to depend on
catching some of those Spring birds.
The dark-eyed junco was another of those early
warning exercises common to Darren inhabited
walks. We are walking along the driveway exiting
from Tournament Park when Darren thinks he hears
a junco in the vicinity although can't place the
location and moves on. The bird is, however,
soon sighted sitting in plain view on a branch
that is directly overhead and about two meters
above a woman standing next to the open door of
her car. Had the junco decided to release some
nitrogenous waste products upon flight, something
birds are prone to do, I suspect that she would
not have been a very happy camper. Nevertheless,
she (and the junco) did not seem to find it
strange to be the sudden focus of three or four
birders looking through binoculars at a spot just
over her head.
Darren seems to have a real affinity for chipping
sparrows. We are in the Maintenance yard when he
suddenly announces that he heard a chipping
sparrow in the big oak at the northeast corner.
This was a simple declarative statement. There
was no ambiguity, no histrionics, and no proof.
We work the oak to no avail. We did get a visual
on the mountain chickadee that a couple of people
had heard previously but the chickadee was in the
top of the canopy, more or less in the open,
difficulty in sighting being in the poor lines of
sight. Eventually his foraging brings him out to
the surface, however, where he can be seen. This
was our first chickadee sighting of the year. In
contrast, you would expect a sparrow to be buried
within the canopy at a lower level and not
particularly mobile. So, the chipping sparrow
was more elusive. He isn't in the tree for food
or display. He's there for security and a stable
scanning platform for potential foraging time on
the ground. That tends to mean not much moving
around and, to the extent there is any movement,
the intent is to deceive, to prevent a line of
sight. This bird had multiple lines of sight to
worry about as there were several birders
scattered around the tree, so he decides on a
strategy of quiescence. He has some experience
with these lumbering predators. They root around
making a lot of noise and scuff up the dirt but,
eventually, they go away. Besides, it's siesta
time. Darren tries looking through the thickets
of leaves and branches and, perhaps because the
bird has decided to not work the weave, he
finally manages a clear visual and we have our
first chipping sparrow of the year, only our
third sighting ever (the other two being from
last March). Perhaps, the campus sparrow drought
is coming to an end.
The date: 1/30/2013
The week number: 5
The walk number: 1181
The weather: 61°F, sunny
The walkers:
Alan Cummings, John Beckett, Darren
Dowell, Carole Worra, Vicky Brennan, Ashish
Mahabal, Viveca Sapin-Areeda, Kent Potter
The birds (27):
Mourning Dove
House Finch
Anna's Hummingbird
Acorn Woodpecker
American Crow
Mallard
Common Raven
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Lesser Goldfinch
Hummingbird, Selasphorus
Bewick's Wren
Cedar Waxwing
Black Phoebe
Mountain Chickadee
Chipping Sparrow
Red-shouldered Hawk
Red-tailed Hawk
Bushtit
Say's Phoebe
Townsend's Warbler
Band-tailed Pigeon
Dark-eyed Junco
Ruby-crowned Kinglet
Snowy Egret
Yellow-chevroned Parakeet
Hermit Thrush
European Starling
--- John Beckett
Respectfully submitted,
Alan Cummings
2/6/13
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/index.html
1/23/13
It was a close/far day. The air was close but
the birds, for the most part, seemed far away.
It seemed a strange walk; it was not without
points of interest but we seemed to have a
suppurating angst that left us, in the end,
moored to the median for week 4 of 19 species.
It was neither good nor bad, high nor low. It
was a dull gray day.
See the plots at
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/species_time.html
and
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/two_plots.htm
Despite the numerical mediocrity, we picked up a
couple of new species for the year (the Nuttall's
woodpecker and Bewick's wren), so that we now
have 35 total species for the year accumulated
over the first four walks. We saw 67 different
species last year (tied for second all time with
2006-2007, one behind the 68 observed in
2002-that Feenstra thing again?). There are, of
course, good years and bad years for the rare
birds that peak the totals but, generally
speaking, the total number of species seen in a
year has been rising with time. Part of this
reflects more eyes and ears. There is a clear
difference in species totals between years in
which there were fewer than four birders on
average (accounting for all but one of the years
with species totals under 60 but only one of
the eight years above 60) and those with more but
there is no correlation with birder numbers above
this, so I suspect that we are beginning to see
real variations in bird populations passing
through campus.
Since the walk ends at the Millikan reflecting
pool by way of the Throop ponds (or Parson Gates
if we are trying to pick up a raven during the
nesting season) and both Kent and I generally
check the Throop ponds for mallards on our way to
the starting point of the walk, we get two
opportunities to see a duck. This time neither I
nor Kent see a duck on the way to the walk, so we
are duckless throughout but we still have a
chance at the end. We check the lower pond. We
see nothing but turtles and koi. The middle pond
has no ducks. The upper pond has no ducks. I
give up, but Alan walks over to the little pond
across the sidewalk from the flagpole. He sees
no ducks but then he hears a quiet quack. Our
pair of ducks is resting quietly on the shore.
We have our nineteenth and last bird of the day.
One oddity of the walk came from the gulls. In
the bird list for a walk, we use "X, Species"
categories for birds that won't congeal into a
specific species but are nevertheless distinct
from anything else on the day's list. We could,
for example, have a red-tailed hawk (a buteo) and
still list a "hawk, species" to account for an
accipiter (clearly not a buteo) that we weren't
able to pin down (e.g., Cooper's hawk versus
Sharp-shinned hawk). In this walk, I suspect
that we actually saw two different gull species
but we credit only one through the entry "Gull,
species." The first encounter is a single bird
flying over California Blvd. that is relatively
far away, as is usually the case for gulls on
campus, and we leave it at "gull, species."
Later, however, we see a flight of four gulls
from the parking lot behind the Child Care
Center. These birds are also fairly distant.
However, the wings are decidedly thinner and
longer relative to the body than was true of the
earlier bird. So, we almost certainly
encountered two different species of gulls but
the idea of checking off gull, species 1 and
gull, species 2 seems excessive, even in the
unlikely event that we could have convinced Alan
to do it. We are left with one "Gull, species."
For me, the highlight of the walk bled from an
antagonistic relationship between relatives.
When we came out of the Maintenance yard and
walked over to the baseball field, we immediately
picked up our second Say's phoebe of the year.
This may well be the same bird we saw a couple of
weeks ago. The Say's was quite active catching
insects near the east fencing. We thought little
of it. That's what phoebes do. However, we then
noticed a black phoebe on the south fence and so
did our Say's. He flies right at the black
phoebe who abandons his perch and flies away,
leaving the Say's in sole avian possession of the
baseball field. The Say's forages briefly in
this newly liberated territory but then flies
across the field to the north fence. The show is
over. This seemed unusual in that I had never
seen an antagonistic interaction between a Say's
and a black phoebe before but it did not strike
me as being extraordinary. Phoebes are, after
all, territorial when there is food on the fly.
However, a couple of minutes later, the black
phoebe returns to the south fence and starts
hawking again, the crazy Say's quickly fading to
a foul memory in the midst of some newly hatched
gnats. I accept the development as a completion
of the interaction and begin to walk down the
sidewalk towards Tournament Park but I have moved
only a few feet when the Say's comes back and
chases the black phoebe. Both birds fly up to
the roof of the gym with the black phoebe up the
ridge from the Say's. An uneasy truce ensues
over the course of half a minute but you can tell
that this is not a sustainable motif. Something
must happen. The Say's, perhaps looking for a
new statement, flies up to the top of a palm
tree, far above the phoebe. The black phoebe
swivels to contemplate the new arrangement and
decides that this is not a good development.
"He is bigger than I am and he has the high
ground. This is getting serious. He can have
his scummy gnats." The black phoebe flies off
towards Braun, leaving the field to the gnats and
to the Say's.
The date: 1/23/2013
The week number: 4
The walk number: 1180
The weather: 76 F, partly cloudy
The walkers: Alan Cummings, Viveca Sapin-Areeda,
Carole Worra, John Beckett, Kent Potter, Ashish
Mahabal, Vicky Brennan
The birds (19):
Northern Mockingbird
Mourning Dove
House Finch
Anna's Hummingbird
American Crow
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Lesser Goldfinch
Gull, species
Snowy Egret
Black Phoebe
Band-tailed Pigeon
Bewick's Wren
Ruby-crowned Kinglet
Say's Phoebe
Nuttall's Woodpecker
American Goldfinch
Cooper's Hawk
Cedar Waxwing
Mallard
--- John Beckett
Respectfully submitted,
Alan Cummings
1/30/13
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/index.html
1/16/13
Numerically, this cannot be viewed as a stellar
walk. Our total of 18 species was below the
median for the week (20), so we had a negative
score. However, once you get past your
disappointment in the raw numbers, it becomes
more interesting. Week 3 has the lowest standard
deviation (2.1) for total number of species seen
for any week in the year excepting only week 33
(1.4), which is in the depths of August when you
are working with half the birds (median of 11).
Perhaps, there is a secret meaning to pure threes
that deters the birds. The dynamic range for
week 3 is just really tight. Only in 1987, which
gifted us with the minimum of 13, did the species
total fall outside the range of 17-23. You would
think that a winter walk would be characterized
by the odd day that is really good and some
fairly bad days, depending on the weather and the
inclinations of the birds. This is exactly what
you see in week 2 (minimum 11, maximum 32 and
standard deviation of 4.6). Apparently, week 3
marches to a different drummer and on this walk,
the drumming left us a little below 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
My view is that poetry is the closest that a
verbalization can come to connecting the natural
world to ourselves and that we should be doing it
as often and as deeply as possible. It is very
hard to make a living by poetry, even if you are
a performer, but it is not hard to live in
poetry. If you are looking, there is a metaphor
to be had in every step you take along any path
you can choose. Inspiration is available
everywhere. Today, after rounding Morrisroe,
Melissa is treated to the yellow rump of a
yellow-rumped warbler. The name makes sense at
last. There is a yellow rump! She suggests that
"Yellow-rumped Warbler" might be the title of her
next poem. I don't know what the maturity rate
of Melissa poetry is once she gets rolling but we
may be lucky enough to see it in a future walk
report.
Every walk has many keys. Sometimes, you have to
stretch outside the walk to find one but, today,
the flaring essence is to be found in Tournament
Park. I can set the stage with every week.
Every week, Alan walks into the park, checks the
wren hole for wrens, walks over to the fence by
the track and along the path between bushes,
hoping to flush a sparrow or a hermit thrush, and
then walks over to the sapsucker tree and scans
for sapsuckers. This tree has numerous rows of
holes that have been drilled en echelon in
spirals around the tree and some of the major
limbs. Usually, Alan is left following the dead
spiraling holes snaking up the tree and backing
down to his memories of the sapsucker who made
them. It is true that there is the odd
nonsapsucker to be found here. We have seen
warblers, hawks, crows, flycatchers, and
parakeets in this tree but these birds, however
welcome and beautiful in their own right, are not
what Alan wants to see. A sapsucker tree should
have a sapsucker on it, so Alan is looking for a
sapsucker. Nothing less will do.
Now, on a
typical walk, on an every walk, Alan scans the
tree, mentions to any within hearing distance
that the arrays of holes twisting around the
trunk and some of the major limbs were caused by
a sapsucker, now long gone. He gives the tree a
wistful look befitting the loss and memory, and
finally, turning away, he wanders over to the oak
trees by the bathrooms, and, finally, exits the
park. That's an every walk. This was not an
every walk. Alan scans the sapsucker tree and,
there, in plain sight 15 meters up on the main
trunk, is a sapsucker. There was the matter of
establishing what kind of sapsucker it was but it
didn't really matter. We had a qualifying bird.
I initially thought it was a red-naped sapsucker
because there wasn't much red when viewed from
the back and the head had a lot of white/black
but I changed my mind when I got a view from the
side. This bird had a prominent red bib with no
associated black throat patch or black band
outlining the red from the side. The head still
struck me as being more consistent with a
red-naped sapsucker but you can't argue with that
bib. We had a red-breasted sapsucker in Alan's
sapsucker tree.
A blind taste test can tell you surprising
things. You like brand A over the industry
standard, especially if you are paid $5,000 to
say so. You could never have discovered that
without the blindfold (and the cash). If,
however, you were to give a set of tissue samples
from red-breasted and red-naped sapsuckers to a
dna lab and then ask for them to label the
samples according to species, they would probably
fail miserably except through pure chance. The
lab will conclude that dna for all of the samples
is virtually identical, so close that you might
be accused of using a bunch of samples from the
same species. So, why aren't red-naped and
red-breasted sapsuckers treated as subspecies
instead of separate species? The answer lies in
the fecundity of the hybrids. There is an
extensive and stable hybridization zone in which
red-breasted and red-naped sapsuckers interbreed;
these cross-species unions are just as successful
at producing young and fledging as their single
species peers and the hybrids have survival rates
that are similar to those of the parents. The
hybrids are, however, markedly less successful in
producing young themselves. This may be a
consequence of a propensity towards sterility or,
perhaps, they are simply viewed as less fit no
matter how fit they are (i.e., they are less
successful at acquiring mates and end up with
poorer habitat when they do obtain mates). The
problem does not appear to have been studied well
enough to be definitive but it should be because
it gets at the heart of speciation. Regardless,
red-breasted and red-naped sapsuckers became
separate species only very very recently; they
have been genetically separate from
yellow-bellied sapsuckers for perhaps a few
hundred thousand years and the ancestors of all
three species separated from Williamson
sapsuckers four or five million years ago, during
the Pliocene.
The key to happy sapsuckers is a dead tree
standing (a snag) and this is the key to why
sapsuckers are less happy than they should be.
We like to remove dead wood, especially in urban
areas but also in forests where logging companies
are often allowed to go in and remove snags even
when they aren't allowed to chop down the live
trees (under the artifice of fire prevention).
Since the density of sapsuckers in breeding areas
is directly proportional to the number of snags
or tall decayed but still living trees, taking
these trees down leads to a declining sapsucker
population. Why is that bad, apart from keeping
sapsuckers suppressed? Sapsuckers, like other
woodpeckers are primary excavators. If you
decrease the population of primary cavity
nesters, you decrease the number of cavities,
and, if you decrease the number of nesting
cavities, you also suppress the population of
secondary cavity nesters who can't make their own
cavities and are, therefore, limited by the
supply of nesting holes.
Factoid of the day: It takes a sapsucker about
ninety seconds to drill out one sapsucker hole
and he/she will work it from two sides until the
cambium is intersected and sap can flow into the
hole.
Finally, I wanted to mention a classic Viveca
moment. We are walking towards Holliston through
the parking lot at the north end of campus when
Viveca decides to look at an odd bump on a limb
of one of the big trees by the ticket office.
Now, Viveca looks at a lot of odd bumps and,
usually, they are nothing but this one is a
female northern flicker. In the absence of a
sapsucker, she would almost certainly have been
the bird of the day.
The date: 1/16/2013
The week number: 3
The walk number: 1179
The weather: 67 F, sunny
The walkers: Alan Cummings, John Beckett, Melissa
Ray, Vicky Brennan, Viveca Sapin-Areeda
The birds (18):
Scrub Jay
Northern Mockingbird
House Sparrow
House Finch
Anna's Hummingbird
American Crow
Snowy Egret
Yellow-chevroned Parakeet
Black Phoebe
Ruby-crowned Kinglet
Lesser Goldfinch
Yellow-rumped Warbler
White-throated Swift
Red-breasted Sapsucker
Hummingbird, Selasphorus
American Goldfinch
Northern Flicker
Band-tailed Pigeon
--- John Beckett
Respectfully submitted,
Alan Cummings
1/28/13
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/index.html
1/9/13
I begin with the numbers. We had 22 species,
which is among the better totals for week 2 but
week 2 in 2011 was an extraordinarily wild ride
with 32 birds. So, although we had a positive
score because the median is only 19, the record
was little more than a distant orange glow on the
horizon. On a more positive note, we had two new
walkers, Melissa Ray and Marianne McLean. They
are the 134th and 135th walkers for the Caltech
bird walk. The bird species are still ahead
(currently 138 if you include all of the "X,
species" entries) but the birders are creeping up.
See the plots at
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/species_time.html
and
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/two_plots.htm
The Maintenance Yard, which has been somewhat
problematic of late, was reasonably productive,
although this was primarily because of distant
birds. We had a Cooper's hawk in bad light and
another hawk, really far out, that we weren't
able to do anything with at all. However, the
failed effort to make that hawk yield to an
identification, did result in our capturing some
swifts. They were just close enough to pick up
the occasional flash of white, making them white
throated. Viveca sees a gull off in the distance
and claims a California gull but this assertion
is met with considerable resistance because the
description isn't definitive. Her bird slowly
transforms into a gull, species. The title is
more ambiguous but more robust and equally
valuable.
Generally, after we exit the Maintenance yard, we
wander over to the baseball field to look for
sparrows on the ground, or in bushes, and phoebes
on the fence. We sometimes see a starling from
here and this is also our best chance for a
meadowlark, although they occasionally also pop
up in the inner turf area inside the track. This
time, we don't see any meadowlarks but we get a
very quick treat because a Say's phoebe is
working the fence directly in front of us. It is
about as good a view as you could reasonably hope
for and it is a new species for Melissa and
Marianne. January is prime time for Say's
phoebes on the Caltech bird walk. They generally
first appear on campus around week 40 as part of
a migration pulse. The numbers drop as the birds
disperse but we then get a slowly increasing
frequency of sightings that peaks around week 2.
They are among the earliest of our Spring
migration birds, with the last of them heading
out to the desert around week 10 (early March).
Say's phoebes are not particularly common birds
for us. We typically see two or three of them in
a given calendar year but we have had as many as
10 (2003 and 2010). If you take a July to July
approach to counting Say's phoebes, which gives
you a better sense for sightings dynamics, you
find that the winter of 2009-2010 with 17
sightings is by far the most Say's rich season of
all time (all others are single digit). At least
some of this extravagance was likely caused by an
individual bird being counted on more than one
week but there was also a real explosion of birds
passing through campus. Our bird had a dull
russet breast. I have seen some Say's that have
breasts that are practically apricot colored but
the winter birds of Caltech tend to be relatively
dull in comparison.
It's hard to consider a bird species without also
considering its breeding habits because these
define how a bird interfaces with its environment
and how it responds to environmental change.
Some birds (e.g., house sparrows) have many
affairs and the eggs in a clutch reflect multiple
fathers. Loyalty is a moment and the mate of last
year is unlikely to be the mate of this year. I
occasionally engage in a snickery banter about
the sex lives of birds in spite of it being an
anthropomorphized approach because it is both an
easy and important target for discussion. In
general, female birds that mate with multiple
males do so because there is a genetic advantage
behind the behavior. It has nothing to do with
moral fiber. Say's phoebes have a different
approach because there is a genetic advantage to
it. They don't engage in affairs very often (a
couple %) and they don't much believe in divorce.
Part of this is probably caused by a strong site
fidelity (a Say's phoebe will return to the same
breeding territory year after year. Widows and
widowers don't waste much time on the deceased
before picking up a new mate but, after all, you
have a limited window for breeding. Now, I admit
that the divorce rate is significantly higher
after a failed breeding attempt but that is a
seriously stressful situation and, even with
that, the divorce rate only goes up to a whopping
3% or so. I think it fair to say that if the
Say's phoebes knew about us and cared, the
knowing gossipy glances regarding our lascivious
lifestyle could get pretty snickery. The Say's
phoebes may be Americans but they are on average
much more loyal in love than we are, even if they
do go to Vegas. Is there any moral fiber
involved? No. Morality is a local derivative
and, after the affairs are over, the aftertaste
is genetic.
The last part of the walk was fairly productive.
We picked up bushtits (by Human Resources) and
the snowy egret (Baxter pond) fairly late, but
the last bird of the week was acquired in the
Throop pond area. We see and/or hear a Bewick's
wren here on occasion, so Alan and I are keeping
our eyes low, scanning bushes and looking for a
wren (or a common yellowthroat). Alan pulls out
his phone and dials up wrens and yellowthroats.
We get nothing for our troubles. In the meantime,
instead of wasting her time scanning bushes with
us, Viveca is scanning the canopy. She picks up
a quiet red-crowned parrot. Then she sees three
quiet red-crowned parrots, then five, then seven,
then a dozen. All of them are sessile and quiet.
I stare at one and he begins to give me the evil
eye. "This is siesta time. Why are you trying
to bother me?" My bird decides that I am
probably harmless but annoying. He slowly
rotates to face away from me, thereby giving him
self the ability to fly directly away should I
somehow transform from annoyance to danger. It
struck me as being a very feline type of action.
Both parties to my analogy would, no doubt, be
insulted. It is, however, unavoidable. If you
are comfortable and there is an annoyance you
can't do anything about, just turn your back and
pretend it isn't there, all the while keeping an
ear on it. It works! I'm not there. I move on.
The date: 1/9/2013
The week number: 2
The walk number: 1178
The weather: 68 F, partly cloudy
The walkers: Alan Cummings, Viveca Sapin-Areeda,
Melissa Ray, Marianne McLean, Carole Worra, John
Beckett, Vicky Brennan, Kent Potter
The birds (22):
Northern Mockingbird
Mourning Dove
House Finch
Anna's Hummingbird
American Crow
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Cooper's Hawk
Gull, species
Lesser Goldfinch
Mallard
Black Phoebe
Red-tailed Hawk
Swift, species
Say's Phoebe
Cedar Waxwing
Ruby-crowned Kinglet
Band-tailed Pigeon
House Wren
Common Raven
Bushtit
Snowy Egret
Red-crowned Parrot
--- John Beckett
Respectfully submitted,
Alan Cummings
1/27/13
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/index.html
1/2/13
There is something refreshing about the first
walk of the year. We breathe a continuum but the
colors are seemingly brighter and the songs are
more lyrical. The annual bird lists are empty
and every bird is a first bird. Every bird, even
one you saw last week, is fresh. We had the
first Cooper's hawk of the year, the first
yellow-rumped warbler, and the first black
phoebe. We have yet to see a red-tailed hawk, or
a Townsend's warbler or a Say's phoebe but there
is always next week. There is always time.
The day was cool and soft. It is close to 60°F
but Alan, who was cocky and fooled by the
sunlight, comes out bound only in a shirt (well,
there were pants and shoes, too). It's not
enough. He is cold and very fortunate to be able
to borrow a sweater from Viveca, who had come
well prepared. Now, on Viveca, the sweater would
have been very nice but expected. On Alan, we
are suddenly beyond fashion forward. He is at
least as cute as some of the birds we are seeing
and I am half expecting some of them to view him
as a rival.
As flamboyant and riveting as the Cummingsbird
is, I suppose that I should turn my attention,
for a moment, to the statistics of the walk.
Based on the raw numbers, we did quite well. The
species total of 21 birds is within hailing
distance of the record 23, which was set last
year, but, alas, we were splitting distance on
the low side.
See the plots at
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/species_time.html
and
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/two_plots.htm
The highlights came late and early. An early
highlight was garnered by Ashish, who picks up on
a ruby crowned kinglet working the fencing
opposite the tennis courts on our way to the
Maintenance Yard. The kinglet is quite close and
not shy as birder after scalloping birder comes
to a hushed stop, each bending to the angled
shoulder in front and watching a foraging show,
though no kills. The kinglet seems to ignore the
gathering throng of saltating birders but,
eventually, deciding that the yield is too low,
she flies off into the Maintenance Yard and is
lost to us. We unfold into the shallow current
of the walk and drift the moment in a carried
memory.
A middle highlight is to be found in the
glimpses that several of us got of a hermit
thrush near Morrisroe. We have sporadic
sightings of hermit thrushes during the winter
with additional migration pulses in the Spring
(circa weeks 18-20) and Fall (weeks 40-44 or so).
This is only our second sighting for this winter
(the winter of 2011-2012 yielded three winter
residents, with a couple of additional, possibly
migrant, sightings).
The late highlight was a black throated gray
warbler working the small trees along Holliston.
We now have one black throated gray warbler for
2013 and three for the winter of 2012-2013. The
sighting was unusual in coming from the back end
of the walk. Historically, most of our black
throated gray sightings have been from the south
side of campus (i.e., the Maintenance Yard and
Tournament Park) but in this season we seem to be
experiencing a new paradigm. Two of our three
birds have come from north of California Blvd.
Each walk is open to an essence. It may lie in a
visceral response to a chirp or identifying a
song that says you have become too mechanical and
lost lyrical heart of the bird. He brings you
back into a resonance of why. You belong here.
For a burgeoning moment, it is not a game of
counting coup but an opportunity to absorb and be
absorbed. Sometimes, the essence of a walk is in
a human voice that carries the heart of the day
or a memory. Today, we have the essence in a
story. It is in the germinating dream of an old
man and a failing patrimony that may, or perhaps,
may not recover.
The story begins with my sister-in-law, who is
planning to be in India next year. She is not a
birder but does have an interest in the natural
world, so it seemed appropriate to acquire a
field guide on Indian birds for her (after all, I
might want to visit India myself sometime). Now,
a quick check of ABE and Amazon, which are my
standard book hunting sites, revealed quite a few
options. I could, in principle, buy several of
these books and choose the best for her or I could
ask for a recommendation from our resident Indian
birder, Ashish. There was no hurry and the state
of my ruminations had not quite reached the level
of composing an e-mail when I joined the walk.
However, Ashish, who is a somewhat sporadic
walker due to a variety of scheduling conflicts,
was also there, letting me skip the cold
tactility of a keyboard in favor of a live
response. I find a quiet moment and launch into
my little spiel about needing a field guide and
Ashish lights up. "The best field guide on
Indian birds," he says, "is by Salim Ali. It's a
little dated and there are, of course, others but
Ali's book is still the best." This sounds like
a simple and straightforward assessment, and it
was, but there was a tonal quality that reminded
me of listening to the description of a deceased
but fondly remembered relative; yes, there is an
enthusiasm but it is tinged with a deep, abiding
respect. Ashish proceeded to tell me that Ali
had also been responsible for the establishment
of many bird sanctuaries and parks in India.
Ashish is always kind of enthusiastic but this
guy, Salim Ali, was making him bounce. So, I
left the walk determined to pursue this paragon
of Indian birding. I bought a copy of his field
guide. It's excellent. I acquired a copy of his
autobiography. This is much less impressive
until you encounter sections describing the two
blatantly public loves of his life, motorcycles
and birds. It is there that you begin to sense
how it was that Salim Ali could have left so many
jewels scattered around the country. I think he
loved his wife, too, but that love was private;
he never remarried, although his wife predeceased
him by half a century and, given the social norms
of the time, he was probably pressured to do
so-the autobiography is silent on the matter.
Salim Ali was in the right place at the right
time with the right connections to influence the
dismantling of the natural flotsam of the
maharajahs and he pushed all of the levers at his
disposal. I will, of course, leave it to the
people of India to pass judgment but Salim Ali
strikes me as being, arguably, as important to
the natural legacy of India as John Muir was to
the national park system in this country.
Rajasthan is a state in northern India that has
one of the great birding spots in the world,
Keoladeo. Keoladeo is the center of a series of
man-made wetlands, originally built in the
eighteenth century by the local maharajah, that
require external replenishment to maintain their
glory. For two and a half centuries, the system
set up by the maharajas in Keoladeo worked. The
park became, and deserved to be, a UNESCO world
heritage site. Now, I had thought to say a
little about the many birds of Keoladeo and bring
this into a testament of how important Salim Ali
was to them but, instead, I found a darker story.
Rajasthan has a political system that reminds me
of old style (and to some extent current style)
Louisiana: hot, powerful, and corrupt. For
example, the Vasundhara Raje administration in
Rajasthan, which was in power in the last decade,
was very big on public works. Many of their
projects were undoubtedly highly desirable but
they often also came at a heavy environmental
cost and with a corrupt twist that adversely
impacted Keoladeo, not to speak of the people of
the state. Discharges from the Pachna dam, which
had historically been used to compensate for dry
years in Keoladeo, were stopped to appease the
farmers who wanted more water. A diversion
project for bringing otherwise unused water to
Keoladeo was funded but the money was somehow
diverted to (Surprise! Surprise!) a power project
in the district of Raje's son (both mother and
son are currently under indictment for their
alleged participation in an unrelated land grab
scandal).
Although it is wonderfully easy to find
environmental villains among the political elite
of Rajasthan, the seeds of the problems for
Keoladeo started well before the Raje
administration and I think it important to point
them out. The first brick was a wall around the
park that prevented any use by local cattle. No
cattle, no water, nothing goes to the locals once
the wall is in. In American centric thinking,
this would be a blatant taking. It was not an
example of running into completely unintended and
unforeseeable consequences in wildlife
management. It is an example of completely
predictable consequences. You are starting with
man-made wetlands that have worked in harmony
with the local farmers for a couple of centuries
and require water sources outside the boundaries
of the park to be sustained. You don't bother to
figure out if part of the success of the wetlands
was due to whatever it was that the locals were
doing. You don't bother to realize that, if you
take food off a farmer's table and don't replace
it with something of greater value, you will
transform a stakeholder with a vested interest in
maintaining the wetlands within the park into a
stakeholder with a vested interest in depriving
the park of as much water as possible. Well,
let's ignore that little difficulty for the
moment. Now that you have kicked the cattle out,
you discover that it was cattle grazing that held
the hyacinths in check. Now, you face a huge,
unmanaged infestation. You also have a less
fertile system for insects because there isn't
any cattle dung. Birds begin to decline. Of
course, that doesn't really matter because the
politics overtake you. The state government,
pandering for farmer votes (including the ones
who no longer support you because of your wall),
stops your water allocation from the Pachna dam.
You go from 500 million cubic feet of water a
year to 19. The park goes dry. You have weeds
(another invasive) and dust. It's an ecological
disaster. The remaining birds leave. The birds
die. UNESCO says this isn't looking like a world
heritage site anymore and your designation is
going away unless you deal with the water
shortage. Even the national government, a
generally myopic entity, begins to realize that
an unnatural stink is rising out of Rajasthan.
It is, however, not until 2010 that the Pachna
dam releases significant water stocks to the
park. This year, it looks like the pipe project
that was fleeced by Raje administration will
finally be completed and bring in another 300
million cubic feet of water a year. The park
may begin to stabilize. So, what is the view
from Raje? Apparently, her government's
siphoning off water funds and water for the park
was, somehow, all the national government's
fault. Politics is universal! Huey Long would
have been proud.
The date: 1/2/2013
The week number: 1
The walk number: 1177
The weather: 61 F, sunny
The walkers: Alan Cummings, Viveca Sapin-Areeda,
Carole Worra, John Beckett, Ashish Mahabal,
Vicky Brennan, Kent Potter
The birds (21):
Rock Pigeon
Northern Mockingbird
Mourning Dove
House Finch
Anna's Hummingbird
Acorn Woodpecker
Black Phoebe
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Mallard
European Starling
Ruby-crowned Kinglet
Townsend's Warbler
Band-tailed Pigeon
Hermit Thrush
Hummingbird, Selasphorus
Lesser Goldfinch
Bushtit
Common Raven
Cooper's Hawk
Black-throated Gray Warbler
Wren, Species
--- John Beckett
Respectfully submitted,
Alan Cummings
1/23/13
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/index.html