7/25/11
Missing, needs to be reconstructed.
7/18/11
We came up with 12 species, a very reasonable
total for week 29 (the median is 11) but a stolid
4 below the record of 16.
See the plots at
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/species_time.html
and
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/two_plots.htm
Had we been counting
butterflies and dragonflies, we would have had a
great walk total. We saw a lot of whites, a
couple sulfurs, west coast ladies, swallowtails,
and a gulf fritillary. I'm sure we would also
have noticed many smaller species had we been
looking very hard (I did notice some skippers)
but, alas, the butterflies count only as
flickering minuets as they color the day.
To me, the walks are really all about the journey
but, usually in a walk report, you find some
trumpeting call over the appearance of a rare for
Caltech bird or, perhaps, a relatively more
common bird flushed to prominence through a
terrific look. This week, the journey held no
such obvious virtuoso. Our Cooper's Hawk, though
a nicely framed and lighted flyby view, was all
too brief. The identification of the lesser
goldfinches was both visually and vocally
competent but neither was inspired and writing
about a three second aerial view of rock pigeons
flying across California Boulevard seems more
than a little excessive. So, instead, I lift a
paean to the bushtit. This is, I think, a badly
underappreciated bird. I've seen birders in
other places walking along in a huddled little
flock that stops suddenly as one of them sees a
small bird rustling about in a bush. At first,
they are all very attentive, each trying to
determine the species, and then you hear the word
"bushtit!" with a sneering lilt. The binoculars
lower like a palpable sigh and the birders avert
their eyes. It is as if there were a subliminal
belief that the gnatcatcher they really want to
see is offended by someone spending the time to
appreciate a common bushtit.
This week, Ashish was the first to notice our
bushtits. He was without binoculars but he saw a
couple of small birds flying from one oak on our
side of Wilson near Morrisroe to other side of
the street. His impression, and the one you
usually get at a distance for bushtits, is of a
tiny puffball of grayish brown with a longish
tail, not definitive necessarily but highly
suspicious. By now, three or four of us were
watching when a couple more of these little birds
flew over to join the first group, followed by a
few more, another couple and then, finally, as if
drawn by peer gravity or word of food, a group of
twenty or so crossed in a single visual whoosh.
Bushtits for sure. Having confidently identified
them, we didn't bother to cross the street and I
feel a pang of regret over not tasking a little
time for closer inspection. It would have
briefly taken us off of Caltech property and
slowed the walk, though not by a lot. We were
allowing bird bagging to triumph over a more in
depth appreciation of a single species.
Now, you might not think there is much to see
beyond identifying a bushtit and you would have a
lot of company among some very good birders but
the attitude is all wrong. Regarding a bushtit
is an exercise in subtlety. After all, if you
read a description of bushtits in a field guide,
the code words (or synonyms, thereof) are drab,
drab, drab gray to brown energetic little birds
with long tails that tend to run in flocks. That
about covers it. They are certainly energetic. I
once took 84 pictures of bushtits over the course
of a few minutes in my backyard and upon
downloading the files, I found myself with images
of bare twigs, clusters of leaves, flowers (this
was in a river silk tree in bloom), out of focus
pieces of bushtits and one, more or less, in
focus bird. I've had better luck with kinglets.
Our bushtits are grayish brown with the gray
mostly reserved for the wings and tail and brown
trending from the head and sides grading down to
a paler breast. There are some regional
variations in the plumage details but you
wouldn't mistake any of these guys for anything
other than a bushtit unless you are a very
serious splitter. I can, however, give you an
extra identification trick that opens into one of
the vistas I find so intriguing about these
birds. Look into a bushtit's eye. A solid deep
dark brown indicates a male. If the iris appears
yellow or creamy with a black pupil, you have a
female. Now, here's the interesting thing. If
you only look at one bird in the flock in this
way, the odds are that you are going to be
looking at a male because the flock will have
about a third more males than females. A bushtit
flock is basically an extended set of family
groups and the way genetic diversity is
maintained is that some of the females go off,
after fledging, to find a new flock and a lot of
them don't make it. Within your flock, you are in
constant communication with everybody else. If
there is a hawk, one of your friends will give an
alarm call and you will not be caught unaware.
You will be safe. If a clot of beetle larvae
just hatched, one of your buddies will find them
and tell you where the table has been set. The
evening is cold? You get to huddle with the rest
of the flock and conserve energy. Being by
yourself is very dangerous and requires a lot of
extra food that may be hard to find. But what
about all those frustrated males, you might say.
Not a problem. During the winter and spring,
bushtits pair off and leave the flock. They
build a nest that looks a lot like a child's
insulated sock (I find them periodically in my
yard) and the entire family spends the night
together. Often, there is a helper who just
happens to be an unrelated male who didn't get a
mate. He forages for the chicks and spends the
night in the sock with everybody else. "Aha,"
you may be thinking, but these are not acorn
woodpeckers. There are no affairs in the bushtit
world. So, what's in it for the helper? If it's
a good year, the female will try for a second
brood and, usually, she will select the helper as
her new mate. A female bushtit is serially
monogamous. And the male? Well, he knows how
the bread is buttered. Bushtits have it all
figured out.
In other news, we didn't see a Nuttall's
woodpecker near the nest of last week but Melanie
said a female mallard was at the pond at 7 PM on
Monday. Perhaps, there is a duck in our future.
The date: 7/18/11
The week number: 29
The walk number: 1100
The weather: 84°F, sunny
The walkers: Alan Cummings, Kent Potter, John
Beckett, Melanie Channon, Vicky Brennan, Vivica Sapin-Areeda,
Ashish Mahabal
The birds (12):
Rock Pigeon
Northern Mockingbird
House Sparrow
House Finch
Crow
Hummingbird, Selasphorus
Red-masked Parakeet
Bushtit
Black Phoebe
Parrot, species
Lesser Goldfinch
Cooper's Hawk
-- by John Beckett
Respectfully submitted,
Alan Cummings
7/20/11
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/index.html
7/11/11
Not so long ago, we were getting mildly
disappointed if we logged less than thirty
species. This week, we saw "only" 15 and it tied
the record originally set in 2002 and matched in
2007, 2008 and, last but surely not least, in
2011. Fifteen is clearly a popular number for
week 28.
See the plots at
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/species_time.html
and
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/two_plots.htm
I find myself in summer looking for secrets in
the mundane. Yes, there are elegant summer
visitors like white-throated swifts I never tire
of watching but most of the available birds on
campus are resident throughout the year. To me,
each of them, actually every bird, is a cacophony
of meshing maybes. Sometimes, a glance is
definitive. We saw a flight of three birds
zipping overhead, perhaps only two seconds, none
with binoculars, and yet there was no doubt among
us that we had seen a small band of band tailed
pigeons. We hear a song that can be nothing
else, a bulbul. Others we never resolved. The
lighting was bad, the bird was shy, the look too
brief, and the one note call, however hauntingly
reminiscent of something not quite on the tip of
your tongue, was not quite enough. This week it
was a tale of tail. There is a prominent
eucalyptus tree north of the recycling center at
the north end of campus and perched patiently for
us on a large branch was a largish hawk. We
never got a view of the breast or face. No call
came. There was no flight off the perch. The
head never turned and the lighting was not great.
We had a back and we had a tail. So what did
that get us? The most prominent overall features
were a really long tail extending well beyond the
wing tips, a relatively lithe appearance,
brownish coloring to the back with a more grayish
tail and no spots on the back (no spangles).
This said something along the accipiter line like
a Cooper's or a sharp-shinned hawk rather than a
buteo like a red-tailed or red-shouldered hawk.
The end of the tail, which was closely held, had
subtle bars and was clearly rounded, which argued
against a sharp-shinned hawk, as did the size
(this was definitely a big bird, presumably
female) and the season. We have admittedly had a
few summer sharp shinned hawks sightings over the
years (you don't need all the fingers of one hand
to count them) but the vast majority of sharp
shins are up in the northern US and Canada right
now and they are far rarer around Caltech in the
summer than Cooper's hawks. Exotics (to Caltech)
like merlins (too small) and northern harriers
(too big a tail to wing ratio) also failed. We
had a Cooper's hawk. We have had some seriously
cool encounters with Cooper's hawks that were
much more obviously extraordinary and close-up
and they are not particularly uncommon even in
summer but a bird that forces you to work with
less is extraordinary in its own right and in
many ways it is working the puzzle of a small
fraction of the potential field markings that
validates the process of birding. We actually
made a quick id on the Coopers but somehow she
seemed to bring out our feral birders. I like
that feeling.
We also saw a female Nuttall's spend a lot of
time poking her head into a hole just west of the
Tournament Park parking lot, occasionally even
disappearing except for the tip of her tail. No
doubt she had a very good reason for doing this
and, although this would be quite late in the
season for laying eggs, there is a decent chance
the hole has some chicks and that she will
continue to have several good reasons to visit
over the next week or two. We didn't see the
male but I'm sure he was somewhere in the general
vicinity.
The record tying bird, although we didn't know it
at the time, was seen near the end of the walk
opposite Parson-Gates. This was a juvenile
common raven, back to commune with fond memories,
perhaps a month old, of free food and total
protection. The times have changed dramatically
and the lost reality of the nest is something
every juvenile corvid has to come to terms with.
It's an unforgiving world out there.
We would have made 16 species if our cat food
mallard had been accommodating but he was clearly
molting last week with the bright green neck-band
of the breeding season rapidly turning into a
muddy brownish goo. It seems likely that he has
gone off to find a large body of water to
complete the molt and he won't be back again this
summer (he will be flightless for a while as he
drops a lot of flight feathers, all at the same
time rather than one at a time like most birds).
Unless some hen decides to stop by (they molt a
little later in the season), we are probably out
of ducks for a while but you never know. We'll
be checking...
The date: 7/11/11
The week number: 28
The walk number: 1099
The weather: 73°F, sunny
The walkers: Alan Cummings, Viveca Sapin-Areeda, John Beckett, Vicky Brennan
The birds (15):
Northern Mockingbird
House Sparrow
Mourning Dove
House Finch
Anna's Hummingbird
Crow
Red-masked Parakeet
Red-whiskered Bulbul
Black Phoebe
Hummingbird, Selasphorus
Nuttall's Woodpecker
Lesser Goldfinch
Band-tailed Pigeon
Cooper's Hawk
Common Raven
-- by John Beckett
Respectfully submitted,
Alan Cummings
7/15/11
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/index.html
7/5/11
Just a short one this time as I'm swamped on the science/project manager
side of my life. We had an average walk,
recording 12 species. We were right on the median
but a shade below the average for a week 27, so
we came up with a slightly negative walk score.
First one of those we've had since Valentine's Day, 20 weeks
ago.
See the plots at
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/species_time.html
and
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/two_plots.htm
The heat probably dissuaded some walkers from walking
as we only had three people total. There was
not a lot to brag about on the walk. The highlight
was that we all survived and nobody even passed out.
The date: 7/5/11
The week number: 27
The walk number: 1098
The weather: 90°F, partly cloudy
The walkers: Alan Cummings, Vivica Sapin-Areeda, John Beckett
The birds (12):
Northern Mockingbird
House Sparrow
Mourning Dove
House Finch
Anna's Hummingbird
Crow
Mallard
Red-tailed Hawk
Red-masked Parakeet
White-throated Swift
Black Phoebe
Lesser Goldfinch
Respectfully submitted,
Alan Cummings
7/8/11
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/index.html