9/24/12
We observed 18 species, which just ekes out a
positive score by being one above the preexisting
median for week 39. We were not even within
hailing distance of the record of 24, which was
set in 2004 but we were well above the worst
showing of 7. We had two and a maybe for notable
birds.
See the plots at
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/species_time.html
and
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/two_plots.htm
The maybe bird came in the form of a pair of
birds fluttering to the north as seen from the
Maintenance yard. Now, the flight pattern said
swift and I managed to briefly get a glass on one
of them. To the extent I could tell, it looked
pretty dark and relatively monotonic. So, I'm
practically salivating. Bird of the week! Bird
of the week! I'm thinking Vaux's swift. Bird of
the week! Weeks 38-39 are prime time for Vaux's
swifts (8 of our 20 sightings have come in weeks
38 or 39). However, nobody's look is good enough
to push anybody around and Kent thought he saw
some white on one of the birds, which would make
them white-throated swifts. I could say that
white throated swifts would be a really anomalous
sighting for week 39, so that these were much
more likely to be Vaux's swifts, but it wouldn't
be true. We have a significant pulse of
sightings at weeks 39-40 on the Caltech bird
walk, (never mind that our pair was heading
north). We are, sad to say, left at swift species
and I remain on the hunt for a bird of the week.
The second potential bird of the week came in
Tournament Park. Darren thinks he hears a
yellow-rumped warbler and he and Alan work for a
visual but they only come up with a bird of the
right size and no viable field markings. There
is no butter butt to furnish thought. There is
no clear yellow and no good sighting for the
group. It is, I suppose, a legitimate sighting
but I HATE it. I look for seasonal markers to
explode the time, charged like the breath of a
lion's decaying flesh. It should roar, calling
every particle into an aligning lattice of
everlasting Fall. I could, I suppose, just not
let Fall happen until I see a yellow-rump for
myself but I'm afraid the Fall is here whether I
like it or not. This time it whimpered like a
lost sigh in a fog. A balance has come and gone.
The second Darren derivative has said that it is
so. The season has officially changed. A
yellow-rump is here in week 39 and I didn't see
him. I am annoyed.
Typically, we see out first yellow-rump of the
season in week 40 or 41. Of 24 years of Caltech
bird walk in which there is sufficient data to be
confident of the first week of sighting, we had
one first Fall yellow-rump in week 38, four in
week 39, including this year, nine in week 40 and
ten in week 41. So, our Fall comes early. It's
time to start looking for ruby crowned kinglets
along with Townsend's and black throated gray
warblers but I'll believe they are here when I
see them.
Although the yellow-rumped warbler is an
important seasonal marker species for us, it
isn't the bird of the week. This bird came to us
at the tail end of the walk when Viveca notices a
pair of birds zipping around a tree trunk. The
behavior said nuthatch. One was clearly a
white-breasted nuthatch. The birds appeared to
be in a somewhat antagonistic relationship,
although there was none of the raised tail or
back feathers signaling that a real fight was in
the offing. Still, we were hoping that the
chasing might mean that one of them was a
red-breasted nuthatch, which would have been a
new bird for the Caltech bird walk. However, it
soon becomes clear that both birds are
white-breasted nuthatches. Perhaps, these are
siblings dispersing from their natal territory.
We have only six white-breasted nuthatch sightings
prior to this year, the last in 2002. Now, we
get sightings in successive weeks, so this is a
big event. The timing is not anomalous in the
sense that our sightings have been evenly split
between Fall (weeks 38-43) and winter (weeks
2-9). Most likely this is a pair of dispersing
juveniles but it could have been a pair of adults
as nuthatches will pair bond over multiple years
and stick together through the winter. How's
that for certitude? Last week's sighting was in
Tournament Park, so there is a good chance that
our birds from this week are different
individuals from the one Kent and Vicky picked up
last week.
To what do we owe the honor of all
these nuthatches? The two usual suspects for
this type of anomalous sighting are that this is
either an aftermath of the Station Fire or that
we have a freak bird or two. The common
yellowthroat of last year was likely an example
of the latter. However, given that people in the
group have been commenting recently on an unusual
abundance of nuthatches in Sierra Madre, which is
upslope from us, and given the possibility that
we have seen three different nuthatches over two
weeks, I'm inclined to go with the Station fire
theory for our nuthatches. If you get a good
year followed by a bad or at least less good
year, you will often have the eruption of a
species into areas outside its normal range as
young birds, especially, look around for new
habitat. With the burned out region of the
Station Fire providing few opportunities for new
territory to the north without flying over an
extensive region of blight, young hearts glean to
the south. Nuthatches tend to be semi-resident,
so if there are enough insects to be gleaned from
the local bark, we may be greeting the equivalent
of the great chickadee invasion of the last
couple of years.
The date: 9/24/2012
The week number: 39
The walk number: 1162
The weather: 86F, sunny
The walkers: Alan Cummings, Kent Potter, John
Beckett, Darren Dowell, Viveca Sapin-Areeda,
Vicky Brennan
The birds (18):
Rock Pigeon
Mourning Dove
House Finch
Anna's Hummingbird
American Crow
Lesser Goldfinch
Yellow rumped Warbler
Swift, species
Bewick's Wren
Red-whiskered Bulbul
Black Phoebe
Yellow-chevroned Parakeet
Nuttall's Woodpecker
Hummingbird, Selasphorus
Mountain Chickadee
Bushtit
House Wren
White-breasted Nuthatch
--- John Beckett
Respectfully submitted,
Alan Cummings
10/5/12
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/index.html
9/17/12
It was a warm, sunny, mid-September Monday. But not nearly as warm
as recent Mondays. Which is good. Vicky was a little late, Kent was
a little later, so each was concerned about doing a solo walk. We
met near the maintenance yard with no birds each. The yard and
Tournament Park and its parking lot yielded 13 birds. Note that this
is also the total for the day. Possibly a California Towhee, by ear,
around the athletic field, but probably the Phoebe we saw later. Two
separate little brown birds on Holliston---maybe one a House Finch,
but nothing to meet the high standard for Caltech Walkers. Only the
Deep South (Campus) produced today.
See the plots at
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/species_time.html
and
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/two_plots.htm
The White-Breasted Nuthatch, Orange-Crowned Warbler, and Mountain
Chickadee showed up close together in time and space, so it's three
birds-for-the-week. Three in one is good, since I know neither
enough natural history nor birding statistics to write much else. It
was a pleasant walk, not too many birds, but, particularly with the
Nuthatch, some interesting ones.
The date: 9/17/2012
The week number: 38
The walk number: 1161
The weather: ~85 F, sunny
The walkers: Vicky Brennan, Kent Potter
The birds (13):
Scrub Jay
Mourning Dove
Anna's Hummingbird
Acorn Woodpecker
American Crow
Bushtits
Black Phoebe
Hummingbird, Selasphorus
Lesser Goldfinch
House Wren
White-Breasted Nuthatch
Orange-Crowned Warbler
Mountain Chickadee
--- Kent Potter
Respectfully submitted,
Alan Cummings
10/4/12
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/index.html
9/10/12
Hmmmm.. this happened so long ago, I've forgotten what happened.
So, this report will be short.
We walked, we ovserved some birds, and we recorded what we observed.
We only saw 8 species. Fortunately, the record low for the week was 6.
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: 9/10/2012
The week number: 37
The walk number: 1160
The weather: 87 F, sunny
The walkers: Alan Cummings, Kent Potter, Vicky Brennan
The birds (8):
Rock Pigeon
Anna's Hummingbird
Acorn Woodpecker
American Crow
Hummingbird, Selasphorus
Black-chinned Hummingbird
Swift, sp.
Bushtit
Respectfully submitted,
Alan Cummings
10/3/12
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/index.html
9/4/12
We each have our own little fears in a bird walk.
For me, there is the haven mind fruiting birds
and easing purple berries into red or green, or
planting a single chirp that rises in like a
faint echo of the chorus dawn into something I
know. Wishing makes it so. I could turn a crown
of thorns into a pigeon or an Anna's into an
Allen's. Do I imagine a flash of brown as he
speeds away? There is no one else to say. It
is all between the me and the haven moi. It is
why there should always be at least two people on
a bird walk. There is the hive mind but there
are only free lunches for dead crows and even the
carrion has to make a living. This week it
finally happened. I have been on more than a
hundred Caltech bird walks, always with others;
sometimes on a pleasant Fall migratory day, with
many others. This time, I reach the starting
point of the walk and find only the echo of
parties from the past. I proceed to the
Maintenance yard, where I flush a big flock of
variably aged young mourning doves. Some of them
have short tails and are still growing out
feathered cheeks but see no other walkers.
Tournament Park is full of ghosts and lesser
goldfinches. Darren is probably up at JPL.
Viveca is gone. Alan is off having fun. It's
too hot for Vicky and Kent, who seems to have a
sixth sense for undersubscribed walks, leaves
only the afterimage of a white beard. I am alone
in a haven mind and must be careful.
Unfortunately, for me, the birds are also being
careful and, at least to my ears, rather quiet.
Still it comes to a yielding struggle. I hear a
crow. I hear a house finch and somehow, I catch
the accent just right and whistle over a dozen.
I see a bulbul. It didn't talk but moved in an
attempt to triangulate my strange call. I manage
to pish up a house sparrow, whose querulous gaze
turns like a sneer into a diving drop. His
hollowed court swallowed by leaves brushing the
tunneling breeze of a poltgergeist. Well, you
say, " You must be one of those dreamers who sees
what should be seen or what should not." Maybe.
I will say that I know what I saw and heard and I
saw what I knew. The total number of species for
the day was 14, which is reasonably good walk for
a week 36 walk. The record is 18, set in 2009,
and I don't think I could have met that without
doubling up on time, tempting, perhaps, but too
hot. However, the median is only 12, so my
solitary saunter officially qualifies as being
respectable.
See the plots at
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/species_time.html
and
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/bird_data/two_plots.htm
I suppose the highlight bird has to be the
Bewick's wren. As I come up along the path
lacing the Throop ponds, I am disappointed but
not surprised to see no mallard, not even a
nitrogenous hint. However, as I glance down
into the Indian hawthorns on the other side of
the path, I see a flash of bird in the
underbrush. He is razzing something as he works
the bushes. Getting louder by the second, he
suddenly pops up to a tree fork, very nearly at
eye level and continues to scold, his tail
straight up and his eyebrow blazing. He is now
looking right at me. What have I done to deserve
this? Perhaps, he knows that I tend to associate
with that riff raff Alan and his smart phone.
Perhaps, he is scolding another bird still hiding
in the bushes (a common yellowthroat would be
nice). He cusses for another few seconds and he
then flies directly over my head, landing about
five meters up and on the other side of the path.
He proceeds to forage, ignoring me and any other
annoyance. It is quiet again in the avian world
and, if I was important to the interaction, I am
now, as I should be, unimportant but we have our
tenth Bewick's wren sighting of the year.
The date: 9/4/2012
The week number: 36
The walk number: 1159
The weather: 94°F, sunny
The walkers: John Beckett
The birds (14):
House Sparrow
Mourning Dove
House Finch
Anna's Hummingbird
Acorn Woodpecker
American Crow
Lesser Goldfinch
Hummingbird, Selasphorus
Red-masked Parakeet
Black-chinned Hummingbird
Red-whiskered Bulbul
Common Raven
Bewick's Wren
Black Phoebe
--- John Beckett
Respectfully submitted,
Alan Cummings
10/2/12
http://birdwalks.caltech.edu/index.html