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Blog Birding #224
Some birds are particularly suited to this time of year, with a number of strategies for surviving the lean month. At Cornell’s All About Birds, Victoria Campbell shares information about North America’s four nuthatches and how they manage.
Winter is the perfect time to observe how nuthatches earned their common name, as they jam large seeds and nuts into tree bark before whacking them with their sharp bill to hatch out the seed from the inside.
Nuthatches are also into caching, meaning they store food to eat later. They often store seeds, one at a time, under the loose bark of a tree, typically hiding their cache with a piece of bark, lichen, moss, or snow. Scientists have observed nuthatches retrieving and eating more cached seeds when the weather gets colder, meaning they may use caching as a strategy for keeping a ready food supply throughout winter.
The Mallard-type ducks show scarcely any hesitancy in mixing up their genes willy-nilly. We’ve long known about the scourge of Mallard x Black Duck hybrids, but in the southeast, Mottled X Mallard is increasingly common, and tough to puzzle out, as shared via the eBird blog (.pdf).
The Mottled Duck’s range has little overlap with the southern part of Mallard’s “wild” breeding range, but feral populations of “park” Mallards essentially overlap it completely. Hybridization with Mallard is widespread, and one study showed that 11% of Florida birds judged to be Mottled Ducks based on appearance had mixed genetic (“hybrid”) composition, with these “hybrids” accounting for as much as 24% of ducks at one sampled locality (Williams et al. 2005). This phenomenon is considered to be the primary driving force behind Mottled Duck population decline there (FWC 2014).
Snowy Owls aren’t the only arctic raptors to find their way south in numbers this year. We also seem to be in the midst of a significant Gyrfalcon irruption, as Alex Lamoreaux at the Leica Birding Blog, explains.
As many people are aware, starting with the winter of 2012/2013, Snowy Owls staged a dramatic and widespread invasion into southern Canada and the northeastern United States, with the biggest numbers being from December to February. Gyrfalcons, the other massive arctic raptor, also pushed further south and in larger numbers than usual that winter. Sightings of these almost mythical falcons jumped from average winter counts of about four Gyrfalcons reported east of the Dakotas to a shocking fifteen birds! January to February 2014 had nineteen Gyrfalcon sightings across the same range, also coinciding with higher-than-average Snowy Owl numbers.
ABA Blog contributor Noah Strycker is still traveling through South America notching hundreds of new species for his global Big Year, and meeting some wonderful people along the way, as he explains at Birding Without Borders.
Julio, Carlos, Glenn, and I spent the morning birding a road above Tarapoto, looking for a few key birds on my last morning in north-central Peru (Gunnar stayed in the hotel to arrange some logistics for next week). It was a nice, relaxed session, especially after yesterday’s antics; we tracked down a Koepcke’s Hermit, saw a pair of Dotted Tanagers, and watched road workers trying to repair a massive landslide. An enterprising family had set up a roadside snack stand next to the flagger, and I had time to consume a bag of plantain chips, a bag of cooked manioc, and a bottle of homemade chicha morada before traffic went through.
British and North Americans are often said to be two cultures separated by a common language, and it’s true for birders as much as anything else, as Bo Boelans explains at Out there With the Birds.
The thing is, as Oscar Wilde wrote in 1887, “We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.”
As witty as this sounds it still embodies a basic truth: We think we mean the same things when using the same words, but it ain’t necessarily so!
I found that California, Florida, and Texas were in many ways virtually different nations. Dress, attitudes, politics, architecture, food… you name it and each state had its own. Lucky for me the one thing that did seem constant was that almost everyone I met was an anglophile.
Join the American Birding Association at www.aba.org!
Source: http://blog.aba.org/2015/03/blog-birding-224.html
