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Blog Birding #228
Feeding birds is aften referred to as the “gateway drug” to birding, and it can be dangerous business as Sharron McInness relates at Bird Canada.
I’ve been feeding the birds in my backyard ever since that morning eight years ago when I noticed several black-hooded birds hopping around the overgrown garden of our new home on Gabriola Island. They made an odd, metallic chip, chip chip, that forced me to sit up and pay attention. Once I started looking, of course, I saw all kinds of birds, many much more beautiful than the Dark-eyed Juncos that I now refer to as “my gateway drug”, and many with a more beautiful song, like this male House Finch.
What do moorhens do when their territories abut one another and the urges of spring are upon them? Africa Gomez at The Rattling Crow shares photos and thoughts.
One of the island Moorhens climbed the willow tree with some nest material and passed it delicately to its partner sitting on the nest. Both males and females carry out nest building and are virtually indistinguishable by plumage, although males are a bit larger. After a while I saw the moorhen approaching some vegetable refuse that some passer by had dumped on the grass. The moorhen then spied either the other territory owner which was about 5 m away, or the coot that was standing nearby, and carried out the most wonderful display.
It seems like every species of bird is succumbing to their annual, reproductive impulses, and David Sibley offers some thoughts on those first, and often most obvious, harbingers of spring across much of the continent, Red-winged Blackbirds.
This is the time of year when Red-winged Blackbirds are returning to marshes all over the continent, and the males are performing their showy displays to impress females and intimidate rivals. You might think the display simply involves fluffing up the body feathers and especially the red patches on the wings, but there is a lot more going on. I took these photos in May 2014 at Pelee Island, Ontario, and they work well to show the directional component of the display.
Hawkwatchers at various sites across the eastern part of North America don’t just look for hawks. They’re detailed census also takes in other taxa as well, and at HMANA’s Hawk Migration Notes, Julie Brown reports on how hawkwatchers helped provide valuable data on dragonfly migration.
In 2014, Lighthouse Point in CT experienced the highest one-day migration pulse of almost 6,000 dragonflies on 7 September, and Hawk Ridge, MN and Illinois Beach, IL both witnessed peak dragonfly numbers (>6000) on 2 September. The two Midwestern strongholds of Hawk Ridge and Illinois Beach were also champions in overall reporting, with 151 and 95 observations submitted, respectively. Because dragonflies skirt coastlines, preferring not to fly out over open water, raptor monitors at these Great Lakes sites are ideally placed to witness large groups of migrants funneling past observation sites.
What do birders do with their time? It’s not always birding, as Lucas Bobay at The Birder’s Conundrum illustrates.
How do birders spend their time? It’s pretty much different for everyone. But if we are generalizing, this pie chart should be a good breakdown of a birder’s free time. Birding makes up a decent chunk of this time, but not all of it, as you will see below. We even manage a decent amount of normal human interaction – that’s good news!
Join the American Birding Association at www.aba.org!
Source: http://blog.aba.org/2015/03/blog-birding-228.html
