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Blog Birding #237
Swifts are remarkable birds, but often hard to get a good look at as they course through the sky. Their vocalizations, however, can be immediately distinctive, as Nathan Pieplow explains in his swift-recording travelogue from Mexico, at Earbirding.
For the next hour, these two species swirled over our heads, sometimes swinging pretty low. The encounter was simultaneously a letdown and a thrill. On the one hand, it woke us up from the pipe dream of documenting some ultra-rare Cypseloides vocalizations. On the other hand, it was a terrific opportunity to spend time with two species that it can be awfully hard to see and hear well. It cleared up a long-standing mystery about whether the Black Swifts of Mexico might sound different from the ones farther north (answer: they don’t).
This can get slow and buggy in late summer, so perhaps some birders can be forgiven for starting to pay attention to those bugs, as Kyle Carson at Out the With the Birds does.
I spent my childhood in field and forest, or at home with my nose buried in a bird book. But that’s the thing: I focused on birds. Any time I tried to stop to admire a beetle or coneflower, I’d almost instantly be pulled away by a bunting or grosbeak. I blame it on my self-diagnosed BDD (bird deficit disorder).
And still every summer, typically in July when most of our birds are quietly tending to young in the shade and being more or less undistracting, I spend some time getting to know the other creatures that share our world.
Late summer is also boat season on the west coast. let Steve Tucker of Bourbon, Bastards, and Birds whet your appetite for an El Nino-filled fall in the Pacific.
What is different about this year is El Nino…not a speculated one, not a possible one, but a real one. The nonbirder associates El Nino (sorry for the lack of tilde) with rain, the west coast seabirder associates it with rare birds. Weird seabirds have already put in appearances in California this year…a Red-footed Booby, a Nazca Booby, a Kelp Gull, a Bridled Tern…and none of those birds were even seen out to sea! So who knows what will be out there?
Worried if your summer vacation is going to negatively impact your feeder birds? The Zen Birdwatcher Nancy Castillo says not to fret.
When we leave home for a few days, besides watering the plants and stopping the mail, we often wonder what’s going to happen with our birds. Will they go hungry if the feeders go empty? And will they come back?
The good news is that the birds won’t go hungry – they’ll just fly to another source of food.
At 10,000 Birds, Jochen Roeder breaks down the real differences between a European and an American Great Egret, just in case you were really looking forward to scrutinizing your egrets this year.
This means that a North American birder will scan their Great Egrets for a large bird with a pale bill in winter or a black bill in summer, and pale yellowish colouration on the upper legs. A European birder will look for a small bird with a bright bill and entirely black legs. This does sound like something that can be done – but remember, it is hot in here and I promised some birding philosophy. If a birder finds such a bird, regardless on which side of the Atlantic they are standing, how certain can they be of their assessment? Even if we assume the field marks themselves are reliable, how reliable is the perception of the observer? I guess we’ve all been there: we see something we suspect is a rarity, get all fired up and excited, watch the bird in a delirious state and note the relevant field marks.
Join the American Birding Association at www.aba.org!
Source: http://blog.aba.org/2015/08/blog-birding-237-2.html
