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Blog Birding #261
The origin of North America’s burgeoning population of Lesser Black-backed Gulls is still something of a mystery, but the confirmation of individuals returning to the same place every year, as Amar Ayyash reports at Anything Larus, is pretty exciting.
Last winter, Michael Brothers and Jay Barry from the Marine Science Lab began banding Lesser Black-backed Gulls in Volusia County, Florida. The first bird to be banded was Green F:001. You may recall I photographed this individual in Daytona Beach Shores last January:
While on gull patrol at the Brevard County Landfill last week, I refound our friend, almost one year later to the day – totally unexpected, roughly 70 miles south of where it was banded the previous winter!
A presumptive Bullock’s Oriole in Ontario that was determined by DNA to be at least a small part Baltimore has caused a bit of consternation among birders there. Not to worry, says Rick Wright at Birding New Jersey and Beyond, that’s nothing unexpected.
There is probably no Bullock’s oriole on the planet that does not have a bit of the Baltimore coursing through its veins. We know this, and we’re happy to ignore it when we identify birds in the field — just as we gladly ignore the fact that the family tree of nearly every mallard on the east coast is studded with black ducks, and that there isn’t a “black” towhee on the great plains that is not the product of repeated miscegenation. It’s biochemically messy out there.
At Whimbrel Nature, Elijah Goodwin, responds to Rick, asking whether science and birding can reconcile in such cases.
I think encouraging distance between “science” and “birding” is the wrong thing to do. Even to suggest that science and modern birding are incompatible is dangerous. Particularly at a time when tools like eBird mean that birders are poised to make greater contributions to science and bird conservation than ever before. Historically birding has been intimately intertwined with science and it is on the cusp of being even more connected. I take exception with two aspects Mr. Wright’s argument. First that science can ruin or be a detriment to birding, and second that birding is primarily “an exercise in identification of species”.
At Cape Sable Birding, Martin Dennis shares some of the more interesting sights of a Maritime winter on the sea.
We’ve been patiently waiting for a Thick-billed Murre to show up on CSI for the year list and they have steadfastly remained at sea until today. Johnny saw one from Barrington causeway this morning and summoned the troops. For Mike it was a life birds, two in two days as it happened. For me it was another chance to engage with what had been a mythical bird until my life bird in Kingston, Ontario a few years ago.
Olaf Danielson‘s ABA Area Big Year finds him spending the end of January in Iowa, of all place, still adding to his list and still in great position this early in the year.
I have five birds that I worry about seeing. I had seen two of them before now and the third is the white-winged crossbill. I am planning on heading to northern Minnesota this weekend but very few sightings have been reported of that bird. The closest reports, oddly happen to be in two cemeteries in NW Iowa. I looked at the map and the checklists. The one in Sheldon, Iowa was a few miles closer to me than Sioux City Iowa and it had brown creeper, so I decided, I’d go there. I had breakfast with my daughter and she went off to school, I…I went off to Iowa.
Join the American Birding Association at www.aba.org!
Source: http://blog.aba.org/2016/02/blog-birding-261.html
