Spring is Here!

As we were getting ready for school on Wednesday, another vagrant of spring showed up in a sapling nearby!

B.O.T.D. Baird's Sparrow

Baird's Sparrow (Ammodramus bairdii)

Baird's Sparrows are frustrating grassland denizens. Just when the form of the sparrow drifts into focus through your binoculars, the bird dives out of view from its perch. Baird's Sparrows sing atop grasses stems and low shrubs, but when they stop singing, they are almost impossible to find.

The Baird's Sparrow is a bird of native grasslands with an unusually small nesting distribution in the southern Canadian Prairies and extreme northern Great Plains states. It favours lush areas rather than grazed, short-grass prairie habitat. During years of drought, the Baird's Sparrow is now uncommon and declining throughout its range. Agriculture has eliminated much of the prairie it is reliant on and continues to reduce  remaining grassland tracts. Baird's Sparrow was the last bird collected and described by Audubon for his classic Birds of North America. If you think this species is difficult to find and recognize now, consider that it took 30 years for a second ornithologist to "rediscover" Baird's Sparrow after is was first described.

Cornell Lab: Baird's Sparrow

Lone Pine Publications: Birds of Canada

B.O.T.D. Hammond's Flycatcher

Hammond's Flycatcher (Empidonax hammondii)

High atop a spruce clinging to the flanks of the northern Rockies, a Hammond's flycatcher sits and waits. Wings and tail flicking, feet clamping upon its perch, the bird fairly vibrates like a slingshot at full draw. Suddenly it darts forth. The wide flycatcher bill opens and closes with an audible snap - and a flying ant disappears within. Then, as it tethered by an invisible elastic, the feathered projectile snaps back to its launch point, where it sits, fidgeting nervously, and waits for another victim to pass.

The Hammond's is a bird for the heights, foraging int eh higher branches of tall western evergreens. In the warmer, southern reaches of its nesting range, the bird's love of high places may carry it to elevations above 10,000 feet - a penchant that helps to distinguish from the dusky flycatcher. This near-twin of the Hammond's shuns high places and favours drier, more open woodlands. Not quite so nervous as the Hammond's, dusky flycatchers seem able to hold their wing flickering in check, but even the strongest willed dusky must surrender to a periodic twitch of the tail.

The high-strung Hammond's must be anxious about being separated from its nesting territory, too. In the spring it arrives uncommonly early - often migrating with those vanguards of spring, the hardy kinglets. In the fall it lingers longer than most other flycatchers - far longer than mights seem prudent for a bird that catches insects for a living.

Cornell Lab: Hammond's Flycatcher
Reader's Digest: Book of North American Birds

Weekly What Bird Wednesday

Thank you for joining me for W.W.B.W. once again! Last week there was one guess... William got it right! The answer was the House Finch. Here is this week's clue:

This bird is stocky, rusty brown, streaky with underlying grey. About 6-7 inches long.

Hint: It is a sparrow ;-)


Other W.W.B.W. posts*:


Birds In Your Backyard
Bird Boy
The Cats and the Birds

*Posts may not be up yet.

B.O.T.D. Pine Warbler

Pine Warbler (Dendroica pinus)

The names of many birds are illogical, if not downright misleading, but in this case a more suitable one could scarcely have been chosen. Pitch pine, jack pine, Norway pine, red pine, white pine, scrub pine - very types do not figure prominently in their lives of pine warblers. Except during spring and fall migrations. these little birds are rarely spotted too far away from their favourite trees.

Their sturdy nests are found well out on a horizontal pine limb, hidden gin tufts of needles at the very tip of a branch or among a cluster of cones. They are built of pine bark, pine needles, and tiny pine twigs, all held together with spider or caterpillar silk (gleaned most likely from around the tree) and lined with plant down, fur, and feathers that also probably come from eh immediate vicinity.

The pine warblers' food consists mainly of the insects, spiders, and their kin whom the birds share the pine trees. Daily they scour the branches, twigs and needles and creep over the bark searching for their prey - not with the single-minded concentration of brown creepers, but in much the same manner, with their bodies pressed low and feathers brushing the bark. Sometimes their bright plumage becomes streaked with the pitch, or resin, that rubs off on them, and it is clearer that ever that these warblers are a product of the pines.

Cornell Lab: Pine Warbler

Reader's Digest: Book of North American Birds

Elm Creek

On Saturday, April 11th we went to Elm Creek (near Carman). It was an amazing experience adding three species to my 2015 list and one lifer... the trumpeter swan. Trumpeter Swans, Long-Eared Owls, and Wild Turkeys. It was much fun as we also did fireworks and tracked down some howling coyotes. We also saw a flock of hundreds of migrating blackbirds and grackles. Picture coming soon.

Bird Log: Saturday Apr 11

B.O.T.D. American Wigeon

American Wigeon (Anas americana)

What some birds won't go through for a taste of wild celery. Take the American wigeon, a duck with diving limitations that would seem to rule out  its enjoyment of a plant that grows deep in the water. But the wigeon has a simple solution: let other ducks get the celery, then grab some of it. The unwitting  donors are redheads, scaups, and canvasbacks - all diving birds adept at rooting up celery from the bottom. Tailoring its migration routes and wintering locations to theirs, the crafty wigeon shadows them like pilot fish trailing a shark.

As a flock of redheads feeds over a celery bed, a redhead dives - and a nearby wigeon springs into action. Anticipating where its victim will surface, the wigeon swims over and waits. When the redhead pops up with a bill-full of celery stems, the opportunist brazenly snatches a strand.

Is the redhead outraged? Does it drive the wigeon away? On the contrary, diving dicks put upon by wigeons accept their role as providers with evident tolerance. Perhaps they can sense that wigeons are quick to sense trouble and warn them of danger. More restless than any other ducks, wigeons impart their alarm to the divers around them, leaping from the water in a flurry of alarm quacks and rattling wings. Surely insurance like that is worth a celery stalk or two.

Cornell Lab: American Wigeon

Reader's Digest: Book of North American Birds

The Art of Mimicry

This morning as I was walking outside to my morning class I stumbled upon a little songster up in a tree. This little bird was the European Starling, a species introduced to Manitoba in the 1900s. It has since spread all over Canada and North America and there is little place you can go to get away from these pests to many who do not realize these birds' talent as songsters. Anyway, as I was walking a Blue Jay flew over head and screamed his jay-jay-jay!  I looked up and as he flew behind the school another 'jay' screamed. Then came the warble of a robin from the same spot along with a few whistles and house sparrow call-notes. I was fooled by them all... trying desperately to locate the source. The amazing (and frustrating)
part was that the starling emitted multiple sounds at once; adding to his award-winning theatrical performance.

B.O.T.D. Yellow-Headed Blackbird

Yellow-Headed Blackbird (Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus)

In a Wyoming marsh a burly blackbird hitches himself to a bulrush stalk, his golden hood glistening in the sun. Slowly, deliberately, he fans his glossy tail. With the eyes of his intended upon him, he opens his wings in a dramatic gesture of appeal. Then, bowing low, till his golden crown is nearly flush with his tail, he opens his mouth and emits the nastiest sound ever heard from a bird's mouth.

Even the most generous critics concede that as a vocalist, the yellow-headed blackbird is unmusical - and a few might agree with W. L. Dawson, who described the song as "a wail of despairing agony which would do credit to a dying catamount." It seems that no one who has written about this bird of marshes and reedy lakes can resist commenting on the disparity between its spectacular courtship display and its horrific, croaking voice.

Yellow-heads nest in colonies, some quite large. They favour deeper water than the smaller red-winged blackbirds, and where the two birds occur together, the red-wings are shunted to the shallower marshland edge. Deep water is a deterrent to such predators as raccoons and skunks, while colony life is a defence against marauding hawks and crows. Any harrier that approaches a colony to closely must soon contend with an angry black and yellow crowd of birds. It is a wise hawk that retreats before it is put to rout.

Cornell Lab: Yellow-Headed Blackbird
Reader's Digest: Birds of North America

B.O.T.D. Marbled Godwit

Marbled Godwit (Limosa fedoa)

To photograph birds is to sweat and swat flies, to stand for long hours waist-deep in swamp water, or to crouch even longer in freezing makeshift blinds. Allan Cruickshank knew these tortures. As one of America's leading bird photographers, Cruickshank expected the worst.

Them along came a marbled goodwill to make his life easy. Tawny like the grass that engulfed her, the mottled female was nearly invisible against the hollow of beaten-down grasses that holder four olive eggs. When Cruickshank approached, the bird scurried away. He built a blind and almost immediately, the bird returned. Perhaps, he hoped he would not need a blind. Perhaps this beautifully camouflaged shorebird - known for "sitting tight" while unknowing predators walked just inches away - would allow him to approach. This bird did that and more. To Cruickshank's amazement, his docile subject even allowed him to pick her up while he photographed the nest.

All that changed overnight, however. As soon as her eggs hatched the goodwill reacted hysterically to Cruickshank's presence, flying this way and that and berating him loudly before leading her young from the nest. Never again would the goodwill allow Cruickshank's approach. But the man had his pictures - and in contrast to most such projects, getting them had literally been a walk in the park.

Cornell Lab: Marbled Godwit
Reader's Digest: Birds of North America