Gray Partridge (Perdix perdix)
Native to western Eurasia, Gray Partridges were released in Canada in the early 1900s as game birds. Secretive and shy most of the year, the are rarely seen in the open. Watch for them in the morning or evening, when they venture onto quiet roads, or in winter, when they sometimes forage beneath rural bird feeders. When flushed a covey of will burst into flight, flapping furiously and dispersing in all directions, a tactic intended to confuse predators. Although Gray Partridges are relatively hardy birds, many parish in harsh weather, and some birds become trapped under layers of hardened snow while taking refuge from the cold.
The Gray Partridge has a high mortality rate and a short lifespan, but it makes up for these with its high reproductive capability. An average clutch size is about 16 eggs, and nests with more than 20 eggs are often found. When incubating her eggs, the female will sit tightly on her nest and risk being stepped on rather than attracting attention.
Like other seed eating birds, the Gray Partridge regularly swallows small amounts of gravel to help crush hard seeds. The gravel accumulates in the bird's gizzard, a muscular pouch of the digestive. This bird was once known as "Hungarian Partridge," and coveys of Gray Partridges are still called "Huns" by many hunters and birding enthusiasts.
Reader's Digest Publications: Birds of Canada
There's nothing like a plague of spruce budworms to make this warbler's day. Such outbreaks occur cyclically in northern conifer stands where the bay-breasted warblers nest, and can denude vast tracks of spruce and fir. Inflicting the damage are voracious budworm larvae, pests that have been a bane of lumbermen since the early 1900s. Bay-Breasted Warblers often react to the infestations by creating a population boom of their own making to take advantage of the sudden insect bounty.
Imagine a beach so densely packed with shorebirds that sunlight is blocked from the sand. If that beach were on Delaware Bay in mid-May, the shorebirds - numbering in the hundreds of thousands - would be red knots.
Thank you for joining me for W.W.B.W. once again! Last week there was a substantial amount of guesses. Bird Boy and Grietje guessed right! It was a Fox Sparrow. Here is this week's clue:
The farmer directs the mower through his field. Crickets and grasshoppers spring for safety as he passes. In the wake of the tractor, where the blades have passed and the grass is cropped short, a dozen russet-bibbed birds scramble and dance. Are they injured? Hardly. The birds are reaping the bounty of insects and small rodents exposed by the mower. The farmer does the work. The Swainson's hawk repays him for his kindness by consuming the creatures that consume his crops.
Common Redpolls and Hoary Redpoll can be confusing to differentiate because they look alike, share similar ranges and have similar songs and calls. The Hoary Redpoll is almost always seen with flocks of Common Redpolls and is generally paler and less streaked, with a stubbier bill. Some Hoary Redpolls are nearly impossible to differentiate from Commons, however, because of individual variation within both species and some overlap in identifying features. Both redpoll species are remote northern nesters and "predictable unpredictable" winter visitors to southern Canada. Like many finches, they can be abundant one year and almost absent the next. In the south, they tend to be more abundant every second winter, reflecting cyclic lows and highs in seed availability in their normal (northern) range. Things were much simpler when the two redpolls were considered a single species.