Carolina Patches and Unfinished Skulking

Winter and Summer visits to the coastal plain of Carolina have now become a regular part of my annual peregrinations, and apart from the major pains that come with flying out of the east coast, this has been a welcome thing. Bird-wise this opens up new state and county lists to lazily track, and a very welcome new cadre of potential life birds. Perhaps most satisfactorily, it provides regular opportunity for closer encounters with bird species that are relatively rare or even non-existent in my home state. Even with the humidity and the biting bugs, they are sweet days indeed when all of these factors coalesce. 

Purple Martin is a bird I do not yet have on my AZ list. This isn't exactly embarrassing, but it's unimpressive, a real signatory that I am not part of the inner circle nor a particularly dedicated state-lister. PUMAs are legion in North Carolina, and they are much harder to expose properly than they are to find and appreciate.

It's a crying shame that most of the eastern (and North American) PUMA population resides now in subsidized housing. Purple Martins must be encouraged to show aggression and malevolence commensurate to their size against the competitive House Sparrows and European Starlings. To move beyond their artificial housing they must become more...uncivilized.
We're all counting on your and your ilk, sub-adult PUMA. Grow into a territorial monster.

PUMAs might be better-served if they learned to construct their own nests a-la Cliff or Barn Swallows. Then they would not be competing for cavities with the aforementioned feral blight species. Barn Swallows practice such yeomanry with near-continental success. In fact they seem to have too much time on their proverbial hands, such that adolescent birds can laze around and stare vacantly off into space without the need of getting a job.

And PUMAs could perhaps learn a thing or two of aggression for their smaller, long-tailed cousins, who bare fangs, as it were, even at the mighty Helios himself.

Another Carolina staple is the Brown Thrasher. These birds are common but often skittish, so any time one gets a close and personal sight it makes for a very happy BRTH day. We're pretty spoiled for Thrashers out west and in Arizona; 6 of the 8 North American species occur in Maricopa County annually. But as much as I love Le Conte's, and as much as I make fun of the East Coast's one-Thrasher policy, I must admit that Brown Thrasher is probably the best looking one of the pack.

One can pick up PUMAs and BRTHs around the yard throughout most of Carolina. Every region has its yard birds, and those are good ones. Walking around the rural areas, just past the well-manicured property lines, one finds the woodland/farmland liminal spaces and the scrub that delineates them. These areas also have their residents, and while it requires a bit more endeavoring to get good looks at Field Sparrow or Prairie Warbler than PUMAs, the pay-off is that much sweeter. 

From my observations, PRWAs in NC are not yet adapted to using toilet paper like those in Maine. Perhaps not coincidentally, handkerchiefs are also very popular in NC.

The coastal plain also offers a higher delicacy of bird, species that can be found elsewhere in the state but almost never without substantial effort and/or blood sacrifice. Much to my chagrin when hiking in the Appalachians, Pops got looks at a Kentucky Warbler while I was distracted by a Canada, and a female at that. That KY bird should have been the one, but instead it was nothing (to me, and therefore by association the entire world), nothing at all.
As such I had to spend a much hotter, muggier, buggier time at Howell's Woods--a great birding spot to be sure--to track down KEWA, which is a leading avian proponent of facial tattoos. This bird was very shy and secretive, and also stayed up much higher than I expected. I was only thinly satisfied with the encounter, but we shall meet again.

Birds of a feather flock together don't ya know. And as I was making up for lost time and lost sleep and lost blood (mosquitos) with the KEWA, his compatriot in skulk started singing from the other side of the trail. Swainson's Warblers are probably the most uninspiring warblers from a visual standpoint, but as is the case with most of the Old-World Warblers, this bird sings better than Andrea Bocelli, and also navigates much better in a shaded wood than the afore-mentioned maestro.

Swainson's Warbler was another semi-overdue lifer, one for which the blood-price had to be paid with a seemingly interminable wait in a dismal mosquito cloud for a mediocre photo. I have no regrets, but these sightings did still leave me longing for more and better time with eastern Warbler species.

Out of Town on a Rail (3:10am to Yuma)

The more money one has, the more expensive one's tastes often get. The more varied one's appetite, the harder it is to find something new and exciting. There's a reason Baskin Robbins had to come up with 31 flavors. The ice-cream bloated, Baby Boom generation market demanded it. So too is it with birding. The birding in Arizona has not gotten old nor stodgy nor dull, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to find new birds in the state, particularly new birds that are resident for part of the year and not whimsical code 5 rarities. Five-striped Sparrows and Ferruginous Pygmies still await at their respective locales, but there was one more loose end I needed to tie up.

I put off Black Railing on the western AZ border for a few reasons. It's a long, unpleasant drive. It's uncomfortable. It comes at the expense of other birding opportunities. It's a near-gaurantee one will get crappy-to-none looks and photos of the bird. Turns out that all of these negatives cannot outweigh the downsides of a torrid Tuesday in Phoenix inbetween two 10-hour workdays when no one else is in the office. As such, Butler's birds finally headed west to Mittry Lake, which is accessed through the Imperial Dam area and ubiquitous desert Army base. Here at the YPG, birders, Euclidian geometrists, and coming-of-age adolescent boys who have troubled relationships with their fathers all convene for their various and sundry needs. 

Truth be told I had additional business here as I have recorded exactly 0 ebird lists in Yuma, so before debasing myself after the Rails I took some time to check out other areas along the Mittrry lake watershed. Typcial raptors stayed hidden in shadows, and Indigo Buntings did not.

Indigo Buntings are gorgeous right? This is something that everyone would admit, and yet I still get the impression that we (myself included) do not hold them to be of the same pulchritudinous caliber as many Warbler species. They're certainly not prized in the same way, and some of this can be explained by the fact that is a pretty quotidian bird in open fields and riparian areas around most of the country in summer. But here's my adjoining theory: INBUs are a brilliant blue, and they're entirely blue. It's like eating a piece of double fudge flourless cake--delicious but you can only have a small amount of it because it's so rich and so homogenous. It's harder to appreciate and sustain without some variety. Cardinals and Summer Tanagers suffer from this syndrome as well--again, not that anyone dislikes them or casts aspersions on their aesthetic, but they'll never occupy the highest levels of bird beauty pageants.    

Mittry Lake has its share of open water, but most of the territory is a forest of 5-to-6 foot reeds and rushes. Considering that Black Rails are about 6 inches long and super secretive, and that most dudes have a hard enough time finding their own weeners in a public restroom, it seemed a daunting task.

Walking around the reeds and rushes was fine, but it was pretty clear that doing so would yield little, and certainly no actual sightings. This is where the birding got unapologetically terrible. As I was determined to get some thin sighting such that Black Rail wouldn't languish on the dreaded 'heard-only' list, I decided to take off the sneakers and walk right through/over/under/around the flood plain...for hours. It is a rare thing indeed for a birder to un-ironically utter something along the lines of, "Fan-freaking-tastic it flushed away!" but that's almost the operating goal with BLRAs.
"Much like a public restroom toilet, BLRAs will flush if stepped on." -- Magill Weber
I eventually lucked into a spot where a couple of the birds where calling, and with only a modicum of shame I can also say that after recording the vocalizations I sloughed around enough to eventually flush one of them. It was an even more glorious 1.9 seconds than that time after Junior-year prom, and just as then there are no pictures to prove any exploits or allegations, absent sound recordings. Enjoy the grass video.

You have to pay the piper...if you want to dance. My beautiful dancer's legs got scraped straight to hell and I do not believe that my shoes will recover (there's stinking tar-mud and standing water underneath all the pretty grass) but hey lifers is as lifers does. It was tempting to stick it out for an hour or two of nocturnal birding, especially as the Rails became more active, but the bugs were also becoming intolerable and, since this is Arizona, there was still plenty of spiky thorny stuff even in the marsh areas, so much like any mal-adapted creature that finds itself caught out at nightfall, I chickened out.

Thank You for Smoking: Birding Appalachia Part II (Getting High)

The foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains offer much by way of diverse flora and fauna. So much greenery and water makes one feel transported to a rainforest more so than the Tennessee/Carolina border, and yet there still is something lacking. A good birder and a good American desires more, he or she desires not only the lush, but also the hard and craggy. One must climb ever upward, to the Appalachian balds and the hardy spruce/fir forests that dwell there. It's like Caspar David Friedrich's ideal picnic. In the early mornings these primordial mountains exhale deeply, linking earth and sky with an intoxicating timeless mist and blurring everything in between.

P.S. It's super tricky to bird in said mist. 

This is the sort of place one can get lost. This is the sort of place one hopes to get lost. This is the sort of place one loses oneself. This is also the place one finds some birds.

With those who were willing and able, we went on an 9 mile hike along the Charlie's Bunion portion of the Appalachian trail, moving between 4,500 and 6,100 feet, up from the deciduous forest to the ancient evergreen peaks. Sunlight was a rare thing and dryness rarer still. From the bowels of heavy growth and pervasive mist, Veeries chimed and Black-throated Green Warblers buzzed in a perpetual homage to the smoking mountains. Once above 5,500 feet, I was reacquainted with a recent lifer and what I believe to be one of the most aesthetically successful Warblers.
There was also an actual lifer in the form of this Blue-headed Vireo, but it's best not to dwell on that.

The Black-headed Blue Warblers were still defining and defending territory, and their periodic outburts also tended to stir up other birds including Canada Warblers, Golden-crowned Kinglets, and the inevitable hordes of Dark-eyed Juncos. Black-throated Blue Warbler is so damned good-looking I want to tear my face off and put it back on upside down. Yeah, you heard me.

Rather surprising to me was the abundance of amphibians, given the altitude and temperature (but less surprising given the moisture). Apparently this area, the southern Appalachians, has more Salamander diversity than anywhere else in the world, or so sayeth wikipedia. The Southern Two-lined Salamander was about two inches long and skinnier than a pencil. The Appalachian Red was about double that, and equally shy, while the mighty and better-armored Northern Dusky Salamander adults (the most common species in mountain streams) dwarfed them both.

There were times hiking along the ridge when we'd pause and look out into straight nothing. The low-stratus clouds emanating from the mountains were so thick we could not see the range on either side of our trail, but as the morning drew on eventually the smoke gave way and shapes took form.

The termination of Charlies's Bunion was supposedly named by one surveyor in honor of his accompanying buddy's gigantic toe affliction that he revealed upon resting in that area. Given the heavy vegetation it was hard to tell exactly the to-scale dimensions of said bunion, but the tree-line birds did not pay that ambiguity much mind. 

The dour weather dampened the birding overall, but Black-throated Blues would have been compensation enough. Chestnut-sided Warbler was another potential lifer for others in our group however, and I had been puzzling at their absence all morning, since in previous experience at this altitude they were the most common behind Black-throated Green. 

All worry was put to rest on our descent, perhaps when the birds were more confident their parades would not be precipitated upon. Upon hearing their calls at long last I ran down the trail to catch up with Pops, only to hear him likewise calling back that he was, "Surrounded by singing Chestnuts and in danger." Indeed. Awesome.

Unfortunately we did not have enough time for further exploration and pursuit of Blackburnian, as well as Ruffed Grouse, but the hike was gorgeous It was like that level of totally comprehensive, soul-shaking gorgeous that sticks with you weeks later and sustains you through torrid summer working conditions...

Thank You for Smoking: Birding Appalachia Part I

American Crows are easy birds in much of North America. They are not easy birds in central and southern Arizona, and I don't really know why their range seems to end with the Mogollon Rim in AZ. To remedy the fact that I see Crows infrequently, and also for various other reasons, I spent some time in eastern Tennessee in mid-June. Butler's Birds set up shop at a lodge on Douglas Lake as a part of the Schiffbauer family reunion, which put the B'sBs operation within striking distance of the Great Smoky Mountains subset of Appalachia. In this national park there are many birds. There are many fantastic trails. There are many waterfalls (yes, chase them). There are many bears. There is mountain honey. There is opportunity for family drama. There are one-way 11-mile loop roads full of geriatric traffic. Yes there are many potent forces coming together, and as a French commander famously said to his British counterpart as their forces approached on the eve of battle, "It will be a good day for the crows when we meet, mon ami."

But just showing Crow photos gets a bit macabre, not to mention boring. For one of our day trips I pushed the family to go hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains NP on the Abrams Falls trail. The trail terminates in a pleasant 20-foot cataract after about 2.5 miles and stays fairly level throughout, so it takes all comers and is recommendable for a large group of varying ability. 

Of course, once the party was underway I had my own plans for splitting off, or at least dawdling to pursue the various and sundry calls coming from the canopies and rhododendron thickets. 

We saw multiple Black Bears driving to the trailhead, and the trail itself had additional non-avian wildlife. The deer didn't seem to care too much about people, or else they just thought they were much better at hiding than they actually were.

Dragonflies and Butterflies, such as the Diana Fritillary below, were enjoying quite the carefree summer day. This seemed a bit cavalier, as there was a simultaneous massacre going on around them, butchery of an emotionless and efficient level matched only by piranha swarms and anteaters on a hill.

I was first alerted to this bird's presence by the chirps, croaks, and gurgles of its expiring victims, and then the buzzing war-call emanating from its carcass-clogged maw. 

I first became acquainted with Worm-eating Warblers last summer in a similar and nearby area. In that previous experience it was cloudy, they were skulky, I was nervous, and we all went home feeling disappointed, like a lame date for which you had such high hopes because, you know, their profile picture looked really cute. 

Anyway, that was not the case this time around. Maybe because it was earlier in the summer, these birds were super active and super vocal, buzzing out their hatred for worm-kind and all things associated with the vermiculated arts. 

Black-throated Green Warblers maintained a chorus throughout most of the hike, and Indigo Buntings were always vocal in clearings along the trail. We also had several Vireo species and hiccuping Summer Tanagers. This was all to be expected, and also to be expected was the ever-presence of Northern Parulas, probably the most common eastern Warbler. 

Everything was so damn green it kinda washed out the Parula colors when they did finally come low, but I guess this bird is nothing new at this point eh? They're hot stuff. They know it. We know it. We all know we know it.

They say that no one could beat the Yankees because they were distracted by their pinstripes. This was only partially true in baseball, but also applies to Worm-eating Warblers. The pinstripe helmet serves both a diversionary and illusory function, distracting insects with the handsome pattern while also distorting depth perception as to how far away the bird's lunging moth really is. It worked on this inch worm, which then became half an inch worm, and then a quarter, and so on and so forth to infinity.

There were a pair of WEWAs gathering food, and since they were not consuming it they were most likely bringing it to a cup-shaped homestead up the trail slope. The key to surviving in this world is to find a specialty, find a niche, and fill it well. WEWAs are very good at what they do.

Being an inconsiderate dork and all, I did not actually take pictures of the trail-terminus waterfall. The hike was scenic and enjoyable, but a bit too low and flat, too open, to have that thick and primordial Appalachian feel. Before this hike had ended I was already planning another to higher climes and thicker trees, and to the birds that might be there.