Breaking the Duck

To break one's duck...I've always liked that British-ism, an idiom meaning someone has done something for the first time. It's awkward; it's nonsensical, and it's also kind of scandalous to use in a conversation about birding. But, as far as the British are concerned, every time we birders see a new bird we're 'breaking that duck'.
Within recording a lifer bird there is another phenomenon, a type of synchronicity many birders have experienced, especially if they see a new bird in the first few years of rookie birding. The phenomenon is that once a bird is finally seen, all the sudden one will see it fairly frequently, or at least unusually frequently given how, up until a point, you had never seen it before. This could simply be because the birder wasn't aware of the bird before or capable of recognizing it, or because they only recently started seeking out the sort of habitats that would support such a bird. Sometimes there isn't much of an explanation.

Last week I saw my first Greater White-fronted Goose, an uncommon migrant, at an old birding haunt in west Phoenix. I birded the heck out of that place but never saw a White-fronted. Finally everything lined up and I got my first, not from lack of effort or knowledge but just from lack of circumstance and luck. While spending the weekend in Iowa, my cousin Mike and I then found another Greater White-fronted Goose in west Davenport, another rare find for the time and place. While scanning hundreds of Canada Geese out on a frozen lake, Mike heard a different vocalization and was able to pick our the conspicuous impostor.

So, I broke my duck last week, and now there's a watershed of White-fronted Geese. I predict I will now see them everywhere always forever.

Front and Center!

On the way home from the Arlington/Palo Verde agricultural fields last weekend I swung by Encanto Park. With several large duck ponds and an adjacent golf green, Encanto isn't bad for an urban park for urban birding. It was a regular weekend patch for me when I lived closer to it, and I even picked up a few lifers there. Nonetheless, it's one of those places with pretty limited bird diversity, and as can happen with the smaller venues, I eventually outgrew it.

Someday, this pretty Gadwall will outgrow it too.

But a recent listerv report caught my attention and drew me back to the paddle boat ponds and its rafts of waterfowl. Someone reported a Greater white-fronted Goose at Encanto, a somewhat common vagrant but one I had not yet seen. I had always figured that eventually I'd stumble across a White-fronted goose at one point or another, and never made much of a point of chasing this species. This particular bird wasn't my discovery, but now there finally was such a goose in the area!

I was happy to swing by my old stomping grounds and survey the ponds once more, especially since I hadn't picked up my target birds in Arlington, but in honesty I also wasn't overly optimistic about the Goose. I didn't recognize the name of the person (sorry!) who posted to the list, and I knew there were also lots of somewhat similarly colored Chinese Geese at the park. The Chinese Geese normally have a bulbous forehead like Mute Swans, but some specimens, like the fellow below, lack the bulge, and can also have varying white bordering their mandibles. 

When I arrived at the ponds the first birds I saw (after that Gadwall) were some Mallards and then the Chinese Geese, but I only had to wait for a few moments before a conspicuous, smaller goose rounded the pond corner and headed my way. The Greater-white Fronted Goose is much more petite than the Chinese Geese, and of course it lacks the bulging forehead and has much more prominent white on its face, in addition to the softer pink bill. Next to the obnoxious Chinese Geese, the White-fronted was a real charmer. 

Geese certainly aren't known for their shyness, especially around urban parks, and this Goose's close approach made me think that it's probably caught onto the handout system for the park, and has likely been there through the winter, living on welfare.

This bird seemed much smaller than the described twenty-eight inch length in Sibley's. The western and southwestern Alaska subspecies of this goose do tend to be smaller though, and while they usually winter in the Mexican highlands, they do pass over Arizona in their routes, and this fellow might've just decided he'd gone far enough by time he hit Phoenix. He swam back and forth between sun and shade, seemingly very content with his little park and the abundance of easy food and little competition that it brings.

It never exited the pond, unfortunately, and I couldn't see any leg bands through the water. Nonetheless this handsome Goose made for a very pleasant return to Encanto and provided me with an unexpected lifer in the middle of Phoenix and in February. Greater-white Fronted Goose, I salute you!

Follow the link!

I'll play the part of a snooty birding aristocrat this month, and tell tales of wining and winging in southeast AZ, now over at Birding Is Fun.

Soaring Over Arlington

Last weekend I drove out west to Arlington and its agriculture fields in search of Kites, Ferruginous Hawks, and Long-billed Curlew. I didn't get any photos of the Ferruginous Hawks and didn't even see the other two targets, but it was still a nice spot for some safari (from-the-car) birding. I also ran into a fellow who tipped me off on a place to observe nesting Common Black Hawks and Zone-tailed Hawks in later March, so I'll just look at this trip as a long-term investment for future good birding. The Arlington fields were not without their own birds either. It seemed like Kestrels dotted every telephone pole, and there were various raptors constantly flying overhead. 

I ran into this same Bald Eagle multiple times throughout the day. He liked to perch on the telephone polls (who doesn't!?), but would also always spook every time a car drove by. His must be a life full of angst. The Arlington fields also afforded some nice Harrier views, including the less common, or at least less conspicuous, silver-backed male.

This immature Red-tailed Hawk was about the only bird that stayed perched while I drove by it. He's no silvery Northern Harrier, but I appreciate the good-faith gesture on his part nonetheless.

But watching birds take flight from posts was definitely the theme of the day. Adding in Belted Kingfisher, Great Egret, Great Blue Heron, Snowy Egret along the canals, and Meadowlarks on all the fences...I must've seen a good dozen species at least take off of fence posts or poles. It was remarkable thematic coordination on behalf of the avian world. Even the Red-tail didn't stay still for long.

It never feels good to flush birds. It makes one feel clumsy and unpopular...high school all over again. But these birds would all perch by the roadside and then spook as soon as anybody drove by, often flushing from other traffic before I'd get anywhere near. So, in short, they weren't making it easy for themselves either. 

Little did we know that, when we'd make 'V' or 'M' shapes to signify birds in our little kid drawings, we were actually always drawing Osprey. 

To be fair, not all of the birds were chickens. When you could pick the Horned Larks out along the gravel embankments (which was easy when they were facing you), they were pretty accommodating. It's funny to have these birds down here in Phoenix, enjoying the 55 degree weather, and also seeing pictures of them foraging in below-freezing weather in the Midwest. Hey, with mustaches like that, is there any doubt they're tough?



While trolling for Kites and Curlews--an ultimately futile task--I did see some other unlikely farmhands.
Six large white figures foraged with the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in the background. Maybe they were spying for the Russians.

Despite their namesake, these Swans must have been sick of eating hard, frozen Tundra grass. They've been hanging out in Arlington for several weeks at least, and seem very content in the plentiful alfalfa fields. Tundra Swans turn up in the chillier northern parts of Arizona, but west Phoenix is not a place I figured I would ever see wild Swans. This is what must have used up my Curlew luck.

As was pointed out by Seagull Steve in the comments below, and also pondered upon by others, second Swan from the right seems large and bigger-billed than the others. Not to blow the Trumpet too soon, but here are a few more heavily cropped shots.

It wasn't a resounding success, but it was a good bout of birding, and next time I go out to the Le Conte's Thrasher spot, about ten miles farther west, I can comfortably detour through Arlington to photograph some big birds and telephone poles on the way home. It's always good to add another site to one's repertoire.

From West to East, to Most from Least

As mentioned in a previous post, I spent last Saturday morning at Tres Rios with Pops chasing after a vagrant Northern Parula and Chestnut-sided Warbler. Of course, we also had an eye out for the other birds around Tres Rios--and there are always plenty--but having dipped on the vagrant warblers and not come away with much in way of photos, it was a somewhat disappointing trip. It felt like the morning had been wasted a bit. So after leaving Tres Rios and indulging in some fortifying lunch, I traded this western extremity of the Phoenix area for far east Mesa, exploring some sites along the Salt River where a Red-breasted Sapsucker has been residing since December.

Since our vagrant warbler quarry at Tres Rios was supposed to be in a single large clump of eucalytpus, we spent most of our time there around those few tress, and as such our species diversity was low.
There were plenty of Lincoln's Sparrows hanging out in the brush piles around the big trees, and some bedraggled Abert's Towhees filled the brisk morning air with their shrieking.

Seeing this Abert's Towhee, and hearing them singing/calling so much, reminded me of how few Thrashers I see at Tres Rios. There could potentially be Bendire's, Sage, and Curve-billed, even Crissal, but I do not believe I have ever seen a Thrasher there. What a dreadful dearth!
Tres Rios does have lots of Cinnamon Teal in the spillways right now, so at least there's that.



We did see lots of raptors during our eucalyptus steak out, with Harris's Hawk, Red-tailed, Cooper's, Sharp-shinned, Osprey, Kestrels, and a Bald Eagle all making for a very carnivorous morning. We didn't pick up Peregrines or Ferruginous Hawks, nor the single Red-shouldered in the area, so factoring these in too, Tres Rios can really bring in the big birds.
 

Eventually our focus and interest waned at Tres Rios, plus pops had some cool, important mechanic-type stuff to do back at home. Feeling a bit defeated, especially with this being my only birding thus far in the the week and weekend, I decided to head over to the Pebble Beach site, about eight miles east from the Salt River dam, to investigate a lost and stubborn woodpecker.



This reclusive, yet very chromatically conspicuous Red-breasted Sapsucker was first found during a December CBC (Christmas Bird Count) in the area, and it's been seen off and on since then. The Pebble Beach site is much like any of the other picnic/hiking areas along the Salt River--some concrete tables, dusty trails, and scattered clumps of chaparral. Honestly, it's not my favorite habitat in which to go birding, but hey if beautiful birds like it, I can like it too.

I arrived at the Pebble Beach site around 3pm--not an ideal birding time--and first just sort of wandered around, curious to see what would turn up. The first half hour produced lots of Phainopeplas and Gila Woodpeckers, but no Sapsuckers. I eventually noticed some mesquite trees with lots of fresh-looking sap wells in them, and figured that maybe with some patience (the worst!) somebody would visit.

Frustratingly enough, the first birds to come by the sap wells during my vigil were Yellow-rumped Warblers and House Finches. Assumedly they weren't eating the sap, as Sapsuckers sometimes do, but were just enjoying some of the insects the sweet sticky stuff attracts (which Sapsuckers also do). But after another ten minutes I saw a flash of black, white, and red entering my peripheral vision. 

What a stunner! I saw one of these birds several years ago in Northern California, but the sighting was brief and distant. Seeing it again, fairly close, and against such a comparatively dull and dreary background...it rocked my socks off.

After ogling this splendid specimen for a little while and watching him move on to other wells, I located and re-applied my socks, before heading back to the car and west towards the Granite Reef Dam. The Granite Reef site is the western most site along the Salt River, and is also, overall, the birdiest. The guest parking area hosts lots of different Sparrows and Flycatchers while the adjacent river walk gives one the opportunity to view lots of waterfowl, including Mergansers and Goldeneye.

While observing this slinking female Ladder-backed Woodpecker, I ran into fellow Arizona birder, blogger, and photographer Gordon Karre, who was showing the sites to another birder from New Jersey. It's always nice to run into other birders and bloggers. Earlier that day I had bumped into Jeff Ritz and some of his crew out at Tres Rios, and I met another very knowledgable birding couple while looking at the Sapsucker.

There wasn't actually a lot going on at the Granite Reef site, though the fellow from New Jersey, having apparently not birded Arizona or much of the southwest before, was racking up lifers like crazy, including the Ladder-backed Woodpecker pictured above.

So I found some good birds and good birders. Tres Rios let me down a bit, but I saw a gorgeous Sapsucker so the day didn't...err hem...'suck' after all.

Plus, I went back and got the Parula on Monday, so Tres Rios and I can still be friends too.

Unconventional Wisdom

There was a cool story on NPR this afternoon (yes, I listen to a liberal radio station; I'm really not that bad once you get to know...ok maybe that's going too far) about Wisdom, a Laysan Albatross and the oldest known wild bird, hatching a chick at the ripe old age of sixty-two. She was banded back in 1956, and she was estimated to be already five years old at the time.

Sixty-two! That's a good twenty years longer than the average Laysan Albatross lifespan. Not only that, but this is actually the sixth year in a row that she's hatched a brood. This momma's got a lot of survival knowledge to share with her chicks, along with plenty of street smarts, bargain shopping tips too, and romantic advice too. With a pinch of luck, they'll live to be 150!

Here's a Link to the full story, from which this photo is also taken.

Parulyzed!

After dipping on a Northern Parula at the Tres Rios Wetlands last weekend, I was determined to find the bird this week and thus not have it nagging at me next weekend. So, it would be a simple drive over in the evening, with clear skies, to spend some time looking in the one little area where this bird has been seen off and on for the last few weeks.

It sounded simple enough on paper, but the mission would prove to be very difficult. Getting off work at 4pm, By the time I reached Tres Rios it was 5:06pm, which meant I had about 40 minutes of honest-to-goodness sunlight left. While the Parula has been seen and heard consistently in one little, contained area at Tres Rios, this was the area:



A group of three huge eucalyptus trees, already teeming with Yellow-rumped Warblers, is not the easiest place to spot a little 5 inch, non-breeding plumage warbler, especially when it's about the same size as an individual eucalyptus leaf. With the fading light and the high canopies, I was not expecting much in way of photos, just a documentation shot.

But the greatest tribulation of all, and one I was not so much expecting (in large part due to my inexperience in this sort of endeavor), was the intense, paralyzing stiffness in my neck from staring straight up whilst also supporting binoculars and a camera. Warbler neck is a common, professionally recognized and diagnosed problem in the east, with many cases occurring in the spring and summer, but it doesn't break out so much in Arizona. I think the Surgeon General needs to start putting a warning on all binoculars and birding optics:

*WARNING: The use of these optics to view and enjoy wood warblers for a sustained period of time surpassing five minutes may result in severe neck soreness and the haunting worry that one has instantaneously become 117 years old.*

At any rate, after about 45 minutes of searching while the sun was sinking below the South Mountain range, I finally caught sight of something. With its smaller size and yellower belly and breast, I'd finally found something that, at least, wasn't a Yellow-rumped Warbler. 

I cranked the ISO up to 800 on the camera, rolled the EV compensation up to +7, and reduced the aperture to 5.6. With all the pent up rage of a sore neck and a frustrated weekend excursion, I unloaded volley after volley of digital shots at the tree, hoping to catch the Parula in the viewfinder. As the sun finally set and my camera barrel was till smoking, I felt satisfied that I had something for my trouble, and could now add this unusual eastern visitor to my Life list.

I hope to see more Parulas up close and personal when I can make a properly timed and located birding trip in May, but until then these sorts of sporadic chases will have to do. On the way out of the preserve, a few hundred Ibis moved in to roost for the evening. There were purple skies and I was Parulyzed. Not bad for a Monday!

Beware Delaware, but Get Hooked on Bombay

I must warn of two things up front. Firstly, this post is, alas, not going to be a tale of addition and fancy Indian gins. Secondly, this is going to be really lengthy. 

During a winter visit to Pennsylvania, I found myself with a free day to move farther afield than the local haunts around, so I fortified and forayed out into the cold towards larger and more famous hot spots. I had no Fellowship, and I had no ring-generated invisibility powers, but nonetheless I set off to a place as terrifying to travel through as Mordor in the summer...Delaware!!!

About an hour and a half south of West Chester is the Bombay Hook Wildlife refuge, a large nature preserve with salt marshes, lagoons, woodlands, and farmland all coming together to form a very diverse and birdy landscape. Admittedly, this is a place better visited in the later Spring, but it still provided some of the winter sparrows and eastern waterfowl that I'd been missing in the southwest. I didn't know it at the time, but I had also apparently been missing the bitter, driving coldness that comes with these sorts of birds. 

In order to get there, I had to first drive through many miles of single-lane "highway" laced with stoplights and stop signs and speed traps and those large carnivorous flowers from the Mario games. It was an ordeal, to be sure, and the fact that often times in order to stay on one of the older "highways" in Delaware one must actually exit and join with a parallel road, or it'll turn into something else. Anyway, the travails of travel aside, Bombay Hook was the vast birding expanse it promised to be, a combination of habitats none of which are substantively found in Arizona.

The preserve is huge and you are expected to proceed through it in a sort of safari loop not unlike the jeep tour in the first Jurassic Park movie, except none of the animals here are enclosed, so it's even more dangerous. The perimeter of the park is old cottonwood and oak woodlands. These craggy trees host all kinds of noisy songbirds, including some of the little brown jobs I was particularly seeking while in PA.

This Swamp Sparrow was kind enough to come up and out into the open for a moment so we could take a commemorative photo.

This red morph Fox Sparrow was not. 

It was also nice to be birding in a place where the ranges of the similar Carolina and Black-capped Chickadees do not overlap. Although the Chickadees aren't as approachable on a nature preserve as they are in the backyard, it was nice to have unambiguous identifications of the Carolina variety.

These old, leafless woodlands would be well-described as sleepy, except that all the Sparrows and Wrens and Chickadees kept up such a cacophonous racket that napping was quite impossible (and, given how chilly it was outside, potentially deadly). In concert with the noisy songbirds were all kinds of headbangers. Pileated Woodpeckers were easily the coolest (too cool for a photo), but Red-bellied Woodpeckers were another great attraction in the old growth forests.

The woodland perimeter is itself surrounded by fallow farmland that hosted Blackbird/Cowbird flocks along with Snow Geese, but this area was best observed through a scope. This massive conspiracy of Crows was large enough to be observed and feared with the naked eye. Hitchcock would be proud.



The interior of the preserve features the tall grass and twisting rivulets inherent to salt marshes, and this was really the big attraction. I had the vain hope of seeing a Nelson's Sparrow in the tidal reeds, and while I did not really expect to find that secretive bird, I knew that I'd see lots of cool stuff in the process. It's difficult to get anywhere near Bufflehead in Phoenix, but while I was trying to photograph a Northern Harrier flying over the dense grasses, a lovely male came floating by parallel to the road without any pomp or fanfare.

Some of the channels come together through the preserve to form larger reservoirs, and these reservoirs in turn have sandbars and islands that support larger birds. In addition to the Tundra Swans pictured earlier, Canada Geese congregated by the hundreds, while the occasional Great Black-backed Gull tried unsuccessfully to blend in with them. 

 

I drove slowly down the dirt road, frequently stopping to binocularize and photograph the marshy species on display. After one such stop, I looked down out my window to see this Savannah Sparrow staring up with frozen terror. I felt bad for the little guy. It was like the sight of this gangly monster protruding from the truck and made him forget how to fly away. It is also possible he was just playing opossum. A third possibility is that he was just trying to remember if he had left the stove on at home. I feel like we've all paused and made this face at one time or another. 

The Savannah Sparrows were pretty common along the road, and it also became clear that they were pretty accustomed to the vehicles. This bird below was hopping amongst these anti-topsoil-erosion rocks, foraging without a care in the world. He definitely got his foot stuck between two stones for like fifteen seconds. He feebly flapped for a second, noticed I was watching, and then just decided to sit still until I was no longer witnessing his great shame. I shifted my attention to other things and, upon a second inspection, the clumsy sparrow was gone. 

The salt marsh portion of the preserve is set up such that on either side of the dirt road there are short, grassy slopes and then thinned riparian vegetation sprouting up before the man-made estuaries that serve to both feed the larger ponds and keep people from approaching any unwilling birds too closely. Nothing likes these thin reedy habitats, or goes better with Bombay Gin, than Bitter(n)s.

I saw three of these eminently awkward and super cool birds along the Bombay Hook drive. Even though they were not new birds for me, unlike the American Black Ducks and Tundra Swans and Fox Sparrows, they were probably the coolest sighting of the excursion, and they're none too common in Arizona either.

Look at this stud of a bird. It's back looks like marble and mahogany all in one. Add to that aesthetic this bird's lightning-fast reflexes, super sharp beak, and disposition similar to that of a stick (but you know, a really cool stick), and you've got a real winner.

The one disappointment of the Bombay Hook, other than the terminally icy and face-chapping breeze, was that I could not actually get coastline access. I had really been hoping the salt marsh road would open up to a full coastal view, but alas. You never know what'll turn up at the beach, and last time I birded on the Jersey shore (Barnegat Bay mind you) it was fantastic. I did some extra driving down past the preserve and made it out to the Atlantic via a small sandy road, but it only opened to a little boat launch and a grumpy gang of stumpy Ring-billed Gulls.

So there weren't any coastal or pelagic birds on this trip then, but I can now say I've taken a shot of Bombay in Delaware, lived to tell the tale, and even come home with a few more life birds. I will definitely try to get back there in the summer.