Got any bird pics?

[Cabezon]

There are four nests within about 3 miles here and I think they are about half in use in a given year, but there is one dominant pair that definitely does the house cleaning. It is a loud affair when it is time to run off those who dare to trespass. The golden eagle is the one bird they do not hassle with. Some immatures make the mistake of trying to bully him like another young bald, but they soon get a lesson of why the goldens rule the northern skies globally.

This dominance of golden eagles over bald eagles was one element of a conservation crisis that occurred in the Channel Islands off Southern California in the late 1990s to early 2000's (see here, here, and here) Due to isolation from the coast (20+ miles offshore), separate subspecies of gray fox (island dwarf forms, 1/3rd of mainland ancestors and smaller than a house cat) evolved on several Channels Islands. They were possible carried out there in canoes by the local Chumash bands who colonized several of the islands.
But golden eagles were attracted to and began nesting in the Channel Islands, especially after local bald eagle populations crashed in the 1960's and 1970's due to DDT; the bald eagles ate primarily fish which were often contaminated with DDT that had been dumped off L.A. The golden eagles ate primarily young feral sheep and later feral pigs on Santa Cruz Island and mule deer and elk on Santa Cruz Island that exploded in numbers in that time period. With abundant terrestrial food, the golden eagles were able to keep out bald eagles whose populations began to rebound after DDT was banned (and its concentration in the environment began to fall).
But the golden eagles also ate the occasional island fox. This incidental (at least from the perspective of the golden eagles) predation on island foxes was enough to decimate fox numbers, always at pretty low numbers. In 2002, the foxes were federally-listed as critically endangered.
To prevent extinction, the National Park Service and The Nature Conservancy (the two major land owners) implemented a multi-pronged plan to restore the island foxes (and to restore the overall island ecology). 1) They systematically (and controversially, as one strategy was mass-shooting of sheep and pigs by hunters in helicopters) eliminated the sheep, pigs, deer, and elk. 2) The golden eagles were trapped and relocated to Northern California (and did not return) and 3) bald eagles were reintroduced. The conservation biologists also used 4) captive breeding to supplement fox numbers.
These efforts were a huge success. In the absence of non-native grazers, the remnant native plant populations rebounded spectacularly. Bald eagle numbers climbed and their populations are now large enough to encourage the occasional wandering juvenile golden eagle that there are better places to settle, especially with the absence of piglets. The island foxes were removed from the endangered species list in 2016.
Steve

 

[Gyrfalcon22]

Great stuff Steve ! Always appreciate your detailed super insightful (and cool) information !! Super interesting about the dynamics at work there.

And the Channel Islands - home to one of the greatest names in the world of creatures. Pygmy mammoths. Amazing we have our own Galapagos Islands. Foxes isolating and being smaller as well.

My local wintering immature golden eagle experiment is an interesting one. Talking to a friend and retired biologist for the state about golden eagle encounters here on the coast, he said there was a nest of golden eagles in Pacific County they monitored with helicopters for some time. Clear cut logging created a habitat they found worked in their favor to raise young. Apparently it did not last eventhough there were plenty of clearcuts to move to.

 

[Wadin' Boot]

A little off topic but saw this guy today, his crown is made of birdhouses, around the statue are poles hung with birdhouses...

one more for eye color:

 

[RRSmith]

Yesterday there was a break in the weather so we took the short drive to Nestucca Bay National Wildlife Refuge to see if there were some refugees from all of the frozen ground in the Willamette Valley. Nestucca Bay NWR is probably the best place on the West Coast to see most of the Canada goose subspecies that occur within the Pacific Flyway. There were definitely more birds there than usual and in a short time, we saw cacklers, Aleutians, Taverner's, dusky, lesser (maybe) and western Canada geese.

I'm thinking some of the Western Washingtonian birders on this board are familiar with dusky's. The dusky Canada population has been a concern for a number of years. The 1964 9.2 magnitude Alaska earthquake caused their breeding grounds in the Copper River Delta to raise 4' in elevation. This altered their breeding habitat which has contributed to a long term population decline (reaching a low of 6,700 birds in 2009). Hunter education/hunting ban as well as habitat work in the Copper River Delta has helped to gradually increase the population. We saw a few family groups scattered about but most were well out of the range of my crop sensor Canon with the 100-400 lens.



A four pack of dusky Canada geese.



Some hungry cacklers with a few Taverner's in the back. I'm not sure if those are lesser's or western's in the foreground. My wife had us pulled off of 101 in a precarious spot so I could take a few photos and we didn't stay long.

 

[Parabola]

 

[Kilchis]

Ruddies



Ruddy ducks are stiff-tailed. In this photo you can see the drake's tail feathers laid out on the water behind him.


Stay tuned to this station for pix of breeding plumage in the spring. Maybe…

 

[RRSmith]

Outstanding images! What camera setup are you using? Ruddy drakes in breeding plumage are stunning and their courtship displays are fun to watch.

 

[Scott Salzer]

Ya gotta love the bright blue bill on the males in breeding season.

 

[Kilchis]

Outstanding images! What camera setup are you using? Ruddy drakes in breeding plumage are stunning and their courtship displays are fun to watch.

Well thank you. I took these photos on the 5th of this month using a Nikon D5200 dslr with a Sigma 150-500 lens zoomed to 500 mm. The D5200 is a smaller obsolete 24 megapixel dslr with an APS-C sensor, so there is a crop factor of about 1.5. The result is that the 500 mm lens equates to about 750 mm. I bought the camera in 2013 and of course it was promptly discontinued. I still like it 10 years later.

 

[Cabezon]

An Ode to Voles. While places like Ridgefield NWR and the Samish Flats are known for their waterfowl, it also supports a diversity of predators on rodents, especially voles. These predators include American kestrels, Northern harriers, short-eared owls, coyotes, great egrets,

and great blue herons.

The latter two species appear to spend more time stalking voles in the grasslands than they do hunting fishes and other aquatic prey from the ponds and canals.
The dominant vole species in Western Washington is Townsend’s vole, Microtus townsendii. They are one of the largest voles in NA, reaching a body length of up to 9”. They are active year-round and feed on a variety of grasses, alfalfa, sedges, and horsetails. They can breed 9 months a year (all but November to January). Females can produce litters of up to nine every other month during the breeding season. Young individuals are sexually mature within a month of birth. And it is that amazing fecundity that support all these predators.
I managed to catch the last act of one of these predator-prey interactions earlier this week. I had seen a great blue heron stalking the grasses adjacent to a service road at Ridgefield when I made my first circuit along Ridgefield auto tour route. In the second circuit, I noticed that the great blue heron had walked down to the edge of a pond and appeared to be washing something it the water. I quickly pulled over and pulled up my camera. The something was a large vole and I snapped a series of pictures that can only be described as “Going. Going. Gone” as the heron swallowed the large vole without any trouble.

Steve

 

[Salmo_g]

Cabezon,

Nice photo series above! Question about egrets; have they always been in WA? I'd never seen one in my life until noticing a few in Idaho and part of eastern WA in the 90s. Now they are in western WA too.

 

[Scott Salzer]

Very nice, as usual!

 

[Cabezon]

Cabezon,

Nice photo series above! Question about egrets; have they always been in WA? I'd never seen one in my life until noticing a few in Idaho and part of eastern WA in the 90s. Now they are in western WA too.

I think that great egrets have been expanding their range northward. I saw one on the tidal mud flats before Christmas at Nisqually and there are several in residence at Ridgefield. I agree that they do appear to be rare, but increasing, in Western WA. I have noticed that several bird species: scrub jays, black phoebes, and great egrets appear to be expanding their range northward. There are other species, such as acorn woodpeckers, that may be entering Western WA in the next decade or so.
One could propose several possible explanations for these expansions (and more than one may be operating simultaneously). First, this could just be slow range expansion by southern species after the last glaciation. Second, it could be due to global climate change, especially the increase in winter minimum temperatures (increased by almost 5oF in the last century for the state as a whole. See below).

Third, it could be due to anthropogenic habitat modifications that favor those species. And fourth, maybe the populations of potential competitors or predators that had kept them out of Western Washington have been declining, allowing these species to expand their range northward.
Steve

 

[Uptonogood]

Great photo series on the vole consumption!

 

[Gyrfalcon22]

Will add with @Cabezon (great report!) my experiences with great egrets over the years in southwest WA. Driving through the Kelso area on I-5 you could pick up an occasional egret over the past 10-15+ years. Same with the Elk River bridge going to Westport and some of the flats inside the harbor-say like by the grocery store in town. You could see one or more out there on the rare occasion.
Taking the drive across the Kelso bridge and then the back way to Portland on the Oregon side/St Helens there were great egrets in the area of the old Trojan Nuclear plant very consistently.. So, they have been around but not in good numbers and they are apparently moving north like Steve pointed out along the lines of the CA scrub jay, Red-shouldered hawk, and various phoebes.
I had my first local great egret a year back and that was an exciting day as I thought it was another "yawn" majestic swan flying in, but it gave me a good fly-by and was thrilled to see an egret instead.

Snowy egrets are now showing on both sides of the mountains on very rare instances. Cattle egret have sort of done the opposite I have heard and retreated in range. I saw some as a kid locally in the very early 70's on the milk farms around us.

 

[Cabezon]

Three duck tales. Tale 1: Ducks have a mixed reputation among the members of the flyfishing community. Their feathers, when legally harvested, make great fly-tying materials. And we can appreciate that they add to the beauty of the amazing places that we fish. But mergansers (with the exception of the too-cute-to-hate hooded mergansers) have a mixed reputation. And that is because they are very effective fish predators, especially on young trout in the rivers and streams where mergansers breed. Both common mergansers and red-breasted mergansers are cooperative hunters. A small flock will make a sudden coordinated dash underwater into the shallows, driving small fishes in front of the flock. In the confusion, the mergansers will grab their prey in their long, thin serrated bills. Then, the flock will swim out into deeper water and repeat this ambush process in another area. In winter, both common mergansers (less commonly) and red-breasted mergansers (more commonly) will forage in salt water, driving small fishes up against the shoreline where they are easier to capture. We encountered several resting red-breasted merganser hens (note the red "hex-vision eyes") in the channel leading into the boat basin at Westport.



Tale 2: Surf scoters are large diving ducks (a bit smaller than a mallard). It is quite common to see small rafts of them along the shoreline in winter where the bird make synchronous dives to the bottom to search for food. All scoters, but especially surf scoters, have massive bills. Especially in winter, they will use those powerful bills to find and then pry bivalves and other marine invertebrates out of the mud during a dive. They swallow their prey whole, often underwater; the shells are crushed in the powerful gizzard.
That massive bill has acted as blank canvas to evolve sexually-dimorphic coloration patterns. The bill of a male surf scoter has a large black spot on a white background and a black stripe then a red stripe on the dorsal bill surface that transitions to a yellow tip. The drake also has a wide white forehead patch and a wide white nape patch on an otherwise black body. This drake was showing off his lunch.

The bill of a hen is darker overall, but you can see the same black spot on the bill if the light is right. Hens have two irregular white patches below the eye and are otherwise dark in body color.

I also managed to capture an image of a juvenile drake that is transitioning into breeding male plumage.

At Westport, we also encountered a white-winged scoter hen. Like a surf scoter hen, she has two irregular white patches on her head, but her overall plumage color is chocolate brown with a white wing patch (the speculum).


Tale 3: I have spent my professional career identifying and investigating the feeding biology of some of the most challenging groups of marine fishes in the Northeast Pacific, the sculpins/cottids, a group that many fish biologists despair to identify. [For the record, freshwater sculpins, however, are an order of magnitude harder to identify in my opinion; there are multiple undescribed cryptic species likely in the mix]. And I’ve reached a point where I can consistently identify a cottid to species from just a passing glance in the field, at an aquarium, or from a picture. I once sent an email to the staff at Olympic National Park because they had a picture of a juvenile scalyhead sculpin (Artedius harringtoni) identified as a tidepool sculpin (Oligocottus maculosus) on a brochure on intertidal organisms.
But trying to tell the difference between greater scaup versus lesser scaup has me throwing up my hands in frustration. At Westport a few weeks ago, I had great view of a small flock of scaups which included a drake and three hens at Westport. I captured good pictures of the drake and the hens. And I’m still not confident that I have id’ed the birds correctly. The only saving grace is that I’m not alone in having troubles with these two species.
My first move is to consult the field guide Sibley Birds West. It indicates that the greater is more likely in salt water and the lesser in fresh water: point to greater. It indicates that the head is lower and more rounded in the greater and taller and with a more obvious corner peak in the head of the lesser. The drake in my pictures has a peak at the posterior edge of the skull, just like this bird identified as a lesser here.

but the heads of the hens are rounded in both pictures : confusion.


So, off to “All About Birds” web site from the Cornell Ornithology lab. This indicates that in the right light the greater drake has greenish iridescence (and the lesser drake often looks more purple): point to greater. But other resources that I read indicate that because these colors are structural and can change from green to purple and back again as the light angle changes – crap.
I consult other sources that require a detailed comparison of the drakes of the two species side-by-side. They address characteristics such as bill shape, bill width, and the size of the dark patch at the tip of the bill. But this references also indicates that this bill tip is variable in greater scaup and overlaps with the lesser scaup. And the two species also differ in the size of the white band on the wings when in flight. But “at the population level, some overlap exists between the two species” and the amount of white is sex- and age-related in both species.
Frankly, at this point, I wish that I just shot the $^@$ers and took a blood sample so that I could sequence their DNA. My final conclusion: scaup…
Steve

 

[Kilchis]

Steve, not to worry about possibly misidentifying the scaup in public. Nobody else can figure the damned things out either!

 

[RRSmith]

Steve, I spent a lot of my professional career working with and around waterfowl and feel your pain. Lesser scaup are (or least were) infrequent breeders in the Klamath Basin so I had the opportunity to see them during the spring and summer months on occasion. Being inland, we rarely saw greater scaup except occasionally during migration and it was much easier to pick a rarer greater out of a flock of lesser's. I felt like I could distingquish between the two but after reading your post, I am not so sure ha ha. We always went with the white on the wings and the shape of the head (especially with males), amount of white on the female's head, but as you correctly point out, that's not always reliable. When I participated in aerial and ground population surveys, we just called them "scaup". Fortunately, hunters were not required to distinguish between the two and the various flyway councils lumped the two species together for harvest management purposes.

I also participated a few times in the annual "wing bee" for the Pacific Flyway. Hunters would voluntarily clip off wings of harvested waterfowl and send them to the USFWS. At the end of the season, a bunch of us duck nerds would gather for a week and go through piles of wings, ID'ing species while aging and sexing them as well. I am having to dip deep into my dusty harddrive but as I recall, we used multiple criteria to separate greater's from lesser's but wing length was a very important one. We had specialties when it came to the wing bee (mine was aging puddle ducks) and the most experienced wing bee participants (not me) usually got the box of scaup wings.

Now that we have a place on Devils Lake on the Oregon Coast, I get to see rafts of scaup almost daily during the winter months. I have been calling them greater's but after your post, I will have to do a deeper dive into ID'ing what's out there.

 

[Scott Salzer]

A leucistic crow at local beach today. No pics, sorry.

 

[Gyrfalcon22]

I was not alone in watching eagles this day. Not just a glance, it was a good long stare -as if his life depended on it.