Things That Go "Scree!" in the Night

The Elizabethtown New York Christmas Bird Count began for Beth and I at 5:30 AM, December 27, on a back road in Lewis New York. We stood on an icy road listening for anything that might have been an owl. We rejected a few owl-like sounds as highway noises and then got out the cassette recorder and played a series of calls by a Saw-Whet Owl. This was an area where we had heard them before.

After only two attempts a short, sharp "screee.." from the woods identified itself as a saw-whet owl--species number one for the day. We never were able to get the bird to come within range of our headlamps but it called several more times.

Saw-wets are tiny owls not much bigger than one's hand. They prey on small mammals such as deer mice and are rarely active by day. Their "song" is similar to the sound of a truck backing up however they often give another sharp call of a single note in response to tapes.

We ended the count day at 31 species which was pretty good for an area with a rather limited range of habitat.

Our "Golden Triangle" in Wadhams New York which in the past has been good for raptors including a golden eagle provided us with only 80 crows, 60 starlings and one injured Canada Goose gathered around a silage dump.

Sunrise on Giant Mountain and the High Peaks from Wadhams, New York

Down the road however we ran into massive numbers of robins, 7 bluebirds and later in the day a flock of up to 80 cedar waxwings. These were all gathered around the edges of the roads where the plows had uncovered bare ground or in the branches of buckthorn bushes and red cedars where they were chowing down the abundant fruit.

There were also large numbers of tree sparrows in the area and a few snow buntings flushed up from the side of the road.

Rain, late in the afternoon, slicked down the roads a bit more and limited my birding to the downhill sections of back roads in the foothills of the Adirondack High Peaks. I just could not stop the car on the uphill sections and hope to get it going again.

But all in all a great day of birding the outdoors but that describes just about any day I have ever spent birding in the outdoors.

One of the nicer moments was, in the late afternoon, encountering a flock of white-winged crossbills feeding in a hemlock. They are beautiful and exotic birds of the boreal (northern) forest. They follow the cone crops and are seen in our area only in irruptive years when cone crops to the north area weak. Thus we see then in numbers perhaps only once a decade. This is an irruptive year and it was a treat to see the bright, rosy-colored males with black wings and prominent white-wing bars dangling from the outer limbs of the hemlocks. Their bills are crossed at the tips, an adaption which makes them efficient feeders on cones of various species of evergreens.

(Owl photo generously loaned by Kirk Rogers)

Thoughts about the Ice Storm '08

When I grew up I learned the concept of forest succession--that abandonned fields and pastures are then taken over by perennial weeds which are overtaken by shrubs, which in turn are shaded out by sunloving trees which then are shaded out by what was called the climax forest. In the more southern areas of New England the climax forest was Beech, Oak, Hemlock and in more northern areas, Spruce, Fir forests.

I could easily observe this phenomenon in coastal NH where abandonned farmlands grew into goldenrod and milkweed. We made arrows for our "bows" from the dried goldenrod stems and we had fights with the milkweed pods which would explode into fuzz when they hit you.

We were scratched by the junipers in the overgrown fields and cautioned each other to stay away from the fuzzy staghorn sumac which we wrongly thought was poison sumach. Up north a bit blueberries, sheep laurel and sweet fern grew in sandy areas that were clear cut or burned by forest fires. A few years later gray birch and poplars would shade out the blueberries. Then pines would shade out the birches and poplars.

Over the years that followed I learned the habits and habitats of many more trees, more or less always accepting the idea that succession inevitably led to the climax forest. Without thinking I more or less took it for granted that soon all of Northern New England and New York State would be covered with climax forest as farms were abandonned.

Then came the ice storm of 98. Thousands of acres of forest trees were stripped of their branches by the "100 year ice storm" and I began to re-evaluate this idea of the static climax forest.

In 2000 New York State began its second breeding bird atlas as a planned follow up to the BBA of 1980 which I had participated in at age 31. I remember doing the math back then and thinking, "I will be 51 years old; will I still be able to walk?". That length of time was unimaginable.

Since then I have watched trees grow. Watched areas in Pownal that were clearcut revert to what most people would recognize as a forest. In the 2000 Atlas I went to areas in which huge yellow birches so big I could not reach my arms across them, had been stripped of all branches. They looked like huge mops stuck in the ground. Bushingwhacking through the woods was slow and painful. So many branches and knock-downs blocked my passage that I gave up on atlassing many areas.

In one of these areas of yellow birch mop-tops I did note the bright green understory. Striped Maple and Mountain Maple were growing up over my head just a few years after the sunlight had suddenly burst onto the forest floor. I began to hear black-throated blue warblers "zree, zree, zree, zuurrreee" and redstarts.

In the 1980 Atlast I had found black-throated blue's only near the south sides of mountains where "glacial plucking" left sharp cliff on the south side of the glaciated foothills. The freezing and thawing of northern winters were still sending chunks of anorthosite rock tumbling into the forests below and in these slopes routinely cleared by falling rock mountain ash and striped maple grew and black-throated warblers and, sometimes, redstarts nested.

I learned that black-throated blue warblers were a bird of the understory. In the school book lessons you would not find black-throated blue warblers in a densely shaded forest with no understory. After the ice storm I began to read the landscape differently. While an ice storm like that of '98 was for us a once in a life time thing, for the northern forest it was a relatively routine event. I remembered being told in boy scouts that in many parts of the north woods you could find your way on a cloudy day without a compass by following the trunks of trees blown down in the great hurricane of '36--again a lifetime event for a human but routine in the life of a forest.

Other things began to make sense: If all forests ended in climax how had populations of birds like common yellowthroats, rose-breasted grosbeaks, indigo buntings, Nashville warblers, brown thrashers, and many other birds of second growth forests and cleared areas been able to sustain themselves over the years.

1947 was called "The Year That Maine Burned."--another life-time event that undoubtedly had happened before.

I no longer view nature as progressing in such a neat and orderly pattern. I look at the opportunities in ice storms and fires. The cherries and gray birch on our property are being shaded out by pines and maples. A few oaks and hemlocks are beginning to fill in. I can see the opportunities presented when the ice storms strips the pines of their brittle branches. Further north the tiered branches of fir and spruce support each other as they are weighed down and they do not suffer so much damage. However when they get mature they are prone to blow-down. Every century or two these is probably an outbreak of spruce budworm and the "western" evening grosbeak explodes east as they did in the sixties to feed on the crop. Nothing in nature is static.

Mature woods traversed by streams during the 1980 Atlas are now beaver meadows. The flooded trees bear nests of Great-Blue Herons. Black-backed Woodpeckers chop nest holes in the dead trees and chimney swifts nest in the broken and rotted tops. Bluebirds or tree swallows nest in the old woodpecker holes. Hooded Mergansers and Wood Ducks nest in the rotted stubs as well or in the old holes of Pileated Woodpeckers. Five years later the beaver have exhausted the food supply, the dams have disintegrated and alders begin to fill in the grassy marshes.

In the yard the broken tops of poplars damaged in the '98 Ice Storm still provide nest sites for woodpeckers, chickadees, titmouse and nuthatches. It has taken a decade for a succession of fungi that invaded the broken limbs and trunks to rot and soften the interior of the trees so that a chickadee can dig out a hole for a nest.

Now another ice storm has struck the area and I am wondering what other opportunities will present themselves.

Counting the Birds

Beth, Steve and I boarded the Peak's Island Ferry last Sunday for my 29th annual circuit of Peak's Island counting birds as part of the Greater Portland (Maine) Christmas Bird Count.

The Christmas Bird Count is organized by National Audubon Society and is one of the largest amateur scientific events in the world with approximately 40,000 participants, mostly in North America.

I served as compiler for the count for a decade and for nearly 30 years have gone to the same place, at the same time to take an annual check of the bird populations in the area.

Every winter is different. In some years warm temperatures allow us to discover late-lingering "summer" birds like catbirds or the very lonely spotted sandpiper that we saw one year on a snow-covered lawn.

This year with a strong red spruce cone crop (and a meager one to the north) there were flocks of White-Winged Crossbills. Crossbills are colorful finches with a beak similar to a parrot's in profile with the bills crossed to aid in prying seeds from evergreen cones. Thanks to Beth, who heard the calls of the crossbills overhead, we saw two flocks. These were our first White-winged Crossbills in all of our years of doing the count.

We circled the island counterclockwise, mostly on foot, checking feeders and areas with flowing water where birds congregate in the winter. After nearly 30 years we have noted all of the areas on the island which are the "hotspots" for different species.

At one such stop we saw two robins, a pair of cardinals, some juncos and a new bird for our count a Red-bellied Woodpecker pictured above courtesy of Kirk Rogers. Steve said, "There's a woodpecker" and when I got my binoculars on it the flame orange head jumped out at me from the colorless landscape of winter on the island. This was also my first Red-bellied Woodpecker seen in Maine, presaged by my neighbor, Sue, who called last week to report one from her yard up the road. A record 16 on this years count shattered the previous high of 4, so I guess these birds have come to Maine to stay.

The woodpecker sighting shows the value of these bird counts. Over the last 50 years we have seen the insurgence of "southern" birds like cardinal, mockingbird, tufted titmouse, carolina wren and red-bellied woodpeckers into Maine as well as the return of Wild Turkeys. The raven has spread southward, in my opinion due to the increase of coyotes in Maine during the same period. Another bird, the merlin, a northern falcon, is now more prevalent at all seasons. Merlins often nest in old raven nests. Is there a correlation there? CBC's don't answer all of these questions but they are a beginning to gaining an awareness of the natural world.

On the far side of the island where we look for black guillemots--a relative of the puffin--we also had a nice grouping of Red-necked Grebes feeding in the channel between Peak's and Long Island. As I lowered my binoculars a mink ran across the road into the marsh. There are many great moments on a CBC and this one ranked right up there with last year's bobcat on our Adirondack CBC.

We caught the 12:45 ferry back to Portland and I enjoyed pointing out loons to an interested passenger from the chilly top deck. He did not know that we had loons around in the winter, so I got to do a little teaching about one of the most popular Maine birds.

The excitement was not over however. As the ferry pulled into the dock I scanned the Portland rooftops for hawks attracted by the abundant Rock Pigeons. A large soaring bird revealed itself as a Red-tailed Hawk. It landed on the top of the Eastland Hotel at the same time that another profile shot like an arrow into the field of my binoculars. A Peregrine Falcon stooped at the Red-tail, wheeled about and stooped on it four more times before the beleaguered and out-classed Red-tail moved on.

My last image of the bird count was the silhouette of the Peregrine perched on the cell phone towers overlooking "its" city.
Peregrine Falcon (Kirk Rogers photo)

Ice Storm '08

I have been off-line for a few days due to the ice storm which downed electrical lines and cut power to a half a million people or so within a hundred miles of our house.

This storm at first seemed like a minor event compared to the ice storm of '98 which was unprecedented in anyone's memory. The bulk of the damage from the '08 storm was south and west of us. Beth and I felt fortunate to be without power for only three days. We jumped back in time a century or so and relied on wood heat and water from rain barrels and the brook for washing and flushing toilets.

Friends that had been asking me where the birds were this year are now reporting lots of action at the feeders. One friend has some feeders mounted on a window. House guests were amazed at the variety and colors of the birds visiting her feeder and viewed from only a few feet away.

We have about 30 juncos at the feeder, one white-throated sparrow and our first tree sparrow of the year. Tree sparrows are down from the far north. We do not often see them in our yard since they generally prefer more open areas in the winter time. I once flushed nearly a dozen birds at dusk that were roosting under a downed tree branch in the middle of a field. They have a sweet "tinkly" sound as they feed in a flock.

Judging from the droppings and deep scratching in the icy driveway our feeder was visited by a turkey while we were away on the Greater Portland Christmas Bird Count--an annual event for us. We are not sure we are happy about turkeys moving in. I have images of them grazing down the seedlings in the garden in the spring. We shall see what happens when that time comes.

Our neighbor, Sue, called to ask if we were keeping warm and to report a Red-bellied Woodpecker at her house. This is a bird that I have predicted would be my next new "yard bird". They are a "southern" bird moving north and I will spend a little more time outdoors hoping to see or hear this bird. They have a distinctive call. More on red-bellied woodpeckers and a report from the Portland CBC and our walk around Peak's Island in the next post.

The Family Corvidae

With very little time outdoors during the daylight hours, I have been a bit short on inspiration for blog postings.

So I was very grateful when a friend wrote asking the difference between ravens and crows. Now there's a topic for a dozen blog postings. Just for now, for the sake of a good night's sleep, I will keep it short.

The photo above is a perfect image of a Raven in flight posted by Dobak from Creative Commons at Flickr. It shows perfectly the rounded "spade-shaped" tail of the soaring common raven. The crow's tail is only slightly rounded. Up close ravens have a larger bill meant for more serious scavenging of meat than the more omnivorous crow is prone to.
The "Roman Nose" of the Raven (jurek d. photo via Creative Commons, Flickr)
Kirk Rogers photo of the relatively demure bill of the American Crow

The raven is a significantly larger bird than is the crow but this may be difficult to observe under some conditions. Size is always a difficult factor to judge in the field and not as useful as most casual observers may think. I am often fooled by into mis-identifying the large corvids at a quick glance due to changes in the light or backgrounds or distance.

The raven is a much more graceful flyer than the crow and their wings often look "droopy" in flight. They hold them with "elbows" bent in flight while crows are more known for the slightly dihedral glide as they descend to a field. Raven soar, crows do not. Crows hate ravens and one might often see several of them chasing the larger bird out of their territory. I once saw a raven chase a crow very high up into the air for over five minutes. It certainly had the look of a life or death struggle and I was convinced that the raven meant to kill the crow.

The best place to see a raven is from a mountain top. The ravens will hang in an updraft along a cliff face and do barrel rolls, somersaults and other dramatic aerial maneuvers particular during courtship and breeding. They seem to love the wind and to delight in their mastery of flight.

More later on crows and ravens. Two references on ravens are listed at the bottom of this page.