Siddle Down Under: A Guest Blog by Ken Cross

A few years ago now a movie came out from Australia starring one Paul Hogan entitled, Crocodile Dundee. It was a story of a ‘character’ from the outback – a crocodile hunting, buffalo whispering, hard drinking, smart mouthed man’s man, who made his way to North America where, in the biggest of big cities, he had to use his wits to survive. It was a more-or-less funny fish-out-of –water story.   

In a similar vein I bring you the parallel story of Chris Siddle in his latest adventure down under.

Chris’s story is similar to that of Crocodile Dundee.

Chris is from Vernon, a small town in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, Canada. He was an English teacher. And he is a bird watcher who enjoys reading in his spare time.

Would he survive on the other side of the world in the separate creation known as Australia? Would he thrive in the outback?

As it happens, yes.

Before we get into how he thrived, we should determine why Chris would want to leave Canada for Australia in the first place [or in this case the third place]. Crocodile Dundee left Australia for North America because there was a story in it and, ultimately, for love; in Croc’s case – a love for a woman. Chris’s story is eerily similar. Chris fell in love…not with a woman but with Australia. The love began at a very early age, a formative stage we may say, such that it became his destiny. The love began, like many of his loves, with a bird; an Australian bird immortalised in an Australian song. One of his teachers, for reasons which will forever remain unclear, taught him to sing, ‘Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree’. Now I can mention the entire lyric as it is agreeably brief;

‘Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree,

Merry merry king of the bush is he,

Laugh Kookaburra laugh,

Gay your life must be.’

The age of the song can be gauged by the use, or by contemporary standards mis-use of the word, ‘gay’ –as at the time of writing the Kookaburra’s life was to be envied.

Now if you are beginning to struggle and feel bad because you do not know what a Kookaburra is, do not panic. After all this would not be a Chris Siddle OK birder blog entry if there was no educational birding content…

The Kookaburra is a distinctly Australian bird. It is a kingfisher – the largest in the world. Its name is an onomatopoeia; being an abbreviation of the bird’s particularly raucous call. It is huge and brown and white with a humongous bill, seemingly specially adapted to its modern past-time stealing steaks and snags from barbies.

Figure 1. A wild but very obliging Laughing Kookaburra allowed me to get close as it watched for prey on the lawn at Kondadilla Falls National Park near Mapleton, Qsld., 31 March 2015. (Ph. - C.Siddle).

Anyway back to Chris’s story. So love was established early and the first full on flourishes were felt many years later when an opportunity for a visit down under presented itself through a BC birding buddy, one Gary Davidson who was living the dream, for the second time; having a year living, working and birding on the island of Tasmania. Chris and his other love, wife and childhood sweetheart, Sonja flew across the Pacific to Tasmania and saw Australian landscapes and the birds within for the very first time, including his very first tickable Kookaburras. 

So the seed was planted and then grew. In 2007 it flourished!

Sonja got a teaching exchange to Australia so the Siddles could live in Springwood in an area known as the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. Here Chris learned, unlike Crocodile Dundee, to blend in to the local population. Strolling around muttering, “Tharteen”*, before thoughtfully adding, “mate”, and suppressing the desire to further add an enquirying, “eh?” he became your typical Aussie. Albeit one who is five-three, bespectacled and bedecked with binoculars, and armed, not with a tinnie, but a scope and camera.

Chris’s blending developed like much Chris has achieved through not-insignificant rational thought and research. The latter achieved by avid reading and viewing of decent Aussie texts and films. By end of 2007 Chris had read Australian novelist Tim Winton, novelist and historian [and rugby league tragic**] Tom Keneally, historian Geoffrey Blainey, Sarah Murgatroyd of ‘The Dig Tree’ fame, scientist, mammologist and Australian of the Year - Tim Flannery, historian and socialist in addition to being champion of Indigenous Issues - John Pilger, and novelist Kate Grenville. TV had provided such classics as Spicks and Specks, and Kath and Kim. 

While Sonja was welded to teaching fourth grade at Penrith, Chris was, to coin a phrase, as free as a bird, and visited Cairns, Daintree, the Atherton Tablelands, Newcastle, Lamington, Adelaide, Melbourne in addition to enjoying pelagic trips off Woolongong. By the end of 2007 Chris's bird list grew to 450 and his love grew beyond measure.

This is where I come in. My name is Ken Cross and I’m a birder; resident in Australia. Chris and I had a mutual friend in Gary Davidson who I had birded with in his prior visits to Australia. Chris was primed to visit me in 2007; however the expected birth of my first and final daughter proved to be an obstacle to birding. In a surprise twist, a few years later, Chris hosted my visit and took me birding as I, like Sonja, had scored a teaching exchange to Nakusp, a mere few hours to the east of Chris’s Vernon. When visiting I invited Chris to re-kindle his Aussie love affair and to visit South East Queensland where I reside. This did not take much rhetorical skill. So in 2015 another chapter of Siddle Down Under was written!   

On 27 March, 2015, the Siddles arrived at my Mapleton Manor, or at least the vacated house of my neighbours across the street, to the herald of screeching Yellow- tailed Black Cockatoos. Think birds the size of Scarlet Macaws with lazy wing beats, all black save a yellow daub on their face and large yellow panels in their tails. These birds, in some bizarre sense the ecological equivalent to woodpeckers, fly from tree to tree armed with massive bills used to tear branches apart for the grubs within. Their yellow tails become
agreeably more prominent when they brake from their flight.

Figure 2 - a male Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoo in the rain at 1 Daymar Road, Mapleton, 1 April, 2015. Ph - C.Siddle

Most birders know that coming a close second to birding overseas in new and exotic lands is the thrill of showing your local birds, animals and special places to birders from exotic lands and so began our exploration  to the local Gheerulla Falls Track. Being Australia our waterfalls are generally not much to look at; however who needs falls when there are spectacular Spectacled Monarchs –a flycatcher, dark around the eyes and orange on the throat and breast.   Here, too as we listened to Logrunners below on the forest floor and, more tantalisingly, Rose-crowned Fruit-dove above, [both equally unseen] our eyes were attracted to a rather large lizard, a Lace Monitor or to use the name I prefer a Common Goanna. This species can hit nearly three metres long from nose to tail tip so is a lot longer than the iguana whose name was bastardised to initially describe it. It is a beautiful animal; however they often attract my anger as they steal my chook’s eggs. [Chook = chicken]

Figure 3 - The New Holland Honeyeater, Phylidonyris novaehollandiae, was one of the first Australian honeyeaters to be collected and described by science, back in 1790, two years after the First Fleet landed. 

Figure 4. A Goanna on the back lawn, April, 2015. Of the world's 50 species of monitor lizards, a full 25 are lizards of Oz. This one, the Lace Monitor, Varanus varius, is common along the eastern coastal areas of Australia. Ph- CS. 

Closer tracks to home revealed more birds; Pale Yellow and Eastern Yellow Robins, Little (Rufous) and Grey Shrike-thrushes, Olive-backed Orioles, the latter sadly unable to compete with the colours of the North American entry into the Oriole field. And of course there were Honeyeaters. The first ones were heard – Bell Miners. Bell Miners are honeyeaters who are always heard before they are seen as they live in colonies and their constant contact calls ring through the forest. Angry pishing brought them to mob and revealed them as cute little olive green birds with bright orange bills and legs. White –naped Honeyeaters were seen too as were Scarlet Honeyeaters, the latter one of the few Honeyeaters I could put up to win a beauty contest against your warblers!

Weekends allowed, for me at least, more birding and early in April we did a little sprint around some sunshine Coast sites. As we left the hills of Mapleton a Grey Goshawk sped across the road – a poor view of a cracking bird! Wappa Dam revealed many common waterbirds but best among them was the spectacular Great Crested Grebe. On the water’s edge Restless Flycatcher attracted us as did the far less showy Peaceful Dove. Farm flats around the Maroochydore River revealed, Golden-headed Cisticola and Tawny Grassbird – both birds which are subtle in colour and reserved in behaviour. Above them on power-lines perched our smallest falcon – an Australian Hobby. Nearby at a residential estate named Park Lake Estates we wandered about enjoying yet more honeyeaters – Brown, White-cheeked and Little Wattlebird [which is a another Honeyeater]. Little Egrets and Royal Spoonbills worked the edges of the Estate’s lakes. Then, because no doubt I was showing off, I took Chris to some sewage ponds. Here there was some good shit. No, seriously; Black-winged Stilt [I’m not sure what IOC is calling it], the poorly named Hardhead (aka White-eyed Duck), tiny Black-fronted dotterals and the main target as they are elsewhere uncommon Chestnut Teal. Annoyingly as we were watching the ponds through the wire fence surrounding them a calling Mistletoe bird was taunting or rather several Mistletoe birds were taunting. We never saw them well which was a shame as the Mistletoe bird is the only Australian Flowerpecker – a family of birds that has spread throughout Asia but refused to establish in the Americas, and it is bright red and pretty attractive.  

The following day we moved to the south of Blackall Range to stroll through some protected hill forest that overlook the Glasshouse Mountains. These mountains are really igneous volcanic plugs; evidence of long-gone tectonic activity and were the first features named by Europeans in the whole of South east Queensland. Captain James Cook sailing past in 1770 saw the mountains reflecting back the rising sun and named them. Following the geography and history we set off for one of my favourite sites in SE Qld – a little village by the sea, Toorbul. Toorbul does not actually look to the sea but across a passage to Bribie Island, so is shallow watered allowing, at low tide, both mud flats and sand bars. Here good numbers of migratory shorebirds gather to feed and roost, Far Eastern Curlew, Greenshank, Grey- tailed Tattler, Red-necked Stint, Bar-tailed Godwit and Great Knot to name a few. Chris was delighted as waders, non showy little grey birds, are among his passion. To further his swooning a Brahminy Kite – a white-headed raptor sailed lazily past. A few mangrove specialties make Toorbul a must visit – Mangrove Kingfisher, Mangrove Honeyeater and Mangrove Gerygone [a small warbler] – and all were seen well.  In the passage impressive numbers of Black Swan can be seen – circa 400. Finally for Chris the marsupial enthusiast we admired the big mob of Grey
Kangaroos that can always be seen decorating the streets of this village.

Figure 5 - One of the few birds that regularly occur in both Australia and North America is the Bar-tailed Godwit, here on the mangrove mudflats at Toorbul, Qsld. Ph - CS. 

Lifers of different kinds followed as we crossed from the mainland to Bribie Island. Crustaceans, specifically Soldier Crabs, were seen marching over sand flats a sight that had eluded Chris on earlier visits. These blue crabs march forward rather than scuttling sideways hence their name. An Eastern Bearded Dragon, a startling yellow mouthed agamid, was added to Chris’s reptile list, while we checked out yet more waders; Pacific Golden Plover and finally a Striated Heron. Our day ended back at home after dark with a couple more natural history discoveries; specifically an Eastern Horseshoe Bat that had been using my down-stair’s storage areas as a roost site and a wonderful Great Barred Frog calling on the lawn.

Figure 5. Our hosts, the Crosses of Mapleton, Queensland. Back row, left to right: Tom, Ken, and Megan. Front: Milly and Matt. Ph - CS. 

I could go on [and on] and mention more outings that we undertook and mention every critter that we encountered however that would end in death threats to me and would achieve little. Chris himself would like to document an enjoyable few days that we had at Giraween National Park and then to Bunya Mountains. Hopefully my account of Siddle Down Under will provide an opportunity for Chris to publish some of his Aussie images and a minor advertisement for more OK birders to come down under!

Ken Cross | Local Branch Convenor                       

Sunshine Coast Branch

BirdLife Southern Queensland

PO Box 375                                       

Annerley QLD 4103                 

southernqld@birdlife.org.au |birdlife.org.au                   

ABN 75 149 124 774                           

birds are in our nature

Tel: 0754457881

* The first word I felt I could pronounce in a truly Australian way was the number thirteen, running together West Canadian versions of "the" and "dean". Next I learned that "beer", an extremely important word in Australia, is two syllables, "be-yaa". Aside from our weird pronunciations wherein we stress the letter R, Canadian English is fairly colourless compared to Strine. My favourite example of an Australian simile comes from Ken Cross who said one night when we were looking for owls and nocturnal mammals that a Greater Glider should be "as obvious as testicles on a dog". 

** "rugby league tragic" = Some things only Australians understand,  so as a Canadian I have no idea what Ken means. Most people know Keneally as the author of Schindler's List. He's a wonderful writer and deserves a world-wide readership, as does the latest Australian I have discovered, historian and essayist, Don Watson. 

Many thanks to Ken Cross for his article which he and I dedicate to Megan because she's awesome, man!

The Final Months of an Okanagan Winter

There comes a quiet time in the calendar when the sometimes unexpected warm temperatures of February melt the snow cover and the robins that have been in town after berries move upslope into higher neighbourhoods and starlings begin to appear in pairs poking around old buildings and holes in snags getting ready to get the reproductive jump on all the other birds. Junco flocks around feeders may contain fewer birds than they did in January, and male Red-winged Blackbirds position themselves in cattail ditches to sing "O-kla-ee". Human spirits rise, people phone the media to report the "first robin", and birders take heart that spring is on its way.

Then comes March. Ponds and lakes thaw and everyday becomes waterfowl day. From shore you tally Gadwalls, Mallards, American Wigeons, a Eurasian Wigeon or two if you're lucky, Northern Pintails, Northern Shovelers, Green-winged Teal, a Common Teal (the Eurasian version of the Green-wing) if you're really lucky, Ring-necked Ducks, Redheads, Canvasbacks, Greater Scaups, Lesser Scaups, Common Goldeneyes, Barrow's Goldeneyes, Bufflleheads, Hooded Mergansers, Common Mergansers, and if you're lucky again a few early Ruddy Ducks and Red-breasted Mergansers. During a better than average early spring a gyrfalcon or a Peregrine will stakeout the ducks for a day or two, adding life-and-death drama to the scene. Gore galore when a gyr knocks a teal out of the air than stands over the ducks and methodically plucks and rips apart the duck, sometimes while the duck is still alive.

After this plethora of early waterfowl, Mother Nature seems a real tight wad with land birds. The passerines and kin of early spring are just a trickle making March a slow month. You long for the first two swallows, Trees and Violet-greens but they are so finicky for the first few months.

Northern Pygmy-Owl "hugs" the trunk of a birch sapling as it watches roosting sparrows in a cedar hedge. Is this a common hunting strategy? Vernon, B.C. January, 2015. Photo by C. Siddle

Here are some suggested activities that may improve your late winter nature experiences.

1. Instead of searching for the first-of-the-season species, be content with the birds that are present. And how does one engender contentment in a mind yearning for novelty? Try looking more closely at birds. Start with one or two species. You might begin with a quest for Northern Shrikes, for instance. How many can you find in a day? What age class does each belong to? Try describing the habitat involved in each sighting. Watch each shrike to see if you can understand its hunting technique. Other questions will occur as you investigate. If shrikes aren't your thing, almost any of the other winter resident raptors will richly reward investigation: Red-tailed Hawks, Rough-legged Hawks, Northern Harriers, Cooper's Hawks, Sharp-shinned Hawks, Northern Goshawks (you should be so lucky!), Bald Eagles, Golden Eagles, American Kestrels, and Merlins.

The Bald Eagle is a good choice to study for its hunting techniques. Highly visible and easy to locate, most immature eagles can be individually identified while adults like this one are territorial and can be relied upon to reappear in familiar locations. Burton, B.C. 24 August 2014. Photo by C. Siddle. 

Let me give you an example. I noticed a Red-tailed Hawk perched atop a lamp standard along Silver Star Road near its junction with Foothill Drive in the North BX area of Vernon. As I walked briskly by the hawk (if I had paused, it would have flown) I wondered why that hawk chose to perch where it did. Then it occurred to me that across the road from the Red-tail was a steep south-facing slope, created by the road builders and planted with varieties of grasses and low shrubs by the developers of Foothills subdivision many years ago. Because of its aspect, the slope was snow free, one of the only snow free patches in the neighbourhood. Could that be my answer? Were rodents more accessible on this cutbank for the hawk? That seemed like an obvious answer. But was it too easy? What if I cruised around and checked other south or east facing slopes? Would I find Red-tailed Hawks there as well? Or perhaps the hawk was just perched in the sun out of the wind. Wait. There wasn't any wind, was there? It's remarkably easy to become more aware of one's surroundings even in the first seconds after formulating a hypothesis to my question. Here was something to investigate in my area.

2. During the first half of the Twentieth century birders were quite used to the idea that most species in their neighbourhoods had life histories that lacked substantial details. Today we are still ignorant about many details of a bird's life. If you decide to go beyond identification, work on the basics like how birds, even common species, feed, interact with others, display aggression, avoid predation, communicate, roost, etc. Carrying your studies into the breeding season you can observe and note how species court, form pairs, built nests, lay and incubate eggs, and care for their young,

One of the mysteries in my yard - House Sparrows will bathe when water is available, seemingly regardless of cool winter weather. The very wet female is standing on a lens of ice that took up at least 90% of the bird bath! Not only do House Sparrows bathe in ice cold water, but will do so  near the end of the afternoon before going to roost. Vernon, B.C. 12 Dec. 2014. Photo by C. Siddle

Good basic observational work can be done by the average birder if he/she is objective, unassuming, and keeps careful notes. Margaret Morse Nice (1883-1974) became the pin-up girl of this movement after she wrote a two volume life history of the Song Sparrow. Truth be told, Ms. Nice was no ordinary person. She had done graduate work in ornithology prior to becoming a housewife when her husband joined the faculty of the Ohio State medical school. However, the point is that amateurs without degrees in zoology or ornithology have made great contributions to the life histories of North American birds. Check out the 26 volumes of Arthur Cleveland Bent's Life Histories of North American Birds originally published by the Smithsonian and now available as Dover reprints in second hand bookstores. Bent (1866-1968), a successful businessman, was a true amateur. He contributed observations about birds in 1901. Accepting no salary Arthur Bent wrote the life histories of hundreds of species incorporating the observations of thousands of birdwatchers.

Northern Shrike. How exactly does this species go about procuring a meal? Is it a perch and wait predator or does it actively seek out its target? Reifel Refuge, Ladner, B.C. 24 Dec. 2014. Photo by C. Siddle. 

Late winter with its lack of distractions could be a good time to begin your own investigations into a species' life history. Do some background reading (Bent is a good place to start) and never give up because some aspect that you want to investigate is already "known". Birds adapt to local conditions. Your local birds may be acting in a different way that has never been described before.

Don't let fashion dictate. These days the words life histories are hardly spoken anymore. The emphasis in zoology is elsewhere. Many contemporary biologists appear to work with keyboards more than they do with binoculars. However, The need for basic life history is just as important as it always has been. If in the future we hope to save species from local extirpation or extinction we will need to know as much as possible about species' requirements.

3. If you keep feeders in your yard, I encourage you to go beyond the mere list of the species that are present. What are the maximum single sighting counts of each species? What time in the day does each species first visit the feeder? Does that schedule hold true in bad weather as well? Describe some patterns of dominance between species. Draw how you feel when you see a new species. Just kidding about that last suggestion.

4. Establish a walking route and keep a census of the species seen and heard during your walks. See my post about Star Road for an example. Try varying the times of your walks to detect patterns of bird activity. Every fourth census, try walking backwards to see what you're missing. Again, kidding.

5. Instead of getting to know one species well, get to know one place well. It may be a woodlot, a park, a pond... Start with habitat, if you like. Identify the conifers, and when they leaf out, the deciduous plants. Record as best you can the distribution of plant species. Record which birds forage and breed in which parts of the place.

6. When all else fails, take a long weekend trip to a bird rich area like Boundary Bay or Tsawwassan. For the price of gas, a hotel and a few meals out you can experience the spectacle of thousands of waterbirds, birds of prey and wintering passerines in places like Boundary Bay Regional Park, Blackie Spit, White Rock and Reifel Island.

7. As a very last resort, post an observation, idea, or decision on the local email birding group. Being a fractious bunch, male birders will respond with their two bits worth and someone is bound to disagree with you and say so via a  group post and so the battlelines are drawn. Everyone and his uncle will pile on, on one side or the other. The posts pile up electronically, days past as verbal volleys are fired, women, sensible creatures that they are, stand back and shake their heads in disbelief, while the men folk pronounce. And so time passes, winter eases into spring, migrants return and life goes on.

An eBird contributor sounds off about a local eBird reviewer. Virginia Rail. Dawson Creek, B.C. June 2014. Photo by C. Siddle

Note - If you are interested in studying nature beyond identification I recommend that you check out the Biodiversity Centre for Wildlife Studies www.wildlife.org. Mailing address: 3825 Cadboro Bay Road, PO Box 55053 Victoria, B.C. V8N 6L8. BCFWS publishes twice annually a wonderful magazine, Wildlife Afield: A Journal of British Columbia Natural History.

Twitching

To twitch is to purposefully make a special out-of-the-way trip to see an out-of-its-normal-range bird that some other birder has discovered (Talk like a birder! Amaze your friends! Key birder terms are shown in italics). For example, say a Dusky Thrush, an Asian robin-like bird that should be wintering in Japan, is found gobbling mountain ash berries in a suburban yard in Langley. On hearing the news, if your reaction is to grab your car keys and your credit card and kiss goodbye your son or daughter whose birthday party you were supposed to be recording, and tell the  birthday child that you'll get the next birthday since they do came around once a year, whereas this could be your only Dusky Thrush ever, you're a twitcher. Filial obligations and domestic happiness evaporate as fast as the exhaust vapours from your vehicle as you begin your twitch.

When a female-type Great-tailed Grackle appeared at Okanagan Landing in early December, 1993 almost every lister in B.C. twitched it. The bird stuck around until at least March, 1994. Photo by C. Siddle of a similar bird at Laguna, Atascosa, Texas, March 2011. 

A recent example of the cause for a twitch: West Kootenay birders Gary Davidson, Paul Prappus and Carolee Colter simultaneously and unexpectedly saw a White-eyed Vireo in Kootenay Creek Provincial Park a few kilometres west of Nelson, B.C., a species that has never been seen in British Columbia before, an unexpected vagrant from the Atlantic seaboard, among other possible places of origin, on 1 Dec 2014. The news of their amazing find spread like wildfire and people far off (Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria) asked, "Is the White-eyed Vireo a one day wonder or will it stick around near the site of its discovery to be twitchable?"

"How long a drive is it from my home to Nelson?"

"What's the weather forecast for tomorrow?"

"What excuse shall I use to get off work tomorrow? Who can I say died suddenly without the lie being discovered?"

"This job sucks anyway. I'll just go for the bird and deal with the consequences when I return to work. Nurse, take over please. The rest of this heart transplant is pretty much by the book. What do you mean, you're not capable? You'll never know until you try. I'm out of here. "

Okay, perhaps that last sentiment is a tad exaggerated since I don't know anyone who actually chucked his/her job to go on a twitch, but I do know several people who might as well have, since they were useless at work once they had been burdened with the knowledge that a rare bird was possibly waiting for them just a few hundred kilometres away, and there they werein an unhappy birdless place, having to appear to be productive while images of a rarity fluttered through their heads.

The origins of the twitch are lost in the carbon dioxide build up of time but since twitching is a non-lethal form of hunting, the twitch may have begun with two of our ancient ancestors, Thang and Mung, two young Cro-Magnans who competed in every way possible at the prehistoric time.

Mung: (chest thump) Mung see a big bird you've never seed! (pronouns and past participles hadn't been invented yet)

Thang: That's pure bison poop. Thang seed every bird in the valley!

Mung: It's not in this valley. Mung seed it in the next valley over that way (cardinal directions had not yet been invented). It's big and white with eyes the colour of the sun. Also its eyes are like ours.

Thang: Bloodshot?

Mung: No. Looking forward. In front of face. Not on side of head like bison or your sister. (invents I'm watching you gesture. Funny how long-lived some fads are!)

Thang: (mini-chest thump) Mung show Thang this white bird?

Mung: No, Mung have big date (an actual edible date, growing large in prehistoric times)

Thang: (heavy furrowing of heavy brows) Where Thang find white bird with yellow eyes then?

And Mung gave him directions by pointing vaguely off into the distance and mentioning camps and caves of people Thang had never heard of. Somethings never change. Thang, being male, pretended to understand.

Thus the first twitch may have been Thang's quest for a Snowy Owl, a species that has since inspired thousands of twitches. The point is Thang had to drop everything and go out of his way to find this bird; he had to explore a valley previously unknown to him and it took him the whole weekend to reach the valley, find the bird and walk home to his cave. That's a pretty typical time frame for a mid-sized twitch. A really long twitch might involve one or more airlines, like flying from Kelowna, B.C. to Brownsville, Texas, for a White-throated Robin, normally found in Mexico. Such LD twitches are for rich birders or temporarily crazed ones, like guys doing Big Years, a devastating mental illness that hurts everyone it touches. A short twitch might involve a drive from Vernon to Kelowna for a Pacific Golden-Plover at Robert Lake. But what if someone reports a rare bird in your town and you go and see it. Is that a twitch? Not really. There needs to be some appreciable factor of distance involved.

A White-throated Thrush near McAllen, Texas, a bird that Gary Davidson helped me twitch in March, 2011. 

Time is always of the essence in a twitch. The most extreme twitchers drop everything to begin a twitch. When the call that a rare bird has been located somewhere, some twitchers are considerate of social obligations like appearing at their own wedding, or attending the funeral of a close friend or relative, but all twitchers, some secretly, some obviously, chafe beneath just restrictions.

The twitcher knows that the faster he/she responds, the better his/her chances are of seeing the bird. Although some rare birds surprise everyone by sticking around, most don't. Many are the birds that stayed one day and part of the next early morning, only to depart as the balance of twitchers arrived. "You should have been here five minutes ago!"  are among the saddest words ever spoken to a twitcher who just dipped, which is the lingo for missing the bird. In this category I would place my only Ross's Gull which appeared at a small lake in Washington State's Okanagan Valley a few years ago. If I recall correctly, birders had about two and a half days to see this exotic Arctic gull feeding on a disgusting jellified deer carcass on an obscure beach off a secondary road.

Some out-of-range birds delight everyone by staying in a known location for months. Some waterfowl are especially good at extended stays especially if the stray turns up somewhere in late autumn and overwinters. Such a target species allows the birder to make a long, leisurely twitch, which has a nice oxymoronic sound to it. That's how I added a Falcated Duck (near Eugene, Oregon), a Steller's Eider (Port Townsend, Washington) and lately a Tundra Bean Goose (near Tillamook, Oregon) to my life list.

Have I dipped? Oh, yes, spectacularly. For example, way back in 1987 a White-headed Woodpecker was coming to a feeder on Anarchist Mountain. Everyone who tried for it got it. We were living in Fort St. John at the time. At the beginning of spring break I twitched 1200 kms one way and parked in the wrong driveway for 2 days. Of course, I didn't learn that it was the wrong driveway until many weeks later, which made my little heartbreak over the dip just that much more bitter. The only good thing about that particular twitch which ended up occupying most of spring break was that on the way home I stopped at Haynes Point Provincial Park, Osoyoos, and blundered into the Okanagan's first Swamp Sparrow. Oh, and by the way, my string of bad luck with the White-headed Woodpecker in B.C. continues to this day. I've seen White-heads in Washington, Oregon and California but every time one pops up in B.C. I am there to miss it, even the two birds that appeared semi-regularly for almost two weeks along Camp McKinney Road near Oliver.  But every birder has a nemesis bird.

This post is dedicated to Gary Davidson, my good friend from Nakusp, B.C., who has been on many a twitch with me. He has also been responsible for finding a large number of twitchable birds himself including the White-eyed Vireo (with Paul and Carolee), Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Black-throated Blue Warbler, Cape May Warbler, Lesser Black-backed Gull, and others.

Little Known Warbler of the Northeast

Two years ago the 200^th anniversary of the scientific discovery of the Connecticut Warbler passed, as far as I know, uncelebrated, even unmarked by anyone in the birding community. During the autumn of 1812 one of the fathers of American ornithology, Alexander Wilson, the immigrant sometime-school teacher from Scotland determined to describe all of the birds of his new homeland, the United States, collected a specimen of a large, furtive warbler and named it for the state he had shot it in. Since that day, remarkably little knowledge has been uncovered about the Connecticut Warbler's biology. In spite of an army of birders carrying an array of technically advanced optics and communications devices, despite eBird, HBW Alive, and BNA Online, Oporonis agilis, the "agile autumn bird" (Gruson 1972), remains an obscure, little known forest species. 

We have learned that the Connecticut has a loud, rollicking song, sung in a voice somewhat reminiscent of the voice of an Ovenbird or a waterthrush. The authors of the recently published The Warbler Guide present sonograms of three song variations  and summarise the species’ song as “1 section of 3- or 4- Element Phrases repeated 3 or 4 times (only shared with Common Yellowthroat); irregular, jerky, percussive rhythm… [with a] staccato, emphatic quality.” I like to transcribe the typical song as a fast, loud ringing “chippy chuppy, chippy chuppy, chippy chuppy” which is unlike the song of any other North American warbler.

Philadelphia Vireo - one of the species added to B.C.'s bird list by Cowan and Martin in 1938. Photo by Chris Siddle. 

We have also determined that the Connecticut Warbler is a long distance migrant that crosses the Gulf of Mexico via the West Indies on its way to and from its wintering grounds somewhere in South America. Exactly where its wintering range occurs is poorly known. There's an odd 2000 km gap between known wintering sites in northern South America and wintering sites in Amazonian Brazil. It could be that the birds collected in the northern part of the southern continent were mostly late autumn migrants, and the Connecticut Warbler spends the winter in a region of Amazonia where oddly enough it is the only North American migrant in the neighbourhood. All of the other birds are resident tropical species.  

The Connecticut Warbler has revealed to us only the most basic information about its breeding biology.  Over 70 years passed between the collecting of the first specimen known to science and the discovery of the first nest. In 1883 Ernest Thompson Seton, later to gain fame as a popular writer of animal stories and one of the founders of the America Boy Scouts movement, happened to see a small brown bird flush from a mossy mound in a tamarack swamp near Carberry, Manitoba. Like several other New World Warblers the Connecticut nests on the ground, often in a hummock. Seton's discovery, though pleasing to Seton,  did not open the flood gates of scientific enquiry concerning the Connecticut Warbler. Safe from spying ornithologists in its mosquito-loud northern forests, the Connecticut Warbler remained obscure.  Forty years later in the 1920s 2 or 3 more nests were found, this time near Belvedere, Alberta, but the discoveries didn't clarify a thing. From the discovery of a few more nests over the years to the present, even the most basic information remains to be discovered about this warbler. A single 1961 study conducted by Lawrence Walkinshaw and William Dyer, based on a single nest in Michigan, has remained the source of most information regarding the bird's reproduction but it makes for pretty thin reading. The Birds of North America Online account, which sums up most of what science knows about the species is still full of words like “unknown”, and phrases such as“further study is required”.

Is it little wonder that American birders often “need” Connecticut Warbler on their life lists? The bird migrates very late in spring, often well after almost all other warblers have already started nesting. As Pete Donne writes in Pete Dunne’s Essential Field Guide Companion (2006) “Running from one to two weeks behind the flood of most warblers, Connecticut Warblers arrive in Florida from early to late May and reach breeding grounds in late May to mid-June.” This inconvenient schedule conflicts with the mid-May field trips at places like Point Pelee and other migration spots. Many Americans see or hear their first Connecticut Warblers on special June excursions to northern Minnesota, Michigan or Wisconsin, the only states where the bird breeds within the contiguous United States. With the remaining 90% of its breeding range sprawling in an arc from southwest Quebec northwestwards across Ontario, through the central parts of the Prairies Provinces and northeastern B.C., the Connecticut Warbler still requires birders living across southern Canada to make special excursions into the southern boreal forest to find it. In British Columbia, the majority of birders live around Vancouver and Victoria. For them to add the Connecticut Warbler to their provincial lists, they must travel to terra incognito, the Peace River area.

The Peace River country was the last area of the province to be settled by white people. (Though the first fur trading posts within B.C. were established, albeit briefly, along the banks of the Peace  between the Alberta border and Hudson Hope.) Real settlement, mostly agricultural, occurred from the 1930s onwards. The area was so poorly known biologically that the first detailed survey of its birdlife didn’t take place until 1938, decades after the basic avifauna of southwestern British Columbia was known. And it was in the forests of the Peace, of course, that the Connecticut Warbler had been living since at least the last ice age, a fact that wasn’t even hinted at until almost mid century.

In May 1938 the B.C. Provincial Museum sent young biologist Ian McTaggert Cowan and an assistant, Patrick W. Martin, by truck from Victoria to Tupper Creek at the south end of Swan Lake south of Dawson Creek. Their purpose was to survey the vertebrate fauna of the Peace River Block, as it was then known. They had very little to go on: even though fur trading forts had first appeared along the river as early as 1797 little information had been gathered on the non-game creatures.

Cowan and Martin set up camp on the west side of Swan Lake on 5 May 1938. They collected and made observations from this camp until 8 June when they moved about 100 kms northwards to the south end of Charlie Lake near Fort St. John. On 19 June they returned to Tupper Creek where they remained until 30 June when they left for Victoria.

Cowan and Martin’s surveys of the Peace River area, published in the provincial museum’s first occasional paper (1939), added several species of birds previously unrecorded to the British Columbian list including Franklin’s Gull, Philadelphia Vireo, Black-and-white Warbler, Bay-breasted Warbler, Cape May Warbler, Ovenbird, Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Common Grackle, Le Conte’s Sparrow, Nelson’s Sparrow, all now known to occur regularly in the Peace River area. They were also the first biologists to discover the Connecticut Warbler within the political boundaries of the province.

An extreme enlargement of a male Connecticut Warbler  southwest of Dawson Creek, June, 2014. Photo by Chris Siddle. 

On 22 June 1938 Cowan and Patrick shot the first Connecticut Warbler ever recorded in British Columbia. The bird was a male singing every 50-55 seconds in a grove of young aspens “below an open stand of large poplars, aspens and white spruce.” (p.50) On 24 June about half a mile away another male was singing in climax aspens. A gunshot, presumably from a shotgun discharged by either Cowan or Martin, caused an additional four other Connecticuts to sing. The collectors bagged two of the five birds.

For many years this episode was almost all that was known about the Connecticut Warbler within British Columbia. Sight records slowly accumulated from other locations in the northeastern including Fort Nelson. During my fourteen years investigating the birds of the Fort St. John area I saw or heard the species only a few times. It wasn’t until Mark Phinney began systematic forest surveys around Dawson Creek that the Connecticut Warbler was found to be a local summer resident in aspen forests in the South Peace. Finding a nest, however, was another matter altogether.

To give my readers an idea how hard it can be to find a nest, cunningly hidden on the forest floor, I refer them to a fascinating yet not well known book written by the American bird photographer William Burt. From 1984 to 2000 Burt pursued little known birds for his book, Rare and Elusive Birds of North America. The book contains entertaining narratives of his searches as well as sharply focused photographs of birds within their nesting habitats taken with a large format camera. In search of a Connecticut Warbler’s nest, Burt searched a Tamarack bog near Waskish in north-central Minnesota for two summers. The habitat was open park-like woods “full of mounded moss and ferns and scanty grass and horsetails.” At least six males were singing from an area about sixty to eighty acres in size.

In spite of the relative abundance of singing males, Burt found no nests that first year.  In fact, other than the robust singing of the males, he saw no evidence that the birds were reproducing. Only twice in weeks of watching did he see warblers carrying food only to almost immediately lose track of them.

His second summer began on 10 June with the same woodland “ringing with the songs of males”, but this time he decided that a more systematic search was needed so he laid out ropes on the moss to mark grids. He painstakingly searched the resulting corridors mossy mound by mound. Still he was unsuccessful. Finally he began concentrating on birds calling a sharp peet or whik, alarm notes. One morning, brushing away spider webs, ducking under fallen timber, braving the loud clouds of mosquitoes, as he was moving toward another calling bird, a small bird burst from the mossy mound near his feet. He looked down, parted a few fronds of fern and saw a “grass-lined cup with three brown-specked whitish eggs.” He had his nest.

Two days later there was a full clutch of five eggs. Not wanting to risk disturbing the female, he made only short daily checks to ascertain the nest’s progress. He was waiting for the chicks to be 4 days old before moving a blind near the nest. On 4 July 4 of the 5 eggs had hatched. On 7 July there were five chicks. On 9 July he brought his photographic equipment with him only to find that the nest was empty. Something – a weasel, a jay, a predator – had taken the young. Reflecting upon his efforts to find a nest, William Burt states, “I don’t think there’s any bird in North America, including the black rail, whose nest I’d less want to ever have to find again.”

On 19 June, 2000 Mark Phinney of Dawson Creek found the first Connecticut Warbler nests in British Columbia. That day the nest contained 5 eggs. On 8 July it held 5 well-feathered chicks which left the nest by 10 July. The nest, like most of Phinney’s sightings of the warblers, was southwest of Dawson Creek in pole-aged aspen (25-40 years old) with a general southerly aspect. This habitat is obviously quite different than the Tamarack swamps described by Seton and Burt and other observers in Manitoba and Wisconsin. Nor does it particularly match the older mixed forest of aspen and White Spruce where I had found the birds in the Fort St. John area. Clearly the Connecticut Warbler occurs in more than one type of forest; however, that doesn’t mean that the bird is particularly adaptable. It isn’t. Across its breeding range the species seems to be fussy in its habitat choice and in general avoids areas where the forest is grazed by cattle or broken up by clearings, seismic lines, transmission corridors and other human developments. 

If you’re interested in more information about the Connecticut Warbler here are the references I used while writing this piece:

Bent, A.C. 1953. Life Histories of North American Wood Warblers. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Burt, William. 2001. Rare and Elusive Birds of North America. Universe Publishing, 300 Park Ave. South, New York, 10010.

Campbell, R.Wayne, Neil K. Dawe, Ian McTaggart-Cowan, John M. Cooper, Gary W. Kaiser, Andrew C. Stewart, and Michael C.E. McNall. 2001. The Birds of British Columbia, Volume 4, Passerines: Wood-Warblers through Old World Sparrows. University of British Columbia Press, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z2.

Cooper, John M. and Suzanne Beauchesne. 2004. “Connecticut Warbler” pp. 1-10, in Accounts and Measuring for Managing Identified Wildlife – Accounts V. 2004. “www.env.gov.bc.ca/wld/frpa/iwms/documents.Birds/b.connecticutwarbler.pdf”

Cowan, Ian McTaggart. 1939. The vertebrate fauna of the Peace River district of British Columbia. British Columbia Provincial Museum Occasional Paper No. 1, Victoria.

Dunne, Pete. 2006. Pete Dunne’s Essential Field Guide Companion. Houghton Mifflin C., 215 Park Ave. South, New York, 10003.

Gruson, Edward S. 1972. Words for Birds: A Lexicon of North American Birds with Biographical Notes. Quadrangle Books, NY Times, 330 Madison Ave., New York 10017. 

Pitocchelli, J., J. Bouchie, and D. Jones. 1997. Connecticut Warbler (Oporornis agilis). In The Birds of North America, No. 320 (A. Poole and F. Gill, eds.). The Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, PA, and The American Ornithologists' Union, Washington, D.C. 

_____, _____, and ____. 2012. Connecticut Warbler. (revised. The Birds of North America Online. 

Stephenson, Tom and Scott Whittle. 2013. The Warbler Guide. Princeton University Press, 41 William St., Princeton, New Jersey 08540.Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Taylor, Peter (editor-in-chief). 2003. The Birds of Manitoba. Manitoba Naturalists Society,

Birds and Berries

Late summer is enlivened for me by the ripening of wild fruit and the appearance of the fruit-eating bird in our local gullies and thickets. These berry thickets, found throughout the Valley, provide birders with exciting birding opportunities during otherwise quiet times.

The classic berry thicket in the North Okanagan grows around almost any drainage, pond or lake, or often in a narrow dry grassland swale that may once have channelled glacial water thousands of years ago when the surrounding ice sheets were melting. Now the folds of the drainage contain bushes and short trees that  provide birds and animals with an annual summer feast. Drawn by the bounty, species like Swainson’s Thrushes and Western Tanagers, normally hidden in upland forests, become temporarily abundant and often more visible than usual as they strip the berries from the bushes.

Choke Cherries are favoured by many species of birds and mammals including Black Bears, Red Squirrels, Ruffed Grouse, Northern Flickers, American Robins, and Cedar Waxwings. The seeds are regurgitated or excreted and thus are spread far and wide by wildlife. Photo by C. Siddle. 

The major fruit and berry species include Saskatoon, hawthorn sp. , Chokecherry, Pin Cherry, Red-osier Dogwood, and Blue Elderberry. Trees attractive to birds and found growing around the berry thickets include Douglas Maple, Trembling Aspen and Douglas-fir.

Birds drawn to such places include Ring-necked Pheasants, California Quail, Ruffed Grouse, Mourning Doves, Calliope Hummingbirds, Rufous Hummingbirds, Black-chinned Hummingbirds, Red-naped Sapsuckers, Northern Flickers, and Pileated Woodpeckers (attracted, in particular to the fruit of Virginia Creeper). Taking advantage of open perches and easy access to flies and to flying insects are Western Wood-Pewees, Willow Flycatchers (open, marshy habitat with red-osier dogwood thickets), and various empidonax species. Most prominent of the flycatchers are Eastern Kingbirds initially in family groups and later in autumn flocks fond of the white Red-osier Dogwood berry. Occasionally even a silent Olive-sided Flycatcher or two, down from the mountain forests, may appear on its way south.

Hawthorns (Crataegus sp.) are principally eaten by Cedar Waxwings. Photo by C. Siddle.

Vireos are typical berry thicket birds and are easily attracted by pishing. There is something in a vireo’s personality that will not let the bird pass by a good pish without investigating. Cassin’s Vireos, whether in molty plumage early in August or in feather perfect plumage later in the month, can be counted on to appear, while it’s a rare Red-osier Dogwood thicket that doesn’t hold at least one Warbling Vireo. Red-eyed Vireos are more conspicuous in mid and late August than at any other time as they fuss and scold their way south from thicket to thicket.

Insectivorous most of the year, Warbling Vireos become serious consumers of Red-osier Dogwood berries in summer and fall. Here an immature with quite yellowish underparts (common) is responding to my pishing. Photo by C. Siddle. 

An interesting thing about Warbling Vireos is that for 10 months of the year the species is highly insectivorous. Only in August and September does the Warbling Vireo consume fruit.

House Wrens are common in family groups, the young birds still showing fleshy gapes at the corners of their beaks, while Ruby-crowned Kinglets don’t usually begin to appear in numbers in the valley bottom until September.

Swainson’s Thrushes, along with American Robins and Cedar Waxwings, are the poster birds for these berry-bird aggregations. Coming out of the forest proper beginning in late July to feed in the thickets of the gulleys and draws, Swainson's Thrushes remain shy, only occasionally appearing at the edge of vegetation but commonly calling softly "whit" notes that reveal their presence. From mid September onwards Hermit Thrushes, that spent the spring and summer nesting in the boreal forest zone from about 1500 m and higher above sea level, replace Swainson’s in the more heavily wooded thickets though never in such large numbers.

A Red-eyed Vireo responds to my pishing. Photo by C. Siddle.

Swainson’s Thrushes call a diagnostic soft "heep" as they cross the night sky during nocturnal migration. It was one of my favourite sounds when I was a teenager in Mission, B.C. running home from a friend's house to make my schoolnight curfew. Overhead invisible in the inky sky Swainson’s Thrushes also hurried on their way. Nowadays it’s a rare night that things are quiet enough for my old ears to hear Swainson’s Thrushes still calling their muffled "heeps". Mostly the road past our house is a longitudinal din, what with rednecks tromping the accelarators of their jacked-up pick-ups, and plump boomers seeking the thrill of the open road in their loud fatly flatulent Harrys.

Seeming to become more uncommon each passing year, the Evening Grosbeak is usually seen gobbling sunflower seeds  at a feeder. On Silver Star Mtn. a female-type makes an absolute mess of more natural food, Saskatoon berries. Late July 2017. 

Just as Warbling Vireos are inseparable from Red-osier Dogwoods, so Gray Catbirds love their Blue Elderberry bushes. But catbirds in late summer are apt to pop up almost anywhere even occasionally in suburban yards.

Gray Catbirds and Blue Elderberries (Sambucus racemosa).  Photo by C. Siddle. 

European Starlings and Cedar Waxwings are among the most conspicuous of the berry eaters, perching atop snags where they can command a view of their surroundings. The sharp notes of a starling are often the first warning that a predator has been spotted, for the berry aggregations attract not just songbirds, but predators like Merlins, Sharp-shinned Hawks and Cooper’s Hawks.

By late August Orange-crowned and Yellow-rumped warblers will be seen passing through the gulleys among the fruit eaters. Occasionally a skulking MacGillivray’s Warbler will be among them.  Around the drowned sticks and thickets aurrounding waterbodies a Northern Waterthrush, a bird that used to regularly breed in riparian tangles along the Valley bottom but which now is mostly restricted as  nesting bird to high elevation ponds, may give its sharp, loud call note as it constantly dips its hind end and climbs amid the stalks above the water. Wilson’s Warblers are also high elevation nesters but pass through the Valley at almost all levels on their way south, bright yellow birds among the many shades of green shadows around the thickets.

A drab autumn-plumaged Western Tanager in a Saskatoon bush. Photo by C. Siddle.

The Western Tanager is a common fruit-eater, coming out of the forest like the Swainson's Thrush to reap the benefit of the berry bushes. Don't expect to see the yellow and black males (wearing a small red cap in the spring) however; most late summer and autumn Westerns are studies in green and yellow.

Spotted Towhee in molt from its brown sparrow-like plumage (seen on its head in this case) and its more adult like black, white and rufous. Photo by C. Siddle. 

Towhees stay in the same brushy habitat throughout their spring-to-fall residency in the Okanagan so it's not surprising that they are seen in the fruit thickets. Juvenal Spotted Towhees, initially streaked like overgrown Song Sparrows, molt into new sets of adult-like feathers while juvenal Chipping Sparrows, among the most common of mid-August sparrows, shows streaked underparts until they molt into the plain unstreaked gray chests and bellies of their immature plumage.

Cassie's Finch gobbling Saskatoon berries halfway up Silver Stare Mtn, .late July 2017. Note how the squashed fruit obscures the beak, possibly even temporarily staining it. 

One or two Black-headed Grosbeaks can usually be found among the hawthorns, while Lazuli Buntings like elderberries and are most commonly seen in mid-to-late August in drab female-like plumage. House Finches are common and conspicuous atop thickets but Cassin’s Finches are much more local and can look awfully scruffy and confusing to birders at this time of year. Finally, completing the suite of birds of the gulleys and thickets of late summer, are American Goldfinches, always present where there is water for them to drink and bath in.

Red-osier Dogwood (Cornus stolonifera) with its small white berries. Note the red stems which separate this species from the common Snowberry Bush which has similar looking fruit. Osier is an Old French word for willows used in basketwork. Photo by C. Siddle. 

Some thicket sites where birding can be rewarding:

NORTH OKANAGAN

Gray Canal Trail – Vernon

Gray Canal Road

Glenhayes Rd – Gray Canal section

Goose Lake – Vernon

Kalamalka Prov. Park – thickets around Cosens Bay

Southern sections of Otter Lake Rd – toward Armstrong

Desert Cove Estates – along Deep Creek

Birding late summer thickets may introduce the observer to identification challenges due to  molt, unfamiliar immature plumages, and excessive feather wear. Believe it or not, this is a Cassin's Finch. Photo by C. Siddle

LAKE COUNTRY

Beaver Lake Road – access to best habitat limited

Winfield Creek Preserve

CENTRAL OKANAGAN

Chichester Wetland Park

Railway tracks behind Scandia – Kelowna

Mission Creek Regional Park – Sutherland Hills division

Kalamoir Regional Park

House Wren fledgling. Photo by C. Siddle.

SOUTH OKANAGAN

White Lake Road between St. Andrews and the Observatory

Sawmill Lake

McIntyre Road, Vaseux Lake

The interactions of birds and berries is an intricate subject with many features that I have not touched upon in my superficial introduction. If you are interested in exploring the topic, try Birds and Berries: A Study of an Ecological Interaction by Barbara and David Snow. 1988.  T&A.D. Poyser, Town Head House, Carlton, Waterhouses, Staffordshire, England.

Juvenal Lazuli Bunting. Photo by C. Siddle.

Birding with Special Ed

Every July for the past three years we have babysat our friend's dog that I will call Special Ed, to give you a hint of the joys and the troubles we have consequently experienced. Ed doesn't travel well so when our friend, Donna, heads south for a well-earned break from school teaching, she takes her older dog, Toby, as a well behaved travel companion but delivers Ed to us. Our house becomes Ed's summer camp. Along with Ed comes cans and bags of his special diet, though if Ed had his way, he would eat almost anything including, we've discovered, grapes, lettuce, apricots, carpet fluff, all carbohydrates, the odd coffee bean, jujubes, dental floss, and Q-tips.

Donna also delivers his toys - one small plushy flying saucer that squeaks when you press it, and a tug toy my wife braided out of soft but tough felt. Rarely does he play with his toys. Sometimes during a long nap he might rest his outsized muzzle on the tug toy as a sort of nose pillow; otherwise he ignores the items. Unless I happen to pick one up to visually suggest a game of fetch. That's when Special Ed exhibits his predominant personality trait - insecurity. When there's something Ed can't figure out, like having a toy tossed to him, or some other event that happening quickly or loudly or both, Ed reacts by barking nervously. Tail and head down, he scuttles out of the room as if I had yelled at him and raised my hand in anger. Weird.

In many other situations, Ed knows pretty much what is going on. Like all dogs, the Shetland Sheepdog, even a slightly defective one like Ed, knows that good things especially food come from human beings. And so Ed studies me as I enter the kitchen and approach the cupboards.  Ed may be a tad ackwards-bay in certain areas but in the subject of the location of food he's top dog.  It took him one short visit to the kitchen to learn that the dog treats are stored in the lower right cupboard. Ed also knows that if I am going to prepare a meal on the counter, the odd tidbit might fall onto the floor. And so he waits, patiently, for gravity to bring him a chance gift. As far as food goes, Ed is a perfectly normal dog.

What Ed abhores above all else is surprise. He understands that humans eat, cook, give him a treat, talk, sit, walk, sleep, and eat but he's always surprised, shocked even, when one of us coughs or sneezes. A cough comes from nowhere and he just doesn't understand it. He leaps up and barks loudly. A sudden sneeze sends Ed into a frenzy. Tail up, ears up, he involuntarliy dances, his barks overlapping into a roar. Other surprises that Ed should be prepared for but never is are the arrival of visitors, the shutting of doors, thunder, the turning on of any noisy appliance, and the forementioned tossing of toys. Ed also barks at things undetectable to human beings, sounds we cannot hear, smells we cannot detect and perhaps vapours caught in the passages of his narrow skull.

No matter how frustrated I become by Ed's sudden loud outraged outbursts, which prompt similar outbursts from me, I still like him a lot and find him a good companion. As a Shetland Sheepdog, though hardly a visual paragon of the breed - his narrow head is too big, his legs are too short, his body is too lumpy - he does like to herd Sonja and I into close proximity to him and he happily watches over us, which I guess is the other important part of shepherding. If Sonja goes to the basement and I go to the second floor Ed will sit miserably on the main floor and howl to bring us back to him.

Birding with Ed is slightly challenging. It's not that he chases, or even notices, birds. Honestly I can't remember a single instance of Ed reacting to a bird. It's as if he doesn't see them. In this regard he is much like your non-birding human friends, except Ed never complains that the damned birds wake him up spring mornings and that something should be done about all the "noise" they make.

Birding with Ed means walking with Ed, because he cannot abide riding in vehicles. There's no arguing about where he's going to sit, fussing with seatbelts, complaining about the funny smell in your car, or nattering about the birds we didn't see the ways your friends will so often do. So once again, Ed comes out as a better companion, mostly silent and mostly content to be on the end of a leash.

Ed does not tug on his leash to go faster. Unlike some human friends he is content to stay within a small radius with me as the centre of his attention, mostly, except when he finds something that smells intriguing on the ground. I wish I could say the same about my human birding companions. They wander, they chatter, and at times they apparently don't hear a thing I have said. OK, so they don't spend much time sniffing at dead things on the ground, but in comparison with Ed that's about all human birding companions have over my canine friend.

I know that some birders keep life lists for their dogs. I don't keep one for Ed for reasons I have already stated. I have a fantasy that one day some largish loud bird, say a Ring-necked Pheasant or a California Quail will bellow in Ed's ears and he will acknowledge that yes something disturbed him, but I know he will never ask me if we can get a better look at the bird, or ask me when are we going to see a Chukar. Again, Ed comes out on top of the dog versus human comparison.

But let me turn the idea of a list for Ed on its head. Let's face it, many of our lists are just a little frivolous. I know birders who keep lists of wild birds seen on TV, birds seen from the office, birds the lister has photographed, and birds copulating. I could start a list of Birds I have Seen but Ed has Ignored while on walks with him. Let's see ... he failed to acknowledge the Violet-green Swallows and White-throated Swifts that flew just above the rim of Cougar Canyon between Coldstream and Oyama a couple of springs ago. He was not impressed by the Canyon Wren that paid us a visit during that same walk or the several Townsend's Solitares that sang around the snags on the trail into the canyon. Once, atop Silver Star Mountain, his dog buddy, Toby, was startled when we flushed some young Dusky Grouse just a few metres in front of us but good old oblivious Ed was looking the other way and missed these chicken-sized birds entirely as they rocketed out of the fireweed.  Ed has missed the everyday and the rare. He has walked by the late summer flutter of goldfinches in the thistles and unknowingly passed into the shadow of a soaring Golden Eagle riding out a sudden spring storm. It would be fun to dig back into my fieldbooks and see what I could come up with for such a list.  Meanwhile, Ed, spending the final day of his summer vacation with us, is standing in the hallways barking at nothing in particular. Yes, I'll miss Ed when he goes home, but there's always next summer.

Ed at Cougar Canyon 2013. Photo by the author.

Maybe next summer he will be quieter. Maybe next summer he will find peace in the contemplation of nature. Why just this morning while Sonja and I were having coffee on the patio, I saw Ed notice, WITH INTEREST, a furry beige caterpillar rippling by on the cement. Hey, it wasn't a bird but it was a start.

Secrets of the Cuckoo

The discovery of a Black-billed Cuckoo calling from a brushy gully along Beaver Lake Road east of Winfield in early July, 2014 by Mike Force and Doug Kragh caused a minor gold rush of birders hoping to add the bird to their lists. But I don't want to tell the usual story of how birders flocked from far and near for a rarity; instead, I want to give some background information about the Black-billed Cuckoo as a species, for, as I quickly found out while browsing through a couple of sources of information, Coccyzus erythropthalmus is a fascinating bird.

The Beaver Lake Road Black-billed Cuckoo photographed by Mike Force, 4 July 2014. 

Here, in no particular order are some of my favourite facts. Unless I have noted otherwise, I found these in the 2001 Birds of North America account (No. 587) compiled by Canadian ornithologist, Janice M. Hughes.

1. Probably everyone knows that both Black-billed and Yellow-billed Cuckoos eat insects, and that the Black-bill, in particular, eats caterpillars, including spiny ones. But did you know that once such spines accumulate heavily in the Black-bill's stomach, it sheds its stomach lining, coughing it up as a pellet?

2. Again just about everyone knows that nestlings of most species can be divided roughly into precocial or altricial types. Precocial chicks hatch downy and ready to go. California Quail chicks are a good example. So are Killdeer chicks. In a few hours the precocial young of both species are running around, following one or both of their parents, learning what's good to eat and what's not.On the other hand altricial young are born naked and helpless. The chicks of swallows, sparrows, and American Robins are good examples. Usually their eyes are sealed shot for the first day or two, they have to develop strength to raise their heads and they are restricted to living in a nest, instead of running around like those baby Killdeers we find so adorable along the shores of our favourite wetlands.

Black-billed Cuckoos have altricial chicks, and since adult cuckoos are so slow moving and slightly reptilian, I had assumed that their chicks would take forever to develop. Not so. In fact, Black-billed Cuckoo chicks are among the most rapidly developing chicks in the altricial world. After an eleven day incubation period (1-3 days shorter than many more highly evolved passerines), the cuckoo chick can raise himself up, using his feet and his bill. By day 6 stiff looking feathers are beginning to burst out of sheaths. On day 7 the chick becomes fully feathered, the sheaths having completely burst open. Your average American Robin is still pretty obviously a glum looking, tailless helpless nestling at the same age. Also on day 7 the cuckoo chicks leave the nest to clamber about the shrubbery. They can hop as well as climb.

3. The Black-billed Cuckoo chick has a couple of interesting defence techniques. When another creature appears to threaten the chick it will assume a motionless sky-pointing posture, like an American Bittern. It may also bark and "voids brown, sticky excretion from cloaca, if handled." Charming. If all else fails, and the chick is handled, it will play dead.

The same bird. Photo by Mike Force, 4 July 2014. 

4. Parent Black-billed Cuckoos will fly at nest disturbers especially if they hear their young barking. They open their bills, spread their tails, droop their wings and call loudly while hopping around at the ends of branches.

5. The Black-billed Cuckoo is distantly related to the much more famous European Cuckoo which is an A-lister among the world's parasitic birds. The European Cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests of a wide variety of other birds. Once the young E. Cuckoo hatches and feels an egg pressing against its back it has the automatic response to push whatever out of the nest. Thus the cuckoo kicks out its potential step brothers and step sisters and becomes the only nestling that its foster parents have to feed. The Black-billed Cuckoo generally raises its own young, but sometimes a Black-billed Cuckoo will lay and egg or two in another Black-billed Cuckoo's nest (intraspecific brood parasite). Some individuals may also lay eggs in at least 11 other bird's nests (interspecific brood parasite) including the nests of Yellow-billed Cuckoos, Chipping Sparrow, American Robin, Gray Catbird, and Wood Thrush.

6. Black-billed and Yellow-billed cuckoos are nocturnal migrants, a fact sadly revealed by the birds' fatal collisions with television towers in the United States and Canada. Black-bills winter in northern and western South America.

For more information about the Black-billed Cuckoo and 715 other species of birds that breed in North America check The Birds of North America Online http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/