Fall Birding on St. Paul Island, Alaska - Part Two.

Fall Birding on Alaska's St. Paul Island - Part Two. 

The story to date: Eighteen birders arrived on St. Paul Island, the principal island of Alaska's Pribilofs, on 18 September. The next day they began their first full day of St. Paul birding under the leadership of Gavin Bieber, Scott Schuette, and Doug Gochfeld. An account of the first day continues in Part Two.

Small groups of Black-legged Kittiwakes buoyantly rode the wind over the breakers. Among them occasionally would be darker mantled birds, which when seen up close would have shorter bills and puffier-appearing heads. These were Red-legged Kittiwakes, endemic to only four groups of islands in the south Bering Sea. Seventy-five percent of the world’s population breeds on St. George Island.

Doug Hochfeld showed me a short series of lodgements for my feet on the cliff so that I could point my lens around the corner to get shots of the cliff-nesting Northern Fulmars which are common around the island in light, dark and intermediate morphs. Other species that nest on similar ledges include Common and Thick-billed murres and of course the smaller alcids, like Least, Crested, and Parakeet auklets, for which the Pribilofs are famous. The auklets had finished breeding and had left the island. Occasionally during seawatches the guides would proclaim a distant dot a Parakeet or Least auklet but for birders who want good long looks at these species spring and summer, not fall, were the times to visit the island.

Horned Puffins were still visible, however, and still in high plumage. A strong flier,  one would pass the point flying at medium height in preparation to landing on one of the cliff tops before bettling into its burrow where late season young still waited. Among the Horned Puffins were a few Tufted Puffins as well.

Horned Puffin at Southwest Point, 19 September, 2013. Ph - Chris Sidle

The last cliff dweller at the point was the Red-faced Cormorant, which like the Red-legged Kittiwake, is restricted largely to the Bering Sea. This is a like a bigger version of the Pelagic Cormorant which also occurs around St. Paul. The Red-faced has a slightly longer bill, red facial coloration, and when it flies a distinctive pop-bellied look.

At shallow Antone Lake Gavin showed us our only Red-necked Stint of the trip. The tour was a little late in the season for Old World shorebirds, most of which would have occurred in mid to late August. This stint had been on the island about four days and we were lucky to get it so late in the season. A few days later we were lucky again when two Gray-tailed Tattlers appeared at the Salt Lagoon.

The commonest shorebird of St. Paul Island is the Rock Sandpiper. It’s another bird that has a giant subspecies found only on the Pribilofs. Calidris ptilocnemis is divided by taxonomists into four subspecies. The nominate race is the big pale one, C.p. ptilocnemis. The other two races that occur in North America are smaller and darker: C. p. tschuktschorum and C.p. couesi. Twice we spotted smaller, darker birds among the big pale ptilocnemis birds.

Rock Sandpiper of the Pribilof race - larger and paler than the other races of this species. Photo - Chris Siddle

Near the hotel/airport was a pond named Weather Bureau Lake. When we checked it after lunch we were lucky. The first Emperor Goose of the season was resting on its shore. Nearby was an Aleutian Cackling Goose (Latin leucoparia), an individual which had been resident during the summer. The three waterfowl that breed on St. Paul were present in numbers: Green-winged Teal (in female type plumage so we couldn’t tell if a Eurasian type was present or not), Northern Pintails, and Long-tailed Ducks. On the salt water Harlequin Ducks are present year-round but do not breed.

Over one hundred Red Phalaropes spun and pecked the water’s surface. Among them were a few Red-necked Phalaropes as well. With individuals of both species wearing juvenile plumage it was surprisingly difficult at times to separate the species in spite of the larger size of the Reds.

Sturdy Red Phalarope appeared in numbers on several of the island's ponds. Ph - C. Siddle. 

Bathing in Weather Bureau Lake were about 100 Black-legged Kittiwakes. With them were two adult Red-legged Kittiwakes. It was here that we got our best look at the differences between the two small gull species. The shorter bill and puffier looking head of the Red-legged Kittiwake was almost as good a field mark as it mantle which was a full shade or two darker than the mantle of its close relative.

Polovina Hill sat low and green in the distance. On the south side of the hill were two pits, a small vegetated one and a much larger recent excavation. Such pits result from road crews excavating volcanic rock that can be crushed and used as material to cover roads with. Any such pit, given the right wind direction, can become shelter for smaller birds in general and accidental and casual wind-blown passerines in particular, so, like putchkie patches, guides always check their favourite pits especially in favourable windy weather.

We had no sooner approached the smaller of the two pits when sharp-eyed Gavin saw movement in the putchkie silohetted across the slope above the pit. As he yelled, “Here’s something good!” it was everyone for themselves as we scrambled from the bus. I make the process of exiting the bus sound like a swift one, but it wasn’t. Eighteen birders automatically reached for their binoculars, the straps of which might or might not become entangled in tripods attached to scopes that snag a camera strap on the way across the bench seat. Coats and  gloves are trampled, hats are hastily re-adjusted on tossled heads before with a final “ummmph” the birder launches him or herself from the bus’s only useable exit. I imagined we looked like the most disorganized string of parachutist tumbling from a plane.

At well over 100 m Gavin used his superpowered eyesight, or so it seemed to me, to identify the bird as our first genuine Asian stray. “Grey-streaked Flycatcher,” he said.

Grey-streaked Flycatcher? I thought that I knew my strays, at least in the field guides, but this was a new name to me. It turns out that it used to be named the Grey-spotted or Spot-breasted Flycatcher, but its new English name suits it better since spots do not seem to be involved at all. It’s an Old World Flycatcher of the Muscicapidae family. It breeds in northeast China and southeast Russia including Kamchatka, and winters in Taiwan, the Philippines, North Borneo, Sulawesi, Moluccas, and west New Guinea. Over the years a handful of records have accumulated from the Alaskan islands.

According to The Handbook of the Birds of the World, the Grey-streaked Flycatcher is “confiding”. Yes, maybe, but if a score of birders come at it from out of nowhere, it may have a tendency to fly away. That’s what our bird did, instantly. Fewer than half of our number saw the bird well enough to count it. I wasn’t one of them.

Then the little bird flew back, staying once again along the upper lip of the cut in the mountain. And then it took off again. I stuck with Gavin who suggested that some of us walk with him up the road to see if we could encourage the bird to return to its first sheltered nook.

The bird did return, just not when I was anywhere near the scope in which everyone else got a satisfying albeit brief look. Damn. I had to take consolation in watching a Pacific Golden-Plover zoom overhead as we explored the other, larger pit.

Pumphouse Lake and the little twins, Cup Lake and Saucer Lake, were our last stops before supper. Here most of us got fairly good looks at a juvenile Sharp-tailed Sandpiper, the first of many we were to see over the next few days. The guides organized us to tramp around Pumphouse Lake where there was a good chance of flushing a Common Snipe, the Old World species which was “left behind” when the American Ornithologists Union split out Wilson’s Snipe. Common Snipe occur was very uncommon migrants on St. Paul. The species has three field marks that can separate it from Wilson’s Snipe: a slightly differently pitched “ski-ape” flight note, a broader white trailing edge to its secondaries, and a paler white-striped underwing. These marks we noted when we twice flushed a Common Snipe from the sedges around the lake.

Sharp-tailed Sandpipers were fairly frequent migrants that often appeared on the island's roadsides. Ph - C. Siddle

Other birds in the area included four Green-winged Teal, a few Black-legged Kittiwakes, a score of Glaucous-winged Gulls and about 10 Northern Pintails. From out of nowhere one Red-throated Pipit chased a second one right in front of Doug who was leading the way back to the bus. Red-throats caused barely a flutter among the guides who regard it as an uncommon but regular fall migrant. As for the rest of us, at least some wished we had seen the birds better, but that’s always the way, isn’t it?

Cheerful and tireless, Doug Gochfeld tramped endless miles of the island in search of birds. Ph - C. Siddle

Earlier Gavin had explained how the long very narrow arm of land which stretched to Northeast Point, which resembled a clenched fist on the end of the long arm, had been within the history of human occupation on St. Paul a separate island but had become joined with sand dunes and the largest wetland on the island, Big Lake. This arm was known to the early Russian and the Aleutian workers as Novastoshnah, “the new growth” as Fisher explains in Wild America, and ended at what was then one of the largest fur seal colonies on the island, challenged only by the Reef colony. Novastoshnah once was home to 100,000 fur seals, possibly the biggest concentration of large wild mammals visible from one place (Hutchinson Hill) on the planet.

Lapland Longspur - one of three common passerines on St. Paul. Ph - C. Siddle

After supper we bumped and clattered our way over the dune road past Big Lake where thousands of kittiwakes loafed on a long narrow sandbar. A single modest wooden house, now empty but available as accommodation for any members of the St. Paul tribe, sat atop a low sandy hill. This was Webster House atop Webster Hill. And in the backyard was small circular Webster Lake, inhabited by a couple of hundred Red Phalaropes, and the usual three species of ducks. North of that was lowland covered by putchkie and finally Hutchinson Hill and the Novastoshnah rookery, as seal colonies are locally called.

The seal colony stretched from the beach to the base of the hill. Some fur seals climbed Hutchinson Hill for reasons best known to fur seals and were curious about the humans who were climbing the hill from the landward side. Once again Scott cautioned us to never approach a fur seal, not only because of the $10,000.00 fine for encroaching upon a federally endangered species, but also because fur seals bite.

We could see below us the remains of an elevated broadwalk strung across the middle of the colony. Long gaps between sections indicated that the boardwalk hadn’t been used in many years. On those boards seal researchers would use long poles with hooks to retrieve dead pups for necropsies to determine how and why they had died. The nightmare of many a seal scientist was to slip off the boardwalk and plunge into the colony to be savaged by territorial bulls and upset cows. I don’t know if such a thing ever happened but I know people did worry about such an accident.

Part of the old boardwalk over the formerly huge fur seal colony at Northeast Point. Ph - C. Siddle

The colony now held a few hundred seals, not crowds of thousands. The big bulls, the beachmasters, had returned to the ocean in August and life on the beach was as peaceful for the young males, females, and the pups as their boisterous social nature and the threat of seal-eating orcas just off the beach would allow. The bleats, belches and barks of the seals still rode the sea wind making the colony sound like sheep suffered from an extreme form of indigestion.

The guides had led us to a notch in the hill lined with vegetation. In the shelter of its steep walls a Brambling, a Red-breasted Nuthatch, a Red Fox Sparrow, and several Lapland Longspurs foraged. The Brambling, a female with a very bright white rump and lower back, was an uncommon migrant, as was the “Red” subspecies of Fox Sparrrow, the Sooty group of Fox Sparrows being much more usual, but the little Red-breasted Nuthatch was a prize, one of very few sightings on the Pribilofs. The presence of the Fox Sparrow and the nuthatch underlined the fact that vagrant birds were just as likely to be blown onto St. Paul from the east (North America) as from the west (Asia). It all depended upon wind direction, of course.

At Webster Lake Scott and Doug were leading files of birders through the sedges, Gavin was scouting an area of putchkie by himself, and the rest of us were quietly standing by some wooded pallets that had been flung upon a mound next to the house where the guides had thrown around some bird seed a few days before. The seeds were still attracting rosy finches, longspurs and Snow Buntings. Some of us were watching the volunteers tramping around the lake, especially since they were close to the spot where Scott and others had discovered a Middendorf’s Grasshopper-warbler on 16 September, a classic and ultra-rare vagrant from Asia. Others of us were squinting down viewfinders photographing Snow Buntings. Suddenly all hell broke loose with Gavin rounding the corner of the house yelling, “Swift. Swift. Pacific Swift!” and those of us who were lucky caught sight of a large swift directly over the house. Somewhat larger than a Black Swift, the Pacific (aka Fork-tailed) Swift is the largest of the Apus swifts, and in shape resembles the Common Swift of Eurasia which I had seen frequently in May 2012 during a visit to Prague. Laura Keene somehow managed to take several photos of the bird, a couple of which clearly show the bird’s rectangular white rump patch, its diagnostic field mark.

The bird gave no one a second chance. It flew steadily away, became a dot on the horizon and disappeared against the clouds. Those of us who had seen it were ecstatic; those who missed it were crushed, and those who had got on it late and had seen only a dot were torn between the desire to count it and the need to have seen it better.  “Jackpot birding”, as the ABA calls looking for ultra rarities in places like St. Paul can severely test a birder’s ethics. Should he count the bird if he himself couldn’t have identified it without the help of a guide?  Was the glimpse he got of the bird good enough to satisfy his standard of sightings? Such questions sometimes end up balanced against the birder’s feelings that he didn’t go to all the expense and discomfort of traveling to a remote place like St. Paul Island to miss a bird just because he didn’t see it very well.

So ended the first full day on the island. Full of talk about the birds we had seen and the ones we had missed, we were driven over the rough sand dune road back to the hotel. Settling in for a short night’s sleep, we all wondered what tomorrow would bring us. 

If you have comments please send them to me via my email at chris.siddle@gmail.com

Be sure to check out Laura Keene's photos of our trip. Find it at http://flickr.com/gp/keeneone/c6jbV1/

Fall birding on Alaska's St. Paul Island - Part One.

When my wife, Sonja, gave me the birthday gift of a place in an ABA birding tour of St. Paul Island in the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea, I didn’t quite know what to expect. As a long time birder I knew, of course, about the Alaskan specialties like the Red-faced Cormorant found only along the southeastern coast and around the islands of the state, and I knew that the farther west the island, the more likely it was to attract Asian species blown off course by storms, of which there must assuredly be plenty in this tempest-tossed part of the world. I vaguely remembered reading about the Northern Fur Seals of St. Paul Island in Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher’s classic Wild America, and Scott Weidensaul’s excellent follow-up book, Return to Wild America. But I didn’t know if any seals would still be on the beaches during the tour which was scheduled 18 September – 25 September.

Sixteen other birders were joining me on this tour. As we waited at the Anchorage airport for a report that our Pen Air flight would actually happen, I wondered what my tour mates would be like. Little did I know that most of them would turn out to be warm-hearted, funny, and delightful field companions! More about them later.

Four hours late, the twin-engined turbo prop took off from Anchorage. The scenery was hidden below a layer of cloud. Three and a half hours later, about 8 in the evening the plane landed at the St. Paul Airport. A quick walk through a big hangar led us into a one story building which was not only airport but also the island’s only hotel, the New King Eider Hotel, our home for the next week.

Even though birds were hoping about outside the hotel, we had supper to eat and orientation to sit through. That didn’t stop the occasional birder from slipping outside to catch glimpses of the Lapland Longspurs, Snow Buntings, and Gray-crowned Rosy Finches that are St. Paul’s three common passerines. As well, two Ruddy Turnstones flew from the road to an open patch of ground though we were at least a km from the nearest shore. Yes, St. Paul Island was going to be a different sort of place.

Our tour bus parked near Hutchinson's Hill - the road is hidden by the putchkie.

The Gray-crowned Rosy Finches were members of the subspecies Leucosticte tephrocotis umbrina, resident to the Pribilofs and St. Matthew Island. Together with L.t. griseonucha of the Aleutians, the Alaska Peninsula and occasionally Kodiak Island, these races are the giant races of the Gray-crowned Rosy Finch. St. Paul’s “umbrina” were rich brown with pink on the belly and much pink edging to the coverts and flight feathers. They seemed to occur everywhere, especially where there were nooks and crannies for them to pop in and out of. I saw them on the roadways of crushed volcanic rock, among the black beach boulders, all over the running boards and cab of a truck, bathing in a puddle on the flatbed of the same vehicle, investigating a hole in a large bag of something that looked like gravel, and checking out under the eves and around the outside electric lights of the airport/hotel. Of the three common songbirds on St. Paul they seem to be the tamest, though not really tame at all. The longspurs and the snow buntings are quite skittish compared to the finches.

A young Gray-crowned Rosy Finch near the New King Eider Hotel 

Our guides (and drivers) Gavin Bieber, Scott Schuette, and Doug Gochfeld introduced us to the concept of fixed meal times at the Trident Seafood Company cafetaria where we took all of our meals except the one we were currently consuming and to the daily schedule which featured a leisurely breakfast at 7:50-9:20 while waiting for enough light to begin birding. The island is situated so far west (Alaska has only two time zones when it should have four, I read) that wristwatch time bears only a vague resemblance to solar time. Finally Gavin and Scott introduced us to putchkie, a specimen of which Doug held high for all to see. This type of wild celery stands almost a metre tall, and has course, stringy, hollow stems that sort of pop when you crush them. Not that we were encouraged to. Quite the opposite, in fact. We were told to leave the putchkie as intact and as healthy as possible, to step around it, a concept that we ignorant newcomers to the island didn’t know enough at this stage to find ridiculous.

A few days later, after having been force-marched through acres of the stuff, sore backed and stiff legged from wading and waddling through the crap weed which in combination with tussocks of sedge tripped us, tangled us up, and engulfed the shortest of us, we knew that you can’t hurt putchkie. Putchkie damages the birder, not the other way around. After humanity has played out is pitiful turn upon the stage we call Earth and we have blasted ourselves to extinction with nuclear weapons, only three things will remain on the planet, from which all future life will be derived – the rat, the cockroach, and putchkie.

Normally one could avoid putchkie, walk around it, but since the island is treeless, putchkie is the tallest plant and songbirds, blown out to the island, inevitably find their way into the putchkie and make do with its branching structure. To find the maximum numbers of rarities one must penetrate the putchkie patches and flush the rare birds out at least for a few seconds and then relocate the birds after they have dived back into cover. To penetrate the putchkie patches one needs a line of people who would slowly walk abreast a few metres apart, a human dragnet that lets nothing escape from the patch. And that’s were the birders came in, as willing and half-willing volunteers.

I swear Gavin would stay awake night dreaming of new ways to push through the putchkie. The manuvers he asked for always involved two lines of walkers, one walking slowly perpendicular to the road away from the dry comfort of our empty bus, while the other walkers formed a line to pivot on one end of the first line and swing like a gate through the cold, wet waist-high jungle. After studying the topography a moment he would call out variations on this basic plan, like a choreographer, a little testy or sometimes clearly frustrated with our inability to conform to his grand ideas of synchronistic movement.

“I said perpendicular to the road, not parallel,” he would shout. “Perpendicular!” he would cry. “Why are otherwise intelligent people are unable to do such a simple thing as walk equally spaced in a straight line?” All he lacked was an eye-patch, jodhpurs and boots, and a short leather quirk to beat against his hand.

But enough for the moment about putchkie.

Our first full day on St. Paul Island was brilliant. The sun shone for whole minutes at a time, the wind was not fearsome, the birds seemed plentiful. On our way from town to Southwest Point, we slowly passed Bachelor Beach named for the Northern Fur Seals that crowded the top of the beach to get a look at us.

These were not my first fur seals. I had briefly seen Australian Fur Seals in a sea cave on South Australia’s Kangaroo Island and New Zealand Fur Seals swimming in a beautiful bottle green inlet near Christchurch, New Zealand. However, this was the closest I had ever been to a fur seal.

The Northern Fur Seal appears to me to look like the classic circus seal – with large soulful eyes, a cute expression, tiny stubby ears and a mouth full of dog-like teeth. Except for the older males, fur seals look sleek. In the surf they are the porpoises of the seal world, torpedoing out of the water in a fast arc almost impossible to capture with a camera.

N. Fur Seals taking advantage of dry windless weather. 

As reluctant as the tour group was to leave the fur seals, we understood as our guides fairly quickly ended the stop and continued to Southwest Point where weird lichen-encrusted boulders broke up the tundra like mosses and low plants. We stood atop a short cliff to watch three Arctic Foxes tugging and chewing on a large pale, somewhat elastic looking mass, all that was left of a Gray Whale. St. Paul’s Arctic Foxes are blackish blue, closely matching the dark volcanic rocks that everywhere lay exposed. During our week we saw foxes in town, around the seal beaches, among the rocks of the quarry, and even out on the sand flats of the large Salt Lagoon. Arctic Foxes are well adapted to living in the cold. Found right across the Arctic, this species even has fur on the pads of its little feet, and fur so thick and of such efficiency that the animal doesn’t start to shiver until -70C.

On the rocks near the whale carcass were Glaucous-winged Gulls, one Herring Gull, and a near-adult Slaty-backed Gull. With its staring yellow eyes looking out from the dark that surrounds them, and its long sturdy bill, this is one menacing looking gull. We duly noted it, little suspecting that it was to be the only Slaty-back we were to see for the rest of the tour.

The St. Paul Glaucous-winged Gulls possessed much lighter gray primaries than the Glaucous-wings around Vancouver and southern B.C. do. Truly our southern birds are “Olympic Gulls”, showing evidence of their interbreeding with Western Gulls in the varying dark shades of gray or gray-black of their primary tips. If the Glaucous-winged Gulls of St. Paul Island interbreed, they do so with Glaucous Gulls, among others, so that large gulls with white primaries are sometimes seen among the light-gray winged birds.

Glaucous-winged Gulls near Southwest Point

To be continued. 

End of July special: photo quiz, shorebirding sites, Vaseux Lake Banding Station; and B.C. Nest Record Scheme

PHOTO QUIZ

Some birders give up birding temporarily during mid summer. For all of you, whether you're currently active in the field or not, here are some diversions to help you pass these warm days. These are a few of my photographs, mostly from southwestern B.C. with the occasional other location tossed in. Send your ID answers to chris.siddle@gmail.com and I'll let you (and only you) know how you did. Yes, you may use your field guides to formulate your answers:

Species 1 and 2- s. Ont. - May 2013

Species 3 - Vernon - July, 2013

Species 4 - Southern Ont. - May, 2013

Species 5 - Vernon - Jan. 2013

Species 6 - S. Ariz. - Feb. 2012

Species 7 - California

Species 8 - Vernon - July, 2010

Species 9 - Vernon - June, 2013

Species 10 - Vernon - June, 2013

Species 11 - Vernon - June, 2013

Species 12 - Vernon - July 2013

Species 13 - Vernon - July, 2013

Species 14 - Vernon- July, 2013

Species 15 - Kelowna - July, 2013

Send your answers to chris.siddle@gmail.com


BEST SHOREBIRD LOCATIONS IN B.C.?

I was thinking about shorebirds today, a timely topic for those of us who have visited the Willow Beach area just north of Osoyoos lately. Here are some of the best shorebird sites in B.C. Next to each site are page numbers from RUSSELL and DICK CANNINGS' excellent new book, BIRDFINDING IN BRITISH COLUMBIA (Greystone Press, 2013).

1. Iona Island (Vancouver) pages 124-127. Note: parts of the Iona Island Sewage Lagoons are off limits due to construction this summer and early fall. See Jude Grass's recent note on BCintbird for more details.

2. Reifel Island and Refuge (Ladner) pages 130-132.

3. Fort St. John North and South Sewage Lagoons (Fort St. John) pages 408-411.

4. Salmon Arm Bay (Salmon Arm) pages 282-286.

5. Shelley Sludge Lagoons (Prince George) page 340.

6. Boundary Bay and Beach Grove (Delta and Tsawwassen) pages 139-143 and pages 134-135.

7. Mission Point/Chapman Creek (Sunshine Coast) pages 180-181.

8. Robert Lake (Kelowna) page 248.

9. Sandy Island (off Denman Island) page 71

10. Sidney Spit Marine Park and Sidney Lagoon (Sidney) page 29-30.

Comments and suggested additions may be sent to chris.siddle@gmail.com

OKANAGAN BIRD BANDING GEARING UP

 The banding station is set to open on Thursday the 1st for our 13th season and right now we are really hurting for volunteers for the daily census and the station. Census is an hour and a half route of easy walking and persons should be familiar with most of the local species. Station volunteers need no special skills other than being able to print legibly. Even top birders will learn a lot as we usually have the time to show how the species are aged and sexed in the hand and these skills can often be used on birds in the field. Please consider volunteering either for census or the station. The scientific data gathered by VLBO is important and the place can't run without the help of volunteers. You can contact Dick Cannings about census(dick cannings@shaw.ca; 250-493-3393) or myself for helping out with the station(douglasbrown01@yahoo.ca; 250-495-6164).

Doug Brown
bander-in-charge
Vaseux Lake Bird Observatory

BRITISH COLUMBIA NEST RECORD SCHEME  - 2012 NESTING SEASON

The Biodiversity Centre for Wildlife Studies (of which I am a director) has just released the 58th annual report of the British Columbia Nest Record Scheme, in a handsome softcover. For information about obtaining a copy, joining the scheme and/or the Biodiversity Centre, go to www.wildlifebc.org

Featured throughout the report are the nest records and photographs of VICKY and LLOYD ATKINS of Vernon. No blog of North Okanagan birds and birders would be complete without reference to this tireless husband and wife team who patrol many of the most significant birding routes in the area, recording natural phenomena with notebook and camera. Of particular interest to those of us interested in Swainson's Hawks is an outstanding and one of a kind photographic "family portrait" of two adults and their three juveniles on the Commonage from 2012.

If you have comments about this blog, please email Chris Siddle at chris.siddle@gmail.com 


Happy birding, folks.

Swainson's Hawk in the North Okanagan - Introduction.

One of the identification problems facing beginning and intermediate birders in the North Okanagan is separating into species the plethora of large dark buteos. Buteos are large, soaring hawks, with broad wings and short fan shaped tails. The buteo group in Western Canada includes the Red-tailed Hawk, the Rough-legged Hawk, Swainson's Hawk, Ferruginous Hawk, and the Broad-winged Hawk. Of these five species, the Ferruginous Hawk is basically a very rare stray from Washington State where a small population breeds in the south-central part of the state. I doubt that the Ferruginous Hawk is even annual in its occurrence to B.C. Certainly it is extremely rare to non-existent in the North Okanagan, so much so that one hardly needs to consider it in attempting to sort out big dark hawks.

The three main species that are fairly common and occur regularly enough in all or almost all dark plumage are the Red-tailed Hawk, the Rough-legged Hawk and Swainson's Hawk. All dark Red-tails and Rough-legs can be very difficult to tell apart, and the reader who wishes to develop this ability is referred to Hawks in Flight (second edition), The Crossley Guide to Raptors, Raptors of Western North America, and Hawks From Every Angle, and A Field Guide to Hawks of North America (second edition). Full details about these publications will be given at the end of this post.

Separating dark morph Red-tailed Hawks from dark Swainson's Hawks can be tricky if the observer has little or no experience with Swainson's Hawks. Of course, Swainson's Hawks never have red tails. However, many dark Red-tails have no red in their tails, so the absence of a red tail is not always helpful.

Swainson's Hawks have narrower, more pointed wings which they hold slightly uptilted in flight. These characteristics are consistently reliable but require the observer develop pracitice recognizing them. Swainson's Hawks often show what Clark and Wheeler (2001) call a two-tone underwing, where the primaries and secondaries are dark compared to noticably paler underwing coverts (the fleshy part of the wing). Dark morph Red-tailed Hawks show a very different underwing pattern where the underwing coverts are darker than the flight feathers. Light morph Red-tails show the patagial marks which Swainson's lack.

Figure 1 - Dark morph Red-tailed Hawk showing the dark underwing coverts and the pale flight feathers. Many dark Swainson's Hawks show the opposite pattern - light underwing coverts and dark flight feathers.  Photo - C.Siddle. 

Swainson's Hawks are a migratory species that breeds across the prairie provinces of Alberta, Sask, and Manitoba and the western half of the contiguous United States south to north-central Mexico. Breeding populations are also found in the interiors of British Columbia and Alaska. In the Okanagan Swainson's Hawk can be found from late April through mid September in certain traditional areas which include the grasslands of Anarchist Mountain east to almost Rock Creek, grasslands and valley bottomlands around Vernon north to Enderby. Swainson's Hawks are also found west through Westwold and across the  Douglas Lake Plateau to Knutsford south of Kamloops. A small poorly known population also occurs around Houston west of Prince George.

In the North Okanagan look for Swainson's Hawks

1.along Mission Road at the Vernon Army Camp
2.along Commonage Road just north of its junction with Bailey Road
3. junction of Commonage and Bench Row roads
4. Old Kamloops Road along west side of Swan Lake, especially at the north end
5. north of Otter Lake where Otter Lake Road passes Wallbridge Road
6. along L and A Road and Pleasant Valley roads east of Swan Lake
7. along Highway 6 in the Brewer and Gray roads area west of Lavington
8. near the junction of Highway 6 and the Lumby end of Creighton Valley Road

Swainson's Hawks occur in many other locations, but these eight

Figure Two - Juvenal Swainson's Hawk near Nanton, Alberta, early Sept. 2012, showing two-toned wings with pale underwing coverts and dark flight feathers. Also note the slightly tapered shape og the wings and the absence of patagial marks on the inner leading wing edges. Photo - C. Siddle. 

sites are among the most constantly productive.

An interesting subtle difference between Swainson's Hawks and Red-tailed Hawks can be seen in Figure 3. This newly arrived Swainson's Hawk was perched on a bare branch which unfortunately was in the shade, creating a less than ideal photographic situation. However, the photo does show the hawk's wing tips protruding past its tail tip. A Red-tailed Hawk's wing tips are always slightly shorter than its tail. The reason for a difference in wing length and shape as well is that the Swainson's Hawk is highly migratory, while the Red-tailed Hawk is much less so. Both migrate but Red-tails are at best only medium-distance migrants, moving south a few hundred kms before the snows of winter appear. Swainson's Hawk, on the other hand, is a world-class long distance migrant, flying south from its North American breeding grounds, down the Isthmus of Panama, across northern South America and deep into Argentina for the winter. This can be a twice-annual journey of 10,000 km each way! A hawk needs long, strong wings for such an odyssey.

Figure 3 - An intermediate morph Swainson's Hawk near last year's nest, Herry Road, Vernon, late April 2013.
Photo by C. Siddle. 

Look for future posts about the breeding biology of Swainson's Hawk, notes on the birds temperament, a guest post about the Swainson's Hawk in the Thompson-Kamloops area, and more.

Here are details about the raptor identification texts I mentioned earlier:

A Field Guide to Hawks of North America (second edition) by William S. Clark and Brian Wheeler. 2001. Houghton Mifflin Co. About $36. 95 Can.

Raptors of Western North America by Brian Wheeler. 2003. Princeton University Press. Price? There's some confusion here. Amazon.ca has a softcover listed for less than $30.00 but a hard cover listed at over $400. Make sure you're getting the right book before ordering.

Hawks In Flight (second edition) by Pete Dunne, David Sibley, and Clay Sutton. 2012. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Co. About $30.00 Can.

Hawks from Every Angle: How to Identify Raptors in Flight. by Jerry Liguori. 2005. Princeton University Press. About 21.00 Can.

The Crossley Guide: Raptors by Richard Crossley, Jerry Liguori, and Brian Sullivan. 2013. Princeton University Press. About $30.00 Can.

Figure 4. An adult Swainson's Hawk near the junction of Silver Star Road and Foothills Drive, early May, 2013. Note the bird's rather benign facial expression, another characteristic of this species.

Vernon's Great Blue Herons - nests full of large chicks

Vernon's Great Blue Herons at the colony along 24th Street laid their eggs in March and April, incubated them through the latter half of April and the first half of May and are now (4 June) busy feeding the resulting chicks. Some nests are crowded with as many as four young herons per nest.

In some of the few nests that are still visible against the green canopy of cottonwood leaves the young are still kneeling in the nest. These scraggly ragamuffins are covered in a messy mix of punk spiky feathers and remnant down. Their body feathers are growing nicely and they are quite dark compared to their parents. However, the careful observer can discern a dark crown, and a whitish throat.

In other nests the chicks are older, larger and are standing. A heron's nest is not very large and three or four large youngsters pretty much fill all the available space. When one of the parents arrives with food, it must stand on the edge or on a supporting branch while the kids go wild with appetite. The nest becomes a cauldron of hunger, the chicks grabbing at the parent's bill. It's amazing nobody loses an eye. The parent regurgitates and the chicks fall to grabbing at whatever comes up.

Juvenile Great Blue Heron not long out of the nest - Crescent Beach, B.C. - 22 April 2010 Copyright Chris Siddle.  

The photo above captures the overall dinginess of a fledgling Great Blue fairly well. The chicks in the Vernon colony, however, have darker crowns that the one shown here.

The parents are kept busy foraging for food for their growing chicks. An adult doesn't tarry very long at the nest. Once the feeding has been completed, the adult may move away a few metres from the nest for a rest or may launch itself away for another hunting trip.

The parents may fly north towards Swan or Otter lakes, west toward Goose Lake or over the Bella Vista Range to Head of the Lake, southwest to Okanagan Lake or south to Kalamalka Lake. Some fly due east up the BX Creek valley. They are not all headed to bodies of water. Some forage in fields and pastures for rodents.

With the adults departing from the colony in a variety of directions, it's easy for the observer to image the heron colony as the hub of a wheel or the centre of a simple web, the strands marked with arrowheads to show the direction of the flow of energy in the form or food for the chicks from ponds, lakes, and fields back to the colony.

However, besides continuing to grow, there is at least one major developmental step the young herons must take before they leave the colony. Once they have a full set of primaries and secondaries they must learn to fly. The first drill is learning to flap while staying in place on the nest.

BLACK SWIFT UPDATE

Before I close, I would like to note that this spring, in spite of being absent for several days, I saw Black Swifts over Swan Lake as I have almost annually for the past 20 years (see blog entry for 31 March 2013). On 1 June I noted about 10 Black Swifts at medium height over the south-east shore of the lake.

GRASSHOPPER SPARROW UPDATE

My search of the grasslands on the east side of Goose Lake early on 6 June turned up no Grasshopper Sparrows. Clay-coloured Sparrows were frequent in the hawthorn thickets, but there was no sign of GRSPs among the grass tussocks.

COMMENTS

If you wish to make a comment about any entry, please do so via my email: chris.siddle@gmail.com

The Third Red-tailed Hawk Entry

The purpose of today's entry is to catch up with some of the readers' images of Red-tailed Hawks.

Gary Davidson of Nakusp, B.C. is an old friend and is familiar with my passion for Red-tails. This winter he captured an image of a Krider's Red-tailed Hawk that was hanging around the Davidson's RV in McAllen, Texas. You think our Red-tails can be pale in the Okanagan/Thompson? Take at look at this bird:

1. Photo by Gary Davidson - Krider's Red-tailed Hawk - McAllen, Texas- late Feb. 2013

This is an immature Krider's Red-tailed Hawk. Aging marks include the poorly developed dark border to the trailing edge of the wings, the multiple barred tail, the pale eye, and the pale panel near the end of each wing.

Why is this bird a Red-tailed Hawk at all? The dark markings just behind the leading edge of the inner wings are called patagial marks. Patagial marks are a diagnostic feature of Red-tails. Compare this bird with the light juvenile Ferruginous Hawks pictured on page 385 of Brian Wheeler's indispensible Raptors of Western North America (Princeton 2003). Also take a look at Dunne, Sibley, and Sutton's excellent second edition of Hawks in Flight (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2012) pages 76-77 to note that a light juv. Ferruginous may show something like a patagial mark though the marks are slightly farther towards the inner wing and more distant from the leading edge. You'll also want to look at the new Crossley ID Guide - Raptors by Crossley, Liguori and Sullivan (Princeton 2013).

Here's an image taken by well-known Kamloops naturalist Rick Howie of an immature Red-tail in the Kamloops area. It shows a large dark patagial mark, the pale window panel typical of an immature, the light eye (not quite so reliable as an indicator of age, I've read), and the many barred tail, plus a couple of other features worth looking at.

2. Photo by Rick Howie

Note that the hawk in Photo 2 has no dark bar on the trailing edges of its wings. The absence of such a broad rear border clearly and easily identifies this bird as an immature.  In the image (3) of an adult I photographed near Westwold in 2010 the rear wing border is obvious.

3. Photo by Chris Siddle - Westwold, B.C.- July 2010

Let's go back to Photo 2. When classifying Red-tails I always look at the breast first to note what the background colour is, in this case obviously white, and whether it is streaked or not, and how heavily. In this case the breast is unstreaked. Then I note the heaviness of the belly band and its width. The bird in 2. has a dark belly band on white underparts but the band doesn't appear particularly wide. Next comes the colour of the underside of the tail and the width and number of tail bands. That leaves us with undertail coverts, the tarsus and the head and throat which all appear quite "normal" in this case of Photo 2.

Here is another image from Rick Howie.

4. Photo by Rick Howie, 21 April 2013, Kamloops

What differences do you spot between the immature in 4. and the immature in 2? The most obvious difference is that 4. has a broader, more solid dark belly band. Noting individual differences such as this will help the birder keep track of the Red-tails around him.

I am ending this post with a summary of Red-tailed Hawk reproduction because I would like to encourage my readers to become familiar with the species beyond identification. I relied upon Charles R. Preston's book, Red-tailed Hawk (2000, Stackpole Books, 5067 Ritter Road, Mechanicsburg, PA. 17055.) for most of the information.

Nest Selection: The pair selects a nest site up to 3- 5 weeks before the female lays eggs. Nest sites in the North Okanagan include groves of cottonwoods and coniferous trees in or on the edge of forest. Nests are large piles of sticks often from the tree that the birds have chosen to nest in. Nests can be difficult to locate or very obvious.

Eggs and Incubation: The female usually lays an egg every other day. A complete clutch ranges from 1 to 5 eggs, with an average over North America of 2-3 eggs per clutch. Incubation is by both male and female, but mostly female, and commences with the laying of the first egg. The male provides food for his mate, but she may also hunt for herself. Incubation to the hatching of the first egg may be as short as 28 days though the period may extend as long as 35 days since hatching of first to last laid eggs may occur over several days. The first chick to hatch has the developmental advantage and siblicide is known.

Nesting period: lasts from 39 to 46 days.

Fledglings: have to learn to fly well, and at first beg incessantly, a well known sound of June and July around Vernon. This period when the fledglings are variously dependent upon the parents can last weeks, if not months.

To leave comments about this or any of my other posts, contact me at chris.siddle@gmail.com

Vernon's Great Blue Heron Colony

Just one block north of 48th Avenue, lodged high in the branches of a remnant grove of Black Cottonwoods along Vernon's 24th St. are somewhere between 40 and 60 huge stick nests built by Great Blue Herons, colonially nesting waterbirds that uninformed people often call 'cranes'. Standing about 1.2 m tall, the Great Blue Heron is one of Canada's tallest birds, a lanky, grayish long-necked fowl armed with a spearhead bill, staring yellow eyes, a compact gray body, long stilt-like legs and a wingspan of about 1.8 m, about two thirds that of a Bald Eagle. It is not a bird one expects to see flying around an urban area of shops, light industry, and a housing development. A flying Great Blue is a hard bird to ignore, whether it's rocking to-and-fro in descent into the colony trees, spilling air from beneath its great, broad wings before making a surprisingly graceful landing on a branch or nest, or it's in sustained flight with its long neck tucked back into a compact S curve over its back, making shallow, but powerful wing beats toward some distant shore. Cranes always fly with necks outstretched; large herons, in everything except short flights, curl their necks into a double curve and that's the main visual difference between the two groups.

In most of southern Canada Great Blue Herons locate their breeding colonies well away from human activity, but Vernon's herons are different, and therein is my story. Even in the mid-1980s when the herons first moved to town, the grove they chose to nest in was close enough to the local MacDonalds restaurant just off a main route through town that fast food diners began to notice 'the MacDonalds herons' as they were then referred to. The herons quickly expanded their colony into the tallest cottonwoods along 24th St. even as the area underwent a change from remnants of old farm fields and patches of young woods to retail and light industrial outlets, a vets' office, a duplex complex, a sports club, a building supply store, a flooring store, a rental place of lifts and aerial platforms, and eventually a housing development of single dwellings called, ironically enough, Heron Glen. The usual polarization occurred among Vernon's human population.  On the one side developers and chamber of commerce boosters in thin but powerful ranks rallied against the herons as impediments to development, while on the other side a greener mob of naturalists, educators, one or two politicos, and some of the public who thought the herons were interesting demanded a place for the herons in an otherwise rather featureless part of town.

The unsung heron hero was Mr. Jan Bos who owned a junkyard and the land adjacent to it, the land on which the cottonwoods grew that supported the herons' nests. Working around his junkyard, Jan started pausing to watch the herons build their nests, lay their eggs, and raise their young. He grew fond of the gangly birds that defied the odds to live at least part of the year alongside restless, often heedless humanity. Eventually in the middle of the unspoken debate about the herons' future in Vernon, Jan Bos visited a lawyer and had a restrictive covenant placed on the grove. The covenant stated that Jan couldn't sell his undeveloped land until a year after the last of the herons had stopped nesting on it. With real estate growing daily in value, Mr. Bos put his property on the line. For his trouble he has received almost no thanks from the people of Vernon, and when a tree fell from his property toward the houses of Heron Glen, a developer made motions to sue him.

With Mr. Bos as their protector, the herons have carried on with their reproductive cycle, with only a few minor interruptions. They don't like Bald Eagles,  one or two of which often hang around the colony some springs. According to some literature, a Bald Eagle killing an adult heron can cause the colony to desert, but like so much in the heron literature, this does not appear to be an absolute rule.

Hot air balloons certainly make the adult birds nervous and flighty, as I saw in the early 1990s when balloonists took to launching, landing near and overflying the Vernon colony. Fortunately the balloonists were co-operative in re-locating their activities.

Okanagan Great Blue Herons are both migratory and resident. Some remain year-round, while most leave us for the winter. Birds start returning to the colony in March. This year (2013) I saw the first herons (6) at the colony on 4 March. By 8 March, the count jumped to 16 birds and by 10 March 27 birds. On 15 March 44 birds were present at 9:05 AM, and thereafter for the remainder of March my counts were in the high 30s or mid 40s.

It is my belief though I have no proof to back it up, that some of the colony's herons are old spouses, familiar with each other and quick to form pairs and settle down to reproducing without much courtship. Certainly by 4 April this year it was obvious that several adults (females and males are difficult for humans to distinguish) were setting low in their nests, incubating eggs.

The female lays 2-6 dull blue eggs, and incubation starts with the first egg. The incubation period runs from 26-30 days with the parents sharing the duty of incubation. Incubation sessions can be quite long, sometimes up to 10 hours each. Occasionally, the incubating bird will rise and turn the eggs to ensure even heating. With most of the birds away foraging or low on the nests incubating, the colony can become a fairly quiet place. During this time look for the occasional adult bringing a stick his mate on the nest. According to the literature, males gather the sticks and females place the sticks into the structure of the nest. Sticks are gathered from trees and the ground around the colony, and old, unused nests quickly get picked to non-existence by stick-happy herons.

Eggs begin to hatch in May. The chicks initially are so small that they are not visible to the ground-based observer, but watch for both parents at the nest at the same time orient their activities towards the nest bowl. Adults bringing food to the nest is a tip-off that the young have hatched. You'll have to look carefully though, because herons usually swallow their prey and deliver it to their chicks by swift regurgitation. Also listen for the soft but persistent chattering that the chicks make when food is delivered. This chattering soon becomes a chorus when several nests contain hungry chicks. and is a characteristic sound of May and June.

The heron chick is hatched covered in pale gray down, bushy on its crown. Chicks attempt to preen at 6 days of age, stagger to their feet at 14 days and walk steadily at 21 days. By two weeks of age the little chick is covered in dark feathers but has a contrasting whitish throat. Wing-flapping occurs at the fourth week and hopping onto branches near the nest at the seven week. By 60 days of age chicks can make sustained flight. By the ninth week chicks recognize parents flying toward the nest. Nest departure happens at about 81 days (64-91 days range).

Both parents feed the chicks. It's highly entertaining to watch a nestful of older heron chicks become highly animated when they spy one of their parents flying toward the nest, presumably with food on board. Wings flap, necks weave back and forth like angry snake, and the chicks chatter loudly and look wild with their crests raised and yellow eyes blazing with anticipation. Perhaps hesitant to land amid these feathered maniacs, each armed with a long spear of a beak, the adult may land on a branch nearby and walk a few steps into the nest where the chicks swiftly grab repeatedly at the parent's bill. Up comes the catch, and down go the necks toward the floor of the nest, with chicks snatching and stabbing at everything within the dump zone. In such a sharp-tipped melee it looks like it would be easy to lose an eye.

At the Vernon colony chicks fledge from the nests beginning in July and continuing into early August. Fledglings have been seen by some heron observers to return to the nest to be fed by parents for three weeks after fledging.

Penticton and Kelowna both have heron colonies but they are situated in more conventional settings along waterways. For urban Great Blue Herons Vernon is the place.

Interesting things about Vernon's Great Blue Herons:

1. Great Blues don't restrict themselves to aquatic food like frogs and fishes. They will also hunt in fields for voles.

2. The location of the Vernon colony is conveniently central to Swan, Kalamalka, and Okanagan lakes. An observer standing next to the colony can note that herons will leave the colony on an obvious bearing to one of these three destinations. Herons will also drop in on any small pond, especially Vernon's backyard goldfish ponds, for easy fishing, and will fly upslope parallel to BX Creek, perhaps in search of fields and voles.

3. The adult Great Blue Heron's bill changes from dull multi-shading to a beautiful shade of orange at the onset of breeding season.

4. The land on which the colony trees stand is considered protected and trespassing is forbidden. A fence around the colony makes this clear.

5. A heron's droppings are ejected with force, often while the bird is in flight. The droppings are a sticky, fishy white liquid that lengthens as it falls. You thought sea gull whitewash was bad? Pray that you will never be hit by heron poop.

For more information about Great Blue Herons try:

Butler, Robert W. Butler. 1997. The Great Blue Heron: A Natural History and Ecology of a Seashore Sentinel. University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, B.C.

Siddle, Chris. 2008. Status, Size, and Breeding Chronology of an Urban Great Blue Heron Nesting Colony at Vernon, British Columbia, 1986-2008. Wildlife Afield, 5: 1, June, 2008. The Biodiversity Centre for Wildlife Studies, Victoria, B.C.

Vennesland, Ross G. and Robert W. Butler. 2011. Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias), The Birds of North AmericaOnline (A. Poole, Ed.). Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology; http;//bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/species/025doi:10.2173/bna25

All photographs in this article are copyright Chris Siddle.