Panama - birding with an expert guide - Part 3

I like to prepare for upcoming bird trips by studying the species I'm likely to find and by reading as much as possible about the natural and human history of the places I am going to visit. However, lately I have begun to suffer from procrastination and a kind of attention deficit where I start to study and research and then about 5 minutes later, go watch TV, or have a nap, or sweep the carport. The biochemical brain circuit that would allow me to concentrate upon my desired subject seems defective, unable to stand much strain, liable to give out after a short session of effort. I blame this on my former occupation, thirty years of teaching English in public schools.  All the after-school, before-school and during-school marking of students' written work took a toll, according to my theory. Some vital factor wore out in my brain.

This is self-justification for my failure to adequately prepare for Panama. I learned a handful of birds, some tanagers, a few raptors, particularly the hawk-eagles, a few of the more conspicuous looking hummingbirds like the White-necked Jacobin and the Black-throated Mango, the icterids, mostly the pretty birds, but there were whole families I failed to study even in the most superficial way. The result was ... well, that's the story I am about to tell you.
On our third day in Panama Carlos took us to the beginning of Pipeline Road. The Americans cut this road partway through the isthmus during World War Two to service a pipeline that was never used. The road has become "one of the best places to see tropical forest birds in the Americas, with a species list exceeding 400" (A Bird-Finding Guide to Panama by George R. Angehr, Dodge Engleman, and Lorna Engleman, 2008). Once paved, now it's a rough track through primary and secondary forest. It crosses several streams and one way birders have seen allusive species is to use these streams as access,  wading along them deep into the forest as my friend Mike Force did with shipmates back in the 1990s during a hurried in-port. He tells of encountering a hostile troop of Red-mantled Howlers that roared and threw sticks and other objects at the birders. For a naturalist, such an interspecies interaction would be a high point, something exciting to remember.

Carlos had just directed our attention to some Snail Kites circling with Black and Turkey vultures when his cell phone rang. Another Canopy tour guide and his clients had spotted an army ant swarm at km 2.5 and attending it were two very hard-to-see birds indeed.

"Quick, quick! Everyone into the truck. Army ants and ground-cuckoos at km 2.5!"

Ground what? Ground-cuckoos? OK, here's the first time my lack of preparation kicked in. Ground-cuckoo sounded like an interesting bird, and we all knew at least in theory that very large mixed flocks of birds often attend army ant swarms, but I didn't know that the sighting justified Carlos's obvious excitement. The man is wonderfully enthusiastic, but wasn't he overdoing it?

Fig. 1 Rufous-vented Ground-Cuckoo. Photo by C Siddle

Here's what I didn't know: the genus Neomorphus has four species: Rufous-vented Ground-Cuckoo, Banded G-C, Rufous-winged G-C, and Red-billed G-C, and you would be hard pressed to find a New World bird genus less known than this one. All of them are found in huge tracts of South America jungle. The Rufous-vented is the only species also found in Central America north to Nicaragua. All of them survive only in very large areas of forest, and all of them appear to be naturally scarce. When Lake Gatun was flooded for the operation of the Panama Canal, a very large forested hilltop became Barro Colorado Island, and a forest reserve and research station for scientists from around the world, the Rufous-vented Ground-Cuckoo was one of the earliest bird species to leave the island, that's how much the bird needs isolation from disturbance and development.

Aside from being long tailed, large billed ground birds about the size of Greater Roadrunners (which are also members of the cuckoo family), almost everything remains to be discovered about ground-cuckoos. Nests remain unknown for the Banded and the Rufous-winged ground-cuckoos, and all that's known about the breeding of the Red-billed Ground-Cuckoo is that the nestling had buffy hair-like down attached to tips of its growing contour feathers on its head and that its bill is black. Because it occurs in Central America as well as South America, the Rufous-vented Ground-Cuckoo is the best known of this mysterious bunch but that's not saying much. It was only within the past 40 years that this species was discovered to have a nest at all, as opposed to being a nest parasite as some expected it to be.

So there we were newly arrived in a cloud of dust at km 2.5 of the Pipeline Road watching an adult Rufous-vented Ground-Cuckoo trotting around the edges of the forest through which army ants were swarming, picking up large insects and feeding them to its one offspring, a slightly smaller, darker billed version of the adult. Since I hadn't prepared properly for this trip, I failed to appreciate just how special this sighting was, even with Carlos and Michael, the other guide, telling us how lucky we were. Imagine my excitement had I actually known at the time that I was looking at birds, rare to begin with, behaving - feeding a juvenile - as very few people had ever seen them behave before.

Ground-cuckoo behavior around an ant swarm is well described in Volume 5 of The Handbook of The Birds of the World:

In the interior of forests of tropical America, the ground-cuckoos follow swarms of army ants, using the ants as beaters to flush insects. The cuckoo appears to wait until an ant swarm enters its territory, whereupon it follows the swarm as it passes through. as the ants move along the forest floor and insects scatter in their advance, the cuckoo waits on the ground or perches on low horizontal branches near the ground. On the ground, it then runs at the edge of the swarm, snaps up an insect or other forest-floor arthropod, and runs away in active bonding movements, changing directions, or it spins away; only occasionally does it flap, to get over a vine or to gain an elevated perch, but extended flight is uncommon. These cuckoos feed separately, usually with only one at an ant swarm...They are the largest birds in the forest which attend these army-ant swarms, where they appear regularly along with numerous other kinds of birds" (pp 527-8).

Being unprepared didn't devalue the experience of seeing the ground-cuckoo for me; however, being unprepared did change the nature of the sighting. I didn't realize the special qualities of the experience until after it had happened, until after I had been told how lucky I was and until after I had done some research that revealed to me just how fortunate I had been.

The army ants scurried randomly over the forest floor and we had to watch closely where we stood for fear of being attacked. "If you do get them on you, take off your pants immediately!" advised Carlos, though he neglected to finish his instructions, his attention caught by birds moving through the understory around the ants.



"Plain-brown Woodcreeper!" he shouted, but the woodcreeper I focused on wore fine black bars on his underparts. When I mentioned this to Carlos he glanced at my bird and said, "Northern Barred Woodcreeper too!" Eventually we added a Cocoa Woodcreeper to our list of the mixed species attending the ants. I had especially wanted to see woodcreepers, and three species in one flock exceeded my expectations.

Bicolored Antbirds of both sexes were common. Right in front of me a Spotted Antbird grew agitated for some reasons, flared its tail, raised its crest and revealed a pale area on the centre of its back. What's that about, I wondered. Nearby were three larger, much calmer appearing birds standing still on the leaf litter. These were Ocellated Antbirds, much larger than the Bicolored Antbird, Spotted Antbird and Dot-winged Antwrens, with pretty blue elongated spectacles and handsome black back feathers scalloped with fine buff edgings.

While the ants swarm over the ground, the birder is busy, really busy. He might be watching a bird through his binculars, letting them hang to take notes, making sure he has written, say, Bicolored AntBIRD and not AntWREN nor AntTHRUSH, lifting his camera to take pictures of any bird tame enough to stand still for a moment, checking the resulting images in the viewer of his camera, making sure he's standing clear of the ants, lifting binoculars again to peer into the shadows and between the branches for more birds, trying to untangle the binocular strap which has twisted around the camera strap, all the while craning his neck and his back at torturous angles to try to see around leaves and other objects that obscure his view, and avoiding bumping into other birders who are also attempting to do two or three things at once.

Fig. 2 A Spotted Antbird. Photo by C Siddle

On a sapling above me a Northern Barred Woodcreeper paused in its hitch upwards to flick its left wing partially open. This movement scared the ants scurrying down the stem over to the right side of the bark. Then it flipped open its right wing to send the ants back to the left side. It swiftly picked something - a little bug, an ant? - off the stem. Was it in effect herding the ants or had I just seen a couple of random wing twitches? Was this a hunting technique or was the bird just twitchy? Here was something else to make note of and search for in the reference books. (But that's for some other post.)

We ended our visit to Pipeline with sightings of White-shouldered Tanagers, a Scarlet-rumped Cacique, and a Slaty-tailed Trogon, among other birds.

In the mid afternoon we visited the former zoo at Summit Hill, now an animal rehab centre. Three caring volunteers brought out their young animal charges, a Tamandua looking very clean and smart in his brown and soft gray pelage, as if he were wearing brown bib overalls, a Geoffroy's Brown spider monkey wearing his Pampers, and a sleek dark brown Kinkajou, an arboreal relative of the Raccoon.
While we listened to the rehabilitators' stories of the difficulties of caring for wild animals in Panama which has no history of animal rehabilitation, and until recently, little history of conservation, we were cautioned not to reach out to the animals. With so much cuteness right in front of us, it was hard for some of us to resist, especially when the animals observed no such ban on touching and reached out various furry arms, legs, and noses to us.



After some of us cleaned out our wallets in donating to the animal's expenses, we moved next to a palm , the bottom edge of its canopy drooping a little. Here Carlos showed us four Common Tent-making Bats, small dark bats with thin pale stripes on their snouts. In order to make themselves a suitable roosting place the bats chew at specific points on the undersides of palm fronds. The fronds droop, the bat has a temporary home in the shade. Researchers theorize that tent-making allows small bats to save energy. Instead of flying long distances to the plants they are feeding on which are scattered through the forest, the tent-makers can spend the day hidden near their food source.

Summit Hill has a captive Harpy Eagle, possibly the most magnificent bird of prey in the world, certainly one of the world's rarest raptors. Like ground-cuckoos, the Harpy Eagle needs huge areas of undisturbed forest in which to hunt sloths and monkeys. With resource exploration and extraction, such isolation from human development grows ever more rare these days. One of the causes of Harpy Eagle decline is shooting. Such a huge bird offers a target that many people find hard to resist. Fortunately through the efforts of several organizations such as the Peregrine Fund, people throughout the Harpy's range are being educated about the value of this wonderful bird.

The Harpy Eagle at the Summit enclosure has a large flight cage but today the bird, a captive-bred female originally hatched in Florida, was perched next to the viewing platform. Unlike most hawks and eagles the Harpy has facial disks, rather like those of an owl, which aid in pinpointing sounds of potential prey. The Harpy Eagle hunts from within the canopy; it is not a bird that soars high over the forest like a Red-tailed Hawk would soar over forest edges back home.

Fig. 3- Captive Harpy Eagle at Summit Hill. Photo by C Siddle

We toured the grounds and added a pair of Masked Tityras, Lesser Kiskadee, and Yellow-headed Caracara to our lists before being driven back to the Tower for supper.

On 18 February a real treat was seeing a wild Tamandua climbing through the forest trees next to the Tower first thing in the morning.

We spent the morning walking the Plantation Trail which is accessed from the bottom of Semaphore Hill Road. Along the trail we saw White-tailed and Black-tailed trogons, a Broad-billed Motmot, a Crimson-crested Woodpecker, Chestnut-backed Antwrens, Western Slaty Antshrikes and an adult and a juvenile Sunbittern. On our return to the Tower we saw a Double-toothed Kite perched near the building.

In the afternoon, after a short visit to the Canopy Bed and Breakfast in Gamboa, we birded around the Gamboa Rainforest Retreat on the shores of Lake Gatun. Here we saw Variable Seedeaters, Greater Kiskadee, Gartered Trogon, and two Southern Lapwings along the lake shore.

On 19 February we spent the day along Pipeline Road, eventually having a picnic lunch several kiometres in at Rio Mendoza. Special finds included a Speckled Mourner, a rusty colored forest species that vaguely resembles a cross between a small thrush and a flycatcher. The Birds of Panama, A Field Guide categorizes the mourner, along with becards, tityras, piprites and the schiffornis as "incertae sedis" or of uncertain relationships within the passerine (perching birds). One thing that a person quickly learns about Neotropical ornithology is how much remains to be worked out. Take the tribe of woodcreepers for instance. There are many widespread species, like the Olivaceous Woodcreeper, that have several subspecies. In the case of the Olivaceous Woodcreeper there five groups of subspecies. Many of these populations look alike but have distinctive vocalizations. It is likely that as research continues the Olivaceous Woodcreepers, and several other species including the widespread Buff-throated Woodcreeper,  will be "split" into multiple species.

Our best bird of the 19th was, in my opinion, not the Purple-throated Fruitcrows nor the Black-striped Woodcreeper which were both good, but the Great Tinamou which Karl spotted as we were getting out of the vehicles at one spot. The bird was a couple of metres inside the jungle edge, all but invisible in its gray-brown plumage. It was absolutely still. Most of us managed to get decent photographs of the bird by searching for "tunnels" in the vegetation down which we could focus our lenses. I was also happy that we didn't flush the bird. It was still in its original spot when we finally drove away.

Other new birds included a strange flycatcher called the Brownish Twistwing, which turned out to be singularly well-named for it was brownish and it occasionally flipped one wing at a time up above its back, perhaps to startle insects into revealing their locations. Apparently at least four other flycatchers share this wing-lifting behaviour including the Ochre-bellied, Olive-striped, Sepia-capped and Slaty-capped flycatchers. Lunch was enlivened by a tanager flock that included Tawny-crested, Bay-headed, and Carmiol's tanagers. My big miss was dozing in Charlie's Toyota pick-up while the some of the people in the open-canopy birdmobile ahead of us spotted a Great Currasow fly off the road during our return to civilization.

Fig. 4 - The young orphaned Tamandua at the Summit Hill rehabilitation facility. Photo by C Siddle. 

Send comments to my email ay chris.siddle@gmail.com

Panama - birding with an expert guide. Part 2

Panama - birding with an expert guide. Part 2.

16 February 2014 - the second day of Avocet Tour's Panama expedition, with Carlos Bethancourt as our guide. This morning was our first opportunity to watch the sun rise. I was so eager for the experience that I crept up the Tower's staircases just after 5 AM. The building was dark. I was too early even for the staff - the fourth floor was pitch dark and the kitchen was empty. No coffee. I like to start my day gently with silence (of which there was plenty), a good book or my journal (I had both clutched in my hands) and a cup of strong, sugary coffee. Clearly I would have to wait for the coffee.

Figure 1. This whiskery cutey is a White-whiskered Puffbird waiting for a lizard or large insect to make itself known so he can snap it up and beat the living bejesus out of it and then swallow it. Semaphore Road, 16 Feb. 2014 Photo by Chris Siddle

About 5:30 the first noise reached my ears. It was a roaring, a drawn out guttural, rageful bellowing. Howler Monkeys! These are fair-sized New World monkeys, the males equipped with enlarged throat sacs and cartilages in their tracheas that resonate and amplify their voices all in the service of marking the troop's territory. "We've got this patch. Stay away!" the males seem to be roaring from the tree tops at other distant noisy troops. One morning I could hear four troops roaring in the national park around the Tower, three to the north and one to the south. Back in the Okanagan I'm pretty sure two of my neighbours who succumbed to boomer-lunacy and bought Harley-Davidsons so big they can barely them hold upright are going for the same audio effect each morning and evening when they rev their engines.

I returned my books to my room on the still silent second floor and climbed all the way back up to the roof. Dawn was diluting the dark. Birds were beginning to stir. This was it!

I am afraid that I have fallen victim to the hype that generally surrounds canopy walkways and towers. I fell for the promos in tropical Queensland and I fell for them in Peru. Now, once again, in Panama I had set my sights too high. It's like I expect dozens of species of exotic jungle birds to flutter around me in blissful ignorance of my existence like several pages of the local field guide come to life. The reality, that of some birds flying by and a few birds feeding in the canopy depending upon which flower is in bloom or which seed or fruit is ready to eat at the moment, always disappoints me a little. However, with several opportunities to view sunrise or sunset, I felt the Canopy Tower over the course of a week came closest to satisfying my elevated dreams.

Each morning and evening a pair of bright green Mealy Parrots would fly by closely together, one individual slightly ahead of the other, obviously more deeply attached to each other than your average pair of birds. I am not a romantic. I don't care a fig whether a pair of birds mates for a lifetime or for three seconds. In fact, one of the most irritating questions non-birders ask me is "X species (swans, eagles, small-vented scaley plodders, etc.) mate for life, don't they?" as if expecting birds to be more capable of long term monogamy than we are. My answer, "Hey, if most humans can't manage to stand each other for a lifetime, why do you think birds can?" never seems to satisfy the person who asked the question in the first place. That said, I have to admit I do have an soft spot for parrots. Long-lived, individualistic, and cranky, when one parrot pairs with another often their mutual bond touches my heart. They stick so closely together. This pair of Mealy Parrots, flying in such proximity that it seemed as if their wings must touch, skimmed over the canopy following the same route as they had yesterday morning and will follow tomorrow morning crying loudly their croaky, squeaky ode to joy.

Figure 2. Fasciated Antshrike, a slow and deliberate forager of the understory. Photo by Chris Siddle. 

By 6:30 other guests were joining me on the roof. The Green Shrike Vireo began his three note chant. A Blue Cotinga was a beautiful surprise. A female Summer Tanager, uniformly yellow-green, appeared briefly but a Golden-headed Tanager, much more elaborate in various colors, stuck around for a while. Other birds included Red-lored Parrots, slightly smaller than Mealys, a Squirrel Cuckoo, a Violet-bellied Hummingbird, White-necked Jacobins from the feeders four floors below, and a Dusky-capped Flycatcher.

We spent the morning walking down Semaphore Hill Road. We progressed until the something interesting - a stream of leaf-cutter ants, the large earthen-looking arboreal nests of the Aztec Ant, the national tree of Panama, a Morpho butterfly-  caught our interest. Life forms were so diverse and so amazingly abundant than we walked only 400 m in four hours!

The forest was is a mix of huge veterans standing among much younger jungle. One could almost hear the plants competing for light. Vines climbed and draped and hung, some so large they matched the thickness of small trees back home. Airplants grew luxuriantly from every possible coign. Some leaves were huge, bigger than umbrellas.

Snuffling in the leaf litter was my first Nine-banded Armadillo. A few metres farther down the shaded green road a mother White-nosed Coati and her baby crossed the narrow pavement. The kitten or cub or whatever a young coati is called was missing half its tail. On the downslope a small troop of White-faced Capuchins moved through the mid-canopy, avoiding our party.

Birds included an Olivaceous Woodcreeper, a Southern Bentbill, two male Slate-colored Grosbeaks, a Black-crowned Antshrike, a Ruddy-tailed Flycatcher, a Blue-crowned Manakin, Dusky Antbirds, a Spotted Antbird, a pair of Dot-winged Antbirds, a Broad-billed Motmot, White-flanked Antbirds, a squat and stolid little White-whiskered Puffbird, a loudly singing Black-bellied Wren, and a Gartered Trogon. It was Tropical Birding 101, the introductory course, with a wide and diverse selection of birds that previously we have seen only in field guides or possibly not at all.

Our afternoon was equally amazing but with an emphasis on wetlands. Carlos took us to the famous (in Panama birding circles) Ammo Ponds, which is to say that we stood on a paved road crossed by a closed sliding chain-link gate controlled by a man in a uniform inhabiting a guardhouse. He ignored us and we were too busy looking at the birds to pay much attention to him. Occasionally an official looking pickup truck pulled up, he opened the gate to let it in, but always the gate closed soon after.

There was one pond to our left with a 20 metre buffer of thickets and trees between us and the water. To our right was a fringe of jungle and ahead to our right was a second pond, but overgrowing with thicket grasses and brush. We could see only one end of it by peering around the corner of the gate. This small, fenced in spot may seem like a poor excuse for a birding spot, but it wasn't. As in the morning, we were once again busy keeping track of the birds we saw: Red-crowned Woodpecker, like a small Red-bellied Woodpecker, obvious a member of the large Melanerpes genus. Panama doesn't have many woodpeckers. As far as I could see in our limited travels, the Red-crown was the most frequently encountered.

Figure 3. Rufescent Tiger-Heron. A juvenile at Ammo Ponds 16 Feb. 2014. Photo by Chris Siddle. 

As with any damp and semi-open spot flycatchers crowded in: Boat-billed, Social, Piratic, Streaked, and Dusky-capped flycatchers, as well as flycatchers called by other names such as the ubiquitous Tropical Kingbird and Great Kiskadee. The tyrant flycatchers are the largest family of birds in the New World and the largest family in Panama with at least 93 species present. Many are named for the colors: white, gold, sulphur, yellow, yellow-green, greenish, ochre, ochraceous, sepia, rufous, vermilion, olive, olivaceous, yellow-olive, bronze-olive, tawny, ruddy, rufous, rusty, brown, brownish, gray, slaty, sooty, dusky, black, and my favourite, the ever-so-specific 'bran-colored".  Many have 'flycatcher' as a common sort of surname, but others are named for their vocalizations like pewees, phoebes, and kiskadees. Several are named for the family's tendency to be bossy: tyrants, kingbirds, attila, and piratic flycatcher, while some are bossy but small: tyrannulets, and another favourite, pygmy-tyrants. Pygmy-tyrant! In a mere two words a character has been created. Some seem to have been named for accidental injuries: flatbill, bentbill and twistwing, but, of course, there are morphological and behavioral reasons for these names. Sometimes, and I love this, the species' name seems to reflect the taxonomist's exhaustion at dealing with so many drab little flycatchers. Take the Mouse-colored Tyrannulet. What colour is mouse-color, pray tell? Or how about the peevishness reflected in naming a bird the Paltry Tyrannulet?

Figure 4 - Green Honeycreepers, commonly seen from the top of the Canopy Tower. Photo by Chris Siddle. 

Variable and Yellow-bellied seedeaters flew to the marshy edge, while an adult Green Heron perched quite still above the water. Orange-chinned Parakeets rocketed overhead. We were to get good looks at the parakeets a few days later. A pair of Mangrove Swallows were investigating and open pipe on the gate as a possible nest site and a newly fledged Black-throated Mango juvenile was visited by a female. I overheard a couple of British birders discussing a "ruddy huge bittern" so I wasn't completely surprised when I spotted a pale juvenile Rufescent Tiger-Heron not long out of the nest. It still had a few downy feathers clinging to it. In the marsh edges were a Greater Ani and several Smooth-billed Anis, as well as Great-tailed Grackles and a Northern Waterthrush.

Rod Wark spotted a large mammal walking into openest part of the overgrown pond. This turned out to be a Lesser Capybara, likely the second largest rodent in the world (the Greater Capybara beating it by some pounds). It looked like a square-headed light brown beaver atop four long legs. It had a short mud bath then disappeared into the brush.

On the roadway and its edges were a few Buff-throated Saltators, Clay-colored Thrushes, Ruddy Ground-Doves and a White-tipped Dove, the same sad-voiced little pigeon common along the Lower Rio Grande in Texas.

Overhead were the ever Black and Turkey Vultures, and Gray-breasted Martins as well as a few Short-tailed Swifts and two Ospreys. Jen spotted a very large multi-colored squirrel - a Variegated Squirrel.

Before we left we added Crimson-backed Tanagers, Blue-gray Tanagers, Yellow-rumped Caciques, Rufous-tailed Hummingbirds, Baltimore Oriole, Tennessee Warblers, Red-legged Honeycreepers, a Common Tody-Flycatcher, two Golden-fronted Greenlets, two Blue Dacnis, a Mourning Warbler, and a Yellow-crowned Euphonia to the list.

Two of the final birds of our second day in Panama were a Ringed Kingfisher, the first of several we were to see, rattling over us at the foot of Semaphore Road and a Great Tinamou crying its weird, slightly Common Loon like quavering whistle from the forest surrounding the Canopy Tower at dusk.

Note - in my discussion of flycatcher names I omitted "elaenia" as one of the common "surnames'. The elaenias are common and widespread in the Neotropics and deserve mention but for the life of me I was unable to find out the derivation of the word "elaenia". Can anyone help me?

If you wish to comment on this post please do so via my email: chris.siddle@gmail.com

Panama - birding with an expert guide. Part One.

Panama - birding with an expert guide. Part One.

30 December 2013 - The forest was silent and full of snow. No movements, neither wind nor birds, disturbed the winter scene. I sighed and silently repeated the well known line from Richard III, "now is the winter of our discontent..." as so many other Canadians had done this season. Most people were unhappy with the unusually cold and severe weather that had plagued the nation, at least those parts east of the Rockies all the way to the last rock east of Newfoundland. To borrow from Shakespeare again, the winter winds had blown and cracked their cheeks, keeping at least nine of the ten provinces huddled beneath winter's frigid blasts, and even B.C. unseasonably cool for months.

Fig. 1 - The Red-mantled Howler Monkey, the species responsible for the impressive roaring that rose from the forest 30 mins. before dawn each morning. We spotted this male along Pipeline Road near the Rainforest Discovery Centre. Photo by Chris Siddle. 

As usual the Okanagan Valley had escaped real Canadian winter, whether its residents realized it or not. Oh, sure, there was the usual whining and whinging about how cold it was in Vernon, but, really, -20 or -25 C for a few days is nothing to complain about. But still I was unhappy, not because of any misconception that the winter was any harsher here than usual but because of one simple fact - the woods were almost empty of birds. Go for an hour's walk through the Douglas-firs and Ponderosa Pines and you would be hard pressed to find a flock of chickadees. Even Red-breasted Nuthatches which last winter were everywhere were hard to find. On a good day this winter one might turn up a couple of Golden-crowned Kinglets, maybe a Pacific Wren but there were few or no Pine Grosbeaks in the lowlands, no siskins, precious few goldfinches, only a scattering or individual Red Crossbills. The list of absent and missing went on and on.

And here I was deep in the woods along Highway 33 helping friends Mike Force, Tanya Seebacher, and Ann Gordon with the Big White Christmas Count. By the end of the day we could have written our complete day's list on a post-it note, and the day's best sighting was not of a bird, but of a Short-tailed Weasel which apparantly had taken up residence in a snow-covered pile of discarded Mule Deer bones. Happy is the weasel that can gnaw away all the winter long.

At the post-count gathering in a dingy pub in Rutland, the four parties compared their results. As usual Doug Brown had come through with the better birds, for he is willing to take on the longest and toughest routes, but even with Doug's list the count failed to stir any positive feelings within me. I was gloomily regarded the dregs in my cup of hot chocolate when Chris Charlesworth who runs AVOCET TOURS out of Kelowna said that he had to wait only six weeks before he was off to Panama.

Fig. 2 - Panama's Canopy Tower. Single rooms are on the second floor. Double-rooms are on the third. The fourth floor is the lounge, commons and dining area. Stairs led from the third floor to the tower's deck, around the big white soccer ball. Photo by Chris Siddle. 

"How many people have signed up?" I asked.

"Only four, but that's enough to cover my immediate costs. I'm really looking forward to those colourful Panamanian birds and some nice hot weather. I hate the cold."

Then I heard myself say, "Hey, would two more be a problem on the trip? I think I can talk Sonja into going."

This was a sudden high hope borne of desperation, but with only the minimum of whining, I was stunned when Sonja agreed that I should join the tour but that she wasn't interested in what she knew would be a hard core birding holiday. She checked Panama online but could find little that would offer her entertainment while I was stalking the rainforest paths. However, if I could find the money, I was free to go.

My copy of A Guide to the Birds of Panama by Robert Ridgely was a revised first edition from 1981. I could do better so I ordered Angehr and Dean's The Birds of Panama (2010) as well as Angehr, Engleman and Engleman's A Bird-Finding Guide to Panama (2008). I already had a subscription to the wonderful online resource, HBW Alive so I  spent the next few weeks printing colour plates of Panamanian birds based upon the plates from The Handbook of Birds of the World (16 volumes). All one has to do with HBW Alive is look up a bird family, apply the geographical filter, in this case Panama, and at the press of a computer key a plate of species is produced, with or without common and scientific names. It's a convenient way to learn one's birds before the trip, though I think flash cards made by cutting up an extra copies of a foreign field guide ultimately work better for me. (I can hear the shocked intake of breath. Cut up a book? Cut up a field guide! Yes, darling, they do print more than one copy of the book. Ever visited a book warehouse? Ever shopped in a bookstore that sells remainders?)

On 14 February, 2014, Chris Charlesworth, Candice Eikermann, Rod Wark and I met at the Kelowna Airport for the first of the flight that would land us in Panama City the next morning at 8 AM. Shirley Coffin of Trail joined us in Seattle and we picked up the last three members of the tour at a hotel near Panama's Tocumen Airport, Margaret Bryan of Kelowna, and Karl Brunner and Jen Dusting of North Vancouver. Candice, Rod, Margaret and I were old hands with Chris's tours, while Shirley, Karl and Jen were new clients. Karl and Jen were new to the world of birds and birding. Boy, were they in for some surprises!

Chris Charlesworth had put two years of planning into this trip and it showed. He had booked our accomodations with the famous Canopy Tower company, who picked us up at the airport and looked after us for our entire stay. No details were too small for the staff. We had excellent food, good rooms, good transportation and a world-class bird guide as well as several other bird and nature guides at our disposal every day.

The Canopy Tower has been covered so frequently in the media that I won't go into detail about it here. If you're interested, check out the company's website which includes a profile of the company's president, Raul Arias de Para, a gracious man who ate several meals with us at the Lodge. After his purchase and conversion of the United States radio/radar tower in Soberania National Park into a hotel in 1995, he built the Canopy Lodge near El Valle in the highlands west of the canal. We stayed in the Canopy Tower for 7 nights and the Canopy Lodge for 4 nights. The only disadvantage to such first-class treatment where a highly efficient staff looked after us is having to return to everyday life at the end of the vacation. (And, of course, having to navigate the petty officious complexities of grubby airports makes one's return to everyday life just that extra bit nasty.)

When we arrived at the Tower we met out bird guide Carlos Bethancourt. Carlos is Panamanian and proud of his country. He's also very personable. Over the next 12 days he was to prove to be the consummate professional. I have never seen anyone as able to spot birds, often very small green or brown birds, in the dense understory or high in the canopy of the forest and get a  scope trained on them as quickly as Carlos does. And I swear he is a bit of a magician for once a bird was visible in the scope, it usually stayed still long enough for 7 other people to see it. I have done my share of guiding and I have carried a scope since 1976 but in the three days that I attempted to find tropical species alongside Carlos I was an absolute failure. I was still adjusting tripod legs and hadn't even tried to find the bird in the scope yet by the time Carlos was set up and showing people the Purple-legged Scalp-tingler or whatever. From Day 4 onwards, unless we were scheduled to go near a pond or to the coast, I left my scope in my room and trusted Carlos would find the birds far faster than I could. However, I did notice that Chris Charlesworth was rapidly learning Carlos's techniques and by the middle of the tour we could count on at least two scopes on the bird. In addition, other guides from the Canopy company, like the excellent Moyo or Cesar, the raptorphile, were often along to provide an additional scope and excellent identification advice.

The great thing about the tower, aside from the good food and excellent service, is its flat roof-deck poking up in the middle of an otherwise unbroken forest canopy atop Semaphore Hill in Soberania National Park. At the very least one one can witness the fast dawn of the tropics, see the distant city of Panama and the Canal and hear the deep roaring of Red-mantled Howler Monkeys, the frog-like croaks of Keel-billed Toucans, the screechings of Mealy  and Red-naped parrots, the vireo-like song of the Lesser Greenlet, and the three clear whistles of the devilishly hard to spot Green Shrike-Vireo. Some of the easier to spot birds might include the Plain-colored Tanager, Green Honeycreeper, and a wintering Bay-breasted Warbler or two. A pretty and loud song might be coming from a Palm Tanager, three of which liked to forage around the railings of the deck. As the day warms Black and Turkey vultures pass overhead, a local Short-tailed Hawk often hidden among them. It always pays to check vulture kettles: on our first day I spotted an adult King Vulture among them and the next day at noon figured out that the very large raptor high above, showing only traces of light color in its wingpits, was an immature King.

For the next two hours every dry morning it's one surprise after another, depending, I suppose, upon the season and which trees are flowering or bearing ripe fruit near the Tower. Mammals that we spotted in the canopy during our seven day stay included a Northern Tamandua, a Brown-throated Three-toed Sloth, a Variegated Squirrel, and Geoffrey's Tamarins, bare-faced little primates with naked dark faces and extravagant chestnut mullets.

The staff at the Tower feed hummingbirds with a series a feeders near the main entrance on the first floor. While we were there the most common hummingbird was the large White-necked Jacobin. We got used to seeing the purple-headed males flashing the large white tail patches at each other while they competed for places at the feeder. Since most Panamanian hummers are predominately green, I greedily tried to turn the green female jacobin into a new species for my checklist, but more knowledgeable birders prevailed and corrected my misidentification.

A single Long-tailed Hermit appeared at the feeders once every 30 minutes or so. This hermit is the Long-billed Curlew of its tribe with a long thin impressively curved bill as well as long white central tail feathers. What a beauty.

Fig. 3 - Most tanagers are colourful but not the well named Plain-colored Tanager, common around the Tower. Photo by Chris Siddle

I was lucky enough to be one of few guests to glimpse a White-vented Plumeleteer, a medium-green hummer with a black tail and white undertail coverts.

After a day to recuperate from our all night flight from Las Vegas to Panama, we were ready for Carlos Bethancourt to lead us on our first full day of birding in the field.

To be continued.

Send comments to chris.siddle@gmail.com

Our Hunt for the Daffy Duck

This is the story of a twitch and the lessons that emerged from it.  Most of you know what a twitch is but for those who think it means an involuntary muscular movement usually of the face, please know that a twitch in the birding world is a fast trip to see a rare bird. The bird is usually one that is out of its usual range, a stray, a "vagrant" as we call it, and though some rare strays adapt to their new homes and stay put for long periods of time, most vagrants occur at the location of discovery only a day or two and then disappear for places unknown. Thus speed is of the essence. That's why the decision to make a twitch must be done quickly and why the trip almost always has a rushed feeling.

OK, it's not a Baikal Teal. It's a male Cinnamon Teal near Vernon in June, just beginning to lose his spring finery as he starts his molt into female-like eclipse plumage. 

My friend Chris texted me Saturday morning, 8 March just as I was starting my exercises in the basement of my Vernon home. "I'm feeling twitchy" he texted, and since I had checked the B.C. Rare Bird Alert the night before I knew he was referring to a Baikal Teal that Russ Cannings had spotted near Nanaimo Friday. I shared the text with my wife Sonja who immediately pointed out that it was March, a relatively quiet time for birds in the Okanagan and that I didn't seem to have anything important on for the weekend, so why didn't I go for it. "You'll travel thousands of miles for a Colima Warbler. What's 1000 km for a Baikal Teal?"

Indeed, why not? I texted Chris that I would pick him up at his apartment in Kelowna in about an hour and fifteen minutes, which I did. And sharing the driving of my wife's trusty 2000 Subaru we braved the Coquihalla Connector which was nice and dry and then Highway 5 where the rain began, as usual, where the toll booths used to be. As we descended into the Fraser Valley, the rain moved through a sleety state of steadiness, through heavy to a monsoon deluge and for the next three and half hours the wipers were slapping away on high while we hydro-planed down Highway 1 to Horseshoe Bay where we were lucky enough to squeeze onto the 5 PM ferry to Nanaimo.

Once snug in our hotel room, Chris phoned Russ who arranged to meet us the next morning at a coffee shop not far from the fields where he had spotted the teal Friday and early Saturday morning. The good news was that the rain was forecast to stop overnight.

Sunday was time change day. This event threatened to rob Russ of an hour of the sleep that young men find so sweet, so he postponed our meeting. No problem: we followed the instructions on the B.C. Rare Bird Alert to the farm lane which led to the field where the Baikal had been feeding with North American Green-winged Teals. A large yellow front-end loader blocked the lane. Propped against the machine was a piece of cardboard requesting people to stay out because the farmers' cows were calving. As Chris and I regarded the sign two shotgun blasts originating from the very field we sought ripped the early morning peace asunder. Interesting cows, I thought, that can be lulled into giving birth by surprise gunshots but abort upon the sight of a scope-lugging Tilly-hatted birder. Curious country ways.

So no guide, no access, and waterfowl taking fire from unseen sportsmen. We consulted our B.C. Rare Bird notes again and walked  rocky path down to a lookout overlooking the Nanaimo estuary from the side of Highway 19. In the next hour we were joined by about 25 other birders, most of them on a Brant festival trip from Victoria who had stopped by as the news of the errant teal spread so that even 70 year olds without computers were hearing of its occurrence. Russ appeared and addressed many of us, telling us the story of the teal. Then as gently and diplomatically as possible Russ dropped the H Bomb.

H stands for hybrid, and a hybrid is the very bad news indeed for a lister. A hybrid may be the product of the mating of two attractive and fascinating fowl, but it counts for naught, because it isn't pure one thing or the other. Hybrids are freaks, unvalued violations of our unwritten code that species should stick to their own kind. Say a Spotted Towhee produced a nice healthy offspring with a Dark-eyed Junco. The resulting bird may be pretty and fill your yard with unique warbles and pretty trills and the mating might be of interest to a scientist, but what does a lister do with the bird? There's no place on his list for it.

Russ explained how he was scoping the original Green-winged Teal flock back on Friday when BAM there it was, a Baikal Teal drake in breeding plumage. Being one of the younger generation inseparable from his cell phone, he phoned his father, ornithologist, Richard Cannings, who opened a field guide and described to son Russ what the field marks were. Son, unfortunately, focused on the duck's body, more than its head, and so for a little while it seemed to be a "good bird" though the length of the bird's tail bothered Russ. Later when someone produced a photograph of the bird taken from a distance, people, including Russ began to worry about the bird's face. The facial pattern just didn't look right, not the long narrow white slightly flattened circle bordering the bird's face, surrounding a big green crescent behind the eye, and two tan commas facing each other and separated by a thin black line below the eye.

Chris and I saw one photo of the bird. The bird looked too big, its neck too long, and the facial pattern all wrong. Although we tried scanning from Duke Point at a second location that morning, we didn't find the bird. Eventually we had to start for home. The duck was seen Sunday, late in the afternoon, but by then we were driving through Hope.

It's interesting and perhaps understandable that the first birders who responded to Russ's immediate phone calls to the birding community didn't question the bird's identity. Several of these heavy hitters unthinkingly accepted the bird as a Baikal Teal, high-fived each other and moved on. It is to Russ's credit that he and a few others looked critically at the meagre photographic evidence available on Friday and Saturday and started to worn birders that the possibility that this birds was a hybrid existed.
For Chris and I however the warning came too late, but that's a risk twitchers face.

As a retired teacher, I ask what can birders learn from the Baikal Teal episode. Well, carry a field guide that shows the vagrants that have reached our shores. By chance a new guide has just been published, The Rare Birds of North American. It would fit in the car nicely.

Secondly, study field guides like The Rare Birds of North America. Be prepared. Learn which vagrants are most likely to occur in your area. Do you know, for example, that there are multiple records of Brambling, a Eurasian finch, in British Columbia in winter and that your chances are much higher of encountering a Brambling than say a Lucy's Warbler, which is a native North American but lives in the deserts of the American Southwest. Another stray you could reasonably expect is the Little Bunting, much, much more rare than the Brambling, but also easier to overlook. It would be awfully easy to misidentify a Little Bunting as some kind of native sparrow unless you had studied the bird's plumages ahead of time. Studying foreign field guides for places like northeast Asia prepares the birder for the unexpected.

Thirdly, if you do encounter a bird that may be a rarity, get as many photos of its from as many angles as you can, and take field notes to record the things that may be subject to the vagaries of light and shadow. Note behavior, colour, pattern, vocalizations, as well as external factors like time of day, foraging habitat, and weather.

Fourthly, make as few assumptions as possible. And most importantly don't assume because most of the birds in a flock are American Green-winged Teal, for example, that all the birds in the flock are Green-winged Teal. Look at every single bird possible. Here's where studying plumages ahead of time pays off. The more you know, the faster the bird that is different will stand out.

Fifthly, if you strongly suspect that you have a bona fide rarity, get on the phone fast to alert other birders so that they can see it too. However, if you aren't sure about the identity of a bird may be bring in just a buddy or two to have a critical look before you alert the nation. This is much easier said than done, of course, and I do not mean to suggest a criticism of Russ Cannings in this paragraph.

I am writing this on Monday, 10 March, 2014. For all I know further photographs will reveal that the Nanaimo Baikal Teal is the real deal, perhaps wearing some obscure, seldom shown immature first winter male plumage and everyone who saw it will be satisfied. There could be a happy ending for some of the twitchers. However either way, whether the duck is pure Baikal or a daffy looking mix of Baikal and some other duck, my points about being prepared will still stand and if practiced will make you a better birder.







b

Red-tailed Hawks in B.C.'s Southern Interior.

Red-tailed Hawks in B.C.'s Interior

1. What constitutes usual versus unusual plumage? 

Figure 1 - RTHA - light morph white-chested adult with medium belly band. Photo taken in Nov. 2013, courtesy of Rick Howie.

Things to consider when describing a Red-tailed Hawk:
1. colour of chest
2. colour of chin
3. extent and darkness of the belly band
4. colour of upperparts
5. presence and extent of pale scapular patch
6. eye colour
7. background colour of uppersurface of the tail
8. presence or absence of a broad band on the trailing edge of the wing.
9. presence of patagial mark

 I would consider the Red-tailed Hawk in Figure 1 to be quite typical for many Red-tails in the southern interior of B.C. A variation on this basic light morph-light chest theme is shown in Figure 2. 

Figure 2 Adult light morph Red-tailed Hawk, Kamloops area. Buffy chested with medium belly band. Photo courtesy of Rick Howie.

Most of our local adult Red-tails have tawny or white breasts. However adults with brick-red breasts, dull brown breasts, and brown and white streaked breasts do occur.

The majority of our light morph adults show belly bands made up of dark feathers lined vertically across the birds' lower undersides. Across the spectrum of red-tail types belly bands can range absent to completely black. Brian Wheeler, famed raptor expert, writes that a belly band is characteristic of the Western Red-tailed Hawk, Buteo jamaicensis calurus.

Here are three examples of fairly typical western type Red-tails with different belly bands:

Three RTHAs photographed northwest of Swan Lake, N. Okanagan, 4 Dec 2013 by CS. 

Now for a very unusual plumage seen recently in the Kamloops area.

Check out the bird in Figure 3. This bird looks much like an eastern Red-tailed Hawk, Buteo jamaicensis borealis, but was photographed in November 2013 in the Kamloops area by Rick Howie.
Notice the single subterminal tail band, the white throat (as opposed to the bird in Figure 2), and the delicate belly band. What a stunner!

Figure 3 - Rick's eastern type RTHA, Kamloops area, Nov. 2013

Figure 4 also shows this same bird.

Figure 4 - Rick's eastern type RTHA- another view

Contrast this bird with the hawk in Figure 1. With the kind of variation by our Red-tails, it's little wonder that beginning birders have trouble identifying hawks. 

2. More images to ponder: what follows is a gallery of Red-tailed Hawks photographed locally. Consider the effects that age, morph or "colour phase" molt and fading play in producing the huge variety of Red-tailed Hawk plumages we see in our study area.

Figure 5 - A dark morph adult RTHA at Westwold, 21 Nov. 2013. Photo by Chris Siddle

Figure 6 - a black RTHA, possibly a Harlan's Hawk. Douglas Lake, 21 Nov. 2013.

Figure 7 - This RTHA lived around the base of Silver Star Mountain during the spring and summer of 2013. It appeared to be an intermediate morph with a very poorly defined belly band. However, it was the apparent general faded aspect of this individual that set it apart. It was paired with a "normal" light morph adult. Mid August 2013. Ph - C S.

Figure 9 - A RTHA adult, judging by the broad band on the trailing edge of the wings, in molty plumage, especially the tail. Vernon, August, 2013. Ph - CS.  

Figure 8 - Note the poorly developed, narrow band along the trailing edge of the wing. This is characteristic of an immature as are the light eyes. An adult shows a dark broad trailing edge as in Figure 5. Okanagan Landing, 11 Nov. 2013. Photo by Chris Siddle.


                                                                                                                                         
     
Any comments? Please email your comments to chris.siddle@gmail.com.

Fall Birding on St. Paul Island - Part Four.

Fall Birding on St. Paul Island - Part Four. 

The story so far: I was a participant in an ABA tour of St. Paul Island in the Pribilof Islands from 18-26 September, 2012. Part Four concludes my account of the tour.

21 September 2013, continued.

We were introduced to the Crab Pots which sounded like a great name for a local bar band, but were actually crab traps made of metal framing, wire and rope. The traps were stacked high like very tall book cases in semi-orderly rows on flat ground close to the Salt Lagoon near town. The grass grew long around the main stacks and today, under the direction of Maestro Gavin Bieber, Mark Faries and Chris Hitt volunteered to walk up and down the rows to flush out birds while the rest of us waited around the outside like eager bird dogs. This afternoon produced familiarity with the routine but no birds.

The crab traps.

Gavin took us to the Antone Putchkie Patch where our chorus line repeatedly flushed a terrified late Yellow Warbler into hiding in the sedges at Mark’s feet.

 

Dance fever abated, we returned to the Grey-streaked Flycatcher rock pit on Polovina where the flycatcher didn’t appear. Full marks to the guides for persistence of effort though.

And our last stop of the evening (we thought) was Tim’s Pond where Doug, Chris Hitt, and Corrine had a walking race around its margin and flushed another Common Snipe, four Sharp-tailed Sandpipers and a couple of Green-winged Teals.

Back at the New King Eider we were taking off our togs and beginning to settle for a short session of socializing before sleep when Scott appeared like a drill sergeant on a mission to surprise raw recruits, stomping down the hotel hallway yelling, “Everybody up. Everybody out. Rosefinch! Rosefinch! Really rare! Rosefinch! Get on the bus!”

And that’s how we ended up marching in lines across rolling terrain east of town. We hiked up and down old stabilized sand dunes covered with short tundra-like vegetation which made the area resemble a golf course. We saw the sun go down and night rise from the Bering Sea, with a breeze bringing the the barking of fur seals intermittently to our cold ears. We scrutinized everything that flew or hopped in front of us down hill and dale and back up. During the New King Eider Hotel roust, some of us had managed to put on appropriate clothing, some of us had managed to grab only a sweater, Mark had only flipflops on his feet, Doreene had wet hair from her interrupted shower… but we were all smiling at the chance of finding a small songbird that Doug and Scott had glimpsed an hour earlier, a small Asian songbird… and even though we didn’t find the bird, you know it was a fine way to end a day in which we had already seen a very special eagle.

It was not unusual to spot a pair of Orcas off any of the fur seal beaches. 

22 September 2013 

The pace and scope of discovery was slowing, of course, as we had seen the puffins, the fulmars, the shearwaters and other seabirds, the eagle, an Asian stray, and a couple of Alaskan specialties already. Now was the time to slow down and get a better sense of the island. At least that was how some of us felt. The guides seemed locked into their rarity search methodology and a few of the hard core listers stifled their impatience waiting for the guides’ strategy to pay off as it had with the discovery of Middendorff’s Grasshopper Warbler and other strays so far this late summer and autumn.  I don’t want to create opposing camps where none existed. Let’s be honest. I think everyone was a lister. However, for some who had never been to one or more of the Alaskan islands before each day had new meaning, new sights, new sounds, and between rare birds we needed time to take in the novelty of just being on St. Paul Island. Today we had a near perfect day for it – calm mostly, with sunny periods and high thin smears of cloud. No rain fell until just before dark.

We started at East Landing where an adult Thayer’s Gull standing on the boat launch was new to our island list. The Salt Lagoon near town held Rock Sandpipers, Ruddy Turnstones and some Western Sandpipers, also new to the list. A Peregrine over the cliffs toward the Reef Rookery was only our second of the tour.  From the Crab Pots twenty Rosy Finches peered at us from around the traps and a small flock of Hoary Redpolls was flushed out. On the nearby Salt Lagoon a fair bit of excitement prevailed among the birders, especially those who had never neen to any of the islands of  Alaska before when two tattlers appeared along the very minimal shore. Gavin went to work, not truly happy to have to opt out of Scott and Doug’s efforts to find Asian passerines. After telling us that the only good way to distinguish Gray-tailed Tattlers from your basic prosaic Wandering Tattler was by voice Gavin hiked across some shore to flush the first tattler toward us. As it vocalized softly, Gavin identified it as a Gray-tailed, my first for North America. A second Gray-tail appeared nearby.

By mid-morning conditions were deemed right to resume the search for the Rosefinch. We lined out as instructed and walked across the tundra. A few minutes into our tromp we were ordered to stop. About 70 metres in front of us, perched on a tall stalk was our bird, a female Common Rosefinch, looking much like a House Finch (it belongs to the same genus) without the streaks on the underparts. OK, visually nowhere near the same class of exciting life bird as the White-tailed Eagle.

After lunch we finally re-located the Pavolina Grey-streaked Flycatcher and I was able finally to get a good look at it through a scope. Thanks, Gavin, Scott and Doug, for your repeated efforts to pin down this active, shy little bird.

We started toward Northeast Point when a message came through to Gavin that Scott had briefly encountered an unidentified finch in the big pit on Pavolina Hill and needed help to re-locate it. So back to Pavolina we returned and while waiting for Doug to scout the slopes above the pit we were treated to another sighting of the White-tailed Eagle, this one prolonged and highly satisfying. The eagle soared in circles low over us in brilliant sunlight for a couple of minutes. Wow!

Scott’s mystery finch never showed, so after watching Doug thoroughly search the slope above us, we clambered back into the bus and drove once again toward Northeast Point.

The routine was always the same at Northeast Point. Check Hutchinson’s Hill and its notch above the seal colony, silently and individually pay our respects to the U.S. Navy sailor, James Heath, Gunner’s Mate, First Class, who lay in his lonely grave so far from home, walk back toward the bus, line out according to Gavin or Scott’s instructions and walk through the big putchkie patches on either side of the road, check Webster’s Beach and the little bay, climb the little hill to Webster House, and either walk around Webster Lake or hang out at Webster House watching the buntings, longspur and rosy finches forage around the pile of wooden pallets.

On the way back to town I glanced east over the ocean between St. Paul and a small island and simultaneously two Orcas broke the surface with their tall dorsal fins, a fitting end to the afternoon.

Three other birders were on St. Paul at the same time that we were. They were Paul Sykes, Larry Peavler, and a young fellow who was identified to me as Tennessee Mike. They drove around in a little white Japanese import that according to Larry was corroding so fast in St. Paul’s salty sea air that the rust could be seen devouring the car’s panels. Paul is a well known birder and birding guide, a retired biologist who once worked to conserve Snail Kite among other species.  His ABA life list is one of the longest known to exist. He has visited the islands of Alaska in spring and fall dozens of times as has his buddy, Larry Peavler who also had an enormous list. Tennessee Mike was a fair bit younger than Paul and Larry but somehow I didn’t even catch Mike’s last name.

   

Paul, Larry and Mike had seen an Eye-browed Thrush, an American Robin-like bird that’s paler, slimmer, and most importantly not North American. It’s a casual northeast Asian migrant through the Pribilofs, and a desireable addition to anyone’s list. They had seen the bird in St. Paul’s quarry, a location that we were soon to grow familiar with but never used to.

The thing about the St. Paul quarry is that it looks so other worldish that it resembles a movie location for an episode of, say, Lord of the Rings. Its boulders and the dark spaces between seem the home of spirits aware that strangers were trespassing.

“Good place for an ambush,” Doug said as he stood atop a pale boulder on one side of the narrow canyon and peered down at us looking up at him from the stony path that wound its way through the quarry.  Gavin had us walking quietly up a sort of mini-Valley of the Shadow, part of the quarry that hadn’t been used for years. After digging out and piling up boulders 10 to 20 feet high on either side, the quarry workers had left the place to Mother Nature who had tried to heal the scars with moss, and other low growing plants, giving the place an air of frozen tumult and mystery. The place was spooky, with moss growing over the rocks concealing gaps into which a hiker might easily slip his foot and break an ankle.

“Do NOT climb on the rocks. I DO NOT want anyone hurt!’ Gavin was speaking to us as if we were a pack of attention-deficit six year olds, an entirely appropriate tone to use with listers. A little blue Arctic Fox spied upon us from the ridge to the right. Likely in its short, hard life it had never seen such a large group of humans invade its territory, and in that opportunistic way of scavengers the fox needed to know if we were leaving anything edible behind. Gray-crowned Rosy Finches watching us from the tops of the rocks and suddenly burst into short flights ahead of us. Among them were individual Snow Buntings and Lapland Longspurs. Halfway up the defile the Eyebrowed Thrush materialized out of nowhere, flew around some boulders and perched very briefly, only long enough for two birders besides Gavin to see it.

When some birders in a tour see a bird while others miss it, the tone can turn ugly. Lifer-inequality becomes the source of trouble, with a capital T.  There can be tension, murmurings, discontent, even among our well behaved group. After losing the thrush in the boulders, we still hoped that we could re-locate it. Doug, our permanent flanker, found the bird again but up high almost on the ridge. Certainly WE couldn’t see it though we could see Doug looking at something, something WE wanted to look at too. The damned bird wouldn’t allow itself to be herded into view, and eventually it shook Doug off its trail. We came back to the haunted quarry on twice on 23 September, and again on 24 September and 25 September but never re-located the thrush.

At Southwest Point  a huge Steller’s Sea Lion had come ashore, though mostly it was hidden behind a reef. Even so, his big square head made him easy to differentiate from the pointed-faced fur seals.

Steller's Sea Lion - named for the German naturalist who accompanied the Russians during their voyage of discovery of the Pribilofs. 

After lunch we switched the bus for two vans and proceeded to Northwest Point and Marunich, the former site of a Walrus colony. Here we hiked along the top of a short cliff backing a narrow boulder beach. Offshore a raft of 60 King Eiders swam closely packed. Other birds included a Yellow-billed Loon way out and very hard to see, a Red-necked Grebe, a White-winged Scoter, and a Wandering Tattler which flew down the beach calling loudly. Watching us were Harbour Seals bobbing just beyond the surf. Among the Glaucous-winged Gulls was what I identified as a first-year American Herring Gull. A Red-throated Pipit flew up in front of the guides but I missed it.

After supper our destination was Northeast Point as usual. The routine, described elsewhere, was wonderfully shattered when a tiny bird leapt up from the putchkie in front of our chorus line and after a few metres of fluttery flight dove back into the vegetation. Someone – Scott maybe – uttered the sweetest words I had heard for days, “Old World warbler! Let’s get on it!”

Old World warbler in a putchkie patch. Electrifying reality, especially since I had NO Old World warblers of any species on my ABA list.

The situation was complicated by a couple of factors. First and most basic was that I was standing on the road with four others birders who, like me, had been … well … rather slow to join either of the lines of putchkie marchers. In fact, we had stayed on the road and since the road was a good metre lower than the vicinity of the warbler we delinquents were in danger of being punished for our reluctance to join the chorus lines in the first place. The warbler was not visible from our location. Second, even when Scott and Doug somehow got us to shut up and move VERY SLOWLY into a place where we had a chance of seeing the warbler, whatever it was, there were no landmarks which is pretty typical of a good, thick putchkie patch. No saplings, no mini snags, not even distinct tussocks of grass broke up the monotonous mess of knee high vegetation. In the middle of a good stand of putchkie there’s nothing but putchkie and sedges. Most putchkies are shaped pretty much like all their brothers and sisters. You can try saying something like, “See that really tall putchkie? OK, about 4 metres to the right there’s a small spider web. Two metres in front of that there’s a putchkie that looks a bit like a Christmas tree. The bird is in THAT PUTCHKIE, but you can’t see him right now.”

QUESTION: How long is a metre?

QUESTION: Do you mean the tallest putchkie, or just one of the tall ones?

QUESTION: You said a little spider web. Is the spider little or is the web little?

QUESTION: What kind of Christmas tree. We always get a Douglas-fir. Its branch ends sweep up a little. Do you mean like that?

Eventually most people got onto the right general area, and the warbler, which was gleaning the putchkie stalks and branches fairly energetically, gave himself away by his movements. Finally everyone was “on” the bird and I could hear Robeck, Laura and Doug occasionally firing off some digital frames. Whichever species our warbler was, he was going to be well documented.

As the thrill of the chase was replaced by the anticipation of identification, Scott tentatively labeled our bird an Arctic Warbler, a casual migrant to St. Paul and as I am sure my readers are aware a regular breeding species in parts of Alaska and the Yukon. For me, however, it was still my first New World Old World warbler.

There was for me a great deal of satisfaction knowing that none of us got any closer than 10 metres to our Arctic Warbler. Except for the initial flushing, the bird was totally undisturbed by 20 very quiet people staring at him from respectful distances. Finally we agreed to leave him to the peace and quiet of his putchkie patch. It was a good way to end the day.

24 September - Wind and rain all day. We tried a sea watch at Zoltoi Reef. Huddling in the lee of a big piece of volcanic rock, those closest to the rock stayed out of the wind more or less, but those of us in the outer ring had little or no shelter. A Sabine’s Gull was new for the day, the first of two or three today.

The quarry was our next stop. Spooky place. No thrush. An Arctic Fox glanced at me as I slogged past in my rainwear as if to say. “You guys, again. Suckers for punishment, aren’t you?”

Arctic Fox - several other tour members have photos just like this one of a fox that was feeding on the dead Gray Whale at Southwest Point. 

We tried another seawatch, this one from beside the bus at the end of the road near Southwest Point.

Then once again we tried Zoltoi Reef. As the first birders approached the boulder a Least Auklet was spotted flying just above the surf. If I could have gotten my binoculars on it, I could have had a decent view of the little bird, but my tripod and scope tangled in the chin strap of my rain hat and even though I tore the strap apart trying to get the tripod off my shoulders, the auklet was gone by the time I stood hatless, soaked and cursing.

An Arctic/Pacific Loon flew by. Big bird. Doug snapped a couple of images which revealed that the loon was probably a Pacific. Drat.

Northeast Point for the afternoon. I stopped taking notes, a sure sign that I was getting discouraged. However on the jolting bus ride back over the dunes in the late afternoon, I did score a good look at my first American Pipit of the japonicus race, a small striped bird standing by a puddle on the edge of the rain soaked road. It’s quite a distinctive bird and one in the bank pending its split from American Pipit  and elevation to full species status in the future.

   

After supper at the Zoltoi Reef seawatch an all dark Parasitic Jaeger powered in from the east and I was the first to call it. I realized it was the only bird I called for the whole trip. That how sharp eyed our guides and the other participants on the tour were. 

The wind and the rain had not let up and I was snuggled into my coat back in the bus and was talking to a few other less than stalwart souls when I noticed a large fur seal coming down the sandy road immediately toward the front of the bus. This seal was getting far too close and clearly not happy with our presence. Laura and Ro stood just outside the door to take some shoots, but I suggested they get back in because fur seals can give severe bites. I honked the bus horn and the seal turned around as if to head back down the beach to the sea, but like a little kid he stopped and peaked over his shoulder as if to see if we were taking him seriously or not. He was still drawn towards the bus though but afraid of the horn perhaps for now he lay prone in the middle of the road with his front flippers straight out as if about to be frisked, frozen in a posture of frustration, neither willing to advance nor wanting to retreat. 

My second bout of honking brought Scott to the bus. He glanced at the fur seal and sized up the situation immediately. “We’re blocking his way to the colony,” Scott said as he slide behind the wheel and eased the bus backwards a few meters, clearing a way across the sand for the seal. The fur seal got up from the centre of the road, humped by our front passenger fender and gave us a look like “Was that too much to ask for?” and continued down the sandy slope to join the 600 other fur seals in his colony.  

25 September – Early during my final morning on the island the guides told us the Pen Air was unable to supply us with a flight off the island today.

My, oh my. I had led a sheltered life. I had never had to deal with a cancelled flight before. What did I have to do? For many of my fellow tour participants such an event was commonplace. Pen Air did not have a sterling reputation for service you could always count on. Never forget to get trip insurance because you’ll need it for the extra costs incurred when you book new flights, hotels and connections.

As a result of the sudden change, change not being a close friend of mine, I was in a bit of a fog most of my last day on St. Paul. However, we now had extra time for a trip to a fur seal colony. Standing in the wooden view shelter Gavin took questions and informed those of us who were interested about the fascinating life history of the Northern Fur Seal. I listened as I took dozens of pictures of silvery two-month old pups and their mothers.

That's the spot! Molting can be an itchy business. Northern Fur Seal pup at the Reef Rookery. 

 When we arrived back at the airport/hotel where several of us needed to use the computer or the telephones, a Gray-streaked Flycatcher suddenly appeared on the south side of the building, perhaps seeking shelter from the wind. Most of us got good looks at this vagrant before entering the hotel.

The afternoon was taken up with another visit to Southwest point where a pair of Aleutian Cackling Geese warily watched us from the tundra and a Yellow-billed Loon flew past the rocky shore. Our one and only visit to the Bone Dump was enlivened by the opportunity for some of us to slide down the slick grass of a hillside.

Antone Putchkie Patch was empty of vagrants. But Antone Pond held several Brant, our first and final.

Our final walk up the valley in the quarry produced only the usual Rosy Finches, Snow Buntings and Lapland Longspurs, but no Eye-browed Thrush.

Our last visit to Northeast Point produced nothing new.  After paying my last respects to James Heath, a very grave fellow, I wondered back toward the bus and realized that I was leaving something behind on St. Paul. It was the right hand of my favourite pair of leather gloves. It had stayed with me through 7 days of rain, wind, and cold, being taken off and shoved into a pocket time after time, only to go missing during my last hours in the field. Somewhere between Hutchinson Hill and the Arctic Warbler putchkie patch lies my glove, the soft leather hardening and slowly decomposing even now.

26 September – I woke even earlier than usual and wrote a silly note about putchkie and posted it on the bulletin board in the empty, still silent hotel hallway.  About two thirds of our tour were staying for another week. I was among only six who were beginning their journeys home today. 

Like a typical airport almost everywhere, the St. Paul airport insisted we who were soon to depart had to be ready to get on the plane even though it was still hours from landing on the island. In the fusty overheated waiting area which also served as the lobby of the airport, I relaxed, enjoying an early morning drowsiness and dreamed of a time when I would return to St. Paul Island. It would have to be in the spring or the early summer. I wanted to see the Least Auklet and his relatives in their breeding plumage. Yes, and I wanted to hear the bellowing of the fur seal beachmasters as they fought to keep their harems together. And I wanted to hear the sweet singing of longspurs and Snow Buntings, and the wind blowing over the putchkie which would be perhaps greener and more tender in the spring. And I needed to find that glove...

Putchkie

ERRATA: Many apologies to Mike and Corrine SCHALL of Bath, PA. I butchered their surname in Part 3.

If you have COMMENTS please send them to chris.siddle@gmail.com

Be sure to check out Laura Keene’s photos at http://flickr.com/gp/keeneone/c6jbV1/