The Oak Titmouse, pictured above (click on photos for full sized images), would be a California endemic if not for its spill over into Southern Oregon and Baja California. Range map courtesy of Nature Serve.

They are a non-migratory, cavity nesting species that mate for life and at least two pair have been nesting on my property every year since I’ve lived here!

I have three bluebird trails that I monitor every year and the Oak Titmouse is always the first species taking up residence on two of those trails. They may be small at only 5 3/4 inches but they are not timid and they don’t seem to take any guff from other birds, even much larger more aggressive species.

When I checked my nest boxes, just a few days ago, I was pretty sure that it was nearing time for these nestlings to fledge. I had never been able to catch this event on film so I took my camera and camcorder to the nest site and waited.

This first video was filmed late Saturday, only a few hours before sunset. In it you will see the adults bringing small offerings to the nest box entrance, then backing away.

Normally the parents dive into the nest box with a beak full of food and shortly afterward exit with a fecal sac to discard. This behavior of showing up at the entrance and backing off, calling the nestlings from a nearby branch, convinced me that they were trying to coax them from the nest.

After being unsuccessful at luring the youngsters out, the adults went back to feeding them. But the nestlings did come to the cavity entrance and peek out.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK7p0WYN2u0

I was pretty sure that Sunday morning would be the best time to witness the Oak Titmouse nestlings fledge, so I headed back to the nest site at sunrise. I grabbed a shot of one of the parents with a worm while they were still feeding the chicks.

This behavior of teasing the nestlings with food and retreating to a nearby branch and calling them seems to be a common practice for many cavity nesting species.

At the beginning of this video, you will hear the adults giving their typical snibit, snibit, snibit call as the chicks come to the entrance and answer back.

At the 1:40 mark, a pair of White-breasted Nuthatches, which are just beginning to build a nest a hundred yards away, visit the nest box and one of them actually peers into the box!

At the 3:15 mark, both adults are at the nest at the same time. They had been going in and out of the nest in rapid succession, a behavior I had not witnessed but I imagine they could be enticing the youngsters to fly out and demonstrating their technique.

At the 5:25 mark, the first nestling takes to the air. The other four followed within 30 minutes of this bravest sibling.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT1ZUiY_pXU

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Be glad you aren’t a Fish Crow flying over reed beds!

*I got myself the sweet, sweet, Canon 100-400mm IS lens. And is it ever a cherry piece of glass. No worries, though, I’ll still be digiscoping too. Just expect to see some much better flight shots from me moving forward…

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Broad-winged Hawks are one of the most abundant northbound migrants at Swainson’s Hawk Bird Observatory, often with over 100,000 (and sometimes many more) being counted on their way north every spring.

One cannot rule as The Greatest Birder In The World on his own. Sure, if you were to kidnap me, blindfold and drug me, push me out of a plane with a parachute over somewhere in, say, Malaysia, I would be able to figure out my exact latitude and longitude within minutes simply by recognizing the subtle local variation in call notes by Crimson Sunbirds and Ashy Minivets. Of course, I’m not busy with that sort of thing every day…most of my day to day duties revolve around telling shadowy organizations like the AOU and ABA what to do. Sure, the AOU has the final say in whats a species, whats not, yadda yadda yadda….but who tells them what to say? Yup….everyone needs someone to whisper in their ear…George W. Bush had Dick Cheney, the birding community has Felonious Jive.

But I digress. I’ve been sciencing really hard lately. After all, there are some epic splits coming your way….what do you think about new species of storm-petrel and murrelet that can be found in the United States? Hmmmm?

Perhaps you have heard of my esteemed colleague, one Seagull Steve. He is a fantastic birder, absolutely brilliant…according to the universally accepted Global Birding Ranking Scale, he is the Number 7 birder in the entire nation. He even writes a crappy blog about….birds. How original.

Despite the grief that I give that man (he deserves it), he has proved to be a great ally, and today he has assisted in filling in some gaps in our knowledge. My recent work with birds has prevented me from, ironically, working on seeing birds lately.  I know Seagull Steve, who is slaving away on Snowy Plover and Least Tern monitoring in San Diego, is busy as well, but he can’t help but reflect on how different his current job is from his last spring gig.

In the spring of 2011 he lived in Chavarrillo, Mexico, which lies between the cities of Veracruz and Xalapa on the east side of the country. This part of the world is well-known for the fall river of raptors, which tallies millions of migrants every season. But Seagull was counting birds that moved north in spring, as well as anything else he could lay eyes on. As the lead hawk counter for Swainson’s Hawk Bird Observatory, he had the pleasure of helping count hundreds of thousands of raptors (not too shabby for spring, eh?) and getting a really good tan at the same time. The local forest birds were a constant source of facemelt as well…when Blue Mockingbird, Keel-billed Toucan, Crimson-collared Grosbeak and Red-legged Honeycreeper reside within walking distance, you can temporarily forget the horror and debilitating pain that is Montezuma’s Revenge.

Here are a few photographic notes from his stint.

It’s amazing to see flocks of thousands of raptors together, and it seems counter intuitive to those who have not already put in time at places like Hawk Mountain or Cape May….this a mixed flock of Swainson’s and Broad-wings.

Common Black-Hawks strike a unique profile compared to most other raptor species. This is really the bird that should be called “Broad-winged Hawk”.

One of the tasks one must learn as a raptor counter is trying to figure out who is passing through and who lives in the area. It’s not an exact science, but after a few weeks you get the idea of who is just hanging out on the local thermals and who is actually going north. Roadside Hawks are generally considered resident birds at the Chavarrillo site.

Staring at the sky for hours on end can reward you with more than just raptors and insanity. Anhingas, American White Pelicans, Wood Storks, and White-collared and Lesser Swallow-tailed Swifts (like this one) could occasionally be seen flying over.

Brown Jays are abundant throughout eastern Mexico, perhaps even more so than their facemelting Green Jay cousins. I am surprised they do not have a stronger foothold on the Lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas, since they appeared to have no habitat requirements besides trees.

Besides what was flying overhead, the handful of trees surrounding the hawkcounting tower often would have interesting birds. Yellow-winged Tanagers were my frequent eye-level companions.

Eastern Mexico is blessed/cursed with a trio of similar-looking species: Social Flycatcher, Great Kiskadee and Boat-billed Flycatcher. Boat-billeds can be identified by their massive, barge-shaped bills and lack of rufous tones on the wings. They are a fairly common bird in the surrounding forests of Chavarrillo, and insects everywhere fear a fate that lies between those enormous mandibles.

When mid-April rolls around, Mississippi Kites swarm through the area in jaw-dropping numbers, and unlike the other migrant raptors, tend to move in a single mass….when one bird flies northeast, the entire flock does, instead of breaking off piecemeal one at a time.  Blessed is the birder who is lucky enough to observe these aerial bivouacs.

Early in the morning raptors will fly in low over town after roosting on the neighboring mountain for the night. As soon as the local thermals get going, birds tend to stay pretty high up. I always appreciated when the Mississippi Kites stooped to the level of us lowly humans.

Swainson’s Hawk Bird Observatory is accessible to the public, and is in operation when the bulk of birds go over in March and April. The mountains and canyon to the south and east of town likely make for great birding any time of year. Intrepid birders visiting Veracruz state would do well to put some time in here.

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This is not Kirtland’s Warbler.

But a Magnolia Warbler hidden in a bush, but if you squint just right you can almost string a Kirtlands out of it.

 And this is what Sharon did:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5wIjQur8W8

just makes me sick

So my question to you is this: with all the wisdom of hindsight, what would you have done? Would you have gone for the Lark Sparrow, Grasshopper Sparrow, pornographic views of a Broadwinged Hawk, and a very vocal Yellow-breasted Chat (Icteria virens) – and a total of 20 lifers? or would you have stayed behind on the Magee Marsh boardwalk for crazy views of a Kirtland’s Warbler?

Just so that you believe me that we actually did see Lark Sparrow in Ohio, here are some very poor photos:

bad photos of a good bird. Lark Sparrow (Chondestes grammacus) showing off his head strikes and tail white.

a Summer Tanager (Piranga rubra) sang for us. Can’t complain about that.

So, Lark Sparrow or Kirtland’s Warbler? How bad should I be feeling right now?

If you have never been to the Biggest Week in American Birding, or Magee Marsh in May then you are seriously missing out. If you have any remote interest in wildlife or nature, then this needs to be put on your bucket list right now. Yup, go ahead and do it. Don’t be coy. Pen. Paper. That easy.

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You can imagine, then, why I have managed to find time to make two visits out to Breezy Point this May, when you consider that I have as a goal increasing my Queens life list. I have only managed to add one new bird, a Parasitic Jaeger that was busy harassing Common Terns, but any visit to a tern colony is going to be cool regardless of additions to a checklist. You have no idea how happy I am to live within twenty minutes of, say, this:

That second-summer bird in the top left (the one with the dark bill and incomplete cap) gave me fits when I first spotted it on the beach because it had very short legs. Tai Haku was almost proven prophetic with the prediction that I would find an Arctic Tern in Queens but, sadly, I realized that the bird’s short-legged appearance was simply because it was standing in a hole. Darn it.

You know what wasn’t standing in a hole? This Piping Plover.

I don’t know if the local birds are still augmented by some that need to go further north but the numbers of Piping Plover at Breezy Point this year seem higher than I can remember seeing in the past. That is, of course, pretty darn good news.

The other plover I had on both of my visits was Black-bellied Plover. They are neat to see this time of year because the advance of their molt is so varied. Some are already in high breeding plumage while others are mired in drab near-basic. The bird below is most of the way to its breeding finery.

Black-bellied Plovers often overwinter along the Long Island coast but they breed way up north, of course. I’ll miss them while they are gone. How could I not? You know what else I would miss if there was ever a day when there were none in the state? Sanderlings. But it seems that there are always some Sanderlings somewhere despite their northern breeding grounds and I for one am not going to complain about that.

Of course, one of the main attractions of visiting a tern colony is the sheer volume of birds. At one point something caused most of the birds on the beach to flush and fly out over the ocean. I captured this video as they returned to shore. How many birds do you think are in the video?

Lots of birds, right? And when there are lots of birds there is bound to be something good mixed in if you are willing to spend time searching through them with a scope. Sure enough, on both days I found a single Black Tern.

Even though I didn’t find anything spectacularly rare it didn’t matter one bit. Being on the beach at and just after dawn surrounded by birds is reward enough for me and, I imagine, for most birders.

American Oystercatcher

Laughing Gulls

Least Terns

If you can get out to a breeding colony you should definitely do it. Just make sure to respect the birds and keep your distance and try to minimize any disturbance. Beach-nesting birds have enough issues to deal with when you consider habitat loss, irresponsible beach-goers, introduced predators, and all of the other challenges they face. And you do want the colonies to be around for years and years to come, right?

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