15 January 2010, Friday
But, again, telling our three accipiter species apart is not controversial, just a skill set known better to some birders than others through facts and experience, where these facts do not include: long or short tails, round or square tails, notched tails, fierce looks, etc. This stuff varies enough betwixt and between the ages and sexes of these species to work, except when it doesn't. This will not be a comprehensive ID clinic... as Brian Wheeler's Raptors of Eastern North America (2003) volume covers it completely. The oldest image set here was posted by Phil Brown back before Christmas. It's of an adult male Cooper's Hawk with a lovely dent in the center of his nearly closed tail. From the back and fully relaxed, the tail on the Coop would look square, dented, and not that long... being a male of the species, either one. The bird is pretty riled up and has the hackles up which lengthens the head, front-to-back, making the eye appear set farther forward than it would on a relaxed crown. Phil put this known Coop on his website as one of a few Cooper's Hawks he's had visiting his yard. Another Coop image set was posted on Massbird by Erik Nielsen in the new year, originally he had it labeled as a Sharpie, because the head's rounded here making the eye position a bit harder to judge, and the gaze calm... not angry. But the dark cap contrasts with the nape of the neck heading us in the ID direction of Coop. In addition, the wing is opened enough to see icy gray bars on the secondaries, while the primaries are blacker. A lot of other possible puzzle pieces, some useful – some not, are mentioned in the discussion and that's perfectly okay, as long as the true stuff wins out. With an update, Erik has now included a summary of the information he received from other Massbird readers atop his images, very nice. Erik's other Cooper's Hawk, clearly a different bird, is like Phil's bird showing a lizard-like head shape by way of the textbook raised hackles and a very pale breast, often a Coop tell. Looks too like it was photographed on a cold day (very puffed out appearance). If you like your Coops with long broad tails, here's your chance to see the opposite of that. If this tail were a tie, you'd be wearing a jacket with the sleeves rolled up plus the collar up and cool... see Road House (1989) with Patrick Swayze, Sam Elliot, and Kelly Lynch... as Dalton, Wade Garrett, and Doc. Both posters received many private messages discussing the images, and both summarized this info. For what it's worth, the two public posts were not so useful. The first one here all depends on whether the bird has flattened out the head... or not (and as Erik learned, that's a Coop option, not a requirement) and the primary reason this accipiter was missed as a Cooper's Hawk on the first go-round was the non-reptile looking head shape... kind of looks Sharpie-round. BTW, instead of the position of the eye (which we now see can move about) work on a sense of the size of the eye on the bird's head: where the smaller species will have the proportionately larger eye. One last field mark is the placement of the eye on the head being forward of center creating a fierce look while Sharp-shinned has the placement of the eye centered and with the rounded head gives quite a gentle(r) look. Back noise — white feather edging on the upper wing surface— mentioned in the post below: is greatest in young/brown Northern Goshawks where it can be extensive; present in many juvenile Cooper's Hawks as upper wing covert flecking (although it's hard to see in late Spring when the back of this species can fade to a light sandy brown); and immie Sharpies' upper wing surfaces are often noted for their smooth, not noisy at all, almost spray-painted look. Perched, the presence of a few large spots has been associated with the Sharpie, but immie Coops can have something similar, so there's that. But-but, the images in question are all blue-backed adults, not immature accipiters. So, huh? Eric, excellent! I like everything you said. To the second point above, Erik's two sets show both birds with red or nearly red adult eye color that all three of our accipiter species attain eventually/mainly, so I don't know if this public poster needs a new monitor, or a second look!
14 January 2010, Thursday
Based on the Fall weather and a southerly flight direction, the Atlantic Ocean is, of course, the big concern. That coastline, and the deep blue beyond it, set off visual alarms for the birds hundreds of miles in advance and they adjust on the fly. The winds will alter that course of action by allowing the flight to stay right down the middle of the line formed by the Atlantic@NYC and the eastern edge of the Great Lakes(!) or bowing it to the coast on strong northerly winds. The land between the void, as the birds see it, is all that matters... big picture. The rest: amusement park rides, and projections skyward of the earthbound hawkwatcher with a point of view not that of the object of their desire. The arch formed along the northerly edge of a tropical storm indicates a cloud deck visible hundreds of miles in advance. But there's an invisible low pressure gradient arcing out ahead of that as well. Both the clouds and low pressure are to be avoided if effortless elevation is your goal. This is a classic case of temporal geography: the birds look at the actual and the virtual as realtime obstacles and adjust... for a hurricane or its kin, big time. This bows the flight inland and farther away from the Atlantic Ocean. On a small scale, if you've been to the ocean's edge yourself, you can feel the effects of the wave even as it departs, and even if you didn't get wet in the first place. That removal of sand literally from under your feet as the wave retreats, is like the low pressure gradient trailing the storm system, even if the worst of the storm's rainshield didn't reach your watch site; even as the TS moves away. So both coming and going, this pattern is moving birds and confusing hawk counts. I have the Hawk Mountain News, April 1980 issue saved because it has many images and remembrances of its first curator, Maurice Broun, on his passing. Recently, I noticed in the report on the '79 hawk migration, the presence and passing of named TS Frederick is duly noted but its significance on the Broadwing flight is missed.
Through the 1990s, as we watched from our alt.Wachusett (MA) nock and knew exactly why there wasn't a Big Day for BWs, the counters on the summit were still in official waiting and watching mode for their due. And certainly in the Oughts, if you are curious at all about this idea of temporal geography, on its biggest scale, look at the numbers and look at archived weather maps (esp. the tracks of named and unnamed storms). You will easily see examples of this effect on the Fall flight in the Northeast of the Broad-winged Hawk. Beyond the Northeast, check out the numbers of Broadwings in TX and MX related to the passage of Katrina!
13 January 2010, Wednesday Geolocators are used on smaller birds to see where they go and when. The bird needs to be recaptured (or the device recovered) so the data can be downloaded. It's not like the larger GPS transmitter used on a bigger species, like the Osprey, where the satellite shows the position of the organism in nearly real-time. BBC science news had a piece today on the Arctic Tern, and our textbooks need an update. The first surprise is that the terns do not make
straight for the Antarctic when they leave the Arctic, but make a lengthy
stop-over in the middle of the North Atlantic, about 1,000km (620 miles)
north of the Azores. Here, they feed on zooplankton and fish to fuel
themselves for the long journey ahead... More detailed info plus additional (insert neatogrooveykeen here) tracking maps are on the project's web site. This is also an article with the full PDF online, for viewing or downloading ("other-click" the PDF inset to pop up a menu). A similar study, combining small trackers and other info, was reported this week for the declining Atlantic Puffin. And, like the terns, we find movements that banding returns and birders' observations have missed. Since there was an unprecedented mortality of adult puffins over the 2007/2008 winter, the logger results suggest that conditions in the North Sea may have become less favourable for puffins in recent years, particularly during autumn and early winter, forcing many birds to move into the Atlantic. Here they have to travel greater distances and adapt to different habitats.
12 January 2010, Tuesday
Using the Birdhawk archive though (Septembers' past), and reading the weather or comments section at the close of a frustrating day of Broadwing watching, you get something else: no wind, too much wind, the wrong wind, no clouds, too many clouds, the clouds were across the valley, or maybe just the right conditions... and still, where were the birds?? You can find the opposite — surprising number of hawks without classic conditions — as well. Something isn't working right. And while the Broadwing migration in Fall is as simple a situation as there could possible be, hawkwatchers, in real time, expect hawks to be overhead when the weather conditions above are suitable. MEDIUM NW WINDS, GOOD THERMALS--only 14 Broad-wingeds That's an actual quote — short and sweet — from a Fall report (9/18/09); many many more like it can be found in the archives, old and recent. On the ground, hawkwatchers readily discuss the current cloud formations, winds, and claim to know why there aren't any birds. On the other hand, troop a thousand Broadwings by, and all is right with the world (and the weather is vindicated). Slot machines work much the same way. Trying this another way: A hawkwatcher goes to see his doctor and he says, "Doc, I've got this cough, what's wrong with me?" The doctor, knowing his patient watches hawks, explains, "A cough is like the winds today, it's just a symptom. We'll need to look at the bigger picture, run some tests and then we'll know more." So, even for the simplest case scenario —Broadwings in the Fall — doorstep weather doesn't work as a predictor of hawk flights, anymore than a cough is indicative of a cold or cancer, on the face of it. What does work (or at least works a little better)? Like with medicine, you need to consider more factors in order to create a bigger picture. With weather, the fronts and winds as you walk out the door on your way to a day of hawkwatching may or may not lead you to a big day (or pay off) because those conditions are a symptom, just like having a cough. Watching the conditions where the birds are, several days before you expect them by way of the five to fifteen day forecast, is a start. Consider too, the hawk flight — not just the BWs, but all species and their subsets — as a living, breathing organism. The weather is its breath, but the hawks are the heartbeat. Divining the rhythm and pace of the two, well. That requires as much information on both the weather and the birds as you can put together — before and after the hawkwatch.
11 January 2010, Monday
Weather concentrated. In the olden days, before cable, it only took fifteen minutes for three nerdy NOAA meteorologists to cover the jet stream, coast-to-coast current conditions, temperature gradients for the country, include the VFR conditions for pilots, and put together a forecast that essentially made for a five-day long-range forecast on the east coast. Before The Weather Channel, there was AM Weather on your local PBS affiliate. It wasn't showing in primetime like Masterpiece Theater... more like the 6 a.m. slot, right after the test pattern got tested. But for hawkwatchers who were weather watchers, this was the must-see TV! AM Weather came out of Maryland Public TV — within the beltway — and was marketed to and funded by the aviation special interests (when that was a term of more positive influence). But, in season, they also provided info for farmers. Professional travelers (before George Clooney) also benefited from this morning infusion of what to expect, weatherwise. POV: Hawks and their watchers too. There is only one episode of this program archived online — the last one — but I offer it up for your viewing. Unlike the 24-hour news cycle weather today, the various analyses come so rapidly in succession that you can't help but see the components overlaying in your mind and making sense, holistically. When the first YouTube segment finishes, skim over the videos along the bottom for the rest of the show, or click here, if that doesn't work. In the second part you'll find the meteorologist covering "winds aloft." I always waited for this to get a true picture of the hawks aloft. Think about the 5, 10 and 18,000 foot images: the 18K is pretty much the jet stream(s), but the other two measure the weather for the winged organisms. VFR conditions, while intended to give pilots a heads-up for instrument use versus eye balls (Visual Flight Rules), showed me areas soaring birds would avoid... thus being squeezed, or not, and gliding into other areas. Watching this aviation weather from the mid-70s onward, is my first recollection of thinking about hawk migration as creating optimal corridors — from narrow, to wide, to too broad to really get excited about. I was starting, in my hawkwatcher's mind, to shift my point of view from here to there — from the hawkwatch to the hawk. At the dawn of the 90s, cable TV was just over a fifty percent saturation nation-wide, bringing The Weather Channel with it, and the end was near for AM Weather. (There is another show preserved, a special: the AM Weather primer. Belated season's greetings.) But, of course, all the resources that those professionals gathered up every morning is available today... and then some! I may have been worshipping at the glow of an ancient idol, but the wind gods are the true ones. I'm just sayin', I had my weather epiphany when the NOAA high priests brought it to my door in tornadic fashion first thing in the morning. Second time through, he said wishfully, notice the program begins with the jet stream undulating track and then see how the fronts, precipitation and temperature color patterning overlay along it and reinforce the warm and cold frontal edges as the program races toward Sesame Street. The program uses winds aloft as a bookend to finish off the day's look at the weather. The presentation flies at you so fast that the dots connect themselves, he said hopefully.
8 January 2010, Friday
It's so fundamental that it's been with us for forty or fifty thousand years in one form or another. It's not even something that is specifically Buddhist. It's as fundamental a human activity as taking naps is to wolves, or soaring in circles is to hawks and eagles. It's how you contact the basics and the base of yourself. Gaining our balance in an ever-more lopsided technological world is often a matter of thinking about keeping up, in mind, with our tools. Knowing how to prune a fruit tree is technology... In other words, useful skills and useful tools are not in themselves wrong. But it's being tricked or dazzled by them that throws us off. Then we think we're less real than our tools. Nice tools are, well, nice but not necessary to finding our way in to a more intimate and deeper relationship with, say, wintering hawks. Not allowing the tools to be the primary experience is the exercise. Our earlier traditions of life prior to agriculture, required literally thousands of years of great attention and awareness, and long hours of stillness. An anthropologist, William Laughlin, has written a useful article on hunting as education for children. His first point is to ask why primitive hunters didn't have better tools than they did. The bow of the American Indians didn't draw more than forty pounds; it looked like a toy. The technology was really very simple — piddling! They did lots of other things extremely well, like build houses forty feet in diameter, raise big totem poles, making very fine boats. Why, then, does there seem to be a weakness in their hunting technology? The answer is simple: they didn't hunt with the tools, they hunted with their minds. They did things — learning an animal's behavior — that rendered elaborate tools unnecessary. How often have you heard someone ask a very good birder what kind of optics they're using... just after they have pointed out a rarity, or described an interesting feature on a bird? And why is that?
7 January 2010, Thursday
Actually it's an interview with an anteater scientist. Well, maybe it's not quite that either, but there's said to be a grain of truth in almost anything... and this proves that theory. In actual news both MSNBC and CBC covered the encounter between illegal Japanese whaling activity and Paul Watson's Sea Shepard activists. Rachel Maddow interviews Bob Barker, who when told by Watson that it would take five million dollars to curtail the latest Japanese whaling operations said, "The price is right." Barker made the donation and they named one of the craft after him! On CBC Radio One, the great and true environmental activist Paul Watson is interviewed in the second hour of the program (it follows a folksy piece on the weekend's Nor'easter washing tons of lobsters onto people's lawns in New Brunswick). Using the CBC Radio app on your iPhone or iPod Touch, program segments can be listened to on demand.
6 January 2010, Wednesday
Others aren't conflicted either, as they easily pose questions and provide answers based on their own numbers from their hawkwatch, some bolder than others. Are we all just following our bliss, as Joseph Campbell would ask? There is a dichomy, whether it never existed for you or you are unaware of its existence. One doesn't need to solve it to be aware of it and what you do about it is up to you. As a botanist, I'm a dichotomous fellow: beaked or unbeaked, hirsute or hoary. Maybe you can dig Robert Frost where the roads diverge... pick one. But do think about it a little and make a thoughtful choice at least. Watch out for the false dichotomies, like: you've either for the Patriot Act or you're for the terrorists. The hawkwatcher false one would be: well, we've got all our numbers, so we either draw conclusions or we've wasted our time. This is the seventh consecutive day here with snow, and a few more are in the forecast. So while I wait it out for a sunny day and the Ontario islands, I thinking: trends or details? Sticking with what I know to be true, I'll opt for seeing one more thing: holding the bird in your eye or thoughts for one more moment. Go for that. "I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Plastics." No, wait. That's a different movie... One word for you, for tomorrow: Anteaters.
5 January 2010, Tuesday
I conducted a very un-official survey of Fall '09 sites that had at least 150 hours of September coverage — the Broadwing season — and/or had at least 2000 BWs (almost the same thing). This would be over twenty sites in New England, eastern NY, and PA (you can use hawkcount.org and pick your own sample sites). A dozen sites, essentially the NE hilltops reported between zero and ten RTs for the month of September, with one 11 and a 13 tossed in from eastern PA. At the other end of this artificial spectrum: 67, 81, 99, 100, & 177 Sept Redtails were logged at sites that, interestingly, also record the most hours beyond September and therefore see the breadth and width of the autumn hawk flight. A transect of these sites, up into NY, is also the centerline between the eastern edge of the Great Lakes and Atlantic big water.... the Golden Eagle and Red-tailed Hawk flightline. The problem is not really a scientific one, because recording no Redtails in September is human error that incorporates an old myth. It becomes science when sites write down everything they see... and, using a protocol that starts from that, is one worth utilizing. Turkey Vultures, I think, are truly a matter of detection. In New England there are Turkey Vultures one day, not looking very migratory (no obvious streams of the beasts). And the next day, no Turkey Vultures to be quibbled over. So what's up with that?! There are a lot of TVs, after all. Go to the Great Lakes in the Fall (works in the Spring too), even to the very eastern edge of Lake Ontario: the vultures look and act like a perfectly fine migratory species, and there are plenty of them going by. Ignore them or call them locals at your peril. For both Redtails and TVs, looking around to other sites at the close of the day, over a course of few days (or the season) that have been counting everything, will show movements by way of the expansion and contraction of these "local" birds (counted). Some sites will now see themselves in line and part of a detection process, others won't. Now that's a fact.
4 January 2010, Monday Samuel Johnson, direct to you from the 18th Century and the literature-searching work of Graeme Gibson, offers: Swallows certainly sleep all winter. A number of them conglobulate together, by flying round and round, and then all in a heap throw themselves under water, and lye in the bed of a river.
The selections range from the early Greeks through Gilbert White and other pre-Darwin era naturalists, and on into modernity — there's Robinson Jeffers, Bruce Chatwin, Peter Matthiessen, naturalists certainly, but literati all. Combined now, his two books of a feather are about the birds, beasts, and finally us. Immensely tweedy, like the author's wardrobe with cockade included at no extra charge, there are quite a few insights to be had, as well as some selections that went right over my head (attention span). But all in all, I'm glad I read it... a little at a time, from the nightstand, as the author suggests in the title. A work like this can aid the fellow or gal who spent their college days out and about with a fieldguide, instead of lounging on campus with Keats or Highsmith. I hadn't thought about this book/author since, but last Sunday there was Graeme Gibson being interviewed in the Toronto studio on The Sunday Edition by the terrific Michael Enright. In The Bedside Book of Beasts: A wildlife miscellany, Gibson turns more inward for this companion volume and the selections reflect more about us and our disconnect with the wild world, hence "beasts" as distinct from just "animals," as he explains. The two Canadians chat in the first-half of the second hour, December 27th program. To listen in, scroll down to "Listen to Hour Two:" and click. Also included in that second hour, is a radio documentary on William Blake following the musical interlude, "To Close for Comfort," summing up the discussion of us and the beasts. Being Canadian radio, the song is played in its entirety (for the attention span of an actual adult, realized or in training). So now I want the new Gibson and some old Blake on my nightstand for the Winter nights, and lake effect afternoons. As I said, I think reading and listening are exactly tuned to better scanning and seeing (hawks in flight). Both the inside and out skills sets are lost arts; at least diminished. So to work on the one keeps us fit and ready for the other, sez me.
1 January 2010, Friday Scheduled for yesterday — the day when everybody and their cousin did their end of the year and decade lists — I chose to insert some current raptor events from the North Country. So today, I have two new and two previous posted images — all from 2009. In addition to the four below, the in-flight Redtail "Recent self-portrait No.3, 2009" just to the right of my Hawk•art•science logotype is another fav from this last year, and as we've been told-to-death, the decade-past. I like it because it looks like it could be a watercolor or oil painting, and since I can't draw to save myself, I can just soak it in... even if I've looked at it a zillion times (click to enlarge, on this page only, now enabled). Each of the images below has a short musing with it, summing up why I like it. After I finished up the hawkwatching roadtrip report posted yesterday, I looked at this site's weblog for the first time since changing over to the blogging format earlier this Fall. A weblog (web log) is the report on page visitation, amount of media displayed, including the clicks on the links I provide either for other sites, or images and PDFs. Yikes people, there appear to be quite a few hawkaholics, depraved migratory workers, and even idea-hungry birders out there! More than I had thought, and, you're actually doing more than glancing at the entries. While I plan to continue posting Monday through Friday in 2010 and continue to image and imagine this as if I were an audience of one, I'm going to be keeping the stats in mind and provide a variety of ways to enter/enjoy. Formally, I'll start 2010, the new year and decade, on Monday January 4th with a weekly feature that might seasonally take over for the Laws of Birding. I think reading and listening are akin to scanning and seeing. Same skill set. To that end, I'll start with a link to last Sunday's CBC morning radio show: Michael Enright talking predators with predator book author Graeme Gibson. Maybe you're familiar with Gibson's Bedside Book of Birds from a couple of years ago? Even without going out and reading his new book, the discussion is fascinating (not at all unusual on Canadian programs).     |
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