31 December 2009, Thursday
For Roughlegs and the most northern Redtails, based
on early Summer reports of cool and damp conditions across the upper
boreal and taiga regions, reproductive success might be reflected in
few birds-of-the-year. There are two ways to detect and test this (other
than on the nesting grounds): look for juveniles on wintering grounds
and observe the Spring migration, paying particular attention to what
should be the rare HY (hatch year) bird on return at sites that get
the numbers. For Roughlegs, like Redtails, simple-age* observations/notes
would work. Compare and contrast; please print legibly. Hawks: Hawk food: While the Roughleg numbers are the best reported
so far for the Winter of 2009-10 from the North Country, Amherst
or Wolfe Islands Ontario, this seemingly low number — for a
region noted for its annual concentrations — is not that bad
for this early in the season, based on thirty plus years of running
the nooks and crannies.
30 December 2009, Wednesday
Over in the right hand column under "Topical archives" you'll find one for Weather & Climate. As my entries on this wide topic accumulate, you'll find them there, in chronological order. Already there is a NEXRAD post with some maps and a link suggesting we should be watching the hawks we can see and also those we can't. There's a first climate change offering that busts another hawkwatching myth remaining in our way (if we want to work on raptor conservation): that the birds travel over our established sites, just because they do. Multiple sites and adjustments due to seasonal weather patterns and change in patterns over time must be factored into our work, if it is to be more than entertainment... "not that there's anything wrong with that." (I feel some Seinfeld Science coming on.) For openers, let me share a few solid references on the subject of climate change.
Red-winged Blackbirds are undergoing a recent decline in Ontario and a biologist has made a link to a short-term weather cycle know as the North Atlantic Oscillation. Climate change aside for the moment, NOA is an example of how weather can affect birds in the near-term. Remember hawk migration data is all really new and therefore short-term too. When Patrick Weatherhead put his 25-year data about
the red-winged black bird alongside climate records, he found a direct
correlation with the North Atlantic Oscillation. The NAO is a dominant
cause of winter climate variability in the North Atlantic region ranging
from central North America to Europe and much of Northern Asia. It
has been on an upward trend for the past 30 years.
29 December 2009, Tuesday
[Trudy Battaly, Drew Panko and I knew each other back in the day hawkwatching, birding, and generally doing our part to protect a fairly wild Westchester County and its airspace. I've never met Arthur Green, but we are kindred spirits, as he counted hawks at Chestnut Ridge in 2009, while I watched there in 1979... starting it up, building a platform to see over a six-foot chain link NYSDOT fence. This fence was being climbed over by three thirteen year olds who wanted a better view of the hawk flight. One of my first tasks on that site was to order the tresspassing teens — John Askildsen, Rodney Olsen and Frank Nicoletti — back onto the Conservancy side of the fence... and build them a platform. That would be the abridged version of the story.] Climbing back out of my time machine... their animation has every day's weather for September 2009, plus the BW (tight bimodal) spike for Hook Mt. NY. Again, this is fun stuff, especially if you have your own notes/site and think about your birds as you watch September... yes, I said "your birds"... even though I espouse taking the opposite POV for understanding hawk migration. Taking it back a decade, let's start with a Birdhawk discussion that began after another season and get into POV in terms of taking the hawk's view, rather than hawkwatcher/site. This was amongst Michael Gochfeld and John Hansen and quotes others (see 11/13/99: "An added problem for modelers of hawk flights" and go on from there; also use overview page to hunt down this thread into the next week; btw, this "overview" is your gateway to any/all past Birdhawk posts). Kirk Moulton's BroadwingSEPT (use the Birdhawk archive link) and my K-April projects begin with the assumption that hawk migration only makes sense if you combine sites while you observe the weather systems over the breadth of that picture. For my little K-April study — Kestrels in April — I used data from three sites that I thought might track the same waves of birds. It's a table of numbers "plotted" from south-west to north-east, so you can see the waves, really! At the top, each date links to a weather map. I have two seasons of this online at my old site. BTW, the El Nino (and/or La Nina) pattern normally develops in mid-Winter, and in 2002 generated the best Kestrel numbers seen anywhere that Spring east of the Rockies at Plum at Plum Island MA! Questions and answers about hawks, hawk food, and weather pop up online with every season, somewhere. Here's another Spring train of thought concluded nicely by Clay Taylor on the CT birding listserv. He uses a surfing analogy which you can often hear me riffing on, both online and in the field. Re: [CTBirds] Two Hawk Questions and More On the dark side, I suppose you need to see this... yet another, "here's what we think is true, now let's publish a paper that supports that" paper. And yes, peer-reviewed journals do publish that stuff, along with good science. This Auk PDF essentially says, "If you've seen one hawk migration handout cold front, you've seen them all... and that's extra-true, if, like us, you are wedded to one site and want your data to mean something all by itself." Save it for Sunday. In the meantime, go watch (you know) it again.
28 December 2009, Monday
Nicasio Vina Davila traveled to Cornell with Freddy
Rodriguez Santana on this trip, in his new role. Both are biologists
in Cuba's fairly new natural heritage program at the Centro Oriental
de Ecosistemas Biodiversidad (BIOECO*)
in Santiago... the city, and region, at the opposite island end from
Havana (fourteen hours or so by car). But as an experience and accomplished
Cuban naturalist, Nicasio is now tasked with adding the federal government's
role to the science. As the latest data is gathered, the question becomes what to do to protect Cuba's unique species, their habitat, and enough wild around it to make it work into the future. Cuba is also very fortunate to have even wilder places where only preliminary surveys have been conducted. Mexico is the Wild Wild West; Cuba is not, even with its wild undeveloped tracts. When the Mexican government designated forests as "protected" — the Monarch Butterfly winter grounds — the trees therein began disappearing at an alarming, accelerated rate. The focus for protection of Cuba's endemic Gundlach's Hawk (Accipiter gundlachii) will be first and foremost on park/reserves, even though the split of Ag habitat is 40-60%, public-private. That's the federal government taking the lead, confident that protection, regulation, and enforcement will take hold! The population estimate, with up-to-date survey info, for their endemic accipiter is three to four hundred individuals, and surprisingly, was a bit higher than originally thought. With new population census numbers in for other endemics and raptors, the new news is not such good news. Old numbers consistently overestimated populations by upwards of 70-89%... either methodology or decline in play here. On the other hand, you work with what you've got and legitimate urgency is always an attention-getter in protection planning for the endemic raptors: Cuban Black Hawk, Cuban Kite, and Gundlach's Hawk (a Cooper's Hawk look-alike). Working with Cornell's "CSI" lab (aka, Irby Lovette's Evolutionary Biology program at the Lab of Ornithology) will make efforts in Cuba different from other North American natural heritage projects, well, because this DNA science literally wasn't available for us back in the 70s and 80s in the US and Canada. Protect the top predators anywhere and you've protected much, much more in the process. Nicasio Vina Davila and Freddy Rodriguez Santana know this is true.
25 December 2009, Christmas Day
Nothing says "Season's Greetings" like a nice Redtail decked out in plumage from a more northern cline. Fully-hooded and even dripping it down onto the breast... chocolate icing. The sooty bellyband is a favorite seasonal treat, with chevrons on the flanks indicating this is an adult bird (if that's all you saw). In addition, juvenile birds, light or heavily marked, are always uniformly colored... here we seen two distinct schemes, indicating adult. There is a tendency too for eastern Redtails with markings this rich to have affinities to moist lowlands. Gloger's Rule in play, rather than subspecies. If this is your first visit here, there are a couple of orientation entries that may or may not explain things. For returning raptobates, there are two new archive headings over in the right-hand column for the Counter Culture and Cuba topics. Cuba 3 will be up on Monday.
24 December 2009, Thursday
What are the odds both these birds survived their first migration as far as Cuba? What are the odds they made the long water crossing from Cuba or the Dominican to South America? While the history, cultures, and of course, politics are world's apart, we all know — Cuban biologists and the rest of us — that the birds know no such divisions. We know via GPS tracking. NASA has a PDF brochure online and also a tracking site showing Ospreys on the move: overland, over water, lingering. Those are some long odds. Just like elsewhere, juvenile hawks especially are prone to lingering on islands. The NASA data, and other satellite tracking work on Ospreys shows these young birds spend between five and 25 days on Cuba. They rest there, wait out the twists and turns of the the tropical storm season, fish, but mostly figure out that, sooner than later, they need to make another water crossing. Siboney is one of two Osprey count stations. La Gran Piedra (The Big Rock), is the other. For birds now following the big water and those coming off the island's centerline, both sites are just outside the city of Santiago, along the southeast coast. There is more coastline to follow, but points East track over Guantanomo and its bay. From their counts to date though, Siboney and The Big Rock are at the confluence of the Osprey flow. Satellite data over Cuba is available for Swallow-tailed Kite and Peregrine too. The kites bear West and cross to the Yucatan, and the counts on the ground see this. The movements of the Peregrine, as least as far as the hawk counts go, is not clear... remember the number of birds being tracked for any species is a miniscule sample set. Still in its early days and years, Freddy's project has yet to search out and count Peregrines from sites where they can actually detect the forward progress of the falcons to their next destination. Over at Veracruz, they had to find a spot along the coast for the falcons, and Cuban counters have yet to find their Carden. Cuba is still a wild place and, applying the the One-mile Limit (see the Laws of Birding), seeking out the best falcon viewing/counting location on the right winds is part of the adventure, future-tense.
23 December 2009, Wednesday
Recently, the world's catfish were in the science news for new info on their lineage and toxicology. Now, Sean Carroll — Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics in Madison WI —has a fascinating NYTimes column on how species tolerate high levels of tetrodotoxin. This poison out-poisons arsenic and potassium cyanide, but the poisonous species that use it, from disparate lineages, are themselves immune. This isn't even the best part! I will let the teller tell the tale, as Dr. Carroll is also an award-winning author and teacher, but we've learned that it's evolutionarily easy to get the drug "on the street" and not fall prey to the toxin once it's within. You just can't make this stuff up. In addition to the primitive look coming at you from the inset image — a Goshawk showing off good old fashioned mechanical death — there's an even more primitive bird found fossilized in China, that in addition to some serious hardware, used chemistry to kill.
22 December 2009, Tuesday
For us and the Redtail, the tail is the easiest thing to do... for us to check (caution on coloration: see image of juvenile Tail tails sticking out of cans, in the right hand column). And, the Redtail to molt into, as it's a pretty safe bet that the "immature" Redtail, ID'd by tail, is a bird less than one year old. Whether you call it "juvenile" or "juvenal" is up for grabs. Roughlegs too. The Redtail image with this post has an adult-type tail (adult tail type works too), he also has a pale eye. Not the straw-yellow immie eye color, but not the rich and deep brown devil may care iris either... I'll be looking this Winter, should I encounter this bird again. Now you can assess eye color with bins, but a fix position scope or better still a photo, examined later, works best. If you're counting, that makes for a three-year aging scheme, give or take. Roughlegs too. Interesting, to me anyway, is this tail and eye progression doesn't work for Broad-winged or Red-shouldered Hawk, while other buteo affinities do. So there's that. I replied privately to the '05 email below with my own data on Redtail wintering ages. On the one hand, good questions from an advanced birder (who readily answers questions online and leads trips in the field). Then again, he hadn't really kept the notes himself that would start a discussion, and therefore it came out half-baked, kind of stayed soft in the center thereafter, with a sprinkling of Woolly Bear science on top... "Have they reached carrying capacity, and have "shut-down" production this last breeding season?" (Oh my!) But big ups for asking more and interesting questions. I wonder if he took his own advice? Subject: Imm. Red-tailed Hawks You know, you don't need to start a thread online or attach data to the CBC to work on stuff. It is early Winter; a new Winter. Maybe it will seem short/long when it's over, but mostly it is ahead of you.
21 December 2009, Monday
Elsewhere, where northern Bald Eagles are wintering: on lakes, rivers, along the coast, their northbound movement can be detected if you think in terms of an overlay... ye olde independent clear acrylic sheets on maps in the days before computers; think layers for a graphics app, if you know that. In other words, two things happening kind of in two different dimensions, for different reasons, yet over the same landscape. The wintering number are still there, but additional adults, and some will be in pairs, are "playing through." Committed pairs in eagles, buteos and other raptors remain together all year. This is not all the adults of a species, or even all the breeding adults, but it's happening and you can detect it, with or without a hawkwatch! A recent study used DNA to confirm pair (high) fidelity in Eastern Imperial Eagles. By performing DNA analysis on the feathers left behind at nesting sites, the researchers were able to identify individual Eastern imperial eagles in a nature reserve in Kazakhstan. Their analysis showed that not one adult strayed from its mate - a degree of fidelity highly unusual among birds, the vast majority of which mate with and raise offspring from multiple partners. With the current cold snap, we are just starting to see wintering Bald Eagles in the Northeast. As you enjoy them, count on the February overlay, and add it to things to look for over the next couple of months, because, by March, you've missed it.    
18 December 2009, Friday To recap the Laws
of Thermal Dynamics:
To illustrate, let me redact a recent email from Plum Island MA: "Gyrfalcon... Peregrine; Bald Eagle; another eagle... Golden Eagle; white Gyrfalcon... adult male Snowy Owl!" I think the Rolling Stones said it best, for the rest of us (1969): You can't always get what you want Look, somewhere between the third and fourth laws, some of us get lost either in the moment, or in the need for celebrity. POV: our own or the bird's. Somewhere along the path from watching E! to 'here's me with [insert celebrity name here]' cellphone snaps to stalker and restraining order, the insatiable integer we multiply by varies to get our daily satisfaction. How to be satisfied, hawk-wise? I've talked about it: scan for it, color it in, know black when you see it, revel in the breadth and width of the Redtail complex, check out plumage in accipiters as a rethinking and sharpening exercise, think of all these things as seeing brushstrokes. And then there's molt. Symmetrical patterning help us replace the Old Testament of Hawkwatching advisement that it's a damaged wing or gunshot, conversely a damaged wing is molt(!?). So, symmetrical, partial, and/or active molt can be seen in the field and in images you might take home. Check out that big Redtail in flight in the upper right-hand corner of this page ("Recent self-portrait No.3, 2009"). It's a Winter shot of a young adult bird flying across a local field. Common, I suppose. Look along the trailing edge of the wing: notice the two shorter feathers with the tiny less than true black subterminal black band, compared to the rest of the secondaries? Those are an example of partial molt, where all the feathers were not replaced at the same time to the same specs. Look across to the upper surface of the far wing: right away you can see a similar feather in a similar position. It's shorter, and, it's pointy... another indication it is an immature plumage feather. Don't need to know all the ins and outs of Accipitridae molt to see and enjoy... wow, what a day, we saw several Redtails with similar molt patterns! Who cares if there weren't any Swainson's, Harlan's, Krider's (as is the case on most days, duh). While the Rough-legged Hawk is a semi-rarity, there are fun things to look for as you sift through the birds of the year for something older. The image at the top of this post actually shows two Roughlegs when you click and expand it, one light and one dark morph, with partial molt. One is showing active molt in November. Active molt is fairly common at Spring sites in the Northeast if you linger (for Broadwing stragglers) into May and June (earlier for Redtails), but in the Fall here, the Roughleg is the best "place" to look for active molt, and likely by now the bird has managed to get all the feathers out and in place. The black primary tip coming in can even be seen in the thumbnail image above... and two other black-tipped fingers are up, along with the very plain and pale primary, looking odd and left out of last summer's latest molt. All that to take in. Discover it. Now that's a rarity.
17 December 2009, Thursday
The young bohemians, the beats of the buteos, wanted more than shadows on the wall, more than cave drawings even. They wanted detailed details and the passion of the beast. They're the ones who have added brushstrokes (fieldmarks), and color to your raptor field guide... otherwise we'd all still be doing it with silhouettes! And they did this through hawk banding operations. Once an act of numbers, became a place to examine and contemplate the brushstrokes. To see patterns, look for consistencies, catalog the variations, and through it all, better identify. As a student, a connoisseur yourself, as you tour this art world, you needn't know all to appreciate the works. But a growing knowledge through the pursuit of the very specific details is a worthy act. Make no mistake, the whole is not lost in the details. Anyone who would scoff at this is still talking in terms of big and small, light and dark, counting wingbeats and conjuring behaviors... VanGogh's Starry Night is just about drugs or dementia, because no one really sees that way. Now to see these works of arts — these raptors — we start at the back of the room, as soon as the picture comes into view. The scan. For the backs, the upper/dorsal surface if you will, require you to start your observation farther out. For context. Artists, as well as curators, and us merelings all want to view the art/hawk at different angles and under various lighting. Something new might just jump out at us. A new point of appreciation... again, even if we have to ask what it means or does it have meaning to the expert's eye, just ours? Select hawkwatches have banding operations that are either open to the public or regularly, in season, bring wild birds out for viewing prior to release. In the early 90s at Braddock Bay, I spent a sleety morning holed up with the banders and counters looking at good and bad slides of hawks in flight, for hours we did this and no one said much at all. So even the folks who handle the birds, like to look at (real) images... and this was a time when it cost real money to develop the slides! Nowadays, with digital imagery and the Internet, it takes only your time to see the brushstrokes. Now, we can have new and real conversations when the living works of art come into view.
16 December 2009, Wednesday
As the climate conference gets started, Jon Stewart covers the coverage. No show does it better... in their own words. It is a bit PG-13, but that's The Daily Show, and worth every second. In the network coverage, we hear from a cavalcade of deniers: Lord Monckton, Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, the usual suspects in their own words. Googling any of these characters along with "global warming" is so much fun. Stewart has fun with the international bureaucrats as well. What's amazing is how little the arguments have changed. The new non-issue is of course the hacked emails from climate scientists in England. The BBC's article is entitled "Show your work"; Fred Pearce covers the cover-up — always a good lesson — and has links to many other sources and stories related; and here's a retelling of the AP-London analysis, close to the story. You simply cannot be deeply interested in birds and not know the importance of this issue, and what more important news source to track this than The Daily Show (in 2010).
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