For someone who studies birds for work and watches birds for passion, I haven't written much about them in this blog.
I'm not sure why this is. I live and breathe birds everyday and I
observe things that awe me regularly, but I rarely think "remember to
blog about that later!". I guess that is something I'll have to work
into my thoughts if I am going to try to preserve these experiences
outside of my mind.
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| Tree Pose. |
At
the beginning of the season, I watched a male Island Scrub Jay foraging
in his territory. Hubble, color combination UWB/AY (blue over white
over black on the left leg, aluminum over yellow on the right), was
landing on the thin, flexible branches of an Island Ceanothus,
Ceanothus arboreus,
and picking at the insects on the seedpods. The weight of his body
caused the whole branch to bow almost to the ground so he dangled
upside-down, swinging like a little monkey while he gulped down bugs. I
couldn't help but laugh out loud.
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| Quick sketch of Hubble's acrobatics. |
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| Hubble, UWB/AY. What a stud. |
The
last month of our season has been focused on Brownhead Surveys. We
search each territory for 10-30 minutes looking for fledged young. We
call them Brownheads because they have a solid gray-brown head and back,
unlike the adults who have blue feathers on their head. Brownheads are
notoriously awkward and klumsy. They flutter their wings and beg with
this high-pitched squeaking "feeeeeeee-eee-eeed meee-eeee-eeee-eee".
They crash through vegetation in pursuit of their siblings and trip on
their own little gray legs. They also are very good at sitting still and
being quiet when their mama tells them to. Until they get bored and let
out a whine or break a stick and fall a few inches. Goofballs.
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| Hopsecutioner Fledge. Look at his little awkward gape (the pink on the side of his bill). |
The
Hopsecutioner pair,
AP/ORK and POG/AP, were pretty sneaky this year (their first year as a
pair; the female used to be with BPG/AP, who probably died over the
winter, and the male was born in 2010 and this is seemingly his first
mating attempt). We didn't know for sure whether or not they had a nest
for a long time and then we figured they had failed because we hadn't
been seeing any signs of nest activity, so I went in to find and "veg"
the nest (aka measure how far it is from the ground and identify the species of tree it is in) and
was pleasantly surprised to find a freshly hopped out fledgling crashing
around in the ceanothus. I took a GPS point and got out of there as
quickly as I could so I didn't attract any predators. We detected one
fledgling every three days for almost two weeks straight with no sign of
more than one. Then one day, I saw one bird in a large willow in the
creekbed and I thought I saw another dark shape bumbling klumsily
through the branches. I crawled through the
Baccharis (Coyote
Bush) to get to the willow and there I found not one, not two, but FOUR
fledglings bopping around in the tree. The parents both flew in to
investigate me, but the babies were all big enough that they no longer
needed to protect them from on the ground "predators" like me. I counted
and re-counted and four it stayed. The four siblings were squabbling
and squeaking at each other and begging to be fed. I stood in awe for a
good five minutes, repeating out-loud to no one in particular "Four?
Four? How did that happen? What? FOUR?" So congratulations AP/ORK, you
sure are starting out strong! The four Brownheads are still out and
about, getting bigger and a little less doofy every day.
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| Recently banded fledge, likely from Saranac. |
