ABA Blog

Blog Birding #125

Think you know how the Prothonotary Warbler got its name?  Rick Wright, writing at Birding New Jersey and Beyond shares a deeply researched post suggesting that what you always thought you knew was completely wrong:

The reason for all this silence is simple: even the most learned, even the best-informed ornithologists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not know why the French-speaking inhabitants of the lower Mississippi had christened their “golden bird of the wooded swamps” Prothonotary. Elliott Coues, the greatest ornithological lexicographer who ever lived, could do no more than quote Pennant in the second edition of his Check List; twenty years later, the etymology offered in the final, definitive edition of the Key ends with a simple question: “Why?”

We're always trying to figured out precisely how many birders there are in North America.  Nick Lund of The Birdist reinterprets some old data:

Birders seems to have a bit of an inferiority complex in the world of outdoor recreation.  Some of it I think is social (we lack the macho chest-puffing of hunters), some of it is institutional (we lack the political organization and historical traditions of hunting and fishing).  I used to think that part of it was simply that there are fewer of us.  But, apparently that isn't true.

At The Nemesis Bird, Erik Bruhnke has been really enjoying this Boreal Owl winter:

Boreal Owls are a tiny owl species that have densely-feathered legs and a copious amount of insulation throughout their feathered bellies. They are well-built for surviving the cold winters of northern Canada where they originate from. The colors of a Boreal Owl are rich, dark, and secretive... hosting a spectrum of colors that are found within the boggy thickets of northern Canada. Their bellies are streaked in white and dark-chocolate brown, as are the backsides of their heads. A Boreal Owl's face is surrounded with a beautiful black outer edge, speckled with only the finest white markings. Their forehead is densely speckled in white spots that trail throughout the top of their head.  Their deep yellow eyes contrast against their silvery-white feathers that insulate and protect their face.

Writing at the Stokes Birding Blog, Lillian Stokes gets some amazing photos of Least Bittern, perhaps our least approachable wader:

When you least expect it you might get a chance to see a rather hard to find bird, as we did when Don and I heard of a Least Bittern on our local FL birding listserve. Least Bitterns are widespread breeders throughout the eastern part of the country and into parts of the West, but they are secretive. So I went to photograph this Least Bittern in a park in Ft. Myers, FL. I had seen some beautiful shots of this bird, out in full sun, taken by other photographers. Of course, when I got there, the Least Bittern did not cooperate, photographically speaking. It stayed hidden in its chosen place in the cattails.

It's the time of year when hawks are easily found along roadsides everywhere you go.  David Sibley offers a couple tips on identifying those birds based on their relative size, shape, and position in the tree:

Hawks are generally solitary and territorial, and will not tolerate another hawk nearby. The only exception is mated pairs. You won’t see two Rough-legged Hawks, or a Red-tailed and a Red-shouldered Hawk, sharing a tree like this on the wintering grounds. Therefore, whenever you see two hawks sitting this close to each other, it’s safe to assume that they are the same species and that they are nesting nearby, which greatly reduces the number of candidate species.

 

Blog Birding #124

Charlotte Wasylik of Prairie Birder whips up a digiscoping adaptor with household items that gets some impressive results:

One downside to digiscoping is that the adapters that help you get better photos can be expensive, especially if as mentioned above you have just spent a lot on a scope. You can hand-hold the camera to take photos, but it can be difficult to hold it still enough. One solution, which I like, is a DIY adapter. While it’s not as good as the real ones, it works quite well and is very cheap!

Laurence Butler heads out of town and induces some thrasher envy at Butlers Birds:

As this point in the year, the creosote and sage scrub hosts inordinate numbers of migrating Sage Thrashers, along with Sage Sparrows and the more elusive, more sought after Le Conte's and Crissal Thrasher. There are Bendire's Thrashers out there too, but oddly enough the region is too arid for the more common Curve-billed Thrashers found just about everywhere else.

Why should you become a gull connoisseur?  Seagull Steve explains at Bourbon, Bastards, and Birds:

It all starts simply and innocently enough. When you are a nonbirder, they are all seagulls. Case closed. But as you fall deeper and deeper in love with birding, you realize there are many gull species. They are similar, but should be easy enough to tell apart, right? But after that overly optimistic assessment, other, more experienced birders inevitably correct the IDs you are attempting. Gulls are not what they seem. You eavesdrop on gull conversations that include unfamiliar words like webs, mirrors, gonydeal angles, bleaching, backcrosses. You look at photos of strange birds online that appear telling to some, but mean absolutely nothing to you. You might as well be trying to read Egyptian hieroglyphs. Suddenly, you have the horrible realization that gull identification is extremely messy and complex. You become daunted, weak in the knees...how will you ever master this perplexing group of birds?

Composition is one of the easiest aspects of bird photography to forget in the heat of the moment.  Scott Simmons, writing at Birding is Fun, offers some pointers:

I like to think of composition as learning to SEE: Simply, Emphasize, Exclude.  Learn to simplify your composition by emphasizing what's important to you and excluding everything else. Whenever you take a picture, it's good to ask yourself: what am I trying to show?  What am I interested in?  Do what you can to emphasize that and exclude everything that would distract from it. Just this morning I found the above American Goldfinch. When I first found it, it was in a tree surrounded by small branches.  I waited for it to move around in the tree, and it eventually perched on a branch with a nice, clean background.  It's a "bird on a stick" photo, but the composition is simple.  You know what I want to emphasize, and I've done my best to exclude everything that would detract from it.

Do you search for Lapland Longspurs by their vocalizations as they pass overhead?  At Earbirding, Nathan Pieplow suggests that this isn't as simple as it seems:

As I started listening to recordings of Lapland Longspurs from other parts of North America, I started to hear other types of calls.  Individual birds give at least 5 or 6 different whistled calls, especially on the breeding grounds, and individual repertoires seem to differ, especially from one geographic region to the next.  In trying to catalog Lapland Longspur calls, I ended up making a map of variation.  First, I found recordings from seven distinct locations where this species breeds in the North American Arctic.

Blog Birding #123

Nick of The Birdist has a fascinating interview with Todd Forsgren, whose photographs of birds in mist nets were rather controversial when they were released:

The only bird photographer I know of who I would consider a great artist is Todd Forsgren.  In his most famous series, Forsgren photographs tropical birds temporarily tangled in mist nets.  The images are striking, and the viewer can't help but calculate his empathy for the birds with the value of scientific data gained from their confinement.  Perhaps most interesting to birders is the conceptual link between Forsgren's mist net images and the artwork of James J. Audubon, whose globally-influential paintings were built upon the sacrifice of thousands birds unfortunate enough to meet the business end of his shotgun.

Andrea Alfano, a student at Cornell, writes on Cornell's Round Robin blog about the whirling amalgamations of starlings and how exactly they do it:

Surprising as it may be, flocks of birds are never led by a single individual. Even in the case of flocks of geese, which appear to have a leader, the movement of the flock is actually governed collectively by all of the flock members. But the remarkable thing about starling flocks is their fluidity of motion. As the researchers put it, “the group respond[s] as one” and “cannot be divided into independent subparts.”

In the wake of the addition of Purple Swamphen to the ABA list, Carlos Sanchez, writing at 10,000 Birds, tries to predict the next ABA-Area additions:

With the recent addition of the Nanday Parakeet (Nandayus nenday) and Purple Swamphen (Porphyrio porphyrio) to the ABA list (it was not too long ago that Common Myna (Acridotheres tristis) was added as well), I thought an article discussing the potentially upcoming exotic bird species from Florida to be added to the ABA area list would be relevant to the times. The current situation with exotic bird species in Florida is in a state of flux, particularly southeast Florida where the bulk of exotic bird diversity in the United States resides — and much of it “uncountable.”

Dan Arndt, writing at Birds Canada, shares some phenomenal photos pf Calgary's Great Horned Owls:

Here in Calgary, there has been at least one pair of Great Horned Owls roosting and nesting year-round in Fish Creek Provincial Park for well over a decade. They are wuite possibly the best known Great Horned Owls in the city, and have fledged dozens of young over the years.

While there are some folks that get a bit too close for comfort, these veteran topics of the bird paparazzi are quite comfortable with their observers, and have a lot of experience making the most of their natural camouflauge, as well as staying out of sight when that too is called for.

Radd Icenoggle, at his Radley Ice blog, is producing another great podcast on birding.  His latest, on how birding can change the world, is worth checking out:

Birding is more than just birds. Birding is a biological study, natural world immersion program, spiritual practice, conservation effort, economic agent for positive change, and goodwill ambassadorship program all rolled into one incredibly powerful package. The problem is that most of the public and many of our fellow birders do not see this fact. I started the More Than Birds podcast to start telling these largely unknown stories. I want to touch on spiritual aspects of birding with a Buddhist monk and birding friend. I want to know how a father balances family and his birding passion. I want to talk with a filmmaker whose passion is to share the natural world in order to protect it.

 

Blog Birding #122

At 10,000 Birds, the next I and the Bird is out and the topic is falcons.  Who doesn't love falcons?

What is a falcon, really?  There was a time we thought we knew.  Based on their physical attributes and lifestyle, falcons enjoyed a very long run as a founding member of the order Falconiformes, along with the rest of the diurnal raptor-y type birds like vultures and eagles and hawks and hawk-eagles.  But the secrets that lie within their genes eventually became public, and it turns out that these arguably most impressive of the raptors (though even that term is less and less useful) are not, in any way, related to the rest of the apex predatory birds, and in fact lie much closer to the perching birds and not far at all from the parrots.  Birders in the 21st Century are no stranger to genetic re-evaluations of species relationships, but this one may well be considered the blot heard round the world.

The always entertaining Nathan Pieplow at Earbirding looks at the world of animated .gifs to see if it offers bird vocalization fans any way to better translate variation in bird songs:

Animated GIF: quintessential genre of the modern internet.  A good proportion of the web is devoted to these short, silent looping video clips, mostly in the service of slapstick humor.  But GIFs have significant educational potential as well, especially when it comes to the visualization of patterns — which is what this whole website is all about.

Winter birders love to talk about irruptions.  Chris Petrak, writing at Birding is Fun, goes deeper into the word and the birds it describes:

Watching birds can do lots of good things for you, including expanding your vocabulary. Or at least, it has expanded my vocabulary. Until I had the time to pay attention to seasonal changes and movements of birds, I did not have the word, “irruption,” in my working vocabulary. I knew “eruption,” which involves something bursting out, like lava from a volcano. Irruption refers to something bursting in, or surging up. It is the word used by ecologists to describe a sudden, rapid, and irregular increase in an animal population. It typically involves some kind of change in the natural ecological checks and balances.

One of the joys of birding is when you are able to get up close and personal with common species.  At Bird Canada, Tim Hopwood shares some incredible photos of Golden-crowned Kinglets:

Photographically, they are certainly a challenge - always moving about at a rapid pace, and often deep within the branches of trees. So almost always I will have to use a high shutter speed to avoid motion blur, and a correspondingly high ISO. However their saving grace (for the photographer at least) is the fact that they seem to be unperturbed by humans and are quite happy for me to snap away at close range as I strive (usually with limited success!) to get a decent shot. 

Laura Erickson sings the praises of Wisdom the Laysan Albatross, the oldest known bird who continues to do her part for the species even north of 60 years old:

But one albatross—the only wild bird known for certain to be even older than I am—seems to be putting my activity level to shame. Back in early 1956, Chandler Robbins banded a breeding female Laysan Albatross on Midway Island in the Pacific. Today Robbins is one of the most respected and beloved ornithologists in the world—the lead author of the Golden Guide field guide and the man who started the Breeding Bird Survey—but then he was a hard-working young employee of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, working on the banding project in order to work out win-win strategies to save the Midway albatrosses from extermination while protecting military aircraft coming and going on the island.

Blog Birding #121

Drew Weber of Nemesis Bird offers his round-up of the latest in birding apps for smartphones:

There is a constant flood of new apps available for iPhone, but it's less common that one of these apps is for birding. Recently there has been a bunch of new releases that birders might be interested in. Some may have been out for a while but I just happened across them now and found them interesting.

At 10,000 Birds, Carlos Sanchez shares some spectacular photos from the Anhinga Trail at Everglades National Park:

Every year from around January through the end of March, Anhinga Trail in Everglades National Park comes alive as water levels throughout the park drop and force birds to concentrate around more permanent water sources. Well known to tourists who visit the trail by the thousands every year to see their first wild alligators, the site is generally passed off by the serious birder as having little potential of seeing something truly special — just close views of herons, egrets, and ibis. I challenge that false notion and welcome those to visit Anhinga Trail in late winter and see one of the great wildlife spectacles of Florida.

Birdchick Sharon Stiteler nails a long-time nemesis Boreal Owl in the wilds of northern Minnesota:

I can’t really do my Big Half Year fundraiser for the Friends of Sax Zim Bog without at least one trip to the bog. I knew I would get up there at some point this winter and I had made some plans with friends and then last week, things went a little nuts. A tiny owl called a boreal owl showed up in spades. One report from Chris Wood counted seven! Granted that this not on the scale with the great gray owl irruption of 2004/2005 but it’s significant none the less…especially since this is somewhat of a nemesis bird for me (a bird I always seem to miss). I finally got to the point of not even chasing one since every effort to do so ended up with the classic phrase, “Oh it was just hear yesterday (or 15 minutes ago)…

Is a decline in duck hunting causing a shortfall in conservation funds acquired via the duck stamp?  Larry of The Birders Report investigates:

“The last 15 years have brought hunting opportunities not seen since the turn of the last century,” said Dr Mark Vrtiska from Nebraska Game and Parks Commission. “The waterfowl population has passed 40 million six times since 1995, something only seen nine times since records began. These should be the glory days for duck hunting.”

However, in stark contrast, the annual sales of the ‘duck stamp’, the Federal licence needed to hunt, are declining. While over 2,100,000 stamps were sold annually in the 1970’s, between 2004 and 2008 this declined to 1,300,000. This fall is continuing with an annual decline of 36% in duck stamp sales.

At the ABA's young birder blog, The Eyrie, James Purcell recounts a fantastic experience with one of the southwest's most spectacular birds:

The entire group had just come back from a fantastic birding day on Paradise Road, Barfoot Mountain, and Onion Saddle, full of Red-faced Warblers, Pygmy Nuthatches, Mexican Chickadees, Scott’s Orioles, Virginia’s Warblers, Juniper Titmice, and so many other unique birds. Everyone was satisfied, except for one thought that penetrated each person’s mind. Paradise Road had been one of our best shots for Montezuma Quail on the trip, and today was our last day in the Chiricahuas. Everyone knew that, while still possible, our chances for getting this secretive denizen of the oak grasslands were greatly decreased after we left this mountain range.

Blog Birding #120

Nathan Pieplow of Earbirding wonders if the Rusty Blackbird's many vocalizations haven't been poorly defined all this time:

Several authors have described Rusty Blackbirds as having two types of songs — one more creaking, one more gurgling — and this would make sense given that the closely related Brewer’s Blackbird has also been reported to have two different songs of more or less the same types.  As I went through online recordings of Rusty Blackbirds, however, I came to the conclusion that I was hearing three different types of songs from the species, not two.  Or is that two types of song and a very song-like call?

At Bourbon, Bastards, and Birds, Seagull Steve contends that birders rely on the Hybird Theory of bird identification way too often:

Hybrids. Ugh. We all hate them. The spawn of two different species. Abominations against God and against our trusted field guides. Hell, they force us to question the very concept of a "species". They are hard to identify and, unless you keep a serious hybrid list, simply cannot be ticked.

Perhaps you knew all this already...but BB&B is here today to make the bold assertion that the increasing use of Hybrid Theory is not a result of increased hybridzation among birds or an increased wealth of knowledge about interbreeding...unfortunately, it is nothing but good old fashioned laziness.

Dwayne of Nerdy for Birdy asks whether technology has made birding better or worse.  The verdict?  You be the judge:

But as technology gets cheaper, more pervasive and more accessible, it has become more and more ingrained in the practice of birding. Information & Communication Technology (ICT) can be looked at as a broad spectrum of technologies ranging from hardware, networks to software to how we use software, such as social networking. This posting attempts to look at how technology is used in birding and how it has changed birding.

The biggest bird news of the week was undoubtedly the release of the report showing cats to be significant threats to bird mortality.  More on that at The Birders' Report:

According to Dr. George Fenwick, President of American Bird Conservancy, one of the leading bird conservation organizations in the U.S. and a group that has called for action on this issue for many years, “This study, which employed scientifically rigorous standards for data inclusion, demonstrates that the issue of cat predation on birds and mammals is an even bigger environmental and ecological threat than we thought. No estimates of any other anthropogenic [human-caused] mortality source approach the bird mortality this study calculated for cat predation.”

Bill Thompson III, also known as Bill of the Birds, gets a look at one of the most rarely seen of namesake field mark of any North American bird:

These field marks are reminders to us that many of our native birds were named during the shotgun era of ornithology when men (yes it was mostly men) took to nature with gun and gamebag and shot any bird they saw—especially ones that were unfamiliar to them. These unknown birds were examined in the hand and sometimes given names that seemed perfectly useful to an gun-toting ornithologist who was nearly always going be looking at bird corpses up close rather than living, flying birds at a distance.

Blog Birding #119

Since Nate Swick is so weighed down with enormous responsibilities at the Space Coast Birding Festival and surely is having no fun at all, it has fallen upon me, your frozen humble servant in Idaho - one who's birding has nearly been limited to observing others blog about discovering state firsts, mega-rarities, and such - to share the interesting or humorous stuff I've come across in the birding blogosphere in the last week or so.

Ron Dudley gives us a photographic guide to aging Bald Eagles at Feathered Photography.

• As we go into prime “eagle watching” season here in northern Utah I thought it might be timely to present a guide that would be helpful in aging Bald Eagles as they progress through the 5-6 year process of becoming adults. Many of these younger birds are mistakenly identified as Golden Eagles by the general public. Eagles that have not reached the adult stage are referred to as immature, juveniles or sub-adults. Plumage stages are highly variable, depending on molt sequence, age and timing so other factors like iris and beak color are also taken into account when estimating age. Eyes gradually change from dark brown to yellow while the beak goes from blackish-gray to yellow.

At the awesome new ABA website Listing Central, there is also a blog. I really appreciated Adam Sell's approach to a Different Dind of Big Year.

• One day in late December, I was going through some big year numbers on my home state’s version of “Lister’s Corner” and to my surprise, found a category that hadn’t crossed my mind. A site list! That was it! As I sat at my computer, all of my goals clicked and the inner rush became palpable. It took only a few seconds to come to fruition. The nebulous became concrete. It was going to be a patch big year for me. Shoot, even choosing the site was easy for me. I was going to do a site Big Year at Waukegan Beach. This all happened in a manner of about 10 minutes.

Tim Avery shares a funnly look back at his run-ins with law enforcement while birding at Utah Birders.

• The first time I had a run in with the law while birdwatching was when I was 20. I was home from college for Christmas break and Colby Neuman and I had gone to the Bountiful Landfill to look through the gulls. Afterwards as I “sped” back towards Salt Lake, I was pulled over on a desolate street in west Bountiful for going 14 mph over the 25mph speed limit. I didn’t know the speed limit was 25mph, as the street was a large, wide, main throroughfare. The street was in a front of a grade school--but it was a Saturday, and the school was out for the holidays to boot. I had made a mistake in not paying attention to the street signs in my pursuit of birds. The officer asked if we were, “looking for the eagles?”. I was a tad snide when I replied, “no, we were looking at gulls at the dump.” I wish I had been more witty at the time, and replied with something like, “yes, and I sped up to avoid hitting one of them--so no ticket right?” In any event, I took the ticket, paid the $65 fine, and went about my way.

Just because the White House petition for a Wildlife Conservation Stamp didn't get the traction many had hoped for, Larry Jordon is doing his part to push the issue to the forefront with his recent post at The Birder's Report. Beautiful photography helps convey the importance of the national wildlife refuge system followed up with a call to action...

• Would you like to be part of creating an additional income stream for our National Wildlife Refuge System? If you haven’t heard of our proposal for a Wildlife Conservation Stamp, please check out our new website where we will be promoting a plan to get an alternative stamp issued to increase revenue for our refuges.

Blog Birding #118

These days digital cameras in the hands of birders are omnipresent.  Robert Mortenson of Birding is Fun asks if that's a good thing or a bad thing when it comes to reporting rare birds:

Back in the day, a new record bird only counted because they had a skin in the hand. The naturalist had skillfully plucked that bird out of the air with a shotgun. Then with the advent of binoculars and bird guides a new craft emerged...the skill of field identification and note taking. Technology has advanced and digital photography is now widespread and super convenient. Almost all of us have a digital camera in one form another, be it your cell phone, an inexpensive point and shoot, or a professional quality dSLR. Digital photographs seem to be the heir-apparent to skins and notes.

The taxonomy of the ladder-backed Melanerpes woodpeckers is far more nebulous than you may have been led to believe.  At Earbirding, Nathan Pieplow argues that there's almost certainly at least one more in there:

The taxonomy of the Golden-fronted Woodpecker and its relatives has been causing headaches for over a century.  Not only does the species display complex geographic variation in plumage, but where ranges meet, it hybridizes with the closely related Gila Woodpecker to the northwest, the Red-bellied Woodpecker to the northeast, and the Hoffman’s Woodpecker to the south, which in turn sometimes hybridizes with the Red-crowned Woodpecker in Costa Rica.  The result is a mind-bending mosaic of similar-looking woodpeckers stretching from Ontario to Venezuela.

And speaking of taxonomy, David Ringer, writing at 10,000 Birds, discusses whether or not the 9-primaried oscines actually consist of 16 different families:

Because this group is so rich in species, so readily able to exploit a wide range of environments and food sources, debates about how to classify these birds have smouldered for decades. Some scientists have lumped them all into one enormous family (e.g., Sibley and Monroe 1990), but more often, they have been treated as several families. This approach, though, has lead to much confusion over which birds belong in which families (remember when we learned that Piranga tanagers are actually cardinals?), and some of the odder members of the group have never really seemed to belong anywhere in the traditional family structure.

Kelly Riccetti, of the Red and the Peanut, gets up close and personal with an Anhinga's silvery back:

When I got home, I looked up Anhingas to see if they really did have glossy silver wing coverts and scapulars, or had I just imagined it. It turns out they do, and they owe their silver feathers to a special structure in the barbules of the feather. I found a detailed technical article published in the Journal of Morphology that explains why those feathers are indeed silver. Click here to read "Proximate Bases of Silver Color in Anhinga (Anhinga anhinga) Feathers," by Matthew D. Shawkey, Rafael Maia, and Liliana D'Alba.

Kimberly Kaufman continues to fight the good fight for proper siting and oversight of wind turbines on Lake Erie's south shore.  She offers an opportunity for birders to make their voices heard:

And, in spite of BSBO's efforts to stop the Camp Perry turbine, in spite of all the official support for our position from state and national conservation organizations, after state and federal wildlife officials told Camp Perry that the project's Environmental Assessment (that they paid a lot of taxpayer money for) was riddled with inaccuracies, misleading statements, and erroneous findings, and Camp Perry ignored wildlife officials and issued their own "Finding of No Significant Impact.." we have heard nothing--no response at all--from the officials at Camp Perry about that project, either. 

Blog Birding #117

The new I and the Bird is out at 10,000 Birds.  The theme this month?  Jays:

Few birds in the world are as beloved and admired as the Jays.  While the family Corvidae has no shortage of species that combine the self-realized human traits of intelligence and social aptitude, only in the jays is that other desired characteristic, beauty, wielded to such great effect. Because throughout human history crows and ravens have been looked upon as clever tricksters or malevolent spirits, but jays, their smaller, more colorful, more congenial cousins, have long been celebrated by birders and Beatles alike.  Because who doesn’t love jays?

Writing at Birding is Fun, Lillian Stokes gets to the bottom of the mysterious irruption of thousands of Razrobills to Florida waters:

"Seen the Penguins?" the fisherman asked us, as we walked out yesterday with our binos and scopes towards Tarpon Bay on Sanibel Island in FL. Ordinarily we would have wondered just what the fisherman had been drinking, but not now. What he was referring to was the big invasion of Razorbills into Florida waters, on a scale that has never been seen before. The Florida birding listserves are jammed with Razorbill sightings. Birders and photographers are eagerly searching for these about football-sized, black-and-white alcids. Birders in Anna Maria Island, FL, where Razorbills hang out by the fishing piers, are being asked by the fisherman whether penguins can fly. Before this December there had been 14 records of Razorbills in Florida with only 1 record from the Gulf Coast. Now there are hundreds, if not thousands of Razorbills in Florida waters and no one has a definitive answer why.

Jim McCormas of Ohio Birds and Biodiversity considers the rapid expansion of Red-shouldered Hawks in his part of the continent:

Hard as it is to believe these days, at one time forest cover in Ohio had been reduced to about 10%. All of those heavily forested Smokeyesque places, such as the Hocking Hills, Shawnee State Forest, Mohican State Forest, etc once resembled lunar landscapes. Forest-dependent animals such as the Red-shouldered Hawk did not fare well in those dark days of deforestation. As our forests recover and mature, the hawks are recolonizing the Ohio country in ever-increasing numbers. This is even true in heavily wooded urban and suburban 'scapes. Red-shouldered Hawks are not an uncommon sight in many wooded Columbus neighborhoods, for instance. They weren't there not all that long ago.

At the new multi-author blog Bird Canada, Charlotte Wasylik celebrates the avian themes work of indigenous artist Kenojuak Ashevak:

Celebrated Inuk artist, Kenojuak Ashevak, known for her stylized drawings and painting of Arctic animals including many birds, died earlier this week at the age of 85. She has been called one of Canada’s greatest artists and was a role model to several generations of artists in the North.

The National Gallery of Canada has 50 of her works, including the original drawing for “Enchanted Owl” which was commemorated on Canadian postage stamp.

At Birding New Jersey and the World, Rick Wright initiates the year of the Common Nighthawk with a post on the subject of that most bizarre trait of the goatsuckers, their enormous mouths:

If there’s one thing the nighthawks and their goatsucking cousins are known for, it’s their extravagant oral cavities. (Fuertes’s nighthawk is terrifying blown up to so much more than “nat. size”!). One species, the dramatically marked Nacunda Nighthawk, is even named for that character: “nacunda” is widely reported to be a Guaraní word meaning “bigmouth.” (Just incidentally, South American languages would appear to have lots of words for those who blab; “nanday,” as in Nanday Parakeet, means “noisy talker.”)

Considering Owl Ethics

via The Nemesis Bird

The ethics of owl photography is one issue birders have discussed at great length, particularly in the modern era as we've seen the rise and increased ease of digital photography.  We've even discussed it here at the ABA Blog on occasion.  Owls, after all, are charismatic.  They're too infrequently seen.  They can be devilishly hard to photograph. And on those rare occasions when the stars align and an owl is observed in daylight, it can be very easy to take things too far without really even realizing that you're doing so. 

 

Northern Saw-whet Owl, digiscoped by Nate Swick in Middlesex, Massachusetts, at a respectful distance

 

Most birders do our best to abide by the ABA Code of Birding Ethics, particularly when it comes to disturbing roosting owls.  But absent any sort of clear owl-specific advice, it can be hard to know precisely how much is too much until the owl flushes and every binocular-toter in the tri-county area is calling for your head. 

At The Nemesis Bird, Andy McGann tackles this issue with a well put together post on photographing roosting owls, but the advice works just as well for those who just want to observe them:

• If you catch wind of the known whereabouts of an owl's daytime roost, ask someone-who-knows for more information.  However, this can often be an unproductive dead-end, because many birders are rightfully extremely guarded when it comes to trusting others with a bird's well-being.  On the bright side, their hearts are in the right place.  The down side is that people can get totally bent out of shape when someone withholds information.  TRY NOT TO TAKE IT PERSONALLY.  If possible, politely ask if you could possibly arrange to join them when they check up on that-roost-they-know-about.
• Target roosts that are located on PUBLIC LAND, especially those WITH POPULAR HIKING TRAILS.  Why?  Because the birds at these locations are simply more accustomed to seeing people walking around.  Birds become desensitized to people walking in the areas where they always walk.  Like city pigeons, but not quite that extreme.

Anyway, there's far more and it's good stuff.  Go check it out!