Northern Pintails in the Park

I think these Northern Pintails were the most handsome birds at Agua Caliente Park last week. 

These males were in their breeding plumage. "Male makes wheezy mewing notes and a whistle. Female quacks." They winter from central United States southward to northern South America. Also in southern Europe, northern Africa, and southern Asia. They are not endangered, but populations are lower than desired. [All About Birds (Cornell Ornithology Lab)]

"This elegant duck with its trim form and swift flight has been dubbed 'the greyhound of the air'. ... They are omnivorous. ... Main foods eaten include grain, moist-soil and aquatic plant seeds, aquatic insects, crustaceans and snails." [Delta Waterfowl]

Ring-necked Ducks in the Park

According to the Cornell Ornithology Lab's All About Birds web site, [the Ring-necked Duck] is the most common diving duck to be found on small ponds in migration. It is more easily recognized by the bold white ring around its bill than the chestnut collar for which it is named. If you enlarge the bottom photo (double-click on it), you can see the chestnut ring. 

I wasn't able to isolate any females to photograph in Agua Caliente Park, but I believe there's a female on the far left of the group photo. 

Double-crested Cormorant in the Park

I spotted this cormorant in Agua Caliente Park last March. A warm spring feeds the three ponds in this park.

I didn't know before that cormorants came inland. Note the turtle sunning itself on the branch in the first two photos. 

"The Double-crested Cormorant is the most numerous and widespread North American cormorant. It's also the only one that occurs in large numbers inland as well as on the coast. Growing in numbers throughout its range, this cormorant is increasingly being blamed for declines in sport fisheries and for devastating fish farms. ... [It] dives from the surface of the water and chases prey underwater. Grabs fish in bill, without spearing it." [Cornell Lab of Ornithology, All About Birds web site]

[These photos are heavily cropped. Thanks to my Canon 70-300mm zoom lens. I could barely see the cormorant across the pond, and didn't see the turtle until I enlarged the photo.]

American Wigeons in the Park

American Wigeons in Agua Caliente Park, Tucson, 5 March 2008

Mallards in the Park

Male and female Mallards at Agua Caliente Park, 5 March 2008

Manky mallard?

I looked through all the water fowl pictures in Sibley and Peterson, and I couldn't figure out what this duck is. I did find a clue in Peterson, which led me to look up "domestic mallard" in google images. This led me to the 10,000 Birds blog. Charlie wrote about "Manky Mallards," and has photographs of mallards very similar to this bird. Based on his article, I'm concluding that this is a feral male mallard. (Please chime in if you agree/disagree.)

Check out Charlie's article: "Manky Mallards" (Domestic, Feral, or Just Plain Odd Mallards, published on June 28, 2007. It's fascinating. Thanks, Charlie! 

[I don't know what the deal is with the little white tuft on his head. Maybe he was in a fight?]

Snowy Egret - Agua Caliente Park

We picnicked with two of our grandsons in Agua Caliente Park this afternoon. As we were setting up, I spotted this egret in the stream. I'm identifying this one as a Snowy Egret - smaller than the Great Egret at Ft. Lowell Park and with distinguishing yellow feet. A lovely bird.

Great Egret - 2008

Yesterday, I was in Fort Lowell Park. All the ducks were at one end of the pond. At the other end, I spotted an egret. I was only able to spend a few minutes in the park, but I did manage to get some photos. I have no idea if this is the same Great Egret I photographed last year. Does anyone know if they return to the same location each year?

Great Egret - 2007

We have a small pond in Ft. Lowell Park, one of our city parks.  


I photographed this bird there last spring. I believe it's a Great Egret. 

CORRECTION: I originally posted this as "Snowy Egret," which is what a friend told me it was. However, the Cornell's All About Birds indicates that the Snowy Egret has a black beak and yellow feet, whereas the Great Egret has a yellow beak and black legs and feet. Since there is already a reference to this post on another blog, I thought I should put in this correction. 

Roadrunner photo

I've written about Roadrunners before. Here's a photo of one who came into our patio last week. It's only through enlarged photos that I've been able to see some of the colours in the roadrunner's plumage. (Click on the photo to see it full size. It's worth it!)

Backyard Birds - Gilded Flicker

Gila Woodpeckers are year-round residents of our neighbourhood. Four of them feed in my patio regularly. During the summer, they brought their babies in and fed them orange bits and seeds. I was looking out the window early yesterday morning and noticed that one of the woodpeckers was different. I was kind of bleary-eyed, but awake enough to realize it wasn't a Gila Woodpecker.

Gila Woodpecker; Gilded Flicker

I photographed the bird through the kitchen window, because I didn't want to frighten it. When I uploaded the photos, I found this flight shot showing a dark gold underwing.

Sparrow; Gilded Flicker

I remembered a similar bird recently posted on a friend's blog. t. beth of Firefly Forest described and beautifully photographed a Northern Red-Shafted Flicker a few days ago at a location about half a mile from where I live. However, the bird in our yard had a golden underwing, rather than the red of the local Northern. I did a little research and was delighted when I realized that the new visitor eating from the suet block must be a Gilded Flicker (Colaptes auratus mearnsi).

"Like the Northern Flicker, the Gilded Flicker is a medium-large, conspicuous bird, often seen on the ground. Flickers have brown backs with black, horizontal barring. The breast features a large, black crescent and the undersides are speckled. Gilded Flicker compares with the subspecies of Northern Flicker in several ways: Like the Red-shafted subspecies, Gilded Flicker has a red malar stripe, gray throat, and gray ear-coverts. These are in contrast to Yellow-shafted, which has a black malar stripe, tan throat, and tan ear-coverts. Gilded Flicker, however, differs from Red-shafted in having a yellowish crown (hence the name "Gilded"), and yellow shafts on the primaries. Gilded Flicker is slightly smaller than both Northern Flicker subspecies, and the background color of the underside is whitish, instead of tan."

Audubon Watchlist

This morning, the flicker was back, this time on the large seed block usually frequented by Gambel's Quail, Gila Woodpeckers and Cactus Wrens. When two Gila Woodpeckers joined it, it was easy to see the differences.

Gilded Flicker (larger, and with the brown back)

Male and Female Gila Woodpeckers
(the male has the red crown)

And the Caged Birds Sang ...

A hot July morning in 1982. We were in Hsinchu, Taiwan, and were staying at the Visiting Faculty Residence at National Tsing Hua University. A colleague of my husband’s from the University of Arizona who had been on sabbatical there had told us to be sure to get up early and walk up the hill behind the university. He promised a delightful surprise.

It was first light, but we could already feel the oncoming heat and humidity that would make walking almost unbearable after about 6:30 a.m. We set off along the road and found ourselves surrounded by cycling townsfolk balancing two, three or more bamboo bird cages on their bicycles. We reached the crest of the hill and discovered a beautiful path along the top of a steep wooded ravine. The villagers hung their bird cages on the lower branches of the trees and began their Tai Chi routines. As we walked along, many of the villagers stared at us. Most of the men had little or no facial hair, but an elderly gentleman, looking as if he’d stepped out of a Chinese classical painting, pulled on his long, whispy white beard and laughed and pointed at my husband’s thick black one.

Suddenly we heard wild birds singing high in the trees. The melodies were complex and beautiful. Soon the caged birds began to imitate them and there was an amazing exchange of enchanting music to accompany the quiet movements of the townsfolk. After about an hour, the caged birds were returned to the bicycles and taken silently back to town.

-----------------------------------

This occurred long before I had becoming interested in birds and I don't know what birds were singing in the wild or what birds were in the cages. I've since learned that Hsinchu County is a prime birding location. I'd love to return.

Red-tailed Hawk - Breakfast Time

Wednesday morning, on the power pole behind our house

Bird Moms Manipulate Birth Order To Protect Sons

House Finches are our most frequent and numerous visitors. I've counted as many as 120 in our patio after I fill the feeders in the morning. The majority fly in and out all day long. Although they're eating us out of house and home, we do enjoy them.

There have been several fascinating studies about House Finches done at the University of Arizona. Yesterday, the UA News Service published an interesting story about how "Bird Moms Manipulate Birth Order to Protect [Their] Sons":

Protecting her kids from peril is the job of every good mom. When marauding mites turn up in a house finch's nest, she shelters her sons from the blood-suckers by laying male eggs later than those containing their sturdier sisters, according to new research. Making sure the vulnerable baby boys are exposed to mites for a shorter period allows both the sons and the daughters to survive long enough to leave the nest.

"Sons are more sensitive to the mites than daughters," said Alexander V. Badyaev of The University of Arizona in Tucson. "Mothers minimize sons' exposure to mites by laying male eggs later than female eggs. As a result, the males are in the nest fewer days." Even so, the male chicks that grow up during mite season end up just as big as ones from the mite-free time of the year. It's all mom's doing, Badyaev said. Once breeding female finches are exposed to mites, their bodies make hormonal changes that affect the order of egg laying and accelerates the development of their sons while they're still in the egg.

"We've found a mechanism by which duration of growth can be adjusted to a changing risk of mortality," said Dr. Alexander Badyaev, a UA assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. He added that this is the first documentation that maternal manipulation of both ovulation and growth influences the duration of development in birds.

One of Badyaev's interests is figuring out how the various developmental periods of birds evolve and how birds can modify those developmental periods to maximize the survival of their young. There's a trade-off between keeping the kids at home longer so they grow big and strong and getting them out of the nest quickly because nests are targets for predators and parasites, he said.

Since 2002, Badyaev, Oh and their colleagues have been intensively documenting the lives of a population of house finches (Carpodacus mexicanus) on the UA campus. Throughout the year, the researchers capture birds several times a week to band and measure them and to take DNA and hormone samples. During the breeding season, the researchers locate the nests, keep track of activity in the nest, follow nestling growth and development, and take DNA samples from the chicks. The researchers have also been counting the numbers of mites on the birds and documented a seasonal pattern. When breeding starts in February, the mites are absent. As winter turns to spring, mites start showing up on the adult females, in their nests and on their nestlings. The exact timing depends on the year. Mites can kill nestlings.

"When it is safer inside the nest than outside, then there's no need for young to leave the nest until growth is complete, but when mortality risk of staying in the nest is great, chicks need to complete their growth fast and get out as soon as they can," Badyaev said. "What should a mother do in the face of shifting mortality risk?" "To leave the nests sooner and still survive outside of nests, the kids need to grow faster," Badyaev said. "But the mechanisms which regulate nestling growth in relation to changing mortality were not known." So the researchers looked to see how finch moms changed their child-rearing strategy so as to always do best by their kids.

The birds lay one egg per day. To successfully raise baby finches in the presence of mites, the mothers altered the order in which male and female eggs were laid. When mites were absent, the chances of any particular egg being male or female were even. But once mites came into the picture, the mothers laid female eggs first and male eggs last. Males that grew during mite season did more of their development in the egg before hatching. Their mothers accelerated their sons' growth, both in the egg and after they hatched. "Mothers essentially hid their sons in the eggs," Badyaev said. It's remarkable that the fledglings have such similar morphology with or without mites, he said. "Mothers did that by modifying the order of laying of male and female eggs and the pattern of their growth.

Badyaev and his colleagues' article, "Sex-Biased Maternal Effects Reduce Ectoparasite Induced Mortality in a Passerine Bird," is scheduled to be published in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Sept. 18. His co-authors are UA graduate students Terri L. Hamstra and Kevin P. Oh and UA research specialist Dana A. Acevedo Seaman.

Cooper's Hawks in our Backyard (summary post)

Last July, K. and I watched a hawk chasing a dove. It disappeared behind the trees. A few minutes later, all the birds at our feeders took off and disappeared. We looked out and saw this beautiful bird on the power line behind our house.It's not a hawk I've seen before and at first I thought it was a falcon. t.beth (Firefly Forest) kindly identified it for me as a juvenile Cooper's Hawk.

The conservation status of Cooper's Hawks is described on Cornell's All About Birds web site:

Declines of the Cooper's Hawk in the late 1940s and 1950s were blamed on DDT and pesticide contamination. Populations started increasing in the late 1960s, but it is still listed as threatened or of special concern in a number of states. Appears to be adapting to breeding in urban areas, which may help increase populations. Project FeederWatch data indicate stable or increasing numbers over the last 15 years.

A juvenile Cooper's Hawk is now a regular visitor to our neighbourhood. I usually can tell when it's nearby because I hear the flap of hundreds of wings as all the birds feeding in our patio take off instantly to seek cover.

A couple of weeks ago, as I was getting out of the shower, I saw this beauty on the telephone wire right outside our bedroom window. I ran for the camera - no time to dry off - and took photos through the window. (The fuzzy blobs in the back are doves on the power lines behind our house. The hawk doesn't go after them if they're stationary.)










The Cooper's Hawk flew to the patio wall and waited. It spotted its prospective prey and took off.










It took off in a flash. My next photo was of a blank wall. He disappeared from my view, so I don't know if his hunt was successful.

Another Cooper's Hawk flew into the yard last week and spent some time hunting finches (unsuccessfully) in a small xylosma bush.
Unfortunately, I couldn't get close enough for a decent photo, but these show its fantastic red eyes and dark grey back, indicating it's an adult. (Juvenile Cooper's Hawks have brown backs and golden eyes.) It wasn't until I processed the photo that I noticed that this hawk's been banded.

Adult Cooper's Hawk

Well, it's been a long time since I've put a post up, but I had to share this Cooper's Hawk, which flew into the yard on Friday morning and spent some time hunting finches (unsuccessfully) in a small xylosma bush.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get close enough for a decent photo, but these show its fantastic red eyes and dark grey back, indicating it's an adult. (Juvenile Cooper's Hawks have brown backs and golden eyes.) It wasn't until I processed the photo that I noticed that this hawk's been banded.

Cooper's Hawk

On Thursday, July 24th, K. and I watched a hawk chasing a dove. It disappeared behind the trees. A few minutes later, all the birds at our feeders took off and disappeared. We looked out and saw this beautiful bird on the power line behind our house.It's not a hawk I've seen before and at first I thought it was a falcon. t.beth (Firefly Forest) kindly identified it for me:

"Your bird in the photo is a bit strange, and overall I think that it looks like a transition between an immature and adult Cooper's Hawk. Cooper's Hawks have proportionally longer tails than falcons, and your bird has quite a long tail. The one odd feature of your bird is the dark line running downward from below the eye, which is characteristic of falcons. However, Merlins and Peregrines have very dark eyes, and your bird has a yellow eye like that of an immature Cooper's Hawk. Merlins are not found in Tucson during the summer (only in the winter), but Peregrines are rare year-round residents. Cooper's Hawks are common here in Tucson, and they nest in riparian areas."

On Friday morning, when it was pouring with rain, we saw the pair flying again. We watched one of the hawks land in a mesquite tree behind our property, spreading its beautifully banded wings and tail. It was a magnificent sight to see through binoculars, but not one I could photograph through the branches. However, I found a beautiful photo of a Cooper's Hawk in flight by Jim Zipp that shows just what it looked like. The pair hung out for a couple of days in the tall eucalyptus across the street.

The conservation status of Cooper's Hawks is described on Cornell's All About Birds web site:

Declines of the Cooper's Hawk in the late 1940s and 1950s were blamed on DDT and pesticide contamination. Populations started increasing in the late 1960s, but it is still listed as threatened or of special concern in a number of states. Appears to be adapting to breeding in urban areas, which may help increase populations. Project FeederWatch data indicate stable or increasing numbers over the last 15 years.

Cooper's Hawk - 3

The Cooper's Hawk flew to the patio wall and waited.












Spotting prospective prey and preparing for takeoff:












It took off in a flash. My next photo was of a blank wall. He disappeared from my view, so I don't know if his hunt was successful.