Fri-D: How To Tell Perched Falcons From Other Raptors By Shape

This week I rode by a sodden, rainy day Peregrine Falcon perched grumpily near the Cape May, NJ ferry terminal, and the child within me laughed.

Perched falcons are broad-shouldered, broad and full chested thanks to powerful flying muscles, with small heads. They look attenuated at the rear thanks to the narrow waist and long wings. Most have powerful feet. After 36 years teaching about birds, this gobbledy-junk feels bloody boring. Not boring to me, necessarily, but boring and even confusing to some portion of the people I teach. Not memorable.

But children of the 1970's,  you have seen this shape before.

Bird like a kid now and then.

 

 

Thoughtful Thursday: What Do They Want?

[Hooded Mergansers, Cox Hall Creek WMA, Cape May County, NJ. Click to enlarge.]

“But that's not love, he thought, that's not what she wants, nor what any of them want, they do not want you to find yourself in them, they want instead that you should lose yourself in them. And yet, he thought, they are always trying to find themselves in you.”

― James Jones, From Here to Eternity

 

Connecting the Dots

[Satellite image, United States and adjoining countries, about 5:30 a.m. Wednesday, December 23, 2020. Click to enlarge.]

Ever wonder why you can't see the stars? Ever wonder why there are few bears and essentially no bobcats in southern New Jersey? Ever wonder why timber wolves and mountain lions will never again come to the east coast? Connect the dots.

In the northeast/mid-Atlantic, the bright line goes from top right (northeast) to bottom left (southwest). Like this:

Boston.
New York City/Newark/Jersey City.
Trenton/Philadelphia.
Baltimore/Washington, D.C.

People, that's us seen from space. If you wander down to Florida, you'll readily find Orlando, Miami, and Tampa. This is good. The aliens will know where to aim.

With the "Great Convergence - Christmas Star" Jupiter-Saturn thingy going on, a lot of people are looking at satellite imagery hoping for a break in the clouds. The satellite imagery has a more proximal message, however.

There ought to be black bears and bobcats in southern NJ (blueberry growers may disagree about the bears). But they can't get here from their northern and western haunts, because they have to cross the (in)famous Route 1 corridor, the stretch from NYC to Philly that I, in complete agreement, also avoid. 

As white-tailed deer numbers exploded in the 1980's and 1990's, well meaning people suggested re-introducing wolves and mountain lions to the east. But wolves and mountain lions don't want to come east. Wolves in northern tier states have been shown to avoid even crossing rural roads. And there's the added problem of the occasional mountain lion that fetches up and kills and eats a female jogger.

Just seeing the light(s). Living where it's dark.

[The Great Convergence of Jupiter and Saturn, known as the Christmas star, at their closest in about 400 years on the winter solstice. 800 years until they appear this close again, but they aren't all that close: Jupiter is about 552 million miles from earth, and Saturn is 456 million miles beyond Jupiter. Something to think about the next time you try to identify a distant bird. . .Click to enlarge.]

 

K

Of Sapsuckers, Lemonade, Observing Birds, and the Perfect Gift

[Immature Yellow-bellied Sapsucker with Poison Ivy berries, Del Haven, NJ Wednesday, December 16, 2020.]

I've bemoaned to a couple friends that we've reached a point in the year where I could do my eBird checklist before going out to visit my local patch (roughly Cox Hall Creek north to Green Creek and from Delaware Bay to about a mile inland, Cape May County, NJ), and it would be within a bird or two of being spot on. This is as much a product of having birded this patch or at least a portion of it nearly daily all this pandemic year, save some not so fun trips to the hospital.

Make lemons into lemonade, right? What better chance to not just list birds, but to observe them? So I decided to redouble my efforts in that regard, spending time with the commoners as it were, seeing how they spend their day, often starting with the pair of adult Bald Eagles which leave the hidden-away east end of Fishing Creek Marsh at dawn, usually flying over my house on their way to Green Creek Marsh and the Bay to sit in the sun and then catch a fish, and fight over it.

Today a sapsucker drew my attention, and taught me something.

[The sapsucker was feeding on Poison Ivy berries, not a surprise since this is a very popular food source for birds. What it was doing with them, however, surprised me.]

The lemons-to-lemonade thing was something I was also forced into last spring while I went blind from rapidly accelerating cataracts, and being essentially blind by May with no "elective surgeries" allowed because of the pandemic, I decided to see just how far the birding-by-ear envelope could be pushed. It can be pushed very far indeed; the experience changed me.

[The sapsucker brought some of the Poison Ivy Berries to a hole-riddled telephone pole nearby and cached them. Did you know sapsuckers cache food? I didn't until this morning.]

Sapsuckers, being beautiful, somewhat scarce, and often hysterical, are birds I usually give some time too, and this one I stayed with for about 30 minutes. It fed on Poison Ivy Berries, no surprise there, but it was also caching them in holes in a nearby telephone pole! I had no idea they did that, even though many woodpeckers do, so I looked it up in a book that is always near at hand (Ehrlich, Dobkin and Wheye (1988). The Birder's Handbook.) Sure enough:

[Read the section on diet.]

Well, I'll be darned. I love watching nature, always have, always will, and the learning is part of the prize.

[You need this book, and so does the birder in your life. North American ornithology on your desk, readable and authoritative. It may be getting long in the tooth, but it's hardly out of date.]

 

 

 

Ode to the Sumacs

[Don't tell ME sumacs are "native invasives." Female Eastern Bluebird on winged sumac, Cox Hall Creek WMA, Cape May County, NJ December 13, 2020.]

Birding lately for me means, in part, sumac watching. The sumacs are excellent wildlife food plants, not the most nutritious calorie-wise perhaps (great for micro-nutrients, though) but making up for that with abundant fruit that stays on the plant, off the ground and above the snow, until it is consumed.

[Male and female Eastern Bluebirds on and around sumacs, Cox Hall Creek WMA, Cape May County, NJ December 13, 2020.]

Some biologists call sumacs "native invasives." This is stupid. Unless you've got a better idea for a field in ecological succession, or a hedgerow, leave them alone.

NJ hosts three species of sumacs bearing red fruit clusters (smooth, staghorn and winged), plus poison-sumac, which is in a different genus and bears grayish-white fruits (birds eat these too.) The ones at CHC WMA are winged. Sumacs with red fruits are in the plant genus Rhus, which means "red." Poison-sumac's apt genus name is Toxicodendron. It means "poison tree."

Among the bird species I've seen feeding on sumacs at Cox Hall Creek WMA in recent days are:

Downy Woodpecker
Northern Flicker
Carolina Chickadee
Tufted Titmouse
Carolina Wren
Eastern Bluebird (big time!)
Hermit Thrush
American Robin
Gray Catbird
Brown Thrasher
Northern Mockingbird
European Starling
Cedar Waxwing
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Eastern Towhee
Fox Sparrow
Song Sparrow
Swamp Sparrow
White-throated Sparrow
Pine Siskin
American Goldfinch
Evening Grosbeak

22 species, not too shabby. My black oil sunflower seeds don't get that many. Some of these may have been after insects or insect eggs in the fruit clusters, not just the fruit. My dream bird for CHC's sumacs is Pine Grosbeak. . . 

[Above and below, you need this book, if you can find it, published first by Dover in 1951. If you feed them, they will come.]