Thoughtful Thursday: the Blues

[Blue Grosbeak, Forsythe NWR, July 9, 2013.]

“The blues ain't nothing but a good man feelin' bad.”
 Leon Redbone

Wordless Wednesday: Rail Baby

Checking On the Colony

 [A brood of Laughing Gulls and one of their parents, on Ring Island, west of Stone Harbor, NJ today, July 7, 2013. Three eggs and hence three youngsters are the norm for Laughing Gulls. These birds, though out of their nest, still have a week or more, I'd guess, before they will make their first flights, though some were stretching and flapping their new wings. Click to enlarge.]

When you say "Checking On the Colony" in these parts, and you mean birds, you could mean any of several species of colonial birds: herons, terns, gulls, skimmers, or swallows, for example. The basic biology of colonial nesting is this: birds tend to nest in colonies (as opposed to as scattered individual pairs) where there is abundant food but limited nesting sites, forcing them to squeeze in together where they can. Colonies are especially prevalent in coastal habitats, where the sea and back bays provide plenty of foraging habitat but little in the way of high, dry nesting sites.

The most spatially expansive and bird-abundant colony or colonies in Cape May County belong to the Laughing Gulls. Most people never even see these colonies that form each summer in the high marshes west of or "behind" the barrier islands, because you need a boat or kayak to really see them. If you're boatless, try scanning the marshes around Nummy Island, south of Stone Harbor - you'll at least see plenty of gulls in the air.

Yeah, I know, they're just Laughing Gulls, common, ubiquitous, French-fry grabbing denizens of the summer beach and bay. But I suggest getting to know them. They certainly are successful. We're talking about thousands or tens of thousands of birds here in our own colonies. It's been this way for a long time - Witmer Stone wrote about the colonies in Bird Studies at Old Cape May (1937).

[What's not to like about Laughing Gulls? They're beautiful, for one thing. Stone Harbor, NJ today. Click to enlarge photos.]

I traditionally paddle my kayak out to the Cape May colonies for a visit shortly after July 4 to see how the young are coming along. Normally at this time the young have vacated their nests, or most of them have, but are still flightless and well-attended by adults.

Cape May's new Laughing Gulls, class of 2013, are coming along fine It looks like even though we're sitting on a new moon and accompanying higher-than-normal tides right now, most of this year's young Laughing Gulls appear old enough to survive some inundation of the marshy islands their parents raise them on. These are islands in the loosest sense, really giant patches of salt marsh that are prone to tidal flooding, especially if an east wind coincides with a new or full moon high tide. Some years these circumstances can combine to limit nesting success, leaving drowned eggs and dead young behind. This year the circumstances seem to favor the birds. One good sign of success will be the appearance of newly-fledged juvenile Laughing Gulls in Cape May proper, like at the meadows or the point, where they don't nest. Look for these first fledges in mid to late July.

Amongst the abundant Laughing Gulls behind Stone Harbor were a couple small colonies of Forster's Terns, whose members are quite aggressive defenders and will swoop on, poop on, and call angrily at any intruder that comes close. We skirted these. One higher island had some nesting Great Black-backed and Herring Gulls, whose young were a week or two from fledging.

[A Forster's Tern makes sure I know I am not welcome near its nest site in the marshes west of Stone Harbor this morning.]

Fri-D: The Willets

We're entering a time period when both our local breeding Eastern Willets and migrant Western Willets can be seen side-by-side, which makes for a great opportunity for study. These are not yet considered full species, but they are distinct in shape, plumage, and distribution, so don't be surprised if one day soon we have two Willet check boxes on our lists.

The photo above shows two birds (July 9, 2012, Stone Harbor, NJ) that are quite similar but subtly different. Notice how the left hand bird, a Western Willet, is:
1. Taller
2. Paler
3. Proportionately longer legged.
4. Longer billed and thinner billed, with a thinner tip.

On Being Nearly Deaf for a While

I'm just back from a week of classroom and field-based training related to the powerful 1964 Wilderness Act, and it happens that towards the end of that week I went partially deaf. I mean it, literally if partially deaf, couldn't hear for example the car radio or the tick-ticking of the turn signal in the dashboard, watched people not that far away in conversation without hearing a sound, heard my own voice echo dully when I spoke. It scared the crap out of me.

The cause was a severe sinus infection later pressurized by air travel back from Montana into a thrumming hollowness between my ears that lasted about 24 hours, until I finally got my hands on some serious congestion relief medicine.

Thankfully, the infection didn't really hit until we had hiked out of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness Area in western Montana, so there I enjoyed the wilderness unfettered and unfiltered, which is a fine thing because that's one of the main values of wilderness areas to me - you don't have to put the filters on in the first place. You know the filters - the ones that let you function without insanity in a bustling city, or airport, or office, the filters that let you listen past many things so you can focus on what's most important then and there.

In wilderness there's no static coming from overhead speakers or workers in the next cube or phones ringing down the hall. Each sound can be received, absorbed, measured - rushing stream, trilling junco, pipe-blowing Varied Thrushes, crunching gravel underfoot. It makes you want to reach for more sounds, not filter them out. The trouble is, most people spend much too little time in the wild world, and have their filters locked on all the time, even when they should not be.

We birders like to say we're never not birding, and for me a big piece of that is I'm never not listening, not just for birds but for any sound that will tell me something about the world around me. I've been told I have good hearing, and I'm glad I do, but I think a lot of hearing is training. Between birding and hunting, probably more the hunting, listening has been wired tightly around all the rest of the neural circuitry with which I view the world, to the point where I have limited capacity to endure bustling human environments like cities, offices, or movies with over-the-top audio.

Until I went deaf. Then it didn't matter. I found, for example, that driving home from the airport I was pushing 80 mph without really knowing it, because I was accustomed to telling speed by sound. When I got home, the dog's greeting had lost something - the clicking of nails on the floor, the thumping of tail against the couch, even his contented breathing. Couldn't hear any of that.

I thought wryly, it's a damn good thing tomorrow's not the World Series of Birding, because I wouldn't be able to hear a goose honk, let alone a wispy nocturnal flight note. It scared me.

And I couldn't help but wonder, is this how the world is for many people all the time? I think it is. Hiking up into the Selway-Bitterroot's Big Creek Canyon, I detected 37 species of western birds, but saw only a few of those thanks to the thick coniferous habitat. Only a couple of my colleagues knew any bird sounds, the rest essentially none, and I suspect that most of these new friends not only didn't know what they were hearing, they didn't hear what they were hearing. Tuned out. Or not tuned in. Several were impressed I noticed and knew the bird sounds, while I was somewhat surprised that they didn't. I tried to teach them some of the sounds, like the upward spiraling fluting of the Swainson's Thrushes or the sing-song of the Pacific Wren. They seemed delighted, and I think it changed their experience there.

If a bird sings in a forest, and someone is there to hear it, but doesn't hear it, did it make a sound?

I don't ever again want to know what it's like being partially deaf. I can hear again now, while driving back from the drug store I just heard a Mama Osprey piping to Dad that the kids need feeding again.

Sweet sounds. All of them.

[Mother Osprey and her brood, Grassy Sound, NJ July 1, 2013. Click to enlarge.]