Birding Alone vs. Birding in Groups and on Tours

This Black-capped Chickadee peeks into my window to see where I am.

I've always enjoyed traveling to new places, and that enjoyment increased manyfold when I became a birder. In my own backyard, I know what species I can expect from day to day and can keep tabs on special individual birds. After traveling a few days or weeks, it's lovely to crank open my window and instantly have my good old chickadees alighting on my hand again. Yet as much as I treasure my backyard birds, every now and then I am seized by a powerful wanderlust. This January I drove to Florida for a couple of weeks. I love exploring places on my own. This year at one spot, I came upon a mother raccoon with three half-grown youngsters, and further on found an otter basking in the sun. I'd seen the otter earlier, running in that wonderful wavy lope characteristic of otters, and now it was resting. If I'd been with a group, we'd have quickly moved on to the next thing, but being alone, I could park myself near these beautiful animals for as long as I wanted.

Mother raccoon and baby at Viera Wetlands

Otter basking at Viera Wetlands

Last week I had an entirely different kind of birding experience--I went on one of Kim Eckert's Minnesota Birding Week adventures. Kim's been leading these trips for over 30 years, and they're always wonderful. Kim is intimately familiar with all the Texas birding hotspots, keeps in touch with virtually all the serious birders of the area, and has matchless bird finding and identification skills, so if a bird is anywhere to be found, people on his trips have as good a chance or better of seeing them than anyone going it alone.

Between about noon on Saturday, February 16, and Sunday, February 24, our group saw a total of 201 species, of which I personally saw 199, so in one week I saw more species than I'd seen in the previous 6 weeks of 2013, adding almost 100 species to my year list. Texas bird numbers are way down this year, based on my own personal experience and on what all the local birders were saying. Extended extreme drought conditions have taken a toll, sending some species elsewhere and almost certainly causing high levels of mortality in others.

Despite bad conditions, we had wonderful looks at some exceptionally difficult species. We started at 7 each morning and birded until almost dark each day. Each day was intense, but to offset the occasional frustration in not being able to spend as much time watching something fun, it's nice to put all the trip planning and driving in someone else's hands. I'm always a bit exhausted at day's end, but it's the good kind of exhaustion wherein I fall asleep with visions of Green Jays, Altamira Orioles, Whooping Cranes, and other amazing birds.

Green Jay

I spend a lot of time studying birds on my own, and I’ve always observed that I learn the birds of an area by searching them out one by one on my own. People who do virtually all their birding on group trips are seldom as strong on identification skills as those who bird alone. But it’s much easier to maximize the variety of birds seen in a new area in the company of a truly professional guide like Kim Eckert and a group of good birders who help spot things. I think the ideal approach is a combination of the two. On my Texas trip we saw and I photographed a large variety of wonderful birds, including a Flammulated Owl (well, his tummy feathers),

Flammulated Owl's tummy feathers

 a small group of White-collared Seedeaters,

White-collared Seedeater

 and even a Crimson-collared Grosbeak.

Crimson-collared Grosbeak (immature)

  In coming weeks I'll be talking more about these and other exciting species, mostly at my Conservation Big Year website.

Why I love living in Duluth

Boreal Owl

When Russ finished his Ph.D. and was considering potential jobs, I strongly lobbied for the job offer he got in Duluth. Yes, we were about to start a family and it would be nice to live near where his parents had retired in Port Wing, Wisconsin, and yes, his decision was going to affect his professional standing and career for the rest of his life, but I admit it—my only real consideration was the birding. I still needed Great Gray Owl, Northern Hawk Owl, Boreal Owl, and Boreal Chickadee on my lifelist. And to spend each summer day where my most treasured warblers and dear little Le Conte’s Sparrow actually breed, and to have Evening Grosbeaks as year-round backyard birds—imagine that!

Evening Grosbeaks

I was expecting my first baby when we moved here in early 1981, but despite my pregnancy and then our having a newborn, within that same year I’d added two of the owls and the Boreal Chickadee to my lifelist. It took a few years longer to luck into finally seeing a Boreal Owl, but even before that I’d experienced their magic. In 1983, a former Duluth doctor named Benton Basham was working on a Big Year and asked Kim Eckert to take him to a Boreal Owl. Benton was aiming to break the 700-species-in-a-single-year barrier as well as the all-time record for a Big Year. To accomplish this, he needed to minimize how many days he spent looking for each rare bird, which is why he asked Kim to take him out for Boreal Owl in April. And Kim generously invited me to come along to the Gunflint Trail with them.

That beautiful evening is seared into my memory. Northern lights streamed in the sky in the most beautiful display I’d ever seen. In the ethereal brightness, an American Woodcock performed his skydance over and over, long into the night. After each flight, he alighted on the roadside right in front of us, the first time I’d ever actually watched a woodcock peent. And over and above the woodcock’s peents, from deep within the shadowed forest rang out a Boreal Owl’s sharp calls. That was before the American Birding Association allowed people to count heard-only birds on our official lifelists, but the joy of the evening was too intense for me to care about that.

I finally added Boreal Owl to my lifelist on February 1, 1987, when my friend Vada Rudolph discovered one in Saginaw. We’ve had a few irruption years since then, when they’ve descended on the Northland in large numbers, so I’ve even been able to see one once in my own backyard.

During the years I was rehabbing, I held many Boreal Owls in my own hands. My best experience was when someone brought me one in March 1996, the night before the manuscript for my book Sharing the Wonder of Birds with Kids was due at the publisher, when I was also to head out for Nebraska to watch Sandhill Cranes. I was up all night with the little owl on my lap at the computer. First he needed fluids and then I started feeding him Gerber strained chicken while I tried to make the final edits to my book, getting up frequently to clean off my goopy keyboard. In the morning, after never getting to bed, I dropped off my manuscript and then headed toward Nebraska, dropping off the owl at the Raptor Center in the Twin Cities en route. Someone from the Raptor Center later told me that of several emaciated Boreal Owls brought to them that year, mine was the only one who survived.

Billie Anderson and me with the Boreal Owl I helped in 1996

Anyway, six years after moving here, I’d seen all my target birds, but long after life birds have been few and far between, I’ve loved living in this wonderful area characterized by the most haunting species of owls, the most beautiful of breeding warblers, and a host of other birds that make me feel part of one of the loveliest avian communities in the world.

Boreal Owl update

Boreal Owl seen on Superb Owl Sunday

I recently wrote about a Boreal Owl Russ and I watched on Super Bowl Sunday—or what I call Superb Owl Sunday. Birders from as far as Scotland have been descending on Duluth to see these birds, and Sam Cook wrote about them in a Sunday Duluth News Tribune.

All the attention and all the birders have been making drives down Highway 61 more interesting than usual. In the same way that Turkey Vultures locate good thermals by watching for other Turkey Vultures already floating on them, birders sometimes locate good birds by watching for other birders already looking at them. It’s way easier to spot a dozen birders gathered on the roadside, binoculars, spotting scopes, and cameras pointed at a 10-inch cryptically-colored bird, than to notice that tiny camouflaged mite in the first place.

I think it would be impossible for me to have a better time with a Boreal Owl than I already have this year, so I haven’t been searching for them or chasing reported ones down, but it’s been ever so fun and exciting to read about other birders’ sightings, and to forward messages about ones being observed right that minute to out-of-towners who are still searching. The thrill of hearing people’s joyous experiences with these exquisite creatures, often for the first time in many years of birding, has been giving me plenty of vicarious joy. Part of the fun this year comes about thanks to social media—text messages and emails accessed via cell phones are getting more people to the right place at the right time than has ever before been possible. Duluth’s cadre of professional birding guides has been sharing information among themselves, and a couple of them have been at least occasionally keeping me in the loop so I can also help visiting birders.

Of course, the huge number of birders and photographers involved and this kind of immediacy are also leading to problems. When one Boreal Owl was hunting on the edge of the tree line off Highway 61, one well-known professional wildlife photographer ran off the road toward it, chasing the little predator until it fled into the woods. Another well-known author/photographer lured a Boreal Owl across the highway—a dangerous road with fast-moving traffic—by setting out pet-store mice for it on the far side. There were witnesses to both these egregious lapses of ethics, but I can’t help but wonder, if such prominent people who tout themselves as conservationists can do such unethical things in front of people, how are they getting their photos when no one’s around to see? That was very disillusioning, and I’m glad they were soundly chastised both when they were caught in the act and later on the Internet.

Fortunately, the vast majority of birders and photographers here have been enjoying the birds from a respectful distance. Some people are naturally worried that big crowds of birders might be disturbing the owls, but even without birders, Highway 61 and the Scenic North Shore Drive are busy and noisy, yet the owls along them have been observed hunting successfully. It’s almost certainly more disturbing when busloads of birders comb the much more remote Sax-Zim Bog during their annual birding festival, but that once-a-year event has raised awareness of northern birds, including vulnerable species, and virtually all the field trip leaders are conscientious about protecting the birds. When I weigh the interests of birders vs. birds, I would much prefer erring on the side of the birds, so I’m glad that so far most of the Boreal Owls have been seen hunting successfully, and most of the birders have been exemplary in behavior toward one another and toward the owls on Highway 61. 

No, birds do not give birth to chicks

Last time I talked about the oldest known wild bird, a Laysan Albatross nicknamed “Wisdom” who is still, at 62 years of age, producing and successfully raising young. Since her chick from this year hatched on February 3, a lot of news reports have covered the story. I’ve read the news releases put out by the US Geological Survey and know they presented accurate information, but some of the media got two important elements wrong.

First, Wisdom is definitely not the oldest bird in the world—some captive parrots live into their 80s—and she’s probably not even the oldest wild bird. What she is is the oldest wild bird that we know about. The vast majority of birds, including the vast majority of albatrosses, are never banded, so we have no means of tracking their age. Most banded birds are never retrapped—the way we get data on their ages usually comes from finding a dead bird with a leg band and finding out when it was first banded. Of the birds that are banded, only a tiny fraction are caught again, and only in a few careful studies, such as Ryan Brady’s tracking of the oldest known Northern Shrike, are bands carefully scrutinized year after year—even in his case, Ryan puts a unique combination of color bands on each banded shrike’s legs so that he doesn’t actually have to catch them repeatedly to verify their returns.

In the case of Wisdom the Albatross, the hard work and tenacity of one man, Chandler Robbins, was necessary to confirm Wisdom’s age. Leg bands deteriorate over time, and hers has been replaced with a new one several times since 1956. Each time a band is replaced, the old one’s number is recorded, but that provides just one entry in the Bird Banding Lab’s enormous database. Of the very few birds whose leg bands ever need replacing, only a tiny fraction need the replacement replaced even once, much less several times. So there has never been a specific and easy-to-use protocol for tracing replacement leg bands that were replacing already-replaced ones, much less a way to trace them through four or five or even more changes. Chandler Robbins is painstakingly going through the database, tracking each change on the Midway albatross bands, which is how he confirmed in 2001 that this particular bird was, indeed, one of the ones he’d banded in 1956. 

Some of the birds banded then may have moved to more remote islands, and some birds living back then may have eluded capture all along, so we’ll never know if she’s the oldest surviving albatross on Midway Island, much less if Laysan Albatrosses living elsewhere are just as old or older. We don’t even know for sure how old Wisdom was in 1956—all we know is that at that time she was nesting, so was a minimum of 5 years old. For all we know, she could have been 10 or 20 at that time.

Next, Wisdom did not give birth to an egg—she laid it—and certainly did not "give birth to a live hatchling" or "birth a chick"—something that would deservedly make headlines. Her chick hatched from an egg on February 3. I do occasionally refer to a bird’s hatch-out day as its birthday, but that’s stretching the truth by quite a bit. Some reptiles produce extremely thin-shelled eggs retained in the mother’s body until they hatch and the young can crawl out. That may be interpreted by some as giving birth, but birds don't do anything like this. I don’t know if headline writers belong to a group of people that tuned out their elementary and high school biology classes, but if they were daydreaming while looking out the window, I wish they’d have noticed the birds out there. 

It’s thrilling that the news media recognize a good story when they see it, and most of the headlines and stories presented the news accurately, but it’s depressing to have found yet more examples of the media’s lack of understanding of such a basic part of natural history and biology. I wish that when people taught kids about "the birds and the bees," they'd actually teach them something about the birds and the bees. 

Oldest Known Wild Bird

(My birding adventures this year are being posted at my Conservation Big Year blog.)

Now that I turned 60 over a year ago and have had a chance to test the waters a bit, I can affirm that not only is being in one’s sixties far, far better than the alternative, but also that the sixties can provide as many wonderful experiences as any other decade. Since turning 60, I’ve seen my lifer California Condor, taken my best photos ever of Northern Gannets, Boreal Owls, and even otters, become an author of a National Geographic bird book, and overall been having a jolly good time.

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.

We have no idea how old the albatross was at the time, but she had to be at least 5 years old to be nesting, so she had hatched out at the latest in January or February of 1951, and may well have hatched years earlier. Since Robbins originally banded her in 1956, her leg band has been replaced several times—leg bands can easily last a decade and sometimes more, but birds are overall sturdier than aluminum or plastic. In 2001, Chandler Robbins started tracing records of each band replacement of the older birds on the island, and realized that this particular albatross was one of his 1956 cohort of banded birds. That’s when she was given the name “Wisdom.” Now she’s at least 62 years old, yet in late 2012 she and her mate produced yet another fertile egg, which hatched on February 3, 2013. Chandler Robbins told reporters, “While I have grown old and gray and get around only with the use of a cane, Wisdom still looks and acts just the same as on the day I banded her.”

Some people have commented to me that her feathers look awfully good for being 62 years old, but they’re not—albatrosses replace every one of their body feathers once a year along with many of their flight feathers, and none of the flight feathers are older than three or four years old. So she doesn’t have to worry about going gray. Being a bird, she also doesn’t need to concern herself with stray hairs growing in on her chin or giving her an unwanted mustache. Unlike humans, birds of both sexes are usually attracted to the oldest mate they can find—experience counts for a lot, and unlike us mere mammals, avian fertility and the ability to ability to raise young seldom diminish with time. And birds of neither sex bother with mirrors anyway, going about their lives without stressing about superficial matters.

I take supplements that include Omega-3 fatty acids to prevent my creaking joints from getting sore. I presume Wisdom’s fishy diet protects her from that sort of thing, but nevertheless, all the obstacles a bird faces make surviving for 62 years darned remarkable. 

The researchers tracking her estimate that she has flown up to 3 million miles since she was first banded. That’s “4 to 6 trips from the Earth to the Moon and back again with plenty of miles to spare,” said one spokesman. Like I said, she puts me to shame, and she’s still laying eggs and raising chicks. It’s ever so  lovely to realize that I’ve spent every single day of my life on the same planet as this remarkable bird. I hope she returns to Midway Island to raise chicks for many years to come. 

A tragically ironic way of proving birds share humanlike traits

In late November 2012, two researchers in the psychology department at Emory University in Atlanta published a study in Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience. They wanted to learn whether birdsong and the music we humans produce serve similar purposes or have the same evolutionary underpinnings. Other scientists have explored tonal and rhythmic similarities and differences between our music and various bird songs, and whether birds are creative in song production. This study focused on whether birds listening to their songs get similar sensations of pleasure as humans listening to music.

Many behavioral studies have shown that both birds and humans approach sources of their species’ music and will learn simple tasks in order to hear a song. But is there a similarity in the physiological response to music? Brain imaging studies in humans show that hearing music induces neural responses in at least 20 different brain regions. When experimental participants describe music as pleasurable, the brain response is most particularly found in the mesolimbic reward pathway. Does something comparable happen when female White-throated Sparrows hear the songs of males?

The scientists predicted that females in breeding readiness would find the song more pleasurable than would females not hormonally ready for courting, and that breeding males would find the song less pleasant or even stressful. The scientists manipulated the experimental birds’ hormonal levels so half of each sex was put into breeding readiness, and half of each of those groups was exposed to a normal White-throated Sparrow song; the other half was exposed to a random series of tones on the same frequencies as a proper song. Sadly, the scientists couldn’t use the same brain imaging techniques that are used in human experiments because the comparable brain centers in songbirds are so very tiny. Instead, 60-90 minutes after playing the series of songs or random tones to each bird, they anesthetized and decapitated it to retrieve its brain to analyze protein products of the genes that would be associated with pleasure. As one would predict, females treated with breeding hormones were extremely receptive to the male song over the control tone, and every region of the mesolimbic reward pathway that responds to music in humans was found to respond to song in the sparrows. The response in males treated with testosterone was comparable physiologically to that of humans listening to unpleasant or fearful music.

My ill-fated Ph.D. project in the 1990s was studying nighthawk digestion, but I worked out with my professor from the start a plan for conducting my research without killing a single bird, or even causing it distress. I can’t imagine having a research question so pressing that the answer would be worth decapitating even one White-throated Sparrow, much less the 46 used in this experiment. I don’t know if I find it more satisfying or sadder that the results were so predictable. 

We start with the premise that other species are not just different but of so little consequence and with such little individual value that a decapitation experiment is reasonable and ethical, even as the experiment itself proves that birds share so many traits with us. I find it amusingly mystifying that anyone could possibly think that if there is life “out there” in the universe we’d somehow be able to communicate with extraterrestrials when we have so abysmally failed to communicate with or understand or value the intelligent life right here on earth.

Conservation Big Year: So far, so good!

I'm posting reports about my Conservation Big Year here: My Conservation Big Year Blog

Fun birds so far!

New Binoculars!

In 1974, I got perhaps the best Christmas present ever when my mother- and father-in-law gave me my very first pair of binoculars. They were Bushnell Insta-focus 7x50s. I’d never had binoculars before, and these were pretty much perfect for a first pair. The 7x magnification made finding birds in the binoculars easy for a rank beginner. The 50-mm objective lens made them heavy, but I was 23 and didn’t mind at all, and that large size made the image nice and bright when I was out searching for my first woodcocks and owls in twilight or even at night. These were the only binoculars I used for the first 4 ½ years of my birding, and I took them everywhere. I saw my first 357 species through them, and passed them among my students on bird walks. They were plenty good enough, but little by little, time and heavy use took their toll.

It was hard to give them up—as a matter of fact, I still have them. But by late 1979 I needed a new pair, so I scraped up the money to get a pair of Minolta 8x pocket binoculars—they were not nearly as bright as my Bushnells, and a little harder to hold steady because they were so tiny, but they lasted for 8 years. By then I was helping as an emergency auxiliary backup counter at Hawk Ridge, and counting birds from the Lakewood Pumping Station. I was also getting headaches after a day of counting. So I blew my family’s entire discretionary income for 1987 on a pair of amazing Zeiss 10x40s. They were brilliant and powerful. They should have lasted a lifetime, but when I was working at an optics company, I made the mistake of loaning them out while I was testing other models. The first person I loaned them to not-too-helpfully took them to a non-authorized camera store for cleaning, but they glued in the eyecups. I should have learned my lesson then and there, but I made the mistake of lending them to another person who never returned them. Meanwhile I’d bought a pair of 6x30 Leupold Katmais, from when Leupold was still making their products in the United States. These don’t quite cut it when I’m trying to spot distant jaegers out on Lake Superior or getting a great look at a hawk way up in the blue, but their wide field of view and brightness make them great for watching feeder birds out my window, and reasonably good for everyday use.

Now that I’ve been taking so many photos while I’m birding, I’ve been getting into the habit of bringing my cameras along and leaving the binoculars behind altogether. But this fall I did quite a bit of traveling and birding in unfamiliar places and missed having top-quality binoculars. Binocular optics have advanced since I worked for an optics company, and one current pair seemed absolutely perfect—exquisite 8x optics and so light I'd hardly notice the weight even when lugging my camera and telephoto lens: the Zeiss 8x32 Victory binoculars. I’m not earning anywhere near enough right now to afford anything new, much less something this wonderful, so when I’ve been to birding festivals I’ve shied away from even touching these dream binoculars. But out of the blue, a few days before Christmas one of my dearest birding buddies, who works at Eagle Optics, gave me his own pair of this exact model on a very long-term loan. I feel like a little kid again—I started a list of all the birds I’ve seen through them, and call them my Mikey Zs, after my friend Mike and Zeiss.

My Conservation Big Year starts tomorrow. I’m going to be trying to see as many birds of conservation concern as I can in 2013, while writing about their plight and what individuals and groups are doing to help. My splendid new binoculars will surely help me on my quest. 

Standing Up to Fear

I was born in 1951, and as far back as I can remember, the news was scary. My first encounters with the words “rape,” “murder,” and “torture” were in the Chicago Tribune. Richard Speck murdered 8 student nurses in Chicago when I was 14 years old. This horror was the top story for weeks after the murder, and was mentioned almost daily throughout the months up to his trial and through his appeals.

And I knew the world was even scarier than what made the news. My father was a Chicago firefighter who brought home stories of death and violence not seen in the news. My high school had a shooting in 1967—a boy killed his ex-girlfriend and wounded some teachers—but that didn’t make the front page. My brother dealt with day-to-day terrors in Vietnam but none of his experiences made the news except as reflected in casualty numbers. One of my elementary school friends, Jimmy Califf, died there, but his death didn’t make the news—his is just one of the 58,195 names on the Vietnam Memorial.  

My own home seemed even more dangerous than the outside world. I was assaulted more than once and threatened at gunpoint by someone in my family’s inner circle. In college I was mugged in my own yard.  Yes, I’ve known all along that this is a dangerous planet.

But I’ve known all along, with equal certainty, that this is a lovely, friendly planet. Long before I knew of the existence of chickadees, I was lucky to have something of their outlook. Some of my family were filled with paralyzing fears that kept them from doing things they yearned to do. I wasn’t less wary than they. Like a chickadee, if anything set off my inner radar, I got out of the way fast. The times I was in physical danger, I protected myself with words and, when necessary, by physically defending myself. But I knew that most people aren’t dangerous, and that behavior, not appearance, tells us who to avoid. I was careful, but never fearful.

Chickadees open their social flocks to any birds that don’t endanger them, including species that look nothing like them. This openness makes them safer as the whole flock works together to provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare. The more open to novel experiences a chickadee is, the more likely it is to discover new food resources and places to make roost holes. The most fearless chickadees in my yard are first to appear when I crack open the window to offer mealworms. One of my chickadees is more fearful than the others. In the time most members of the flock have taken 4 or 5 mealworms from my hand, that wary one will get just 1 or even none. Caution is a useful trait, but since every chickadee flits off instantly if I do something unexpected, they’re all safe, and the most fearful one is the one at a disadvantage.

TV nature specials and outdoor adventure stories seem to equate fitness with aggressiveness, glorifying the “kill-or-be-killed” “nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw” philosophy. But chickadees are far more numerous and successful than the predators that attack them, because they know to avoid the bad without ever losing sight of the good in their world. Despite their tiny size and fragile bodies, some banded wild chickadees have survived over 12 years. They transcend the “dog-eat-dog” “it’s-a-jungle-out-there” mindset to lead their lives without ever once jettisoning their essential goodness and openness and trust. 

Victor Hugo wrote in Les Misérables:

Have no fear of robbers or murderers. They are external dangers, petty dangers. ... The great dangers are within us. Why worry about what threatens our heads or our purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls. 

Chickadees go through life souls fully intact, knowing instinctively what only the happiest, most successful human societies ever figure out: We’re all in this together.

Gary Ganakas and Mike Robinson!!!!!!!!!

Oh, man--I am ELATED! My all-time favorite basketball players in the known universe, Gary Ganakas (who led the Big Ten in assists) and Mike Robinson (who was the Big Ten's biggest scorer) are at Michigan State's Jenison Field House tonight for a big reunion game, and Gary just sent me this photo of the two of them with Mike's son. 

I can't possibly explain how fun it was to watch these guys play! Russ and I always sat in the front row in the center. We were living on love and not much else, and the only money we could set aside for entertainment went straight to buying season tickets to watch Spartan basketball. It was money well-spent--I still get so much pleasure just thinking about this wonderful team. 

Russ and I badly wanted to go to the game tonight, but things got dicey with family responsibilities and the 700-mile trip suddenly became impossible. I would so much have loved to actually meet my heroes. But what a joy to know that for one brief, shining moment, they were thinking about their biggest fan--ME--and that maybe their smiles are actually directed at the woman who smiled so much watching them play lo those many years ago.