TIS THE SEASON

It’s not just about the nest box, but where that nest box is placed. This one happens to be in a patch of oak savannah at about 3000 in the western foothills of the Oregon Cascades. It’s surrounded by open meadow and rolling hills that drop sharply down to a year-round stream. No humans live within a mile of the place and it’s back from the highway. No pesticides, no toxics. Just the sort of neighborhood where you’d raise your family if you were a bluebird.

This nest box is on the fence of a tiny garden behind a row of town houses. It faces a busy sidewalk next to a busier parking lot adjacent to a dog park full of noise-making carnivores. Just the sort of avian slum where you’d expect the hardscrabble House Sparrow to eke out a living on bread crumbs and seeds.

This drumming Red-breasted Sapsucker is still advertising for a mate. House-hunting will come later.

This pair of Flickers seem well-matched. She sits up and listens to his drumming. What more could a male Flicker ask for? And later in the day I saw them checking out nest holes in Lithia Park, Ashland, Oregon. Location, location…

Look carefully to the left of the female Great Horned Owl. You’ll see the round, white head of an owlet and its dark eye-rings. This is at least the fourth straight year a pair of GHOs have used this nest near Ashland. Whoever first built that nest did a great job; owls don’t build their own nests but “borrow” or squat in what they can find.
MAGEE MARSH
PIB will be present at the Magee Marsh bird festival again in early May. Here are some nest pictures fro last year. This female Woodcock nested in a weedy strip along one side of the very busy parking lot.
Shortly after they hatched before a group of wondering birders, mother Woodcock led her quartet of newly dried fuzz-balls into the nearby Magee Marsh woods where they quickly vanished from view.

Finding a place to raise your children is always emotional. This pair of Ohio Tree Swallows is a case in point.

And, finally, this location seems perfect for Great Blue Herons. It’s at least the third straight year the nest has been used. It sits high in a cottonwood above Neil Creek, facing Oak Knoll Golf Course southeast of Ashland.

HERE IN ASHLAND, OREGON, THE KLAMATH BIRD OBSERVATORY IS SPONSORING OUR FIRST-EVER MOUNTAIN BIRD FESTIVAL. IT IS MAY 30-JUNE 1. WHITE-HEADED WOODPECKER, CALLIOPE HUMMINGBIRD, WESTERN SCREECH-OWL, SANDHILL CRANES ON NESTING GROUNDS, BOTH EAGLES, NESTING OSPREY, ACORN & LEWIS’S WOODPECKERS, MOUNTAIN BLUEBIRD AND CHICKADEE, HERMIT AND MACGILLIVRAY’S WARBLER, CASSIN’S FINCH AND VIREO, BAND-TAILED PIGEON, BLACK TERN, RED-BREASTED AND WILLIAMSON’S SAPSUCKERS, GREEN-TAILED TOWHEE, LAZULI BUNTING, AMERICAN DIPPER, WRENTIT, TOWNSEND’S SOLITAIRE–SOME OF THE BIRDS WE EXPECT TO SEE. WITH A LITTLE BIRDING MOJO WE CAN ADD GREAT GRAY OWL, SOOTY GROUSE, MOUNTAIN QUAIL, NORTHERN PYGMY-OWL, SWAINSON’S HAWK, EVENING GROSBEAKAND NORTHERN GOSHAWK.

PIGEONS AND ALEXANDER WILSON’S GHOST

The shade of America’s first great birdman is restless today. It’s been more than two centuries since Wilson, a self-exiled Scot, began publishing his color descriptions of all known North American birds. One of those, still very much alive, was the Passenger Pigeon.
Earlier this week I saw the living, closest cousin of the Passenger Pigeon, in my own garden here in southern Oregon. It was a lone Band-tailed Pigeon. Note the iridescent patch on the bird’s nape. Many members of the pigeon/dove family have similar coloring. So did the Passenger Pigeon.
I blogged earlier about seeing Band-tails in my garden this winter. In six previous years I had no record of Band-tails after Nov. 5 or before March 5. This year they’ve been around occasionally in both January and February, now on March 2 as well.
I attribute this presence to the non-winter we’re having. After one heavy blizzard on Jan. 5 and two more weeks of freezing cold, winter seemed to dissolve. We began to get occasional light rains, and winds from the south. Most days the high is over 50 degrees. There’s no mountain snowpack. Our local ski resort at 6500′ on Mt. Ashland never opened this year and now is defunct. Lakes at 4500-5000′ are unfrozen, full of ducks, coots and geese instead of snow drifts. I now see Western Bluebirds hunting meadows at 4500′ in full sun. It’s been so dry that a Rough-legged Hawk has wintered at Howard Prairie which should be an icy marsh this time of the time.

A CENTURY AFTER EXTINCTION
This year marks the sad centennial of the death of the last living Passenger Pigeon. Killed off by widespread gunners’ slaughter and manmade habitat destruction. When he drew the bird two centuries ago Wilson would never have imagined its coming demise: On this page from my copy of Wilson’s American Ornithology you see his image of the bird.
He wrote, “…the most remarkable characteristic of these birds is their associating together, both in their migrations, and also during the period of incubation, in such prodigious numbers, as almost to surpass belief; and which has no parallel among any other of the feathered tribes on the face of the earth, with which naturalists are acquainted.”
From prodigious numbers to extinction in one century.
Wilson described watching one Passenger Pigeon flock move across the Ohio River in Kentucky: “the Pigeons, which I had observed flying the greater part of the morning northerly, began to return, in such immense numbers as I never before had witnessed…The were flying, with great steadiness and rapidity, as a height beyond gunshot, in several strata deep…From right to left, far as the eye could reach, the breadth of this vast procession extended, seeing every where equally crowded…I took out my watch to note the time, and sat down to observe them. It was then half past one. I sat for more than an hour, but instead of a diminution of this prodigious procession, it seemed rather to increase both in numbers and rapidity…I rose and went on. About four o’clock in the afternoon I crossed the Kentucky river, at the town of Frankfort, at which time the living torrent over my head seemed as numerous and as extensive as ever.”
Finally, Wilson tries to calculate the size of the Passenger Pigeon flock he had seen. His conclusion: “two thousand, two hundred and thirty millions, two hundred and seventy-two thousand Pigeons!”
In figures: 2,230,270,000 Passenger Pigeons in a single Ohio/Kentucky flock. A century later : 0.

BRING BACK THE PIGEON?
Now the very much alive Band-tailed Pigeon may give Alexander Wilson’s ghost some rest or further unrest. The Band-tail is at the heart of an effort to bring the Passenger Pigeon back from extinction. Read all about it in Nathaniel Rich’s amazing piece in the recent New York Times Magazine. Click here for the link.

I am not even sure how I feel about his plan to revive the dead. And I am even less certain what Alexander Wilson might think.