These four birds were photographed by my friend, Cherry Gregory, on a recent trip to southern Africa. Top to bottom: Crested Barbet; Trumpeter Hornbill; Gray-crowned Crane; Saddle-billed Stork. Thanks for sharing, Cherry.
That trio was organized through Partnership for International Birding.
Yesterday brought a rare dry day to Sauvie Island. That’s just a dozen miles of central Portland, Oregon. Occasionally a leak in clouds let sunlight spill across the land. Geese were cackling and honking, a pair of Osprey were whistling from their nest. Wigeon and mallards contributed squeak and quack to the cacophony. Yet over it all spread the bugling of Sandhill Cranes. Their calls made the air vibrate, hinting of primitive compulsions carried across time from ages when long-gone species ran and swam in seas and prairies that are gone as well. The sound of the crane reverberates through an elongated and convoluted trachea that can only have evolved to produce such music. We humans can only listen and marvel that such a sound pre-dates cave art, villages, stone tools and even digital recordings. The crane sound is both ancient and inimitable. I much hope their kind can out-live the damage humans are determined to commit upon this earth. Whatever sentient creatures are about in some future millennia will be sure to halt and listen when those yet-to-be cranes bugle.
“When we hear his call we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men…The sadness discernible in some marshes arises, perhaps, from their once having harbored cranes. Now they stand humbled, adrift in history.” –Aldo Leopold
In several marshes the Trumpeter Swans and cranes were feeding side by side.
Sauvie Island usually has the northernmost wintering populations of cranes in North America. In Europe the Common Crane may winter even further north, not far from Troyes, France.
In late winter the crane population is augmented by the arrival of cranes heading north from California. The cranes using Sauvie as a stopover are traveling the Pacific Coast Flyway. That population is less than 5% of the total Sandhill population. Cranes we saw yesterday included both the lesser and greater sized cranes.
ABOVE US ALL
Compelled by nature’s uncaring demand for survival and adaptation the cranes now have a flight that is elegant, graceful and strong. With wings moving in fluid flaps, the long. thin legs trailing like a streamer, the sharp spade of a beak thrust toward the future, a flying crane is kinetic art of the finest.
“Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins as in art with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words.” –Aldo Leopold
Cranes often gather together in big flocks for migration or simply to find better forage.
Riding tail winds or seeking thermals cranes may migrate at elevations up to 15,000 feet. Some cranes in Asia fly over the Himalayas thus topping 20,000 feet elevation.
“For sixty million years, the call of the sandhill crane has echoed across the world’s wetlands and waterways, and it’s been heard in North America for at least 9 million years. Sandhill cranes, the oldest living bird species, have seen the violent birthing of entire mountain ranges, and then watched these same experience slow death at the hands of wind and rain… Long before man first took feeble steps on two legs, or raised a rock in anger, sandhills were already ancient.” Jim Miller in Valley of the Cranes
If you would like to see these cranes, Trumpeter Swans, Wrentit, Black Oystercatcher, Rhino Auklets, Marbled Murrelets, all three scoters and other Pacific Northwest specialties, contact us about a winter visit to the Pacific Northwest.
Want to see a busy Bewick’s Wren? PIB has numerous trips into territory where these busy birds feed year round.
Our guide, Harry Fuller, got these images while birding in Oregon’s Willamette Valley where he lives.
Our guide, Harry Fuller, is co-founder of the Mountain Bird Festival in Ashland, Oregon. He is author of a book on Great Gray Owls in Oregon and neighboring states and began leading regional trips into the owls’ breeding and wintering grounds in the southern Cascades. Here’s a description of an field trip on October 8, 2016…
This morning Klamatth Bird Observatory’s “Talk and Walk” program took a group of birders up inot the Cascades east of Ashland, the topic: Great Gray Owls. And they saw two of the birds. Here’s KBO board president, Shannon Rio’s brief summary of the day: “it was beautiful this morning up on the mountain. bird time was as usual timeless. we enjoyed two views of a ggo, one at the beginning of the day and one at the end of the journey and in between: pelicans, widgeons, bald eagle, bluebirds, vesper sparrows, coots,american goldfinches and pine siskens, red tailed hawks, a bobcat sighting, an osprey sighting. and lots of nature. thank you all for another journey with the birds and nature and each other“
Both pictures by Mel Clements, top bird at Two Pine Meadow, the lower bird west of Howard Prairie Lake on private land. Both locations can be checked from public roads without disturbing the owls’ hunting territory.
Jackson County, Oregon, may have as many or more GGOs than any other county south of Canada. Evidence you do not need to spend big bucks and suffer a Minnesota winter to see Great Gray Owls in the U.S.
Here are the birds we saw on our early June trip through the Pacific Northwest over eight days. Portland to Astoria to Florence to Bend, then back through Portland and north to Nisqually, then Sequim, then Victoria, BC.
PIB NORTHWEST TRIP SPECIES LIST:
Birder Nan Perkins from Wimberley, Texas, goT these three images on a Partnership for International Birding trip around Oregon and Washington in early June:
This Crossbill was near the Darlingtonia Preserve along US 101 on the Oregon Coast. The Mountain Chickadee was in the Deschutes National Forest on the eastern slop of the Cascades. The Wood-Pewee was one of dozens we saw on our trip.
Here are some images from the Partnership for International Birding that I (Harry Fuller) co-led in early June. A pitcher plant reserve along the Oregon Coast:
Pelagic Cormorant on rock offshore. Below: Pigeon Guillemot.
From the foggy coast we headed inland to the sunny Cascades:
At Suttle Lake, a Dipper:
At Calliope Crossing west of Sisters, OR, a Red-naped Sapsucker:
Princeton University has just published a heavy-duty guide to all the world’s known Bovids: deer, antelope (but not our unrelated Pronghorn), sheep, wild cattle, goats. That’s a total of 279 species. The book is paperback and would fit in your suitcase for trip to East or South Africa where you’re sure to need it. My wife and I visited Uganda n a birding trip a few years back: seven antelope species happened to cross our path. Besides good illustrations of each species and range maps, there are comparison pages: 
The books sells for $35 US and has nearly 2000 illustrations, both drawing and photographs. Each individual species is shown next to a human outline for some sense of its comparative size. They range from the lithe, tiny dik-dik up to elands and banteng (cattle of southeast Asia).
Right near the front,and the first species listed, is my favorite member of this tribe, the common impala. Seeing them almost float through thickets and over logs or boulders is a thrill not to be forgotten. Go see ’em and take this book with you.
Partnership for International Birding organizes trips to south Asia and all around Africa where many of these animals live.
Bovids of the World:
Antelopes, Gazelles, Cattle, Goats, Sheep, and Relatives
By. José R. Castelló
Foreword by Brent Huffman & Colin Groves. Princeton Press. 2016. 664 pages.
Jesse Nuth and Harry Fuller led a trip across the Pacific Northwest in early June. The birding group was from Wimberley, Texas, and envrions and they go to see plenty of birds not wandering about Hill Country or the Rio Grande. Here are a few of Harry’s photos:
Purple Martin above, White Pelicans below…both along lower Columbia River downstream from Sauvie Island.
Two juvenile Bald EaglesMound:
Rock full of Common Murres along Oregon coast. Their whistling sound was piercing.
Pelagic Cormorants in breeding plumage, that white rump patch goes away at end of summer.Two young Peregrines, below, in nest at Yaquina Head, OR.
Wrentit, Fort Stevens State Park northwest of Astoria.
Male Wilson’s Warbler belting out his song, also at Fort Stevens: 
Wildlife of the Galapagos. Pocket Guide. By Julian Fitter, Daniel Fitter, David Hosking. Princeton Univ. Press. Second edition. 2016. paperback. 272 pages. $19.95.
This new, updated, handy field guide will fit in your pocket. It describes over 400 species from insect to mammal. It uses colored photos, not drawings. There are range maps only for Darwin’s finches. It also has good advice on photography (flashes are banned) and other practical travel advice for the naturalist. It also explains the different climate zones that exist on the larger islands depending on direction of slope and elevation.
This small guide will fit even into your carry-on luggage for in-flight study.
There are Short-eared Owls on the Galapagos as there are in Hawaii. Those guys sure get around.
Partnership for International Birding 