GET YOURSELF TO ECUADOR

PIB has great trips to various habitat zones in Ecuador. And there’s a book you want to take with you. It’s the first-ever, one volume nature guide for anyone headed to Ecuador’s wondrous mountains and rain forest and arid western slopes:
Wildlife of Ecuador:
A Photographic Field Guide to Birds, Mammals, Reptiles, and Amphibians
Andrés Vásquez Noboa. Photography by Pablo Cervantes Daza. Princeton Press. 2017. $29.95.
I wish I’d had a book like this when I was in Ecuador…or even Panama where I got far too close to a pit viper without recognizing it. The bird section is fine but the real value is in all those other critters: face-to-face shots with snakes. It’s the head that matters…look for the heat-sensing pits. You may want to keep your birding guide nearby or back at the ecolodge because only breeding plumage shots are given for most avian species.
Now I know there are two species of agouti in Ecuador and I saw the black in Coca. Not sure even my bird guide knew there were two, certainly didn’t tell us.
Superbly clear range maps. Both English and Latin indices.
My favorite Ecuadoran bird is at the top of page 140…the Collared Inca.
ECUADOR GALLERY FROM MY VISITS:
Yellow-tufted Woodpecker:
Great Ani:Hoatzin at Sani Lodge:Squirrel monkey:
Swallow-tailed Kite over Napo River in Amazon Basin:

A PACIFIC NORTHWEST GALLERY

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:

RAPTOR RECORD OVER PANAMA

This fall’s migration saw a record number of raptors passing over Panama City in one day. Take a guess, then click on this link and read about the number of zeros in the new record.
PIB offers great trips to Panama, including a chance to see Harpy Eagle.
But Panama is much more than just raptors…below some images from my recent trip to Panama: Violaceous Trogon, white-faced monkey and White-necked Puffbird.

These two guys were just down the street from our arrival hotel in Panama City: Crimson-crested Woodpecker and Common Tody-flycatcher

WHAT THE FLOCK IS HAPPENING AS WINTER APPROACHES?

ASHLAND, OREGON, US, NORTHERN HEMISPHERE, JUST ABOUT HALF-WAY FROM EQUATOR TO NORTH POLE

For some birds this is the season of togetherness. Parents and juveniles, families and cousins, unrelated birds of same species, even several species ganging together. What the flock?
Here is a small group of female Hooded Mergansers near a pair of sleepy female Bufflehead on Ashland Pond. A common winter sight that is not to be found during breeding season.

Above, Tundra Swans on Emigrant Lake (they are no longer there) showing three adults and four gray-headed juveniles. Parents and offspring? Here are Snow Geese (still at Emigrant Lake today). Two white adults, two grayish juveniles who may be their off-spring. Below, small flock of Green-winged Teal; they even fly in tight formation when they take off. Covey of California Quail. Historically these coveys included numerous family groups and would grow to the hundreds in food-rich habitats before gunners and feral cats came on the scene. Before Europeans arrived Native Americans could hunt quail with nets because the flocks were so dense.

This is a Solitaire in Harney County, OR. At the Sage Hen Rest Stop on US20 where I took this shot there were also Starlings, Cedar Waxwings, Robins, Mountain Bluebird and Varied Thrush all sharing the healthy juniper berry crop. Very mixed flock.

Above, a group of Elegant Terns loafing in Monterey after breeding season is over.
There are many working theories about why birds of a feather flock together. None are more together than some small shorebirds or Cedar Waxwings. The latter often be identified in flight at great distances simply by the cohesion of the flock. Mutual alert system? More eyes to find the food source? Safety in numbers? We should ask the birds…but maybe they have little self-awareness. Among Corvids there is “deliberate” or at least instinctive food-sharing rather than secretiveness. Again this may insure more survival for more individual birds. Fifty Ravens have a better chance of finding a fresh carcass than any single bird, then the croak goes out and the flock gathers to feed.

Certain families of birds in North America are almost always in flocks when not breeding: Acorn Woodpeckers (even putting all their eggs into one basket), Bushtits, most sparrows (except Song), finch family members from siskin to Evening Grosbeak, swallows, Robins, Icterids (blackbirds and meadowlarks), most Corvids (magpies to Crows), chickadees, Golden-crowned Kinglet, pipits, starlings, swifts, Burrowing Owls, nightjars, waterfowl, shorebirds, cormorants, gulls and terns, pelicans, grebes.

Some other families of birds may join mixed species flocks but aren’t highly tolerant of their fellows from the same species: tyrant flycatchers#, nuthatches, most raptors*, hunting herons and egrets (though many nest in colonies), vireo, Ruby-crowned Kinglet, shrikes, cuckoos, many woodpeckers, most owls.

For some interesting musing on mixed-species flocks, check out this piece by Jack Connor in Cornell’s LIVING BIRD magazine.

* There are colonial members of the falcon family that flock together: caracaras, Little Kestrel in Europe, Eleanora’s Falcon. But DNA tells us falcon have more in common with woodpeckers than with a Red-tailed Hawk or Osprey.

# When was the last time you saw ten Black Phoebe sitting on a telephone wire lined up like Tree Swallows or blackbirds?

Spring here in northwest Ohio comes in many shades, from gray to grass green to brilliant red. Here are a few:
Tufted Titmouse and Cardinal share feeder.

Groundhog, known also as woodchuck. How much wood wuld a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? We await the answer.

Golden-winged Warbler at Wildwoods Metropark in Toledo area. This disappearing warbler is the central figure in a conservation program headed by American Bird Conservancy.

Red-bellied Woodpecker, which has no red belly.
Solitary Sandpiper, Ottawa NWR.

Baltimore Oriole, Magee Marsh.Indigo Bunting male, Oak Openings Preserve.

All these birds seen in the first two days of the Partnership for International Birding Trip, co-sponsored by Golden Gate Audubon, to northwest Ohio for spring migration. So far we have 109 species for the two days and over 20 species of warblers seen.

OAKS OPENINGS, LAPLAND AND MISSISSIPPI

Oaks openings sounds like a twee name for a 3600-acre open space preserve, but once you start birding there it could be named “Walmart” and you wouldn’t care. Great spring birding. Warblers included Canada, Wilson’s, Chestnut-sided. And these guys, as well:

Black-throated Blue in the air, showing large white wing bars.

Bay-breasted Wasrbler along creek in Oaks Openings.

Baltimore Oriole male.

garter snakeRed-headed Woodpecker,

Gray-cheeked Thrush at Oaks Openings.

Lapland Longspur along Krause road where there was small flock of six, three of each gender.
In this picture note the male to the far left, with pale yellow beak.

American Golden Plovers, part of flock of thirteen, seen along Krause Road west of Ottawa NWR.

Rarest bird we saw all day was Mississippi Kite flying over Ottawa NWR late in the day. There are only two previous confirmed sightings in this part of Ohio for that species.

BIGGEST WEEK, DAY #1

Today was the opening of the Biggest Week in American Birding festival here inn northwest IowaOhio. The four of us from Partnership for International Birding and Neblina Tours of Ecuador have already seen 110 species. Some samples:Evenb here the increasingly scarce Upland Sandpiper is considered a good fine. These two were walking in the grass along the road margin today. Winter here has lingered and the birds could find grass tall enough to hide in.

Blue-headed Vireo, the eastern counterpart of our western Cassin’s Vireo.

Chestnut-sided Warbler gives me the eye.

Eastern Kingbird

You know how much I love owls if you read my blogs. Eastern version of Screech-Owl.

Ovenbird feeding on the forest floor.

Purple Martin atop martin housing development at Ottawa NWR. They are big and aggressive e enough to drive off the real estate greedy House Sparrows.

Swainson’s Thrush along the Magee Marsh boardwalk. All these birds are within a mile of the south shore of Lake Erie where the winds comes whipping off the waves.

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.

THE LEWIS’S WOODPECKER

There are a lot of birds I enjoy watching, some I find endearing, others amazing. The Lewis’s Woodpecker is somehow up in my personal pantheon with the Sandhill Crane, Shoebill (an ambulatory pelican), Hoopoe, Yellow-breasted Chat, Toucan Barbet, dippers of all species and any puffin anywhere.
The Lewis’s Woodpecker is a bird of the arid western forests of North America. Oak, ponderosa, digger pine and similar drought-tolerant trees are its métier, as they say.
Where I live now (Ashland, Oregon) the species nests about forty miles to the south, then comes up here to winter in the open oak savannah at around 1200-3000′ elevation.
In a rather sharpish comment Kenn Kaufman in his LIVES OF NORTH AMERICAN BIRDS says “one of our oddest woodpeckers–and not only because of its colors, which include pink, silver, and oily green.”
I prefer to think of my local Lewis’s as eccentric, not “odd.” And that green is iridescent, not “oily.”
But Kaufman has chosen to live back in Ohio where he can feast on colorful wood warblers each spring. Perhaps he doesn’t have the refined taste it takes to appreciate the eccentricities and colorful subtleties of our Melanerpes lewis.

The Lewis’s has a more moth-like flight, buoyant and almost weightless in appearance, than other woodpeckers with their typical undulating flight of flap, rise, glide, droop, flap, rise, glide. This woodpecker is not only a driller, though less vigorous than say a Pileated or even a sapsucker, he is a consummate flycatcher.
In California the Lewis’s can be found on Mt. Hamilton above 4000′ and along much of the western slope of the Sierra. In Oregon there are three pockets of breeding Lewis’s: southern Cascades, east of the Cascades in the Sandy River basin and in northeastern Oregon’s mountain ranges.
The slight, faint peeps are all this bird uses for vocalization. None of the loud calls of the Pileated or the sharp “clear” call of the Flicker. And he is social like his cousin the Acorn with which he shares a genus and a love of oaks and acorns.

The Lewis’s may mate for life and re-use a nest site for generations. Saves having to drill another hole, unlike more vigorous wood-workers in the woodpecker clan: Downy, Hairy, Red-headed, et al.
Right now the Lewis’s are performing in an ensemble at Milepost 10 along Oregon Hwy 66 east of Emigrant Lake. That’s where I took these pictures. They are also at the waterslide area of Emigrant Lake Recreation Area and on the east side of Agate Lake northeast of Medford. Certainly there are groups around Table Rock and in Sam’s Valley in north Jackson County though I have not personally been up there this year.
Here are some Lewis’s in images taken on sunny days in better light, so you can see some of the colors:

This final picture was taken on Mt. Hamilton last spring.
Lewis and Clarke discovered this species on their expedition, 1803-5. Thomas Nuttall met with the bird three decades later on his trip to Oregon and California, “this remarkable bird…They often perch in the usual manner of other birds, as well as climb, but they are also in the habit of darting out from their station and after performing a circular sweep return to the branch, spreading their wings horizontally and sailing like so many hawks.”
Now that shows some proper respect.
To see Lewis’s Woodpeckers you can come on one of our California field trips or arrange a custom trip to Oregon. Click here for California itinerary.

IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER (IBW)

Even now in one of my birding classes I occasionally will get asked, “Do you believe the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is still alive?” Or maybe, “That big woodpecker, do you think they really found one?”
What I do believe is that some experienced birders certainly believed at one time that they had re-found this species. The IBW had last been seen alive in the 1940s in Louisiana. The last sighting in Cuba was 1987. It’s almost a decade since that heady time back in 2004 when Cornell Ornithology Lab and several researchers declared that they were optimistic that the Ivory-billed had been found alive in an Arkansas marsh. The exact ten-year anniversary of the first celebrated modern sighting will be February 11, 2014.
Five years of intense searching in the field followed that 2004 public announcement which reverberated across the birding world. There followed some even sketchier reports that the IBW may have been found in Florida. Those reports, too, failed to provide anything like convincing evidence.
Cornell’s website today declares that field teams searched over 500,000 acres in 8 southern states over five years. The Cornell Lab and its supporters stand ready to follow up any credible reports that may still be heard.
The last proven sighting of IBW were in a private forest tract in Louisiana in 1944. During World War II that forest was cut down so the wood could be used “for the war effort.” There was no Endagered Species Act at that time and no way for friends of the IBW to stop the deforestation and probably the coup de grace for the woodpecker in the U.S.
At one time the Ivory-billed Woodpecker was widespread in the lowland hardwood forests of the southeastern U.S. That is a habitat type that is almost completely gone from America, along with the largest woodpecker that once lived on this continent.
In the first half of the 18th Century, English naturalist Mark Catesby collected a specimen and drew the first full-color image of the IBW. He called it “The Largest White-billed Wood-pecker.”

He went on to write, “The bills of these birds are much valued by the Canada Indians, who make coronets of them for their prices and great warriors, by fixing them around a wreath, with their points outwards. The northern Indians having none of these birds in the cold country, purchase them of the southern people at the price of two, and sometimes three buck-skins a bill.
“These birds subsist chiefly on ants, wood-worms, and other insects, which they hew out of rotten trees; nature having so formed their bills, that in an hour or two of time they will raise a bushel of chips; for which the Spanish call them carpenteros.”
Perhaps the next known colored image of the IBW was by John Abbot, an English naturalist who settled in Georgia in 1776. Abbot collected natural history specimens and made drawings, all of which he sold to wealthy collectors in England and America.
Writing in the early 19th Century, Alexander Wilson described the IBW thus: “This majestic and formidable species, in strength and magnitude, stands at the head of the whole class of Woodpeckers, hitherto discovered. He may be called the king or chief of his tribe…
“Wherever he frequents, he leaves enormous pine trees with cartloads of bark lying around their roots, and chips of the trunk itself, in such quantities as to suggest the idea that half a dozen axe-men had been at work there for the whole morning….

“The head and bill of this bird is in great esteem among the southern Indians, who wear them by way of amulet or charm, as well as ornament….”
Wilson shot and slightly wounded one IBW. That evening he carried the bird into his room at a hotel where he was spending the night. While Wilson ate dinner the bird—tied to the bed by a rope around its leg—proceeded to hack apart the hotel room furniture and carve up the window frame.
Three decades later Audubon wrote of the IBW: “The flight of this bird is graceful in the extreme, although seldom prolonged to more than a few hundred yards at a time…The transit from one tree to another, even should the distance be as much as a hundred yards, is performed by a single sweep, and the bird appears as if merely swinging itself from the top of one tree to that of the other, forming an elegantly curved line.”
When Thomas Nuttall wrote his account in his Ornithology, second edition (1840), he noted the bird had become secretive.
“More vagrant, retiring, and independent than the rest of his family, he is never found in the precincts of cultivated tracts; the scene of his dominion is the lonely forest amidst trees of the greatest magnitude…the high rattling clarion and the rapid strokes of this princely Woodpecker are often the only sounds which vibrate through, and communicate an air of life to this dismal wilds. His stridulous, interrupted call, and loud, industrious blows, my often be heard for more than half a mile….”
By the time Roger Tory Peterson published his first field guide in 1934 the Ivory-billed Woodpecker had become “extremely rare.” He says the bird is confined to the Gulf Coast. When Europeans first arrived the IBW had been found as far north as Virginia and the Ohio River.
In 1936 a Cornell expedition included ornithologist George Miksch Sutton. Here’s his description of finding an IBW nesting pair in Louisiana: “There we sat in the wild swamp, miles and miles from any highway, with two ivory-billed woodpeckers so close to us that we could see their eyes, their long toes, even their slightly curved claws with our binoculars.”
Also on that expedition was graduate student James Tanner who returned to study the birds in this virgin forest from 1937-39. It was his PhD research and was underwritten by the National Audubon Society. At that time he estimated there were about two dozen IBWs in that forest. Tanner also checked numerous other reports of UBW sightings around the south but never succeeded in finding another population. He worked hard to try to save the last forest with the last IBW but there was no legal standing in those days to conserve a species in the face of the profit motive. The forest was owned by the Singer Sewing Machine Company. They sold the timber rights to Chicago Mill and Lumber. Logging proceeded during the war. In 1944 artist Don Eckelberry spent two weeks sketching a single female IBW surviving in an island of yet-uncut forest. That is the last confirmed sighting of the doomed species.
Today we wait. Perhaps some intrepid birder will get the definitive video of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker high in a tree along a flooded bayou in the American south. Or perhaps the Ivory-billed Woodpecker will continue to be a phantom, haunting our collective yearnings for what used to be, floating through time next to the ghosts of the Passenger Pigeon and Great Auk.

CLICK HERE FOR SUMMARY OF CORNELL ORNITHOLOGY LAB’S STUDY OF IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER BEFORE WORLD WAR II.

CLICK HERE FOR SUMMARY OF THE SIGHTINGS AND SOUNDS THAT LED CORNELLTO ANNOUNCE THE FINDING OF THE IVORY-BILLED ALIVE IN ARKANSAS.

–Harry Fuller, PIB field guide