anonsally:

hey, @lies–sorry to bug you again with another eBirding question, but… 

Keep reading

Heh. I can tell already this answer will get long, so in deference to the dashes of unfortunates who aren’t obsessed with birds, here’s a cut.

Absolutely no need to apologize. A bird question from you is the high point of my day.

You don’t need to report subspecies. I believe eBird asks that if you do report subspecies you do so on the basis of observed (or heard) characteristics that identify the bird’s subspecies, rather than simply doing so based on the location where you saw it. Since the location where you saw it is already recorded as part of the observation they have that already. Rather than separately identifying such birds with an explicit subspecies designation that you didn’t visually confirm, you can just leave them ID’d to the species level, and anyone using your data for research can draw their own conclusions as to subspecies.

If you want to get really persnickety you can put separate entries in your checklist for species, and for separate subspecies of that species, all in the same list. I do that sometimes with yellow-rumped warblers, where both the myrtle and Audubon’s subspecies occur around here. So I’ll sometimes have a list with, like, 5 YRWA, 3 YRWA (Audubon’s), 1 YRWA (Myrtle), where the undifferentiated ones are birds I didn’t see or hear well enough to know which subspecies they were.

I confess I’ve never paid much attention to Steller’s jay subspecies until now. It turns out there are a LOT of subspecies of those. 🙂 North of Mexico they tend to get lumped into two “groups”, the coastal group and the interior group, which eBird offers as possible IDs.

Looking at eBird data, I don’t see records for interior group birds in (most parts of) California; they seem to be reported more inland.

Here are some eBird links:

Coastal group:

Map: https://ebird.org/map/stejay1

Photos: https://search.macaulaylibrary.org/catalog?taxonCode=stejay1&mediaType=p&sort=rating_rank_desc

Interior group:

Map: https://ebird.org/map/stejay2

Photos: https://search.macaulaylibrary.org/catalog?taxonCode=stejay2&mediaType=p&sort=rating_rank_desc

I went back and looked through my own photos of Steller’s jays and had fun putting my newfound interior/coastal group knowledge to the test.

Here’s a coastal group bird I saw at La Cumbre Peak above Santa Barbara:

Here’s an interior group bird I saw on Mount Lemmon in Arizona:

I was curious whether Mammoth Lakes in the Eastern Sierra would have coastal or interior birds. At least for the ones I’ve photographed, all appeared to be coastal group, including this one:

Thanks for the fun question!

Reposted from https://lies.tumblr.com/post/680159662557069312.

inthetags:

Reblog and put in the tags things you do to feel better after a bad day. 

Reposted from https://lies.tumblr.com/post/660405001817063424.

The United State of Birding

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/183731558396.

valentinaonthemoon
replied to your photo “Sometimes when I’m birdwatching”

This is beautiful!!

anonsally replied to your photo “Sometimes when I’m birdwatching”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Holy cow, lies, this is an AMAZING photo. So gorgeous. What a view!!!

It really was incredible. I’ve put some more detail after a cut, if anyone is interested.

Even though we lived in Mammoth Lakes for several years in the 90s, I’d never visited this particular spot before. But on our visit this time I chased the Grace’s Warbler that local ebirders had reported on Bald Mountain Road, and when I went there on Monday evening after work I not only got to see the warbler (yay!), I also realized what a neat area it was. So I took today off and set my alarm for 4 a.m. to go explore.

I’d wondered on Monday where the road the Grace’s Warbler was on led to. The maps showed an area labeled “Indiana Summit Research Natural Area”; some googling led me to the web page of the US Forest Service’s Research Natural Areas program.

The Research Natural Area (RNA) program is a nationwide system created to protect a network of federally administered public lands for the primary purposes of maintaining biological diversity, providing baseline ecological information, and encouraging research and university natural-history education. Areas selected exemplify minimally disturbed ecosystems representative of the range of widespread and unique natural vegetation types on federal lands.

The Indiana Summit RNA, it turns out, is the oldest RNA in California, having been established in 1932. The Eastern Sierra Jeffrey Pine forest is one of my favorite natural environments, and the Indiana Summit RNA preserves “a rare pristine example” of that forest. Most of the Eastern Sierra has been logged extensively over the years; mature Jeffrey Pines are scattered here and there, but in a lot of places you’re basically in a tree farm where all the trees are similarly aged “teenagers”.

But for whatever reason the land in the area just east of Indiana Summit (a low hill west of Bald Mountain) had never been logged, and after the RNA was established in 1932 no logging was allowed. You can actually see the boundary of the RNA in the Google Earth imagery below; the RNA is the area that’s darker, reflecting the presence of so many mature Jeffrey Pines:

The view here is looking north, with the eastern edge of Mono Lake in the background. I drove in via Bald Mountain Road, a well-graded dirt road that leads in from US 395. There are no roads in the RNA; I parked at the end of a dirt road near the southwest corner. The sun was just coming up, and the view was amazing.

If you look closely you can see in that Google Earth image how the southwest edge of the RNA ends at a steep cliff; I was standing on the edge of that cliff when I took the photo Sally commented on; here’s another shot from there:

The sun is just hitting the Eastern Sierra in the distance, though it hasn’t yet risen where I am.

I walked into the RNA and counted birds from four different locations: the southwest corner, a point along the western boundary, the northwest corner, and the middle of the northern boundary.

When I walked in from the north, crossing that ruler-straight boundary line you can see in the Google Earth image, it was breathtaking to suddenly be surrounded by so many mature Jeffrey Pines:

The Indiana Summit RNA burned in August 2016, after a lightning strike ignited the Clark Fire. In some areas along the western edge where I explored earlier in the day most of the trees had been killed, but in the interior of the RNA it was mostly the understory and the bottoms of the trunks that had burned, while the upper parts of the mature trees appeared to be okay:

As I saw when I birded the area around Jameson Lake for the Carpinteria Christmas Count after the Thomas Fire, woodpeckers were abundant in the burn area. My woodpecker total for the morning was:

• 1 Lewis’s Woodpecker
• 1 Williamson’s Sapsucker
• 18 Hairy Woodpecker
• 3 White-headed Woodpecker
• 4 Black-backed Woodpecker
• 4 Northern Flicker

I may have counted a few birds more than once as they moved around, but even so, there were a lot of woodpeckers. :-)

Besides the mature Jeffrey Pine forest, another feature the Indiana Summit RNA seeks to preserve is the archaeological record:

The Paiute Indians harvested larvae of piagi (Pandora
moth [Coloradia pandora]), which cyclically attack Jeffrey pine, by digging
trenches encircling the trunks of mature trees. These piagi trenches may still be
seen surrounding some of the larger Jeffrey pines, although their evidence has
been largely obliterated by logging and other disturbance in adjacent areas.

I found a number of those trenches in the RNA; here are two of them:

I’d told Linda I’d be back by noon; I ended up being only 20 minutes late, which is pretty good for me when I’m birdwatching. I’d like to go back again, though. I want to check out the eastern side of the RNA, where there are some more mesic White Fir stands on the north slope of Bald Mountain.

Next time! :-)

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/175631483676.

Bird nerds

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/174790317981.

Jameson Lake, Carpinteria Christmas Bird Count, 2018-01-05

So, if you’ve followed me for a while you know I get really into the bird thing late in the year when the Christmas Count comes around. This past year I got super into it, helping Rob (the founder of our local Christmas Count) organize things, which mostly meant letting him do the hard work of contacting everyone and lining up participants while I did the fun part: scouting (i.e., birdwatching).

We were in the home stretch when a slight hiccup occurred: The Thomas Fire. It burned through the majority of our count circle, forced evacuations of large parts of the Carpinteria Valley, and kept those who stayed behind indoors due to the horrible air quality. We basically had no choice but to postpone the count to Friday, January 5, the last day of the count window.

By the time the rescheduled count rolled around the fire was contained and people were getting their lives back together. The firefighters had done a great job, keeping the fire mostly out of the human-inhabited coastal strip. But inland it had burned unchecked.

We normally work hard to get a team to Jameson Lake, a freshwater reservoir in the northern part of our circle. It’s hard to reach even in the best of times, but it’s worth it; there are birds there we just can’t get on the coast. But this year it was completely inaccessible; no one was being allowed in except firefighters and Forest Service personnel.

Then we got a break: Alan, the dam caretaker at Jameson Lake for the Montecito Water District, is a birder. He’d arranged for us to go in back in November, before the fire, for a scouting visit. Now he’d started going back in for damage assessment, and he scheduled ones of his visits for count day. Even better, he pulled some strings and got permission for a carload of us to go in with him.

So it was that I, along with two other volunteers (Deborah and Taylor, aka @quickthreebeers) got to spend count day out of cellphone range, exploring a burned-out landscape that was eerily silent: no other people, and very few birds.

For the most part it wasn’t great birding. But it was a fascinating look at the aftermath of the fire. And in terms of the citizen-science mission of the Christmas Count, it was a wonderful opportunity to gather data on which birds were there (ducks, woodpeckers, and SO many Dark-eyed Juncoes) and which were gone. I’m really looking forward to going back over the next few years to see the area come back to life.

As I mentioned, we were out of cellphone range all day, so it was only after making the three-hour trip back at the end of the day that I was able to touch base with Rob, and get the good news about the overall count: It went great. We got 155 species, just 3 short of our all-time record.

This is some video I shot of our trip to the lake.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/171217768486.

Bartram’s Garden has both! The good bad of being a very urban nature center. They do the bird count every year and if I could tell birds (apart from catbirds, redwing blackbirds, and like, starlings) I would totally do. It’s one of my maturity goals. The end of year bird count. And, I guess, being able to identify birds.

Since I’m in the midst of a series of classes for beginning birdwatchers I’ve been thinking about this. Something I’ve tried to convey is that birdwatching actually is super forgiving of beginners.

I’ve tried to compare it to learning a musical instrument. If you’re learning to play violin or clarinet I imagine there’s this whole initial phase you have to go through where you’re working at it, but the actual thing you’re producing isn’t very close to the intended result. (I could actually be completely wrong about that, by the way. I don’t play anything myself.)

Birdwatching is very much the opposite: From the beginning you are legit doing it. Birdwatching is about, well, watching birds. And even as the most newbish of newbs you will, in fact, be watching birds, and will have access to the same pleasures that experienced birdwatchers get from it.

It’s true that correct identification is part of it, and as a beginner you’re going to be challenged by identifications that will get easier as you gain experience. But the challenges you face as a beginner aren’t fundamentally different from the challenges you’ll face later on. You’re just experiencing them with a different class of birds. Learning to solve those challenges is half the fun, and it’s a challenge you’ll keep facing no matter how far you progress.

The other half of the fun (or more than half, at least for me), is the beauty and wonder I feel from just watching the birds, which is totally available to everyone regardless of their level of experience.

Oh, and about the Christmas Count in particular: Some of the new birders I’ve been talking to have expressed hesitation about doing the Count. “I don’t know anything,” they say. “I won’t be able to help.”

Not true. When we organize the count we make sure that there’s at least one experienced birder in each group to handle the finer points of identification. But in a group of five or six birdwatchers, even the least-experienced person can make a big contribution. It’s all about eyes and ears. When the experienced folks are staring at something through a spotting scope, a group of white pelicans (say) could fly directly overhead and they’d never know it. But if a member of the group is scanning the landscape, they can say, “uh, hey; guys? check this out.” (This exact scenario happened with my group on count day last year.)

So, in summary: Watch birds. It’s awesome, and it’s awesome right from the beginning.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/2eHLvyE.

I like trying to uncover secrets by analyzing regional spelling variations!

Dad joke.

No, actually, one thing I look forward to all year is the Christmas bird count. This year our local count will be on December 18. I love having an excuse to spend all day birdwatching. I could do that any day, of course, but doing it as part of an organized effort that produces useful citizen-science data, and has the added fun of being a competition in which our local small-but-doughty birb fandom gets to measure itself against the nationally-ranked powerhouse up the road in Santa Barbara (spoiler: we lose) is fun.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/2gWDINM.

It’s the season of Christmas counts. I did the one that I do, but I still feel birdy-ish. I want an excuse to do some more without the pressure/commitment of something major like another Christmas count or a conventional big day.

So I thought: What about a little big day?

The normal way an obsessive birder does a big day is to devote the whole day to it and spend a lot of it driving from place to place. I don’t want to do that, but a scaled-down version sounds like fun. So here’s my plan:

• A single day.
• 100% human-powered. Walking or biking only.
• I don’t want to bird dawn to dusk; I’ve got too much going on with work and the holidays. But I could do an hour each in the morning, noon, and evening, and then just incidental birding around the house during the rest of the day. So:
• 0700 – 0800: Franklin Trail (rural/chaparral)
• 1200 – 1300: Carpinteria Creek Lagoon and Carpinteria Bluffs (freshwater wetland/coastal sage scrub/rocky and sandy beaches)
• 1600 – 1700: Carpinteria Salt Marsh (coastal estuary)

I started listing species, and I think 70 should be pretty easy. With luck I could get to 80 or even 90. If I get all the likely species on my list plus all the “bonus” species that I think are reasonably possible, it gets me to 99.

So, you know, if magic happens: 100. Not that I expect that. It will be fun no matter what; that’s the best thing about birdwatching.

I realize this isn’t anything super impressive for a serious birder. But I’m pretty casual about it, so for me it sounds like a fun challenge.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1NIq4WJ.

As I worked in my home office a few minutes ago, a western bluebird flew over the house singing its brief, sweet song.

Being able to birdwatch in the midst of other activities is one of the best things about learning bird vocalizations.

Audio credit: Cornell University’s All About Birds page for Western Bluebird songs, which links to a Macaulay Library recording apparently made in Oregon in 1961 by Robert C. Stein. Technically I think I may be violating their copyright by reposting it here. For the purposes of this post, though, I’m going to think of it as an unauthorized bootleg of a performance by an artist who’s cool with such things, and have my fannish way with it.

Image credit: I’m on safer ground here. That’s Western Bluebird in Sonoma, California by Wikimedia user SarahStierch, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1v4M2wL.

anonsally:

llamapunk:

fat-birds:

Pygmy Kingfisher by D&R IMAGES on Flickr.

Omg! Does it catch Pygmy fish? Or Pygmy kings? Squee.

This bird does not attend Parulidae Junior High but it is so cute and so colorful I had to reblog it anyway. 

#birdwatching#not really but that’s where my non PJH birds get filed

Um, I think you are birdwatching. You’re doing it on Tumblr, but you’re birdwatching.

Now you just have to take the next step, and do it outdoors with a pair of binoculars instead of a computer. Come to think of it, so do I. I’ve probably been birdwatching on my computer more than IRL for a while now.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1rJ2eyF.

fuckyeabirds:

This bird is called a Sora.

One of the things that’s really compelling for me about bird watching is the challenge of identifying the bird. And not just the challenge, but what the challenge reveals about the way my brain works (or doesn’t).

A Sora is not a particularly difficult bird to identify. It’s difficult to see, because it’s a rail, and rails are fat and tasty and survive mostly by being really good at hiding in reeds near the water and never coming into view unless you, the birdwatcher, are really patient and quiet and a little lucky.

Soras are probably the easiest of the rails to get a glimpse of, at least in my experience, but they still are stuck firmly in that part of my brain reserved for rails: Secretive. Hard to see. Always in the reeds near water.

So it was interesting, and fun, when one winter day in a snowstorm at 9,000 feet in the eastern Sierra Nevada, probably miles from the nearest water that wasn’t covered by ice, my wife and I glanced out the window of our condo and saw a bird climbing around in the branches of a nearby lodgepole pine. It was moving awkwardly from branch to branch, shaking off the snow with its giant feet, and I was just agog. Because I’d been birding for a couple of decades, and I was having what was at that point a very unfamiliar experience: I was looking at a bird, had a good view of it, and had no clue what family it was in, to say nothing of genus or species. My brain just could not put together what I was seeing: It was in a pine tree, in the snow, and it just looked completely wrong. It was not any kind of bird that I could imagine being there.

I think it probably took me a good 20 seconds, looking at the bird, talking about it with Linda, before the logjam in my brain suddenly gave way and the truth flooded over me: It was a Sora. And then everything in the world made sense again.

Those 20 seconds were awesome.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/48819541270.

dduane:

luckstergal:

bellisadinosaur:

This baby owl hit our window. Gave us this look the whole time – Imgur

YOUR FORCEFIELD DISPLEASES ME

AS DOES YOUR INTERIOR DECORATING

HELP I AM CRY

Oh sweet heaven, what an expression…

Some pedantic bird-watcher points:

This isn’t actually a baby, but an adult owl of a species that doesn’t get very big. My guess is that it’s a Boreal Owl (Aegolius funereus), which has an adult length of about 10 inches. If I knew where and what time of year the OP saw it I’d feel more comfortable about the ID, but it looks a lot like a Boreal.

The whole idea of non-human organisms having “expressions” is interesting. As social apes we’ve evolved to put a lot of stock in emotional states as revealed by things like eyebrow position. Other social animals (think domestic dogs) can certainly convey emotional states to humans, though it tends to happen more via body language than facial expressions.

There’s no doubt that people can consistently read what appear to be emotional states from some birds’ facial expressions, but it tends to be hard-coded in the birds’ facial pattern. In some cases birders use it to help distinguish similar-looking species. For example, Cooper’s Hawks have a “severe” facial expression, while Sharp-shinned Hawks look more “surprised”.

Still, I owned a pet lovebird once that definitely got a pissed-off look in his eye when he was angry. So maybe this owl really is conveying an actual emotional state via its face.

Anyway: Ooh, cute!

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/48579805513.

wifeinkorea:

bird outside my house. i think it is some sort of morning dove… still waiting for the bird book to come.

I took a look at Wikipedia’s List of Birds of South Korea (which is not a bad resource for you to check out while you wait for your field guide, though it’s not going to be nearly as good as having a consistently formatted collection of pictures for you to browse through, which the field guide should hopefully provide). Since I agree with you that that’s a dove or pigeon of some kind, it sounds from the wiki page like you have eight species to choose from.

Some of them look very different from this bird, and some are uncommon or local to forest habitats. But your photo looks like an urban setting, which makes me think you’re probably looking for a common species. And actually, there’s a candidate that jumped out at me right away, because it’s a species that has successfully invaded my neighborhood here in Southern California over the last few decades: The Eurasian Collared Dove. Your photo looks a lot like one of those.

It could be something else. Both the Oriental Turtle Dove and the Red Turtle Dove seem like they could be possibilities. A field guide would be helpful, since it would probably include more information (range maps, notes on habitat and abundance) that could help exclude either or both of them.

But if I had to put money on it, I’d bet it’s a Eurasian Collared Dove.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/45031257947.

animalstalkinginallcaps:

IS EVERYONE BLIND? IS THIS THE MOVIE BLINDNESS STARRING JULIANNE MOORE AND GAEL GARCÍA BERNAL?

SOMEONE ACKNOWLEDGE HOW GOOD I LOOK TODAY BEFORE I HAVE A VIOLENT OUTBURST THAT ENDS IN BLOODSHED!

I have seen this IRL. It was when my wife and I were living in Mammoth Lakes in the Eastern Sierra. There was a lek out near the Mammoth Airport, and one chilly morning before dawn the two of us drove out there with our friends Kitty and Paul. (The sage grouse do their insane neck-bubble display most enthusiastically right around sunrise.)

We got out there and set up my spotting scope and waited, and then the sun came up and the grouse started bubbling and it really was quite magical. And after about a minute and a half, when we each had had a chance to look, we all said, more or less simultaneously, Jesus it is so fucking cold do you mind if we yes please dear god let’s go.

So we did.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/44397581702.