Today I leave for the Davis Mountains to continue my second (and last) field season of thesis research. Last year my adviser was gracious and allowed me the use of his vehicle. This year however, he wasn’t feeling so altruistic. And who can blame him? I had a whole year to arrange for another vehicle.

The problem of course is that I drive a Corolla. She’s light and nimble on her feet and gets a near miraculous amount of miles to the gallon, but she aint exactly renowned for her off road abilities. Her name is Betsy.

I needed more of a bastion of transportation to handle the mountainous terrain. I needed Bertha.

Bertha has a long and storied history. A 1988 GMC suburban that belongs to my parents, she’s like that relative that everyone respects for all they’ve seen and been through, yet no one wants to sit next to at the dinner table because of the smell…

A few years ago in what was expected to be her last hurrah, Bertha embarked with five young gents on a trip deep in the southern bowels of Mexico. She made it all the way to Oaxaca and back. True, she got her gas cap stolen and there were four flat tires in the first six days, but Bertha can hardly be faulted for Mexico’s hooligan youth, shoddy road conditions, and below standard spare tires.

No, Bertha will do quite well for me this summer. She’d better. I just spent $250 to get one of her four windows working (she has no air conditioner) and glue the fabric ceiling back on. She’s just got the right constitution for field work.

I’m really looking forward to these next few weeks. In addition to the research, I’m going to be pulling out the camera in my spare time, catching up on processing all my pictures, and reading lots of books. If my internet connection cooperates, you can expect to see plenty of pictures.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re in the market for a 1988 GMC Suburban with one working window and a glued on ceiling lots of character, I’ll have one for sale in about five weeks.

A new species of hummingbird has just been discovered in the cloud forests of southwestern Colombia. No surprise there. At roughly 1,800 species of birds, Colombia is second to no other country in the total species of birds that it has. Equator + Mountains = ginormous amounts of speciation in lots of different habitat types. With 2,500 species, South America is the bird continent.

Dubbed the Gorgeted Puffleg (Eriocnemis Isabellaea), the bird is quite spectacular.

He’s a puffleg, so he’s got the furry (feathers actually) “disco boots” around his legs. But what struck me the most is that the group of feathers underneath his tail (called the undertail coverts) are iridescent! Lots of hummingbirds have iridescence on their throats, but I can’t recall off the top of my head any that have iridescent undertail coverts. (I’m sure there are plenty in the tropics that I’m just not familar with.)

Despite having so many amazing birds, the article succinctly captures why most birders and even ornithologists don’t usually make it to Colombia.

Investigators caught their first glimpse of the bird while surveying a mountain ridge in the Cauca province in 2005. Braving the zone’s leftist rebels and drug traffickers, they returned to confirm the sighting.

The article also highlights fears that habitat loss from growing drug crops threatens the bird’s existence.

Still, it’s pretty amazing that we’re still discovering new species. There are something like 325 species of hummingbird alone, confined entirely to the new world.

I welcome each and every addition to this group.

I came across a three week old story in the Onion that takes aim at birders, particularly the Sibley Guide. It’s an absolute riot!

Here’s a brief taste, but if you know anything about birding, you’ve got to read the rest of the article.

I don’t understand it. How could it have happened a third time? They’ve had two opportunities to correct it. But there it is, once again. The Sibley Guide To Birds, third printing, page 488: “The dark-eyed junco, a familiar visitor to wintertime bird feeders throughout much of North America, is a species of the junco genus of American finches.”

Mr. Sibley, once again, the dark-eyed junco is not a finch. Its a sparrow. A sparrow.

[…]

Apparently the 42 letters I sent Mr. Sibley, his publisher, and his literary agent either went unread or now line the nests of Carolina wrens. I’m not sure what the mans afraid of, especially since I larded these letters with all kinds of reassurances like “its a common mistake” and “I get all those seed eaters mixed up, too” and other things I didn’t really mean.

And if you’re not laughing, me thinks you need a brief primer on what the Onion is…

Another blogger has used (after getting my permission of course) my recent picture of Burrowing Owls that I put up recently.

Says one of the commenters on the post,

Many thanks for the burrowing-owl photo. It brightened my Monday considerably.

It’s nice to see the shot getting wider exposure.

My wife and ventured to southern Colorado for spring break. I’ve finally gotten around to throwing up the pictures from the trip. They’re heavy on Sandhill Cranes in flight. Why? Because literally tens of thousands of these birds migrate through the San Luis Valley and use it as a staging area on their way back north, and the birds are just about impossible to sneak up on when they’re in the fields feeding. So it’s much easier to take pictures as they fly by.

It was really a magical experience. Most cranes in the world are endangered. These ancient birds haven’t coped well to the changes people have brought. And while it wouldn’t take much too see Sandhill Cranes get in trouble, their populations are currently large and stable. Like all cranes, they’re quite vocal and frequently display towards one another by jumping in the air and flapping their wings. In short, they’re sexy.

Other highlights of the trip included a couple of Burrowing Owls sitting in the rain on the drive up to Colorado, my first Snowshoe Hare (I now understand why they’re in the same genus as our jackrabbits), and an amazing place named the Great Sand Dunes National Park.

I’ll leave you with a selected few pictures. (Click on them to see slightly larger versions in the gallery).

I went birding for a short time with my wife yesterday to the north unit of the San Angelo State Park in west Texas. For those of you that are birders, you’ll understand that there are rare days that are just magical. Yesterday was just such a day.

Ringed Kingfisher

I was hearing a kingfisher chattering in the distance. Not its full machine gun fire call, but just individual chattering notes. After walking through the brush and peering out along the Concho River, I spotted this guy (or rather girl). It’s a Ringed Kingfisher, the largest new world kingfisher that ranges throughout Latin America, barely reaching south Texas. They’ve been straying north, seemingly with greater regularly, with sightings from central Texas. This is perhaps the third sighting and first photographic record for the Concho Valley.

Black-throated Blue Warbler

That alone would have made it an incredible day, but the magic wasn’t done. We walked down to a dry spot on the river to try and refind the kingfisher, when my wife pointed out a small passerine bird coming down to the water’s edge. I was somewhat distracted, still looking for the kingfisher. When the bird finally hopped out into view, my jaw hit the ground. A male Black-throated Blue Warbler, one of two regularly occurring U.S. warbler species I’d not seen, hopped in view to get a drink. This is a hard bird to find anywhere in Texas, but when it does show up, it’s usually on the southeast coast. They breed in the northeast and winter in the West Indies, so most migrate down the eastern seaboard and miss Texas all together. As far as I know, this is the first record for the Concho Valley.

I’ve also put up lots more pictures of both birds in the photo gallery.

When it was all said and done, I’d seen a couple of highly unlikely birds within the span of 15 minutes. When you least expect it, birds can really surprise you.

I came across a video highlighting the unique mating system and courtship displays of tiny tropical birds known as manakins. They interesting for forming leks — a place where multiple males will gather and engage in elaborate displays to get the ladies’ attention.

Take a look at this following video. Now for you none birding folks out there, don’t give up on me… The last minute contains a bird moonwalking, and trust me, you’ll want to see it.

It brings back fond memories of a time when I was near the shores of Lake Catemaco in southern Veracruz, Mexico, standing right next to a friend who suddenly found himself look at one of these birds, a Red-headed Manakin. No sooner had he seen it than the bird was gone.

Long-tailed Manakin - photo source

I have seen other species in the tropics though. I’m particularly fond of the coveted Long-tailed Manakin. These birds will form leks where males will jump up and down as they call, trying to attract a female. The displays can last 20 minutes.

They’re extremely vocal too, giving a series of varied noises. Two of the most notable are their toledo song and a call that I can only describe as sounding like a baby crying — a descending waaah.

I’ve included them at the bottom of the post. (If you’re using internet explorer, you may have to click play twice due to the new way Microsoft handles the Flash plugin. I won’t get into it).

Toledo Song:

Waaah Call:

It’s little things like this that should remind us how important conservation is. The life and diversity within tropical rainforests is simply staggering. Even now, after years of study and exploration, it yields new secrets and new beauties.

I went birding a couple of weekends ago in my old stomping grounds of Abilene, TX where I grew up. It was fun, and I managed to get a number of pictures of birds (and the ever present summer dragonflies of course). While none of them are spectacular, it was nice to get shots of feathered friends, since before owning a telephoto lens they were simply out of reach. You can, as always, find them in the gallery.

I did manage to get three interesting pictures of a Franklin’s Gull (here, here, and here). For birder’s, the reason these pictures are interesting is because of this species similarity to Laughing Gull. Normally, Franklin’s Gulls can be separated by large white tips to the flight feathers (primaries). However, during this time of year, the birds largely lack these, and one could get the identification wrong. These picture show a number of characteristics which separate the two. Note that the white eye crescents are much bolder, the underwing coverts are in flight are largely white (they would have strong brown markings if it were a Laughing Gull), the black on the underside of the primaries is less extensive than Laughing Gull, and the black band on the top of the tail does not go all the way to the edges. This bird shows the necessity of caution in relying on one mark (white to the tips of the primaries) in identifying a bird like Franklin’s Gull.

Ah, the subtleties are what keep it fun!

Because of eye candy like this. You just can’t see little buggers like that in the states (though we’ve certainly got eye candy of our own).

And if you’ve never seen the Ben Cruachan Blog before, you should bookmark or RSS it. Getting a dose of bird pictures from down under is fun.

In my week long break, there were a bunch of things that I should have blogged about. Hardly having the time to cover any of them in depth, I’ll simply include a list with some links for your perusal.

• Perhaps the biggest story I missed in my week off was Kansas. The state board of education got an “anti-science” cleansing in the primary elections. Several republicans that were vehemently opposed to properly teaching science were replaced by moderate republicans, most notably Connie Morris. MSNBC covers the details and describes just how crazy life in Kansas is.
  

  Control of the school board has slipped into, out of and back into conservative Republicans’ hands since 1998, resulting in anti-evolution standards in 1999, evolution-friendly ones in 2001 and anti-evolution ones again last year.

  And for more on the political math in the election, see this post on Red State Rabble, a good source for Kansas politics as they relate to education.

• NASA has joined the search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker by using air planes and “lasers” to map vegetation and identify potential habitat. While I lean on the side that the bird is extinct, it may be very interesting to see what they can learn about the habitat through techniques like this. I think every grad student studying ecology should get their own laser equipped NASA aircraft.
• In a new study, Sooty Shearwaters have been found to migrate over 40,000 miles in a single year. There are a couple of great write-ups on this story from the BBC and The Australian, as well as this site, which also included a nice picture gallery. At these distances, the birds would easily claim the title of longest migration in the world from Artic Tern. However, I might slightly quibble with how we define migration. Shearwaters and other tube-nosed birds (like Albatross) are ideally suited to cruise the open oceans. It is their habitat. It doesn’t mean this isn’t impressive. Just that perhaps it’s still impressive when a bird like the Arctic Tern makes the trip between poles to find favorable habitat.
• I had no idea that high polar latitudes and temperatures lower than -176°F could cause psychedelic clouds. Here’s the story, some really nice pictures, oh and leave it to the British to ruin the moment and kill the beauty.
• The latest edition of Carnival of the Spineless (all about invertebrates) was held over at Words and Pictures. There were a number of very interesting posts, including (I would like to think) two (here and here) from yours truly.