Amy and I went birding this weekend with some acquaintances from Austin who’d come down to see the Ruddy Ground-Dove. Having found the dove on Friday evening, we made quite a day of Saturday, covering a wide area in and around San Angelo. We managed to take a few pictures along the way.

Our first stop was the South Unit of the San Angelo State Park, which was fairly uneventful. Moving on to the North Unit, we focused on sparrows along the river bottom. We had a lot of success and managed to find Vesper, Song, Lincoln’s, Fox, and best of all White-throated Sparrows.

After lunch, we headed out to an area known as the Lipan Flats, an agricultural area east of town where we hoped to find longspurs or a Merlin. The landscape is bleak (empty dirt fields as far as the eye can see), and therefore I don’t bird the place very often.

It wasn’t long before we got out there that we found a flock of Horned Larks and McCown’s Longspurs. Scanning the flock carefully, a picked out a single Lapland Lonspur in amidst this flock!

It was a good thing that I had, because when we got back to the car and looked through Amy’s notes, we realized that the Wilson’s Snipe seen last weekend wasn’t a new bird for her after all. Thus she started the day at 398. McCown’s Longspur was 399 and Lapland 400. Even more surprising, when we got home and I checked my notes, I learned that I hadn’t seen Lapland Longspur either. Though I generally know exactly what I’ve seen and what I haven’t, I just completely overlooked this species, thinking I had already seen it in the Texas panhandle. So Amy’s 400th was also a new bird for me.

Our final destination was Middle Concho Park along the Concho River. We found this Pine Warbler, which was perhaps the best bird of the day. (Lapland Longspurs are probably here every year, just hard to find and see. Pine Warblers on the other hand are not. This was the first I’ve ever seen in west Texas.) Other highlights included this Rock Wren that was extremely cooperative for the camera.

Amy and I ended the day at Chili’s for a celebratory dinner. It was really unexpected and fun that her 400th bird was new for me as well.

Last weekend, Amy and I went up to Abilene to be with my folks. We were able to do a little birding on Saturday morning at a local park that includes some of Lake Fort Phantom. I had recently given my dad an old camera of mine, and he happily took a few pictures.

One of the great joys of getting my wife into birding has been to experience things first hand all over again. I imagine this is a joy that any mentor or teacher feels. My wife has been steadily adding new birds here and there as we’ve travel about, and at the start of the day, she had seen 398 species. Not too shabby, though then again, she has a great personal guide.

One of the mythical creatures that has been eluding us all winter is Wilson’s Snipe. Yes, for you non-birders, there really is such a thing as a snipe. (I once had a reporter who simply would not believe that such a bird was real, even when I showed him pictures in a book. He was convinced that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax and he wasn’t going to fall for it.) Well, based on a good tip from my mom who’d just seen several at the park within the week, we finally caught up to the critters.

So now Amy needs just one more bird to hit 400.

In addition to the park, we stopped by the local landfill, where gulls by the thousands come in to feast on the endless buffet our trash provides. It came as a surprise to me that Abilene has two landfills, side by side, though apparently not managed by the same companies. One landfill let us right in and we happily scanned the gulls and ducks on several ponds. The other landfill wasn’t so accommodating, and the guy there informed me that if we’d been to the landfill next door, then there was nothing different for us to see at his landfill. I tried, very nicely, to explain that everything’s not the same and that we were in effect, looking for that needle in a haystack, the rare gull amongst the thousands of Ring-billed Gulls. Not buying it, and to back up his authority, he explained that he’d been here for 27 years and that “it’s all the same seagulls.”

What a dump!

Update, Feb 7, 2009

As we later realized, Amy has already seen Wilson’s Snipe. Several times in fact. That doesn’t deminish the enjoyment of the bird. And all’s well that end’s well.

A couple of weeks ago on January 12, 2009, I got a call from a friend who said he needed help identifying a bird. He was looking a dove and he gave a remarkably good description of a Ruddy Ground-Dove… The only problem was that Ruddy Ground-Dove is an exceedingly rare bird in Texas. It’s only been documented a dozen or so times, with all records coming from the lower Rio Grande Valley, Big Bend, and near El Paso.

In less than five minutes, I was in the car and on my way to the location. When I got there, the bird had just flown (Murphy’s Law, of course). So I did what any person with other responsibilities would do. I waited for four hours enjoying Red-winged Blackbirds and House Sparrows.

My patience was really, and I mean really, rewarded.

Yep, this is a Ruddy Ground-Dove alright. (And I’ve got a host of additional pictures in the gallery.)

For those that aren’t familiar with these small doves, they look an awful lot like a similar species — Common Ground-Doves. The main field marks are:

• An unscaled throat and upper breast (Common Ground Doves are noticeably scaled)
• Black base to the bill (Common Ground Doves have a pink base to the bill)
• Black streaks on the scapulars (these feathers are unstreaked in Common Ground-Dove)
• White tips to the greater wing covets (not easily visible in the above photo but seen other other pictures in the gallery)

The color (reddish on the body with a very gray head) is also distinctive, but this can be misleading as some Common Ground-Doves can have a very pinkish wash on the breast.

While this new record (if and when accepted) is by far the most northern in Texas, and totally unprecedented so far from the Rio Grande, another Ruddy Ground-Dove turned up at Lake Balmorhea in west Texas just last October. This begs the question. Is there a push of Ruddy Ground-Doves out of Mexico into west Texas this winter? If one could put 10,000 birders out into the mesquite grassland habitats of west Texas, would more Ruddy Ground-Doves turn up?

At any rate, this bird is still hanging around some two weeks later. It will be interesting to see how long it stays.

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:

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Waaah Call:

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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.