Bewick's Wren

Bewick's Wren today was a nice addition to my Lafayette Parish list, and Duson Quad list.

Towhee Trifecta

I had my first-ever Louisiana "towhee trifecta" today, on the Grand Chenier winter bird atlas quad.  All three birds were on Little Chenier Road east of Muria Road.  This is the year to do it, with excellent numbers of Spotted and Green-tailed Towhees around.

Spotted Towhee and Eastern Towhee.  Can't ask for more
cooperative towhees.

Green-tailed Towhee.  This one took some effort
to see, and even more to photograph.  

Cool Canine

Went almost to the coast to do the Creole and Grand Chenier Quads today.  On Little Chenier Road, I had the following creature of interest:

Dark coyote?  Coy-dog?  Pretty awesome sight, whatever it was.

Mac Myers sent me the following regarding canines:

New York State State Museum scientist says wolves and coyotes in St.

Lawrence County and the rest of the eastern U.S. are hybrids between gray wolves, coyotes and domestic dogs.

Dr. Roland Kays, the museum's curator of mammals, has co-authored a new research article, representing the most detailed genomic study of its kind.

He is one of 16 national and international scientists who collaborated on the study that used the dog genome to survey the global genetic diversity in dogs, wolves and coyotes.

The study used over 48,000 genetic markers, making it the most detailed genomic study of any wild vertebrate species.

The research results are especially relevant to wolves and coyotes in the Northeast. The study shows a gradient of hybridization in wolves, with pure wolves in western states and increasing hybridization as you move east.

Populations of eastern coyotes, which only colonized the region in the last

60 years, were minor hybrids, with some introgression of genetic material from wolves and domestic dogs. For example, Northeastern coyotes, including those in New York State, had genetic material primarily from coyotes (82 percent), with a minor contribution from dogs (9 percent) and wolves (9 percent).

Midwestern and southeastern coyotes were genetically 90 percent coyote, with an average of 7.5 percent dog and 2.5 percent wolf.

Wolves in the western Great Lakes area averaged a genetic makeup of 85 percent wolf and 15 percent coyote, while wolves in Algonquin Park in eastern Ontario averaged 58 percent wolf, and the 'red wolf' in North Carolina was only 24 percent wolf and 76 percent coyote.

The advanced genetic techniques used in this study also allowed the scientists to estimate when the hybridization initially occurred. Kays said "In most cases this breeding across species lines seems to have happened at times when humans were hunting eastern wolves to extinction, and the few remaining animals could find no proper mates, so took the best option they could get." Kays continues, "The exceptions were an older hybridization between coyotes and wolves in the western Great Lakes dating from 600-900 years ago, and a coyote-dog hybridization in the eastern U.S. about 50 years ago, when coyote were first colonizing eastern forests."

This study also provides fresh data on the controversy over the species status of the Red Wolf in North Carolina, and the Eastern Canadian Wolf in Ontario. Both are medium-sized wolves that some have argued represent unique species. However, this new detailed genetic data shows both are the result of hybridizations between coyotes and wolves over the last few hundred years, and do not share a common origin in a unique eastern wolf species.

This research is also relevant to a recent U.S. Fish and Wildlife proposal to remove the western Great Lakes wolves from the Endangered Species Act by showing that those wolves are only marginally hybridized with coyotes, should be considered a subspecies of the Gray Wolf, and have no genetic ties to a more endangered form of eastern wolf.

The research is published online in Genome Research, an international, peer-reviewed journal that publishes outstanding original research that provides novel insights into the genome biology of all organisms, including advances in genomic medicine.

This study follows another research paper co-authored by Kays last year in the journal Biology Letters, which used museum specimens and genetic samples to show that eastern coyotes hybridized with wolves to rapidly evolve into a larger form over the last 90 years, dramatically expanding their geographic range and becoming the top predator in the Northeast. This hybridization contributed to the evolution of coyotes from mousers of western grasslands to deer hunters of eastern forests. The resulting coy-wolf hybrids are larger, with wider skulls that are better adapted for hunting deer.

In the past, Kays has also studied coyote diet and distribution in Albany's Pine Bush and in the Adirondack Mountains. His research indicated that deer accounted for approximately one-third of the coyote's diet and that they made extensive use of forested areas.

Weekend of January 25th and 26th

Last weekend, I worked the Mire Quad for the winter bird atlas, getting it over the 20-hour mark, and then went down to the coast with Dave Patton and Mac Myers to explore Sabine Pass in Dave's boat.  

The Mire Quad is just northwest of Lafayette, but the land is slightly different, a little higher and drier, maybe, and with a bit of a wave to it.  The area featured mostly dry fields and thin roadside treelines.  Nothing fancy there, but fun stuff: 

Carolina Chickadee

Carolina Wren

Common Ground Dove.  One of three that I came across.  

Hermit Thrush

Yellow-rumped Warbler.  The Swiss Army Warbler.  

White-throated Sparrow

The trip to the coast was fun,  The seas were rough, but the water was okay inside the channel.  

Bonaparte's Gull

Brown Pelican

American Oystercatcher.  These are always a treat. 

Herring Gull

Quad Birds

Some interesting birds from Louisiana Winter Bird Atlas quad surveying last weekend:

Ash-throated Flycatcher in Lake Charles SW Quad

Grasshopper Sparrow, Lake Charles SW Quad

Sandhill Cranes; Lake Charles SE Quad

Ghost Eurasian Collared-Dove

Harris's Sparrow; Lake Charles SE Quad

Say's Phoebe, Lacassine Quad

Wilson's Phalaropes; Lake Charles SE Quad

Finally...

In more ways than one.

Today, with Dave Patton, I made my first trip of the year to the coast, and only my second or third trip down since mid-October.  We never even actually never made it as far as the beach today, but at least we made it to within a few hundred yards.  So--finally--some coastal birding.

After birding in circles in December (CBC circles) and birding in boxes in January (surveying quads for the winter bird atlas), it was nice to be able to do some free-form birding.  One of our goals today was to see a Green-tailed Towhee, a bird that's typically almost mythical in Louisiana.  However, this is no typical year, and almost 20 of these western towhees have been found in the state thus far during the cool season.

When the first few towhees were found this year, I figured it might be wise to chase one while I could.  Green-tailed Towhees are incredibly rare in Louisiana, after all.  When would I ever get another chance?
I've never been the biggest fan of chasing or I'd have gone over the 400 species mark for Louisiana years ago.  I passed on the Rock Wren in Cade, the Painted Redstart in Hackberry, on Lazuli Buntings, Lark Bunting, etc., opting and hoping to find my own instead.  I'm still looking for all of those birds years later, so maybe the towhee was one I might be wise to chase.

The first Saturday I got, I decided to take advantage of the predicted cold sunny morning  to go see the staked-out towhee.  I was figuring it would jump up in the first warm rays of the sun and be easy to see.  Only problem was, it was cloudy, warm, and next to a duck pond on the first day of duck season.  After that day, I decided I could put the towhee dream on the back burner, and hopefully just find my own.  Since then, report after report has filtered in.  Some CBCs had up to 3 Green-tails, but I scratched.  I figured towhees might be hanging out with White-crowned Sparrows, but I went whole CBCs without seeing any White-crowned Sparrows, either.  By this weekend, I'd finally had enough.  I called Dave and asked if he wanted to go see someone else's towhee.

We thought about some locations, and found a few likely ones.  Erik Johnson, the undisputed king of Green-tailed Towhees after finding a nice handful of them, had reported one lately from Broussard Beach, so we tried there. No luck.  Tons of sparrows, just didn't see a towhee.  I'd bet there's still one there; we just didn't see it. Then we tried one Melvin Weber had found.  No luck there, either.

So we decided to start heading back inland.  On the way back, we saw flocks of sparrows on the roadside and stopped to take looks.  Just east of Willow Island, we stopped at a good sparrow spot, parked, and started to enjoy the sparrow show.  We started comparing variation in young White-crowned Sparrows' head colors, and basically forgot all about towhees.  Dave was mentioning how bright reddish or orange the central crown color of some white-crowns is when a bird with a really bright reddish orange crown hopped up out of the brush right next to the truck.  Uh...uh...uh...Green-tailed Towhee!    

We got great looks and listens at the towhee.  Super cool bird.

Finally...    

Leconte's Sparrow

Dave Patton showed me how to look for these sparrows way back when, and the type of yellow straw and broom sedge fields he described are still the best places I've found to see them.  Leconte's Sparrows are secretive, pretty small, and not very easy to flush, but when you can get them to sit in the open, they sometimes pose pretty well for photos.  Looking for them first thing in the morning on a cold morning when they come up out of the thick grass to sit on a tall stalk in the sunlight is a trick I learned from Gary Broussard.

The books I used when I was a kid made all sparrows look the same, mostly drab and brown.  The first time I got a good look at a Leconte's, it changed the way I thought about sparrows, especially the small grass sparrows.  Look at the beautifully patterned back of Leconte's, the rich colors on its face, and the subtle purple streaks on the back of the neck and I think you'll see what I mean.  It's a shame this bird hides its beauty in the thick grass.

These birds were photographed this morning at a field that's loaded with Leconte's, a field that was pointed out to me by...Dave Patton.

Click for larger images.

Common Ground Dove

The Common Ground Dove is one of many species I first learned about as a kid through reading Lowery's Louisiana Birds book.  I was plenty familiar with pigeons and I was an avid hunter of Mourning Doves, but I wondered if I had somehow overlooked Common Ground Doves.  I wondered if maybe they were so similar to Mourning Doves that I'd seen them and passed them off as the wrong species. 

I shouldn't have worried. One fine fall day, as I was riding in a car west of Kaplan down what's now called Rosewood Road, a chunky bird a little bigger than a House Sparrow flushed off the shell and gravel roadside right next to the car.  I could tell it was a dove by its flight pattern, and the small size, short tail, and the rufous flashes in its wings were enough to convince me it was a Common Ground Dove.  

A few years later I got a better look at one in the Enchanted Forest on the LSU campus, and over the years I've seen them in scattered locations throughout the state. You can't expect them anywhere, but you can expect them anywhere--if that makes any sense.  They're not common, but I see a few every year.  I usually see them as singles, but I have seen small groups of them at times, including one relatively huge group of 20-something years ago on the Lafayette Christmas Bird Count.

Identifying Common Ground Doves is fairly easy, but there is one recent invader that's made the job a little harder.  Over the past few decades the similar and formerly rare in the state Inca Dove has moved into Louisiana, and has become way more common than the Common Ground Dove.  The Inca differs in a few ways, most noticeably in having a longer tail.    

The Common Ground Dove in this video was in the Duson area this morning.  It was unusually cooperative, and during the course of preening showed off all of its important field marks.  Look for the red flash in its wings, and see if you can see the small white marks on the corners of its tail.  Awesome little bird.    

Hybrid Teal

This may look like a professionally shot video of two ducks practicing their synchronized swimming routine, but it's really just some lousy video I shot through my spotting scope at a pair of teal.  The rustier of the two is a hybrid between Cinnamon Teal and Blue-winged Teal.  The bird shows a watered down version of the rusty colored of the former and fragment of the face crescent of the latter.

Lucky, lucky, lucky...

My backyard used to be a haven for winter hummers.  So many hummers used to fight over it that I thought I'd found a magic formula for attracting and holding them.  I shouldn't have been so cocky; a couple of years ago, the party suddenly stopped.  I looked at every reason I could think of for the drought, but I finally had to admit that the presence of winter hummers had been nothing more than luck.  With reports that this was a bumper year for some "western" hummers in Louisiana, I hoped my luck would change.  Finally, a few weeks ago, my backyard got its first western hummer in a long, long time, a lone Black-chinned.

That Black-chinned made sporadic appearances, and I made sure to enjoy every glimpse I got of it.  Soon after, another Black-chin showed up, and then a nice green-backed immature male Rufous arrived.  Within days, another couple of Rufous arrived, and the Black-chinneds were pushed to the edges of the yard.  I put up more feeders, and by this weekend, I realized I couldn't keep track of how many hummers were visiting my yard, and that most were immature male Rufous.

Hummingbird bander Dave Patton paid a visit yesterday, and set up his traps.  Within a few minutes, we'd caught 10 birds, and at least one hummer stayed away from the traps.  The totals were 7 immature male Rufous, 1 immature female Rufous, 1 immature male Ruby-throat, and 1 adult female Black-chinned.  I know of at least 3 other Black-chinneds that have passed through the yard in the past month, so my yard has gone from 0 to over a dozen hummers in about a month and a half.

I won't take it for granted, now or ever again!