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!

300

I always set 300 species a year as an informal goal of what I'd like to see in Louisiana. Hitting 300 in a year used to be a little harder to reach than it is now.  Between range expansion, introductions getting common, and splits of species (Baltimore/Bullock's, Eastern/Spotted), there are more species available now compared to just a few years ago. Just as $300 isn't as much as it used to be, 300 species in a year for Louisiana has lost some of its luster.  I still use 300 as a yearly benchmark, but I adjust the figure upwards for inflation.  Nowadays, I think of the 315-320 range as the new 300.

Caracara is pretty much a gimme today.  Just a few years ago, this bird was nearly impossible to see in Louisiana.  

This has been an exceptionally birdy year in Louisiana, so even with some misses, I hit my target a couple of months ago.  I'm not sure exactly where I stand today, here on the final day of 2011. I may stop to tally it up, but I doubt it.  It is informal, after all.

Merry Xmas!

Click on the photo above to see the ornaments.

It's Getting Better

During rain delays on the Lacassine-Thornwell CBC yesterday, Mike Musumeche and I had a nice discussion about birds that used to be difficult to impossible to get within the past decade or two that are now "gimmes," or pretty close.  We came up with a list that included some of the following birds:

Black-bellied Whistling Duck (taking over)
Ross's Goose
White-tailed Kite
Crested Caracara (how cool is that?)
Lesser Black-backed Gull (probably present the year around)
Eurasian Collared-Dove (from 0 to 60, and then some)
Inca Dove (from rare to a backyard near you)
Calliope Hummingbird
Cave Swallow (taking over)
Clay-colored Sparrow
Yellow-headed Blackbird
House Finch

At the same time, it seemed to us that some rare or uncommon birds have also become much more regular.  We tossed a few names around, but never settled on a list.  I've cobbled one together, including the following:

California Gull
Glaucous Gull*
Great Black-backed Gull*
Allen's Hummingbird*
Broad-tailed Hummingbird (not a Review List bird, but not quite a gimme)
Broad-billed Hummingbird
Anna's Hummingbird
Say's Phoebe*
Ash-throated Flycatcher (not a Review List bird, but not quite a gimme)
Great Kiskadee*
Bell's Vireo*
Black-whiskered Vireo
Black-headed Grosbeak*
Bullock's Oriole*

All of these birds are still good finds, but if the trends continue, I think it's possible at least some of them (*) will be removed from the Review List.

Different drivers seem to be responsible for different species becoming easier to find here.  Some of these birds are introduced and have invaded Louisiana.  Some are "Texas" birds that are expanding into Louisiana.  Others are birds that are expanding on their breeding grounds.  Whatever the reason for their increase, it's nice to see.

Oh, and by the way, Mike and I didn't find many of these birds on the CBC.  We stunk it up, but seeing a White-tailed Kite flying over the cold rainy fields was a nice sight!

Thanksgiving Redux

Thanksgiving vacation was great.  I made a few short trips out, but for the most part I stayed home and enjoyed family time.  Below are a few images from what little birding I did.

A Blue Grosbeak that will be a nice find if it sticks around through CBC season.

One out of 10 Sprague's Pipits I had one morning in Acadia Parish.

The amazingly rare Snow-capped Least Sandpiper.

The amazingly common but equally under-appreciated American Pipit.

And this beautiful ghostly Red-tailed Hawk.