A little bit passed on from Bogbumper

Bogbumper posted this which might be related to this but surely has a connection to this even though it's passed that season.

A good weekend to everyone and have fun 3pleB-ing (Breeding Birds Birding)!

Cooper's Hawk and the different ways of seeing it

Judging by frequent inquiries on email lists that are accompanied by mystery photographs and by taking a look at what others blog about (e.g. Mike, but I don't know the precise link anymore), the Cooper's Hawk is the most frequently misidentified raptor in the backyards of (Eastern) North America. One of the reasons for this is rather drab and boring and would make for a short post here: it is just about the only raptor that enters backyards in the first place to raid bird feeders or rather the bird flocks gathered around them. Unless you have a good supply of rabbits on your lawn or a small pond full of Apple Snails, there's just no reason for a Red-tailed Hawk or a Snail Kite to even consider paying your garden a visit. Small birds however are everywhere and so - subsequently - are Cooper's Hawks, at least outside their breeding season.
Now however is the point where this introduction leads to nowhere as I now should be presenting ideas and hints on how to identify an Accipiter perched on top of an increasingly unhappy songbird. Well, tough luck, I don't have pictures of perched Cooper's Hawks and all I can do is direct you to Andreas' site to check out his "Hawks and Eagles" gallery. Well worth it!

But one thing may save this post at last: Even in flight, the Cooper's Hawk is a tricky species to identify. Of the three North American Accipiter hawks, its size is right between the Sharp-shinned Hawk on the small extreme and the Goshawk on the large end of the scale. While both "extreme" species are thus more readily recognized by size and general impression alone, the Cooper's can be tricky to identify by these rather subtle characters that are subject to each observer's individual experience and recognition.
Amazingly though - amazingly at least until you get to know the cuttlefish of the sky which is the Cooper's Hawk a bit more intimately - a Cooper's is also not very difficult to misidentify as a female or immature Northern Harrier!

What follows are a few pictures of one and the same Cooper's I obtained on the way to pick up a rental car downtown at the beginning of May, so besides offering a few thoughts on identification, this blog post also demonstrates that a decent birder never, ever leaves the house or even opens a window without their camera at hand.

That's what a decent Cooper's is supposed to look like: the tail appears long because it is and because of the narrow base to the wing. The broadest part of each wing is right in the middle between body and wingtip, giving it a very peculiar shape. In a Sharp-shinned, the broadest part of the wing would be much closer to the body than to the wingtip and that makes for a very different general impression. A Goshawk is more similar in wing shape to a Cooper's than to a Sharp-shinned, but the Cooper's hand narrows quite abruptly on the border between the secondaries and the inner primaries whereas it appears to narrow more evenly towards the tip in a Goshawk. The latter difference is rather subtle though.

In this head-on view, the Cooper's appears rather massive and is very reminiscent of a Goshawk. The degree to which the primaries show "fingers" would even put a Golden Eagle to shame and contributes a lot to the massive appearance. On a Sharp-shinned Hawk, the "fingers" wouldn't be quite as impressive and I frankly don't recall any of the Goshawks I saw to show "fingers" to such a degree, but that's nothing anyone should count on!

Just a slight turn and a little wing beat and this elegant raptor might appear to be just a fat blob in the sky. Note that the shorter outermost tail feathers - one of the best characters to tell Cooper's from Sharp-shinned - might not be visible easily even when the tail is almost fully spread, being concealed behind the other tail feathers. Cheeky bird!
Of course these strange proportions are only an effect of the bird being "frozen" on this picture in the middle of a downstroke of the wing but if this picture was all we had of - say - a rarity documentation, the wing shape would be quite reminiscent of a Sharp-shinned Hawk.

A second later and everything is almost back to normal. But yet again, notice how still Sharp-shinned-like the wing shape is with the wings being pushed forward quite a bit and that this Cooper's outermost tail feathers aren't that obviously shorter than the rest of the tail. Even circling birds therefore must be watched carefully over a prolonged period of time.

This photo demonstrates why so many Cooper's often get misidentified as a "Ring-tail" Harrier (female/immature Northern Harrier): the white undertail coverts are frequently slightly spread and exposed to the sunlight from above at the base of the tail. The bird therefore appears to clearly show an obvious white rump, the diagnostic feature of a Northern Harrier. If - typically for Accipiter hawks - we only catch a fleeting glimpse of such a bird dashing into the woods, it is easy to see that it doesn't take much effort to call it a Harrier and start discussing how strange it was to see a Harrier hunting for songbirds inside a forest.

But that apparently white rump is not all: this bird above is again the same Cooper's gliding away from me laterally (against the light, hence the greyish sky), with the primaries bent slightly backwards. Well, that's a pretty good impression of a Harrier and surprising to see a few seconds after obtaining the "fat blob" impression.

What's the message of this post, the thought between the lines?
An Accipiter in North America will always be tough to identify and as this series of photographs shows, it would be very, very difficult to base an identification on shape and size when all you have is a single picture or a very short glimpse of the bird. To use these characters, one ought to best watch it for quite a few seconds or - on a circling bird - a few circles to reconfirm characters like wing shape, rump colouration and the length of the outermost tail feather.

So, my apologies to all those who have expected to learn about an easy solution. All I can offer is a justification for an extremely cautious approach and if ever you very understandably misidentify a Cooper's as a Northern Harrier, you can use this post as an excuse or explanation. Mind you, I might have to use it myself some day!

The Far Side of Herons and Egrets

We all know that birds belonging to the Herons and Egrets are incredibly elegant and delicate creatures. Their movements are manifested grace, their agility is sublime and on a stage they would outshine Audrey Hepburn.

But honestly, as much as this is true, there is also another side to them, their far side.

During my birding travels in May, mostly to Northern Ohio thanks to Bruce giving me a lift, I was fortunate enough to not only come across a wide array of species and get decent photographs, I also grew more familiar with their alter egos and am now in a position to share the newly acquainted knowledge.

Let us start our journey with the Great Blue Heron.
This species combines strength and power with agility and I would not be surprised if Brad Pitt one day confessed the Great Blue Heron was his inspiration to the way he played Achilles in Troy.



But when they know they are being watched and they are in the right mood, they might just offer you a short and fleeting glimpse of another side of them, their far side:



Next one in line is the Great Egret. The very definition of beauty and grace. Nothing - really - surpasses the elegance of a Great Egret, no matter what it is doing.



Unless of course there is this persisting itch on its lower back that it can't get to...



Snowy Egrets are very nice and neat animals, and very tidy. Just look how incredibly clean and white its plumage is despite its surroundings.



But that of course doesn't necessarily mean they are strangers to the chaos related to a scientific genius or two and show off their sympathy through an appropriate hairdo.



The Little Blue Heron is a very neatly coloured heron, and there is much more to the species than "little" and "blue". Remarkably though, they do have a way of turning their head into the wind and having their feathers fluffed up that does remind the unaware observer of a Capuchinbird or even an Egyptian Vulture. That's a strange kind of humour, don't you think?



Green Herons show the same kind of humour as the Little Blue Heron it seems, and David Sibley is well aware of this fact. David Sibley? What does he have to do with this, you may ask?
Well, the following picture is basically how he painted the Green Heron in his field guide.



So far so good, but then he mentions "slight crest" on his juvenile bird. Slight!? Well, you do get the picture now, do you? Too bad he didn't write the caption for Europe's Crested Lark.





And last on our list for now is the Black-crowned Night-Heron, seen below.



You may look at the picture in surprise and wonder where the far side is on that nice and innocent-looking creature. This is the way you always see a Black-Crowned Night-Heron, right?

And exactly that is the point: this species has the most wicked of humours amongst the herons and egrets, and its sarcasm and irony run so deep we mostly don't even notice.
That's the way you frequently see a Night-Heron, right?

Night-Heron?
Frequently?
See = Sunlight = Day?!

Man, the species even changed its whole daily routine just to have us fooled and call out in the brightest of days "Look, yet again, a Night-Heron".

Now, is that far off, or what?

Stunning News

There's no global warming.
Dinosaurs went extinct millions of years ago.

What do these two statements have in common?

They are utterly untrue!

I will leave the global warming talk to others but would like to mention here that my wife and I were recently able - after years of research and expeditions - to provide definite proof of the Dinosaur's survival until this present day at Michigan's Lake Erie Metro Park.

How did they go undetected for so long?

Well, they spend all year in the rotten and muddy swamps of North America's most vicious wilderness areas where they hide in the mud to prey on unwary fish, amphibians and toes of reckless swimmers, only to emerge each year in early June to lay their eggs on dirt roads or other places no one would think of searching and prepare to get back what mammals had taken from them so long ago: world domination!

You don't believe me?

Well, seeing is believing and here are the pictures...





On that very same day, we were also able to prove why European Starlings are so successful in North America. They simply have adapted to mammalian food and prey like hawks on small rodents and other mammals up to the size of Rabbits.

As hard to believe as it may be, yet again we have photographic evidence that no one can deny!



Aren't you glad you read Belltower Birding?

Normal blogging about Extraordinary Birding

I promised that normal blogging would resume in June.
Well, point taken: I promised to try and establish something one might consider normal blogging on this blog by June.

Whatever I promised, here it is:
I am blogging again.

However, the fact that migration is basically over and normal blogging may resume does not imply that anything even close to normal birding would resume here in Michigan in June, as can be seen by the following report.
Okay, you got me again: admittedly, the following report is about half a day's birding with Laurent on the 31st of May and not June 1st, but I think it is close enough to June to make it count and it is not so much about migration than about breeding birds.

Oh, this is getting boring, so I'll stop the introduction and start heading out towards the real post:

Grassland birding!

Migration may be (largely) over but this is the Great Lakes. Most people will have you think this name relates to the lakes' size. Well, sorry, they are wrong.
Then it would be the "Big" Lakes or the "Extensive" Lakes, but nope, it clearly says "Great" Lakes on the maps.
A few people however know why they are called "Great" Lakes.
I am one of them.
They are called Great Lakes because the birding here is always great, even when those migrant warblers have left us for the juicy spruce budworms up North (silly!).

With the end of bird migration came a significant change in bird-related email exchange. Suddenly no one was talking about woods and warblers anymore, it was all about Dickcissels and all sorts of Sparrows while names like "Point Pelee", "the Arb" and "Crane Creek" had given way to "Scio Church Road", "White Barn Lot" and "Sharon Valley Road".

On May 31st, Laurent and I finally couldn't resist the call of the prairies any longer and we followed the numerous hints and observations of other local birders to the south-west of Washtenaw County where the grassland birds dwell.

After a 20 minute drive, we arrived at Scio Church road which is nice in itself but basically leads to the highlight roads, which are Meyers and Sharon Valley. Upon getting there however, we were greeted by a grim sight.

From the outside, this may seem like an ordinary house, and it might be, indeed.



But someone somewhere nearby was in serious trouble, as we could easily tell...



On the other hand, there were so many Eastern Meadowlarks around that we did not take the misfortunes of others as a bad sign.



Meyers Road was supposed to have Dickcissel and Grasshopper Sparrows, so this is where we were headed. After checking all the telephone wires and power lines for perched small brown birds with grey on the head and a yellow throat - in vain - we eventually stopped at the southern end of Meyers to give it one last intensive try.

One could say this was a good idea. Brilliant to be precise or rather: one of the best we've had in a long, long time.

Sure, there were two Grasshopper Sparrows singing, of which we were able to scope one nicely. A Savannah Sparrow was not a rare but still nice sight, and a total of two Northern Mockingbirds also were a pleasant surprise. But what was truly outstanding was a little blue bird perched 120 metres away in a small bush: neither a Blue Jay, nor an Indigo Bunting! Well, not much left then and indeed, we were amazed to see a nice male Blue Grosbeak!

This was not only a nice bird, it was not only a bird neither of us had ever seen before, it turned out to be only the (roughly) 10th record for Michigan - ever - if accepted!

Can you believe it? I hope the Michigan rarities committee can.
Well, we couldn't at first, I mean the bird was easy enough to identify, but only the 10th or so record?
Unfortunately, the bird was not relocated by other birders in the days following our observation, but as birding is all about sharing, here is a little manual on how to find great birding spots in south-west Washtenaw County:


As the Blue Grosbeak eventually flew out of sight, we gained our consciousness back and managed to re-focus on the grassland birds we were still missing: Henslow's Sparrow, Bobolink and Dickcissel.
Those, we knew, could be found along Sharon Valley Road just off Meyers (well, actually Meyers is just of SVR), at the so-called White Barn Lot just before the border to Jackson County.

Strangely, Jackson County came before we were able to spot a white barn. At first we considered turning back but then we remembered that a) we weren't County listers after all and that b) the spot where I had watched Henslow's Sparrows way back in May 2005 was just a few miles further down the road.
So on we drove to Fishville road and my heart rejoiced with lovely memories of times long past and the expectations of a repetition: back then I had parked the car because I thought the meadow looked good for Henslow's, had switched off the engine and there they sang. I walked around the hedge row to the edge of the meadow and immediately was treated to prolonged views of a singing Henslow's just 10 metres in front of me and could watch the feathers on its throat vibrate in song.
It had been very easy.

But would history repeat itself?
Would lightening strike twice?

Okay, so we got there and switched off the engine [check]
We heard a Henslow's sing [check]
We walked around the hedge row [check]
We immediately were treated to prolonged views of a Henslow's Sparrow [aaaand ... check]

This time though, the sparrow was roughly 50 metres off in the meadow but still the scope views were horrifyingly awesome. I did manage a photo documentation which I have included below. You may not get the complete feeling of watching a Henslow's, but you might get an idea - if you are lucky or have maintained a child's fantasy.


Back on Fishville Road we checked another fallow field to the west where I eventually managed a few rather decent pictures of a grassland special: a Grasshopper Sparrow. There were quite a few singing and we also spotted some of them, which is quite good.

Nice sparrow, but unfortunately not a Henslow's.

All right, calm down, I won't say it again, promise.

Another unexpected find on that particular field was a Turkey that was just a wee bit too large to be turned into a Bobwhite.


Driving back into Washtenaw County we had the most unspectacular great bird of the day, which is why I will only mention it as unspectacular as it was to convey the complete picture to my inclined readers: a Dickcissel had perched on a fence right besides the road but immediately took off as Laurent slowed the car down and flew on and on and far away out of view.
Hmmm, no comment, and that was that, no more Dickcissels for the day.

But we did find the White Barn lot on our way back and boy, was this a nice and pleasant piece of grassland. Look for yourself and you'll agree, just plain very nice:


Henslow's may be good - and there was one Henslow's Sparrow singing there too which we didn't see - but Bobolinks can be quite showy as well and sure enough, it only took the time needed to put up a scope until we had excellent scope views of a pair of Bobolinks, our last grassland target of the day.

Very nice birds, cool song

A small wood land preserve nearby had produced reports of a Louisiana Waterthrush and we therefore decided to end our day's birding there. It was remarkably quiet in the woods around noon and most of the birds we heard were Red-eyed Vireos. The woods however were lovely, dark and deep enough to host quite a few Acadian Flycatchers of which several were heard and one seen nicely, so all in all it was a nice addition to our grassland day and we headed back to Ann Arbor at 1 p.m. quite satisfied and with great news (Blue Grosbeak) for the local email forum.

Michigan rocks!

I and the Bird # 50

I and the Bird is back again with its sparkling 50th edition! For those who like to surf the waves of global birdblogging, check it out here on A Blog around the Clock.

"I and the what" is up? Am I missing out on something?

Keep your cool, buddy, and relax, it's just "I and the Bird", hear me? Just those birds again!

Man, always birds, birds, birds. I really don't know what all the fuzz is about. If it was "I and the Squirrel", okay, but birds? Highly overrated if you ask me...

Doin' the Britney

Music and Birding: One of the great and most incredible harmonies this world has to offer!

And I am not talking about the wonders of a morning's bird concert or the song of a Red-winged Blackbird. No, I am indeed talking about human-made music and the pleasure we receive from watching the feathered creatures of this earth.
This interwoven and inspiring relationship however is often little realized by today's birdwatchers and I have thus decided to shed some light onto the subject in form of a blog post.
For starters, here are a few examples:

Many of us have probably picked up their first pair of binoculars and subsequently this fantastic hobby just to finally know what Iron Maiden were talking about in their epic Rime of the Ancient Birdwatcher.
And walking the trails at the migration hot spots of North America's Great Lakes would surely only be half the fun if it wasn't done to the tune of AC/DC's Warbler Struck.
Or - to give you more examples in case you aren't entirely convinced yet - just look at the huge impact Styx had on global birding tours with their song Come Bird Away.

But it isn't just Rock or Heavy Metal that have shaped and been shaped by birding, this fertile symbiosis goes far beyond that. Historians have now agreed that one of Jazz' most eternal songs, Tick Five, was inspired by a weekend's twitching in Cornwall, or possibly Manchester. I am not entirely sure about that but Tom would know...

Amazingly (when we consider factors like creativity and quality) pop music also had a shaping influence on birding. One of the most fundamental and recent interactions between birding and pop music can be seen in Britney Spears' first real hit, you know, the one where people still didn't mind that she can't sing because she looked cute in her school uniform. I don't particularly like it, especially as it stands for an unpleasant situation encountered once in a while when birding, but okay, here's the link to her song, to maintain fair play on this blog: Baby one more time.

Where is the interaction with birding? Ha, you see, that's where the quality-thing or the lack thereof in comparison to Rock kicks in, so I need to explain.
What are lovely Birtney's first words at the very beginning of the song? Exactly:

"Oh baby, baby [she only sang that to sell more records and also reach the non-birding crowds] how was I supposed to know that something wasn't right?"

Ah, now it dawns upon us, clearly she is singing about the subspecific identification of North America's wood warblers!

Here's the classic situation: you see a warbler that looks somewhat strange and you think it might show characters of a subspecies that normally shouldn't be where you are seeing it right now, e.g. a Western subspecies around the Great Lakes. So you take some pictures and compare them to the information provided in the leading warbler guides of North America and surely, it indeed seems to be a strange bird, not a typical Western but also not a typical Eastern, and you remain clueless. What to do next? Easy, you post your pictures on a local birding Internet forum and seek advice there.
And what do you get as an answer by experienced birders (like long-year ringers/banders) who really know their birds and what they are talking about? Nothing unusual about it, just a rather normal Eastern, and field guides can't always show the full range of individual variation.

Yet again, you have nurtured a "stringy" reputation and are forced to do the Britney ("How was I supposed to know?").

The following warbler is the most recent example of a bird that had me do the Britney:

Female Yellow-rumped Warbler, Dolph Park, Ann Arbor, May 2007

It was a female Yellow-rumped Warbler that lacked an obvious white supercilium, showed no dark mask on the auriculars and I found the yellow on the flanks quite reduced, which - according to my field guides - all seemed to point towards the bird showing some characters of Audubon's instead of Myrtle's. Sure enough, all other features of the bird clearly were pure Myrtle, so my guess was it might be just a strange Myrtle or a bird from the introgression zone between the two forms.
But boy, was I mistaken - again. Just an ordinary Eastern Myrtle's Warbler, these things, like the lack of a supercilium, just happen to happen once in a while.
Oh baby, baby...

I have a few more birds that could easily get me into the Britney trouble again, but I sometimes learn from my mistakes, and since I don't like to see myself seen as a stringer (although I do like strings, especially when they are attached to a bass guitar and are played by Steve Harris - yet again, a remarkable correlation between birding and music), I won't say they show characters that might point towards unusual subspecies. I won't even say they could suggest one may be lured into doing the Britney by these birds, nope, they are just a couple of warbler pics and if someone has commented in the captions about possible characters of other subspecies or whatever, it wasn't me, it was a stringing hacker!

Common Yellowthroat, showing a rather white band across the forehead and a yellow breast that's quite reduced, which might have one think it could be the more western subspecies campicola instead of the Great Lakes regular trichas.

One of the characters of western (chryseola) Wilson's Warblers are supposedly, according to the literature, the almost completely yellow cheeks. These should be greenish in the regular Eastern pusilla. How's your judgment on the cheek colouration of the following Wilson's Warblers?
Would you dare a guess and risk having to do the Britney?

Wilson's Warbler at Ann Arbor's Dolph Park, showing slightly greenish cheeks, but not really greenish if we are honest.

The same Wilson's as above, suddenly not so greenish anymore...

This Wilson's at Ohio's Crane Creek State Park was rather -easterly - dull.

This bird however, seen on the same day, is not so dull after all, as can be seen on the following portrait, a cropped version of a picture posted earlier on this blog.


It's a good thing the Western subspecies of North American wood warblers can be recognized by a characteristic introduction to their song:

Hit me baby one more time