On problems you never knew existed

[Slightly updated April 25th, mostly pictures though...]

You surely know who Frank Abagnale is and if not, you might remember having seen a movie called "Catch me if you can" about the life of said Frank Abagnale. Then again, you may have seen the movie but can't recall it now, as it wasn't all that very exciting in my opinion, but the life of - again - Frank Abagnale is truly very much so. Exciting, that is. Of course in a bad, bad way.

Anyway, on a compleeeetely unrelated note, I got asked (! can you believe it) to join the panel of the miraculous 10,000Birds Clinic:

“Got a question about bird ID, birding best practices, or hotspots across six continents? Ask 10,000 Birds!“

Good idea in general if only the whole concept wasn't doomed due to a single weakness in the performance of the clinic's human resources department, but incredibly, this is what Charlie had to say about me joining, and please, my name is Roeder, Doctor Roeder:

"...Jochen Roeder...an extremely knowledgeable and well-travelled birder..."

Well, I spent all weekend googling "Jochen Roeder extremely knowledgeable" but couldn't find anything that made sense, so I presume Charlie's sentence does pertain to my humble ability of holding a pair of binoculars steady for more than 15 seconds.

That qualifies me to solve (or was that dissolve?) other birder's identification issues? Feel the pressure.

Thriving to live up to my newly acquainted reputation as an "extremely knowledgeable" birder, I have decided to dedicate this blog posting of mine to providing insights into one of the fundamental yet largely overlooked problems of bird identification:

Ageing Black-headed Gulls in Spring

Possibly this post is not due to there being a serious problem but to the fact that this is a) just about the only bird species I got to see lately and b) take decent pictures of, but then again, maybe there is a problem and this post may come in handy.
Okay, picture yourself amongst the seals on the beaches of Cape May on a stormy spring day, returning towards the lighthouse after having grown tired of all the Red-throated Loons around the famous concrete ship. Yes, these situations happen now and then. You have heard there's an immature Black-headed Gull around and of course, that's on your wish list before enjoying some hot tea and possibly a lobster or two in the evening.
Suddenly, you spot this strange-looking gull standing amongst the Ring-billeds on the beach in front of you, raise your binoculars steady for more than 15 seconds and sure enough, a Black-headed Gull. Great and congratulations, with the only problem being that this bird shows a completely dark brown hood, a dark bill, no brown feathers on the wing coverts and the tail clearly is all-white with no traces of a black terminal band. Ooh, nice, an adult, can't be any clearer than that, so there must be two birds around and we are talking about a major influx to the area!
Well, this may be the case but then again, it also may not and aren't you glad you read Belltower Birding before you walked amongst the seals on the beaches of Cape May on one stormy spring day?
The following pictures were taken around Stralsund in the last couple of days (except the first one which is from a while back now) and demonstrate clearly that sometimes, ageing this two-year gull can indeed be not completely straight forward.

Here we see an adult winter Black-headed Gull: largely white head with only a few darkish spots and stripes, red legs, and a red bill with a blackish tip:





Truly nice.
By early April, most adults will have completed their moult into breeding plumage and show the nice and crisp blackish-brown hood we can see here, together with almost blackish legs and an equally blackish, uniformely coloured bill:





The majority, roughly 75% I'd say, of the second calendar year gulls (those that are nearing their very first birthday) look completely different, with their head pattern reminiscent of adult winter birds, large portions of their wing coverts and tertials still patterned in various shades of brown and a black terminal band to the tail. Legs and bill are comparable to winter adults but more orange.





Also not a bird whose looks you'd call shabby, but also not a bird you'd call difficult to age, so where is the problem, Doctor Roeder?
You want problem? You need problem?
Here, I give you problem:

Some precocious immature Black-headed Gulls, and certainly not just a few, show a far more advanced plumage, although being exactly the same age as those immatures depicted above.
Here are a few examples of these advanced immatures:



Looking at the classic ageing criteria

a) blackish hood
b) uniformly dark bill and legs
c) brown juvenile feathers on the wing coverts
d) brown juvenile tertials
e) black terminal band to the tail

the amount of individual variation only leaves us with d) and e) to reliably age our gulls.

But to our utter amazemend, we may even find that some - though admittedly relatively few - individuals even moult part of their tertials as seen below, rendering d) at least slightly unreliable as a dead ringer for ageing second calendar year birds.



And e) the black terminal band to the tail?
Well, e) isn't all that reliable either!

The problem with the black terminal band on the tail is that quite a few immature gulls moult part of their tail feathers and exchange them for purely white adult-like ones by early spring (I once saw a bird that had one side of the tail completely white and the other one with a nice and pristine black band, quite a sight for sure) and the black tips also tend to break off through wear easily and often. Here are a few examples, and even though none show a completely white tail this would be well within the range of possibilities.





Rather unexpectedly, we are left with no reliable criterion whatsoever to age a Black-headed Gull in spring.
So what now, Mr. Extremely Knowledgeable?

Ha, I wasn't being completely honest before in that I concealed the f)-criterion from you: the flight feathers.

The flight feathers of adult and immature Black-headed Gulls differ quite obviously from one another and when seen clearly will always - as far as I know - allow you to age any Black-headed Gull. The primaries might look similar in some birds, although immatures tend to have the neat white pattern broken up into "windows" and broader stripes, but the pattern of the secondaries is always obvious:
The secondaries of adult Black-headed Gulls are always the colour of the wing coverts, forming a uniformly coloured upper wing. The secondaries of immature birds are very much darker grey than the wing coverts, providing the birds with a neat dark trailing edge to the wing.
Look for yourself how obvious that difference is:




Okay, okay, seriously:

99.9999...% of the immatures you'll encounter will be rather easy to age without the pattern of the secondaries. There will always be some brown somewhere on the folded wing, the tail will either look obviously shabby/worn or have at least traces of the black band and the tertials will always be easy enough to see.
But then again, you could encounter such an extreme bird, and returning to our Cape Cross scenario, you ...no, wait, the other guy ... could potentially mistake an immature bird for an adult at long distance with the whole burden of proof that there really is only one bird present resting solely on your shoulder.
And I hope I was able to provide that bird ID shoulder of yours with a bit of a work-out opportunity here.

Bird ID physiotherapy - just one of the many ways we use to fix your birding ailments at the 10,000Birds Clinic.

Yours truly,
Dr. Roeder


P.S.: Unless you already knew, this may be shocking news for all you gullers out there. You might be a birder and still believe in the existence of Sea Gulls!

Arctic Bay hits the Baltic Coast

Sometimes, the world is full of surprises even when we are not specifically looking at or for birds.
It sure is the nature of a surprise to come unexpectedly, but this surprise was so much of a surprise that I can truly state here that it was an unexpected surprise and that this is not an exaggeration.
This surprise also gave me an insight into the effectiveness of global bird blogging and how it enlarges our view of the world by turning it into a smaller place.

Last Saturday, I bought the weekend edition of our local newspaper, the "Ostseezeitung" (Baltic Sea Newspaper) at my local bakery. Of course my son LBJ - though only approaching his fourth month - is incredibly cunning and effective when it comes to spotting and eliminating any spare time spent with anything different than attending to him, but nevertheless, I bought the newspaper in good hope of finding a few minutes to read parts of it.
And when - surprise, surprise, but not the surprise I am talking about here - I actually did find a few minutes to read it, I rushed to the "Travel Pages" that are - to me - a vital and the most interesting part of the weekend edition.

And now, finally, we get to the surprise that was the inspiration to this post:
The picture of an Inuit lady caught my attention, I checked the article and there it was, the mentioning of Arctic Bay!

Can you believe it?

Here's the story in short:

"Visiting the Inuit in the Arctic by Ship"
The story starts by telling how Emily Emudluk and her friend Mae Ningiuruvik entertain some guests on board the cruise ship "MV Lyubov Orlova" by performing a Katajjaq. They belong to an Inuit-run company called Cruise North Expeditions that specializes in introducing tourists to Inuit culture. Then, the author Ole Helmhausen goes on by describing the route between Kuujjuaq and Resolute and finally gets to the most significant part:

"At Arctic Bay, a settlement on the northern shores of Baffin Island rarely visited by ships, half the village gathers at the beach to take a look at the Hallunaq - the White Men. And the tourists get to see the problems of the Arctic, unemployment, population growth, global warming. The glacier in the recently proclaimed Sermilik National Park on Bylot Island for example retreated by 10 metres within the last three years. Joseph, the ranger, doesn't hide his worries: "Back then, the bay was full of Icebergs"."

Here is a photo of the article for those few readers who understand German (anyone?). Heck, I know I am touching a few copy right issues here, but come on, this is a non-commercial site, I couldn't find the article on the home page of the Ostseezeitung and I have linked to both the author - a freelance journalist - and the newspaper, so have mercy on my soul.





Anyway, I was only able to spot a single but significant flaw in the whole article: no mentioning of Clare's blog or his bed & breakfast! And - for crying out loud - not a single raven is featured in the article!
Surely, Ole Helmhausen is not a birder (although he does mention the bird colony on Akpatok Island) and I am sure Clare has a few things to say about that, but possibly Anna, the Inuit lady depicted in the article, will feel flattered when she learns that roughly 160,000 readers along the Baltic coast of Germany have seen her picture while having their Sunday breakfast.

In Silent Preparation...

Just a short note to show I am still around:
I am currently going for something rather big. If it works out, it'll change a few things, including this blog, quite fundamentally. If it doesn't work out, I'll never tell you and just continue with things the way they are.

Days so fair and fowl were never seen.

No, I did that on purpose, this is still a birding blog, remember?

Talking about fowl:
Here's a pic of a few Tufted Ducks (with a few Common Pochards mixed in) that never learned how to pirate meals from the wells of Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers.

Tufted ducks and Pochards on one of Stralsund's city ponds. Yes, Corey, those large bodies of water in big (or in the case of Stralsund, a-little-biggish) cities are good places to go look for them.

Birding-Me in 6 Words

I got a decent pat on the back recently by the wonderfully wreflecting Wren. Yes, it's another meme, although there hasn't been one in quite a while, and this one - I think - is rather neat as it goes beyond answering questions. The original thought was perceived by Bookbaby (what a coincidence, when the quality of my day is currently determined by the content of the diapers I change).
Here are the rules to those few who haven't been included yet (copied from Bookbaby):

1. Write your own six word memoir

2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like

3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere

4 .Tag five more blogs with links

5. And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

It took me a long, long time to figure that one out, but then I remembered something Laurent told me during one of our bird excursions to Michigan's Point Mouillet way back in August 2007 and it became clear just what those six words are that characterize me, or rather: the birder in me.

So, okay, here goes, my Six-Word-Memoir meme:

THAT is a VERY cool bird! (White Wagtail, Germany October 2007)

THAT is a VERY cool bird! (young Mute Swan, Germany October 2007)

THAT is a VERY cool bird! (Adult winter Black-headed Gull, Germany February 2008)

THAT is a VERY cool bird! (American Robin making a political statement in May 2007, Michigan)

THAT is a VERY cool bird! (Palm Warbler, Ohio May 2007)

THAT is a VERY cool birder! (German Baltic Sea Coast, October 2007)

THAT is the VERY definition of a cool bird and thanks again, Wren! (House Wren, Ohio May 2007 )

Here are the bloggers that will have to do a lot of thinking in the next few days if they so wish:

Bird Girl
Larry (if his amazing research on car wrecks will allow him the time!)
Owl Man
Richard

and

Chris

I am wonderfully surprised that I am recently getting a lot of comments from people new to this blog and these comments include so much positive feed back. This is so great!
Unfortunately, this is a time for me to reflect upon a lot of things and get heaps and piles of work done (and - you may remember - the diapers, the diapers), so yet again the post frequency is likely to remain low for the time being. However, the optimistic part of me keeps saying that the end of the drought is near or - as we say in German - "hope dies last"!

What on Earth ...

... is THAT doing here NOW?

P.S.: first snow this "winter"

All or Nothing?

Friday was grand as I finally got some first-hand, original, out-for-real birding done and can actually write a post in “been-there-seen-that” mode instead of just making strange things up while searching through my photo archives.

Wait, sentence reconsidered, make that: “could actually write...” as currently, time for blogging is hard to find between my worshipping the bosses’ whip and avoiding the daily dangers of the dreadful diaper of death (which, incidentally, you already knew I guess). I’ll see, possibly there’ll soon be a post about me actually getting some birding done. I sure hope so and you may take this as fair warning. Here's one of the pictures I took.

A gull gal sure likes her bit of pedicure

In the meantime, a short notice on my little son LBJ, now heading towards finishing his third month on planet earth and having loved every minute so far - kind of.

Coming home last Friday, my wife told me in a flat matter-of-fact tone that apparently LBJ was no birder.
Imagine the horror.

She had played a CD containing bird songs to him (“Nature Sounds” by a German drugstore chain) and he had started to cry and wail instantly.

“Oh dear”, I thought, “all my hopes and dreams vanished like smoke in a breeze”. But then the investigating side of me took hold of my actions and I inspected the CD’s content.

The result is a glimmer of hope: LBJ is either no birder or is already the best birder ever!

Here’s why:

The bird concert on the CD is a mixture of three species, and remember this is a CD bought and played in Germany. It sounded so familiar and thus took me a few seconds to notice (apparently longer than it had taken LBJ), but the bird species on the CD are ...

.... American Robin

.... House Wren

.... Common Yellowthroat

None of these are anywhere near the normal European avifauna and apart from the Robin, I don’t even think the species have even turned up as vagrants in Germany.

So LBJ possibly got all excited about finding 2 “firsts” for Germany, then grew suspicious as this was so unlikely, and then noticed that this was no continuous chorus of the birds’ song but a monotonous repetition of the same few short phrases, so clearly he was being fooled and a recording was being played to him.

And being the serious birder he is, this clearly ticked him off in a big way!

I sure can’t blame him and hope this explanation holds true in contrast to the alternative hypothesis, that he just doesn't like the sound of birds singing ...

How to avoid being arrested for Bad Bird Photography - part 2 of the occasional bird photography series

I tried to be funny, I honestly did.
And it sure isn't my fault that the characters behind 10,000 birds landed three hard funny punches right in the faces of competing blogs (here, here and especially here, in reversed chronological order), rendering any further attempt at being funny on a bird blog pointless (although this is must have caused some sweat-soaked handkerchiefs over at 10,000 birds for sure).
But now that the damage is done, you just gotta roll with the punches and make the most of the worst, which in this case is to re-organize. If funny doesn't make sense anymore, maybe - just maybe - I should give "useful" yet another fruitful and optimistic try and just ignore your snickering. Such are the times now: desperate!

So here goes, the not funny but honest attempt at writing something useful, part 2 of the occasional series on how to avoid having your camera trashed by fellow birders:


Sticks And Stones May Break My Bones But Also Ruin My Picture

We sure all like birds and any picture of a bird is a good one - BUT.

We sure all like birds and any DECENT picture of a bird is a tad better than just any picture of a bird, although any picture of a bird is a good one.

Thus, any birder with a camera will want to take a decent picture of a bird, one that doesn't only show the bird in its pristine beauty as such but also in a setting that suits its beauty.

And here, problems start to arise.

I have addressed the eye-issue before (here, or just scroll down two posts), and today's post also has a lot to do with the temptation of focusing on a bird's eye, but I'll have to get to that a bit later.

The problem I am addressing now - at least it is a problem for me - is that wild birds are often found in equally wild places and are especially fond of vegetative structures. These however tend to hinder any attempt at getting unobscured and clear views as well as pictures of desired birds. In short: those darn sticks in front of birds often mess up the picture.

Out in the field, this is not so much of an issue: simply pay attention to the twigs before the bird and get them out of the way by slightly changing your position relative to the bird, like bending your knees a bit or stretching your neck. But frequently, the theoretical awareness I have towards this issue doesn't prevent me from taking pictures like the following ones.

You may be right in thinking this is a perfect picture of an as yet undescribed species of Umbrellabird, but it may also just be a lousy picture of an Oriole behind a dead leaf. Take your pick.

A Black-throated Blue Warbler using some foliage to mimic a moose - unsuccessfully, but nice try nevertheless.

This - in theory - is a not completely useless photo of a Blackbird (the Eurasian species of thrush, not an American Icterid). But it would have been not quite so far from being neat had I only noticed the tiny twig that's causing a slight pale blur right across its eye and gotten the bird's head a bit off the big twig right behind/above it.

This - again in theory - is a pretty darn good pic of an Eastern Wood-Pewee, except that I completely messed the photo opportunity up by not noticing the massive log across the bird's tail tip. The tiny twig on the Blackbird might be explained away or even excused, but a fiddling huge branch covering up a quarter of the picture? Groan!!

So, where the heck was my problem with these pics?
Why wasn't I paying attention?

The problem is actually very simple and I have sort of hinted towards it already: I am not a bird photographer, I am a birder with a camera!
And as such, I sometimes tend to approach the view-finder of my camera in very much the same way I approach my binoculars or scope.

That's the problem: looking through, not at!

Cleared that up?

No?

Thought so.

Okay, I'll explain.

Think of us humans walking around and looking at the world. We clearly don't have a field of view that's 360° in all directions, instead we are limited to around 180°. However, the surroundings outside of our field of view don't appear as a black area, meaning we're not seeing a black frame around our world. Our visual perception simply stops, from full colour to nothingness, just like that.
Now, if we look at a bird through binoculars, the optical approach is very much the same:
of course the binoculars don't offer a 180° field of view and we can see a black frame around our field of view if we want to, but as soon as we concentrate and look at the bird, that frame disappears and we feel we're looking at the bird with bare eyes, only now it is much closer to us. And then the whole psychological thing about selective human visual perception kicks in. We can't help but focus our attention on the bird's face/eyes and completely blank out features of the view that are unimportant to us.
Like massive fricking sticks covering up the tail tip of a Pewee.

Now, looking through binoculars, this trick psychology is playing on us isn't a cause for serious concern. However, the same effect ruins your shot when you are looking through a camera at the bird.

Aha!

Problem recognized is problem solved, as we say in German:

The solution is to not look through the view-finder at a bird but to look at the picture you see in the view-finder, including its frame. It is very much like looking at a framed picture in a gallery. Surely, there are a lot of nice things to capture our attention in Botticelli's Venus, but we'd still notice the trees in the background, the horizon, and how it all comes together to form a perfect picture. Because we'd be looking at the whole picture - well, most of us would, I guess.
To avoid that "sticky" problem, it is therefore essential to look at the picture framed by the view-finder as a whole: check the frame and how it corresponds to the position of the bird. Straighten the horizon according to the uppermost side of the view-finder frame. Check each and every corner of the picture for sticks, foliage etc., and when you have thus composed your image setting, switch from looking at to looking through (at the bird), wait for the bird's eye to sparkle or some interesting pose and - take your pic!

Voilà.

Well, this may be a strange post for some and it is a difficult thing to convey, but realizing the difference between approaching a camera and a telescope was a huge leap forward for my bird photography.

Here are a few more stick-related and commented pictures for your valued entertainment.

This is a happy Crane Creek Woodcock, the living landmine of the forest, and a tough bird to photograph amongst all the fallen twigs and leaves on the ground. Apart from the fact that any picture of a Woodcock is a good picture, there was not much one was able to do, especially with it moving around constantly.

... Until it finally stopped its feeding action to give its beak a rest. But - nasty, nasty - we can clearly see another factor messing around with our attempt at the perfect picture: light and shadow. A bird in the shade is pretty bad, a bird in the shade with sticks in front of it is even worse, but a bird in the shade with sticks in the sun in front of it is downright diabolic!

It was a tough choice during a mayhem migration day at Crane Creek: stick around the woodcock and wait for the sun to move or just leave without a good pic and go for the warblers. Darn, sometimes I am a bit more on the photography side of things and less on the birding side, although it takes a very special bird to pull me over. Like, sigh, a woodcock, as can be seen. If I remember right, I did miss out on a Prothonotary that day, but I won't blame the timberdoodle.

This stick was unavoidable without moving quite a bit and thus risking to flush the bird, but at least I positioned it in a way that would cause the least distraction: in the shadow part of the breast away from head and legs. Even though the stick is still a major bugger, the picture looks okay.

In terms of stickology, I am almost proud of this shot of a Common Grackle gathering wood to burn me at the stake if I don't move away from its breeding site.
Come on, give me some credit, this was a hard shot to get!

This image is meant to show that sticks - or in this case leaves - can sometimes even be incorporated as a nice frame to highlight the bird. Unless of course the bird decides to remain in the shade while the leaves won't.

But sometimes, you just gotta let the bird go...


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