10 Species You Can Kiss Goodbye

An interesting population countdown from LiveScience. I've actually seen one of these species in the wild - the condor, almost a dead cert (no pun intended) down the Big Sur coast of California. I wonder if any bookmakers are running bets on which will be the first species to go.

This sounds like poor taste but it could be the best publicity: get William Hill or someone to sponsor an endangered species and offer a price on its extinction. They'd have a strong motivation not to pay out on those bets.

Mind you it may also give criminals even more motivation to push them to extinction. I'd bet on the publicity winning out.

Great (White) Egret, nr Pershore

Egretta alba according to the Collins Bird Guide; Ardea alba to Wildlife Recorder (WR) and BirdGuides, which includes the “White” in its name. WR only includes “White” for its alternative Egretta alba scientific name. Sibley in the US and Morcombe in Aus both agree on great egret Ardea alba but Robertson & Heather in New Zealand call it white heron Egretta alba. And Robson for South-East Asia throws a complete spanner in the scientific works with Casmerodius albus.

Is this the same bird around the world? To which genus does it belong? Ardea tends to be the herons and Egretta, the egrets. I've had trouble with consolidating worldwide records for this species since I first started seeing it. The confusion seems to be historic and Wikipedia suggests that the egret is in fact a heron, with the possibility that the down-under race is a separate species.

Got that straight? The visitor to Worcestershire showed for all of three seconds this afternoon, less than 1% of the time it took to sort out its taxonomy. Still, the glimpse was long enough to identify black feet, which in the absence of an accurate size is the best distinction from little egret. I was happy enough with it anyway.

Long-Billed Dowitcher, Chew Valley

This American wader just happened to me. BirdGuides had listed it a few days back but I'd thought no more about it until I stopped at Herriott's Bridge this afternoon as part of my standard route round the lake. I was only in the area looking at a room to rent in Chew Stoke, which pretty much has to be a birder’s dream. Fingers crossed on that one.

A gaggle of telescopes at the lay-by told me something was up, so I hauled mine out of the boot and joined them. I picked up the muttering of “long-billed dowitcher” and then remembered the earlier report.

Among half-a-dozen snipe the stranger was easy to separate. But was it a dowitcher? I've seen long-billed dozens of times in California and short-billed often enough, and generally separated them by habitat. By default the long-billed occupied the Bay Area while shorties were more coastal. I guess I even got quite lazy about that because it’s nowhere near a hard-and-fast rule.

Certainly the length of the bill is little use in identifying them, so I’m continually amazed when British birders confidently announce one or the other. I used to have the greatest difficulty with them. So, here's the British trick: if you’ve got a dowitcher, which is rare, it’s long-billed. Short-billed is a mega; the last certain sighting was back in 2005.

Still not sure whether I was looking at the right bird, I decided to play a game of sketching what I did see. Here in words is what I came up with: surprisingly similar size and build as the snipe; grey head and breast with darker cap and possible eyebrow; a slight gap between the breast and coverts/scapulars – rather like a common sandpiper; black-spotted grey coverts under black-spotted rufous scapulars, then back to black-spotted grey on the mantle; and a kind of weird, splayed tail-feather configuration. Google Books shows typical shorebird topography for these terms if you scroll down a little. I had to use it.

The spotting on the feathers signifies a juvenile at this time of year, as do the rufous fringes, so I got those bits right. I’m not too sure what was going on with the tail though! The rest of the description is pretty much spot-on for any dowitcher.

Sketching, in my case just ovals and lines (you should see the tiny head on my effort!), is something I should do more. Again, I tend to get lazy. But not this time, not for my 278th British (sic) bird. Surprisingly it did nothing for the year list: good old Shoreline at Mountain View, CA gave me one back in March. Or was it short-billed? Ha! I don't know. However, this afternoon did push the year list on to 575, thanks to my first water rail – so late in the year. I could reckon on getting to 600 since I have yet to see many of our common winter birds.

Did I mention that I was away last winter? I expect so.

Three Things I Never Knew About Raptors

Guts. They're the key to a raptor’s ability to soar. Guts and wing area. A shorter gut means less weight, a lower wing-loading and “up she goes!” That's why a sparrowhawk soars and a similarly dimensioned wood pigeon flaps like crazy. The pigeon is full of guts for processing seeds. The hawk with its high-protein diet doesn't need so many.

This came out of a fascinating talk given by Keith Offord to the Kidderminster branch of the WMBC last night. Here's more: raptor is a taxonomic term. Yup, the birds have hooked bills, binocular vision and long, pointy claws; but so do owls, which technically are not raptors. Nor are New World vultures, more closely related to our storks. They evolved convergently to the same body pattern. (Actually all vultures have somewhat subdued claws but I’ll skate over that.)

And finally, why are some species’ females bigger than the males but not others? Nobody really knows but there's a correlation between this sexual dimorphism and the speed of the birds’ prey. Dead stuff doesn't move fast at all and the sexes of the carrion eaters, like vultures and kites, are the same size. At the other end of the scale birds are the zippiest things on the planet and the female of our sparrowhawk can be twice the size of the male.

So there's another thing for him to worry about, along with his lack of guts. (Just kidding: I wouldn’t tangle with a male sparrowhawk.)

International Vulture Awareness Day

10,000 Birds gives the reasons why we need this tomorrow. Not a species us Brits get to see and it doesn't help our awareness when Hollywood movies call them buzzards, as in Clint's immortal line from The Outlaw Josey Wales that "Buzzards gotta eat, same as worms."

Extinction is for Ever

Fuck the anniversary of the start of World War Two. That of the death of the last passenger pigeon is far more symbolic of mankind's latent Nazism, but on an entire species level. Reduce a population of wild birds from billions to zero in little more than a century? Impossible, the sustainable-hunting fraternity will tell you. No, we are capable of anything, except adjusting our own behaviour to accommodate the rest of the planet.

Raven, Redditch

First of the month, so my rather irregular jaunt round the coppice at Walkwood to get the September list going. Well, last month I was on my voluntary job in Cornwall; in July on an outing with the RSPB at Cannock Chase; June dipping on purple heron at RSPB Saltholme... Dave and I hadn’t gone far into the wood when a loud cronk issued from the canopy.

So, out on the moors, up a bleak hill or on some storm-lashed cliffs, raven would have come to mind immediately. But in Redditch? I caught a black shape flap noisily away above us. It was indisputably a raven.

The call took me back a few days to walking back from Tesco, a route through suburban Redditch, when I also heard a single cronk. I looked up then, saw nothing and dismissed it as a figment but now realise that it too must have come from a raven. The species does seem to be spreading. I see it regularly at Bittell and reports appear on BirdForum from Upton Warren, so I can't be long adding it to that list.

There's no reason, apart from persecution, why these “honorary raptors” shouldn't spread. I used to see them regularly in the Bay Area where, like golden eagles and harriers, they thrive in the absence of gamekeepers. Funny that, ain’t it?

Shearwater Spectacle on YouTube

The shearwater picture on The New Dharma Bums is impressive enough but the YouTube video, although indistinct, gives a better impression of the sheer (deliberate pun!) numbers out in, presumably, Monterey Bay. Also presumably, they are sooty shearwaters. I occasionally saw this kind of carpet of birds when I lived in California but never over such a large area.

Grey Phalarope, Witcombe, Gloucestershire

This year I’m doing well on phalaropes: red-necked added to my British bird list two months ago; and only my sixth sighting anywhere of grey today. What better compensation for dipping on the wryneck that's been showing at the reservoir the last couple of days? At first, distant, the phalarope flew after five minutes – right to our edge of the water – for binoculars-filling views. They're not shy.

It was moulting into winter plumage and impossible to sex. The female of the phalaropus genus, like the dotterel, is the colourful one and does all the courting. Oh, to be a phalarope. Hang on, though. The bloke gets left on the tundra with the kids while her-outdoors buggers off back to the African oceans. This wader, along with the red-necked, is also unique in spending its non-breeding life at sea. So, today’s bird was probably female.

In summer plumage the gal’s body and neck are red, as are the male’s but more blotchily so. In fact, they're called red phalaropes in the USA, where they're also considered the rarest of the genus. Rarest because America has a third phalarope, Wilson’s. It’s a landlubber but “she” still wears the trousers.

Movie Birds – Charlie’s Angels

Movies that get their ornithology wrong appeal to the trainspotter in me. From nearly ten years ago, the bloomer in Charlie’s Angels still tickles. I'd only recently moved to California but even so knew that when Natalie (Cameron Diaz) exclaimed that a pygmy nuthatch only lived in one place, Carmel, I was definitely in Hollywoodland. Moreover, she had identified the bird from its song over a telephone connection.

For starters, few species in the world are restricted to an area as small as one town. Then, California really only has one endemic bird – the yellow-billed magpie, which is widespread throughout the Central Valley. To give the film’s researchers credit, pygmy nuthatch does actually occur in the state, but also in Oregon, Washington and as far east as Colorado.

What made the mistake more egregious was a previous shot of some very, very red bird supposedly representing the nuthatch; and as for the song... No, no, no, no, no. Although going to an earlier version of the screenplay on Daily Script suggests the source of this error and just how little the original authors knew about birds. In this, a good couple of pages before Natalie’s detective work, they introduce a bright red songbird, which she later, by sound, has to identify as...

A blue spotted egret?!?

Yeah, that needs a whole paragraph to itself. Then Alex (Lucy Liu) pins it down to Florida. If nothing else, this demonstrates the huge gap that can grow between script and final cut. Speaking as a wannabe film-writer, I say, “Don't shoot the author!”

In US Alone, 30 Birds Killed every Second in Window Collisions

Sorry to bang on about this again but this statistic is truly alarming. What's the figure in the UK? I don't know. How about a conservative guess of more than one per second? Even so it's way too many and far outstrips the damage done by cats, hunters, cars, wind turbines, yes, and even magpies/sparrowhawks/other bogie birds. The full article is at 10,000 Birds.

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Solving Bird Collisions

Fascinating stuff from The Cornell Blog of Ornithology last week reporting on an American Ornithologists' Union meeting.

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Arizona Bird Listing, 2001

First off, thanks to Max Silverman for donating his picture of a red kite to this blog’s header. And talking of pictures...

I was browsing my friend, Baxter’s, photographs when I saw this great vista of Arizona, where I lived in the late 80’s. I could kick myself: I wasn't birding back then. What riches did I miss?

To find out, I returned for a few days in my Silicon Valley period – not to Sedona, the location of this shot, but back to Phoenix and Tucson, the latter being the birdy hotspot. I added fifteen species to my life list in a couple of days and, but for the standard stingy American vacation allowance, would have stayed for more.

Of the new birds, five have remained my only sighting ever: gilded flicker and pyrrhuloxia at San Xavier Mission; and canyon towhee, painted redstart and yellow-eyed junco at Madera Canyon. Of the others I think that verdin has become my favourite. I've seen this little tit-like bird since in Southern California.

I had entered the state at Needles and driven down through a night at Lake Havasu City and actually avoided Phoenix on a loop round highway 85, where the strange town of Ajo held cactus wrens for the trip’s first lifer. I had to wait for the next day’s visit to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum to really get the list going with five more additions. Then came the Mission and the Canyon.

Almost as a final act I revisited my old apartment block in Tempe to find my first ever Inca doves. Just think: they'd probably been there all the time.

Birds Vanishing in Plain Sight

I removed a somewhat anti-American paragraph from my post about our endangered swifts because... well, not because it may cause offence. I'm going to cause offence here no matter what I say or how I say it: the easily upset will always listen out for that. No, I actually like Americans, having lived among them for a tenth of my life. And many of them do know what baleful impact they have had, and still are having, not just on their own country but the rest of the world.

And not just them, but us, and Europeans, and the whole damn lot of humanity. If that comes across as misanthropic, then so be it. Anyway, I am thankful to the Denver Field Ornithologists for reprinting this 2007 article about birds' population decline by Verlyn Klinkenborg in the New York Times. It's far more eloquent and persuasive than I could ever be.

HawkWatch, Golden Gate

I have surveyed raptors too. The fall, as the Americans call it (and we used to), of 2002 found me on Hawk Hill in the company of a diverse crew, all looking for that speck on the horizon to turn into another blip on the ever-rising tally of birds migrating south. I had acquired the taste for this back in 1997 on a visit to Derby Hill near Oswego, NY. Then, I merely observed the participants calling out “Sharpie”, “TV” or whatever at the speck’s appearance. I asked one of them how he could be so sure. “Oh, it gets easier after the first million,” he replied.

Now it was my turn but I still needed a good binocular-filling view to be sure of my identification. We watched north, east, west and, less logically, south. One person recorded each quadrant and several scanned. Frequently the fifth quadrant, straight overhead, caught us out. How could any bird sneak up to take us so unawares?

On the days that weren't fogbound, that is. This being San Francisco we had a couple of sock-ins early in the season. Then there was nothing for it but to bird the Marin Headlands and Rodeo Lagoon.

We had some highlights, mainly among the passerines. The first August watch produced western tanager and the second elegant tern. We also had a broad-winged hawk and a regular white turkey vulture. But it was the constant passage of these winged killers that seemed most impressive of all – so far to go, and all of it to do back again in the spring.