Tag: lifelook

YHBL

Yellow-headed Blackbird (Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus Bonaparte) (YHBL)1 has been a nemesis bird, a jinx bird for me. Over the course of six or eight trips to the west, I have not seen one for myself.

I was chatting with birders at the Great Salt Lake Bird Festival, and talked about birds we wanted to see. I sheepishly admitted that I was still on the trail of YHBL. “Oh, go to Farmington Bay, you’ll see them, no problem,” was the first bit of advice. Farmington Bay is an arm of the lake in Davis County; presumably they meant the sprawling Wildlife Management Area by that name. Then, on that Saturday, I got more targeted advice: Eccles Wildlife Education Center. “It’s where we used to have the festival until we outgrew it.”

So that afternoon, off I went. I headed up the track that runs north from the Center’s visitor center. Some nice birds in the ponds on either side, some of them a bit distant but photographable. Cornell’s Merlin app was running, and it suggested an audio match for Yellow-headed Blackbird. It occurred to me that I should review what the bird sounded like, so I pulled up the Sibley app as well. Towards the end of the track, almost to the northern boundary of the property, Merlin was matching on hardly anything else than YHBL.

So that raucous, creaky sound I was hearing, like an rusty screen door falling downstairs, was my bird.2 And then, a flash of yellow dropped out of the phragmites into the shorter grass.

Yay! a glimpse of the bird, enough for a twitch. But for a bird that I had sought for so long, could I get an identifiable photograph?

A bit of patience was in order.

Maybe a half dozen birds were up in the tops of the reeds, singing (yes, technically they’re songbirds). I snapped a few pix, generally seeing most of a partly obscured bird. All the while they continued to, um, vocalize.

I was ready to declare victory and return down the track, when my best photo op appeared, out in the open with the flick of white on the wing visible. Fifteen minutes of watching and listening had paid off.3

ABA Area lifer #453, Yellow-headed Blackbird.

1The only member of its genus, it is saddled with a binomial that repeats the genus and species epithet, literally “yellow-head yellow-head.” Perhaps Charles Bonaparte expected that it would be moved into a different genus, retaining the species epithet.

2Honestly, if I were a Briton, I would be miffed that we use the same name for the all-black singing thrush of Paul McCartney’s song (Turdus merula)and for the group of squonky oriole relatives of North America: grackles, cowbirds, and blackbirds.

3Casual birder and even more casual photographer that I am, armed with no more than a 300mm lens, I got an image good enough for my purposes. But it’s hardly going to be a competition winner.

New Mexico circuit: 2

I had plans for long excursions out of Las Cruces, but after the schlep from Santa Fe, followed by a round trip to White Sands NP the next day, I looked in Howe et al.’s New Mexico Bird Finding Guide (4/e, 2021) for some choice spots locally in Doña Ana County. Howe suggested Mesilla Valley Bosque State Park, also known locally as the “Old Refuge.” Like many of the sites I visited on this trip, there were bird feeders out front before the visitor center/park office buildings, mixed in with the usual scrub, with a courtyard and garden behind, enclosed by the low-slung buildings. Many White-crowned Sparrows at the feeders; WCSPs were almost ubiquitous in New Mexico.

Just off the courtyard/garden, there was a simple blind (just panels with viewports cut out) looking on to an open lot. Merlin reported that it heard Gambel’s Quail (Callipepla gambelii), a secondary target bird for this trip, in the vicinity of the blind. Hmm. Intriguing, but no quail to be seen.

Two park staff strolled by, and explained that a Great Horned Owl had snagged a skunk, its remains hanging somewhere in the courtyard. “Ah, that explains the sewer smell I’m getting.”

I started following the park trails, and after about half a mile I saw some distant bird activity scratching around under the scrub. Not a good look, but maybe I was looking at quail?

Some time later, I noticed another bird also scratching under some scrub. This turned out to be a Crissal Thrasher (Toxostoma crissale), an unexpected lifer.

I continued around the Upland Trail. I found a mysterious plant, green fleshy leaves, in a loose basal rosette, and with a pale central vein. It just looked out of place and possibly exotic, so I snapped some pics and took a precise GPS reading.

Nearing the end of the Upland Trail loop, I spotted a prime target bird, Greater Roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus). This was not a lifer, but the only other time I’d seen a roadrunner was a “B” look, many years ago, and I couldn’t absolutely affirm that I had seen my bird then. This time at MVBSP, it was an “A,” and I got good photos to document it.

So I was feeling pretty good for the trip, and I headed back toward Maria the Ford Edge.* Back at the blind, I found the second of two Common Side-blotched Lizards (Uta stansburiana). Apparently this species has a fan club. My observations were featured in an iNat post by Pete Zani.

I was still curious about the green plant standing out among the dust and tan and sage green. So I stuck my head into the park office to ask about it. (I didn’t see any other doors with activity behind them.) I was greeted by one of the park staff who had gleefully called out the skunk carcass; he said, “I can help you outside.” (Apparently a faux pas to barge into to the office uninvited.) Out in the courtyard, my staffer explained that my plant was some species of native dock. “They start sprouting in February-March, but they’re a bit stunted because it’s been so dry.” In the end, iNat and my Audubon guide identified it as Canaigre Dock (Rumex hymenosepalus).

I thanked him and walked out front. The Gambel’s Quail were at the feeders! With one bird perched on the roof of a building, keeping an eye on things. The birds on the ground were rather shy—I got one usable photo.

One of seven new birds for me for this trip.

*Maria will be introduced more fully in a forthcoming post.

Clifton Institute bioblitz June 2024 (Rappahannock bis)

The Clifton Institute held a second June bioblitz on private property in Rappahannock County, this time on a smaller site (about 50 acres). Still, there was a good mix of upland, meadow, and a bit of wetland habitat. And it was hot: by the end of the afternoon, I was knackered and I skipped the after-dark UV lights.

in the meadowHere’s the group starting off in the meadow. This is as tight a clump as we formed all day.

As our homeowner’s site has only been partly managed for natives, and (friendly) neighboring properties perhaps not at all, there were opportunities to meet new non-native invasive plants, like Everlasting Pea (Lathyrus latifolius): dig the superwide wings on the stem. The householder was disappointed when I told her that the Persian Silk Tree (Albizia julibrissin) was one of the less-desirables.

On the native plant side of the ledger, I found a huge (1.5 meters tall) sedge, most likely Carex gynandra or C. crinita, and another monster, Soft Bulrush (also a sedge, but with a soft round culm) (Schoenoplectus tabernaemontani).

Organizer Bert Harris went fishing in Beaverdam Creek (tributary of the Thornton River) and netted a Mountain Redbelly Dace (Chrosomus oreas), not showing off a red tummy, alas.

New crawlies for me! A Cherry Dagger caterpillar (Acronicta hasta); a sharpshooter (Graphocephala sp.); a False Milkweed Bug (Lygaeus turcicus) [I’ve been focusing on the red-and-black species this summer]; and the gloriously named Twice-stabbed Stink Bug (Cosmopepla lintneriana).

And—after three seasons of chasing after Larry Meade and Bert, who are always spotting Prince Baskettails (Epitheca princeps) patrolling a pond, I finally found one for myself. Dusk was approaching and I was ready to go home, but I took a little walk down to the swimming pond on my way to the car. I found my guy doing what he should be doing, and with five minutes’ patience I squeezed off a few smudgy photos, sufficient for one of iNat’s experts to confirm the ID.

Cinclus mexicanus

This isn’t exactly a lifelook, in the sense that Frank Izaguirre is promoting. But it was my first sighting of this species, it was a good look, and it’s been one of the most personally significant. When people ask me, “what is the best bird you’ve seen?” this is usually the story I tell.

In December 1996 I was visiting family in Sacramento and doing some of my first birding in California. I was fortunate in that the rains that had been pounding wine country let up just before I arrived, so I had some good birds in the Central Valley—my first Sandhill Cranes, for instance. But the lowland rains meant substantial snow cover in the mountains. U.S. 50 was closed, preventing me from getting out to explore at elevation.

Finally, on the morning of Christmas Day, the roads were opened, and I made a dash to the Eldorado National Forest to see some birds before rejoining family for the holiday. I was pretty much limited to finding a parking place on the side of the road, clumping through someone else’s tracks in the snow (three to five feet of it on the ground) for a hundred yards or so, then returning to the car.

Looking at my checklist for the day, I see that I didn’t record much: some juncos, nuthatches, maybe a kinglet. The White-headed Woodpecker was a lifer for me. But it’s when I stopped on a footbridge over a little creek that the Look happened.

I was watching the meltwater rushing downstream, and I noticed a burbling, roiling something under the surface of the water. Just water over the rocks, right?—but then the roiling moved. What, a tiny mammal? I thought. The disturbance continued moving upstream, and then the dark head of a bird broke the surface. The rest of the bird emerged, the size of a thrush or smaller. It was an American Dipper (Cinclus mexicanus), a/k/a Water Ouzel, doing what it does best, foraging in fast-moving mountain streams. The bird worked the stream a bit more, then took flight, settled in a tree, and sang its whistling, trilling song.

And thus, #227 on my life list.