February 2009 – Page 4 – Seabrooke Leckie

For the past year I have been involved as a contributing editor with the Ontario Field Ornithologists’ publication OFO News, but recently stepped into the lead shoes when the previous person decided to take some time off to travel. This is my first issue at the helm. The last couple of days I’ve been busy pulling all the pieces together that our contributing editors have solicited and sending them off to our layout person. The position hasn’t been too much work, right up until the deadline (which is this week). I’ve spent about half my time the last few days following up with authors, doing last-minute edits, making sure all our pages are filled, arranging it all and sending it off. So I’ve been keeping busy. Having the computer die right in the middle of it all didn’t really help.

One of our articles for this issue is on green birding. This is also our birdathon (spring fundraiser) issue, so it’s partially tied in with that (doing your birdathon on bike or some other means of green transport). In the past few years I’ve done a birdathon, in support of the research station in Toronto, but since I’m not there this year I won’t be doing one. Dan is hoping to put together some research projects on the birds in the Frontenac region, but it’s still in its infant stages at the moment, and so I’m not sure if I’ll be involved any such fundraising efforts this year.

In the article, however, the author mentions a recent green birding initiative, started up by Richard Gregson, of Baie d’Urfé, Québec. Most birders probably know about the concept of the Big Year – the year when you try to see as many bird species as you can within your allotted timeframe. It’s been spotlighted in such books as The Big Year by Mark Obmascik. There have been many spin-offs to the idea. Generally, the original Big Year covered all of North America, but people have adapted it to their own state or province, their own backyard, or a particular destination they enjoy. There have also been Big Months and Big Days. Taking it yet another step is the Big Sit – as many species as you can while staying within one very small defined area, often simply a lawn chair but sometimes graciously extended to the area of a birding platform or tower to allow the participant to stretch their legs (and change their angle of viewing, if necessary). Some, such as the Big Sit, have become an event on the scale of Christmas Bird Counts in their participation.

And then there’s Richard Gregson’s Big event. He’s started up the BIGBY goal – standing for BIg Green Big Year. The goal of BIGBY is the same as most big years – see as many species as you can. Where it differs is in how you go about doing it. In a BIGBY list, the only birds that can be legitimately counted are those that were seen while using some method of green transportation to see them. This could mean hiking in a park by foot, biking through your neighbourhood, canoing down a river, or driving to the state’s wildlife refuge using an electric vehicle, if you can get your hands on one! The primary goal is to avoid the use of internal combustion engines. “No gas was burned in the viewing of these birds.” (At least, not directly. In the case of using a bike or canoe, you don’t have any control over what method the companies used to freight their products to where you bought it, and you probably burned some fuel in getting it home.)

In most cases, this means your BIGBY list will also be a list of what’s in your neighbourhood, that circle, with your home at its epicentre, within which you can comfortably get out to bird and still return home without causing yourself physical pain. The particular radius of your circle will depend on your fitness level, and the method of transportation you choose to use. If you’re on foot your circle will be smaller than if you bike. Personally I think my circle is likely to have a radius of no more than 4 kilometers (2.5 miles), and if I’m very honest with myself, it’s probably more like two. That’s about as far as I seem to go in any one direction before turning around and heading home again, at least when I’m on foot. The exception to this would be if I’m out in our boat. I think because the boat is powered by an electric motor that also counts as green. I might make it three or four kilometers from the house in our boat.

Stony Lake Birds is the blog of a couple who live on a lake north of Peterborough, at roughly the same latitude as Dan and I only a couple hours west. This year he is taking on the BIGBY challenge, while at the same time also keeping track of his birds on a wider scale. His circles are considerably larger than mine are, with his smaller one being 24 km in diameter – the size of a Christmas Bird Count circle. In his sidebar he lists all the birds he’s seen thus far this year, and highlights his BIGBY birds in green.

I thought this was a neat idea. I toyed with the idea of keeping track myself, in my sidebar, of my BIGBY birds. Then I thought that because I’ve tried keeping year lists in the past, and failed miserably to keep them up-to-date (usually losing track sometime in the second week of January), I was unlikely to be any more successful with this. But then I thought well, heck, why not. I don’t necessarily have to ascribe dates to the sightings, so if I fall behind it shouldn’t be hard to catch up again. And it would be interesting to see just what I observe in a year. And if I’m posting it to the blog I have more of a purpose to it than if I’m just writing it onto a piece of paper tacked onto my bulletin board.

So I’ve added a tab to the top of my blog – My BIGBY List – and we’ll see how it goes!

The unfortunately-timed computer death last week meant that I missed posting on a couple of subject I had planned to. On the upside, the same computer death has also kept me preoccupied such that I don’t have anything new from the last couple of days to blog about. So I’m able to go back and revisit these topics.

The first one was this lovely little Red-breasted Nuthatch. Strangely enough, even though we’ve heard them in the surrounding forests since we moved in, I’d only seen a handful, and we hadn’t ever had one (that we’d observed, anyway) on our property itself. A week and a half ago we finally had one turn up. It visited the platform feeder once or twice, but mostly stuck to foraging on the trees in the vicinity. It then disappeared for a few days, and I’d figured it’d carried on since it hadn’t shown interest in the feeder, but then last Tuesday it showed up again.

The species’ scientific name, Sitta canadensis, refers to the fact that the majority of its range is within Canada, though it’s also found throughout New England and the western mountain ranges where coniferous and mixed forest predominate. It’s the only species of nuthatch with such a strongly Canadian range; in fact, the White-breasted, which prefers deciduous forests, only creeps in along the southern edges of the country, Pygmy just barely makes it in to the Okanagan in BC, and Brown-headed doesn’t come anywhere close.

The blue-grey crown that contrasts with the dark greyish eye-stripe identifies it as a female. Nuthatches can be hard to age compared to other birds, but based on how brown the wings look compared to the back in this and the first photo, I’d hazard that this was a youngster, hatched last summer. Very little data exists on how Red-breasted Nuthatches disperse from their natal territories, or how far they go. The species, particularly in the northern part of its range, is mildly migratory, and in lean years can undergo population irruptions southward. A very old description of the species (from 1918) suggests that their annual movements constitute a “centrifugal migration” – that is, many birds leave their breeding grounds and become dispersed through their wintering grounds, settling down there and not returning the following spring. However, there isn’t really any data that confirms or refutes this pattern, or quantifies what percentage may remain versus return.

The short way of saying all that is I don’t know whether this young female is a post-breeding dispersal or an irruptive, or whether she’ll stick around for the summer. (Unrelated, but check out her feet in the photo.)

She spent most of her time going up and down the trees, peering into the loose bark and crevices, looking for food items. I tend to think of nuthatches as seed-eaters, but actually seed comprises very little of their diet, perhaps less than a third. Although no quantitative analysis has been done for eastern populations, a study in Oregon showed that even during the winter, anywhere from 56% to 77% of their diet consisted of beetles, depending on their habitat type. Although it seems likely that those numbers would be considerably smaller here, where we go into a deep freeze in the non-breeding months, it is still interesting to note what a strong component of their diets insects make up.

Nuthatches are food cachers, tucking food away in safe places for future retrieval. They mostly store seeds, although they will occasionally store insects and spiders. They use not only natural crevices and gaps in bark, but also old sapsucker holes, and sometimes even the ground in regions where the ground isn’t frozen. They’ll often cover up their cache site with a bit of bark or lichen if a handy piece happens to be within easy reach (a 1995 study reported 44% of caches), which is presumably to conceal their carefully hoarded food items from other birds. Hairy Woodpeckers have been observed to watch nuthatches as they cache their food, and then go in to retrieve the food item once the nuthatch has left. Crafty!

The American Ornithologists’ Union, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the Academy of Natural Sciences undertook a huge project back in the 1990s and early 2000s to compile all of the known information about every North American bird species (including Hawaii) into a series of informative accounts. The Birds of North America is now THE destination for information on a species, providing invaluable information and data (such as the diet figures, above). A full set of the 716 printed accounts will cost you a pretty penny (although you can now buy accounts individually from Buteo Books), and the online version requires an annual subscription (much more affordable, though). They have six sample accounts available on the website for free, such as for the Yellow Warber, that give you an idea of what they all contain. You can also probably access all of the accounts for free at your nearest university library. A number of years ago, my mom co-authored a couple of accounts with a friend of hers, and as an author was offered a complete set of the printed accounts for free. Of course she took them. However, with the move to their new house, and because she rarely references them herself and felt I would get more use out of them, she’s offered them to me. I gleefully accepted before she could change her mind.

These accounts are a wealth of information, both the sort you would expect to find, as well as the obscure. Where else are you likely to discover that Red-breasted Nuthatches sing 2-6 notes per courtship “song” with 12-16 songs sung per minute, or that their thyroid averages 0.0163% of their body weight? Or that in 1969 one observer watched a nuthatch foraging on the back of a deer like an oxpecker? That Red-breasteds can reach a maximum speed of 32 km/h, or that before the kids are born the male and female will roost together in their cavity at night? It’s hard to pick through the 20+ pages of an account and select just a few tidbits to share.

This seems to be the shot I get most often when photographing birds. Why is that?

I haven’t seen her again since last week, though Dan may have. It’s possible she’s moved on for real this time, headed further down the lake looking for additional food. I wonder if she cached any food around here. If she did, she may be back.

Month: February 2009

Green birding

Canada’s nuthatch