birds – Page 30 – Seabrooke Leckie

Pink flamingos for the yard

Edit: This post was recently included in the 200th edition of the Friday Ark. Pop over for more great posts.

The frequent rain this spring and summer has meant that hay farmers have had trouble harvesting their crops, and my mom ran out of her winter supply some time ago. She’s been stretching her reserves with the help of a few bales from a neighbour, while waiting for her hay dealer to have new hay available. In the meantime she’s been investigating other potential sources to tide her over. We swung by a farm at the corner of my parents’ street on our way out to town this week, to see if they had a few bales they might be willing to sell.

For most of my childhood I remember it as a horse farm, with hay growing out front and a couple of horses hidden in the back field. The farm was sold about 10 years ago, and the new owners have a menagerie of different creatures. The owner breeds birds, primarily parrots but also a number of species of exotic waterfowl. And, in a fenced off area containing a small bubbling pond, flamingos.

There they were, real live flamingos, in all their splendid pink glory. What a funny choice for a pet bird, I thought. They weren’t alone in the enclosure, the waterfowl also paddled in the pond. The flamingos were the most numerous, however; I think there were eight individuals. My mom spoke with the owner regarding the hay, but also chatted about the birds. My impression was that he sells his birds’ offspring. I wouldn’t have thought there was a big market for backyard flamingos, so I’m not sure who his buyers would primarily be, whether they’re private enthusiasts or zoos or wildlife parks or what. (Perhaps Wren of Wrenaissance Reflections would like a few for her yard, to join her current flock?) I didn’t think at the time to ask a lot of questions about them, being more focused on admiring the birds themselves, though I’m sure he would have been kind enough to provide the answers; an oversight of mine.

Their legs seem ungainly, extraordinarily long for their body size. The length of their legs is useful for keeping their body above the water while they’re wading, looking for food. Of course, with legs that long, you need an equally long neck to be able to reach the ground if you’re in shallow water. They look even stranger in flight than they do on the ground, with their long neck sticking out one end and their long legs sticking out the other, their wings spread out to each side, and hardly any body left. My neck gets tired just looking at them. If I were a flamingo, I’d curl my neck in to my body like a Great Blue Heron does. None of these birds were going anywhere, though, I believe the owner had all of his birds pinioned or feather-clipped, since the enclosure was open-topped.

I’m not positive what species these are, since at the time I just assumed them to be Greater Flamingos and didn’t ask. However, there seems to be quite a bit of confusion on the web, and trying to find representative photos of the different species is tough. They’re either Greater or Caribbean Flamingos (Phoenicopterus roseus or P. ruber), but the two were once considered conspecific, so some photos may still be labeled under the old classification. I think these are Caribbean, however, based on the eye and bill size – the Greaters seem to have tiny eyes and huge bills, while Caribbeans are more balanced (as much as they can be with such a honkin’ big snoz). There’s also a Chilean Flamingo (P. chilensis), which also used to be considered conspecific but has now been separated. However, it’s easy to tell apart by its gray legs. I like a straightforward field mark.

The Caribbean is native to Cuba and Mexico south to Venezuela and the Galapagos. It’s occasionally sighted in Florida, but most of these are considered to be escapees because it is so commonly kept in captivity. However, at least one banded individual was initially from the Yucatan, and some others may be genuine vagrants from Cuba or elsewhere nearby.

Flamingos are pretty neat birds. Aside from their bizarre shapes, they have some interesting adaptations. Their colour is primarily obtained through their diet. When the bird is growing in new feathers, which it does once a year, the red pigments contained in the shrimp that make up the majority of its diet are deposited into the feathers, giving them the flamboyant salmon pink colour. The owner indicated that the colours are brightest in fall when the feathers are fresh; as the feathers age, they fade in colour. In captive birds, these pigments are usually obtained through supplements added to their foods (for instance, processed shrimp in the birds’ regular pellets). It’s the pigment molecules that are important; without them, a flamingo will grow in white feathers. This premise applies to many species of birds, mostly red or orange ones. The American Birding Association magazine Birding recently ran an article about such pigments affecting the plumage of Baltimore Orioles – check out the pdf for more info on the phenomenon (Blackburnian is one of the authors!). A well-fed bird will have more brightly-coloured plumage, which is a good indicator to potential mates of the health of the individual.

Flamingos have really interesting bills, backwards from the bills of most birds. In most birds, the upper mandible is larger than the lower one (especially pronounced in the birds of prey), but in flamingos it’s the opposite – the lower mandible is the larger one. It’s also bent in a funny way that you don’t see in most birds. The reason for it is their feeding habits. Flamingos are filter-feeders, straining out invertebrates from the water, primarily brine shrimp. They have hair-like filters called lamellae, which are very similar to what a baleen whale uses to feed. Feeding is accomplished in a similar manner, by taking a mouthful of water and pushing the water out through the lamellae, trapping the critters against the filter. The bill is bent backwards so that when the bird lowers its head to the water, the bill is parallel with the surface, facilitating feeding.

Young flamingos are gray, and obtain their pink plumage in their first moult into adult feathers. They also have relatively straight bills, which straighten out and take on the distinctive colouration as the chick ages. It takes about two months from hatching for a chick’s bill to become developed enough for it to filter-feed. During that time, the parents feed it a milky secretion produced by glands lining the upper digestive tract. The “milk” contains the proteins and nutrition the chick needs, as well as white and red blood cells. The only other group of birds to produce “milk” to feed to their young are the completely-unrelated pigeons and doves of the family Columbidae. Flamingo “milk” contains more fat and less protein than pigeon “milk” – somewhat interesting as one would think the adults’ diet of shrimp would contain less fat and more protein than the pigeons’ diet of seeds.

I poked around the internet to see if I could find out how much a flamingo would run you, but I couldn’t find anyone who even indicated they bred flamingos, much less who had a price list online. I did find a store that sells flamingo pellets, however – the food will set you back $120 CAD for a 50 lb bag. I have a feeling that, like many tropical birds, the sale and transport of flamingos is regulated due to their inclusion on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), and so you have to jump through a few hoops and piles of paperwork to obtain captive birds. Which would explain why I don’t see any listings for them online. Would make a pretty neat yard addition, though…

Home among the colewort

One of the things I love about waking up at my parents’ house is the sound of the birds singing in the morning. Specifically, the House Wren, who has settled in just under the guest bedroom’s window. For the last half a dozen years he’s sung from the garden, adding some very bubbly life to the backyard. Although my mom had always put out seed for the birds, we only put up some birdhouses when I got into birding myself, in university. It didn’t take long for the wren to discover them; I think he moved in the next summer, and he, or his offspring, has been there since.

There are now six nestboxes set up at various spots on the property (one of which has two compartments). In any given year most get used. In previous years there have been Tree Swallows in one, and Eastern Bluebirds in another, but for whatever reason they’re absent this year. However, to make up for that, we have three House Wren pairs that have set up territories at three of the boxes. I occasionally hear them counter-singing at one another, reinforcing their territory boundaries.

The garden wren has three boxes to choose from, but picked the one right next to a large flowering colewort. To put it in perspective, in the photo above the shepherd’s hook the box is hanging from is about as tall as I am. The colewort is a pretty amazing plant, growing to huge proportions, and it completely dominates that section of the garden. When my mom first planted it I don’t think she knew at the time just how big it would get. She had intended to pull it up after the first year because it took up so much space, but ended up leaving it. The wren thinks this is great, as it provides lots of good cover, right near the nest. I’ve seen the little birds foraging in and under the bush frequently.

When I went out to wander about the garden this week, I noticed the wrens took great exception to my presence. They hopped about first the crabapple tree, then the nearby apple tree, chirring at me and expressing their displeasure. When I located one with my binoculars, I could see it was carrying a mouthful of food. I didn’t leave right away, and it ended up swallowing the food so it could more easily focus its attention on distracting me. Birds only carry food, and get this worked up, when there are young nearby, so I knew they must have a brood in the garden nestbox.

I hid myself behind the corner of the garden shed, and waited for the adults to calm down enough to return to the box. Eventually the one (I think the male) did, coming to perch on the top of the shepherd’s hook and scout the area. He had a fat mouthful of bugs. It amazes me how much they can cram into their little beaks, you’d think as soon as they opened their mouth to grab another food item the first would fall out, a little like watching a dog try to pick up two tennis balls. Birds have amazingly dexterous bills, considering that they’re not flexible or opposing like our fingers. Can you imagine trying to weave a nest using just a pair of chopsticks?

I leaned around and propped my camera up on the corner of the shed, hoping to remain out of sight, but the wren spotted me and decided it wasn’t safe yet to duck in to feed the youngsters. He took off for the crabapple tree again, mouth still full of insects. Birds generally won’t approach their nest unless they feel confident that the coast is clear. It’s less their own safety they’re concerned about, and more trying to prevent tipping off a potential predator to the whereabouts of their young. A lot of time, effort and energy goes into raising a brood of young, and by the time they get to the age where they’re needing to be fed a lot, often it’s too late in the season to re-lay. So it behooves the parents to be overly cautious – given the harsh realities of migration, there’s a good chance one or both of the parents may not return to try again next summer.

Eventually they did both settle down, and came in to the box where the hungry mouths were waiting. I think this is the female, as she was quieter, and appeared a mousier brown than the bolder male, who somewhat resembled a Winter Wren in the darkness of his patterning and barring of the chest. Of course, there’s also two colour morphs of the eastern subspecies of House Wren, a brown and a grey, and it could be the pair is composed of one of each, unrelated to sex.

Delivering the goods.

Off for another load. Young birds, like young humans, basically spend all their time eating and sleeping and growing. A newly hatched nestling will need to be fed every 15-20 minutes, which keeps the parents hopping to try to find enough food to fill as many as five or six hungry bellies.

About 40 meters/yards away, another male sang atop his chosen nestbox. I notice this one’s paler, but is definitely a male, so maybe the colour difference in the first pair is simply a morph after all. There wasn’t any evidence of a female associating with this guy, but she could be inside the house incubating. While she’s on the eggs, the male doesn’t have a lot to keep him busy and will spend most of his time singing and defending the territory.

He moved to some nearby saplings where the lowering sun’s rays illuminated his pale breast. It’s really a shame that a single photo can’t capture the burble of a House Wren’s song. Their mandibles tremble rapidly like the bird is shivering with joy as the cheerful notes tumble out of its mouth. I might see if I can borrow Blackburnian’s camcorder to get some video clips of the House Wren and other things.

A birding interlude

I’ve been very busy this week, it feels like I’ve barely been home. I returned to my parents’ on Monday, and remained there till Wednesday morning, whereupon I headed out for a dentist appointment. Fortunately this was just to have some routine x-rays done and a couple other similarly benign procedures, so it wasn’t a terrible trip. Then yesterday Blackburnian and I headed off to his mom’s place for the afternoon and stayed overnight to do some mothing. We returned home late this morning, and I’ve spent most of the morning photographing and subsequently editing the photos of the moths we got. I’ll have some catching up to do this weekend on various projects, tasks and chores that were put on hold while I’ve been away this week.

I’ve been trying to contribute to I and the Bird on a regular basis, but realized when the deadline came up for this edition that I hadn’t actually posted anything about birds since before the previous edition (which are semi-monthly). This is a little strange considering how birds are my primary interest, but I suspect part of it has just been a lack of good photos or notable observations. I haven’t had a lot of chance to just go out and stalk some birds – either the weather’s been not-so-hot or I’ve been busy trying to complete a survey and couldn’t dawdle with the camera.

However, while at my parents’ this week I decided to take my camera and go out to track down a couple of warblers I’ve heard singing for a while, despite the rather overcast skies that makes getting good photos near impossible. I headed up to the woodsy area behind the barn where the birds have been singing for a couple weeks. I gave a few good pishes and the birds came right in. The first one to give me a good look was the above Pine Warbler, which flew right to the open branches above my head and, after a minute or two of checking me out, began to sing. He’s an annual resident there, the first warbler to arrive in spring, his musical trill a constant from the huge White Pines in the forest behind the house.

The other warbler was this Mourning Warbler, who was much more reluctant to come forward and be seen. This is the first time I can recall a Mourning being at my parents’. They do breed throughout southern Ontario, but I’ve never encountered them there before. Most of my breeding Mourning experiences date back to when I worked for the Toronto Zoo some eight years ago. Mournings are among my favourite warblers, so I was very pleased to discover that the bird I’d heard last week was still hanging about the same spot this week. I’d expected he was likely just a migrant, present for a few days while he fueled up, but he seems to have actually set up shop back there. I wonder if he has a girl.

After the dentist appointment I was feeling ravenous, and decided to stop by Tim Horton’s on my way home to grab some lunch. The Tim’s store isn’t a very exciting place to eat, though, so I thought I’d find a spot out on one of the backroads in the countryside somewhere where I could pull over and listen to the birds. The spot I chose was a little dead-end road not far off the highway (I could still hear the roar of the highway traffic, though it was muffled by a lot of trees), where they’d run the end of the road through a small, thick swamp. I parked the car and opened the door, and the first bird I heard was this bright male Common Yellowthroat singing virtually right beside the car. I grabbed my camera and snuck over to where he was singing and pished him in. Like the Pine Warbler, as soon as he’d determined that there was nothing to worry about (which didn’t take him long) he returned to singing from within the thicket, his head thrown back and his chest all puffed out, hormones raging, I’m sure.

Another colourful bird to come in when I pished was this striking Baltimore Oriole. I don’t often get orioles to show much interest in me, so that was interesting. I also don’t tend to associate orioles with swamps, although they are often in riparian areas. They’re fairly common around here, but are more often heard than seen. It’s funny that such a brilliantly-coloured bird can be so difficult to spot. While at my parents’ I don’t see the male all that often, except when he comes to the oriole nectar feeder my mom has out.

And finally, a yellow bird. There were a couple of Yellow Warblers in the swamp with the oriole and yellowthroat, but I wasn’t able to get one to come down close enough for a decent shot. I did, however, get this other yellow bird, a sunny American Goldfinch. There seemed to be a small flock of goldfinches in the area, and they’d always respond when I pished at various points along the road. Goldfinches are late breeders, waiting for the thistles and other plants to go to seed and using the fluff to line their nests and the seeds to feed their young. They often won’t start building nests till late June or early July, when many other birds have already raised and fledged broods of young. So this group of birds I encountered were all still just hanging about, not having established territories yet (although two or three pairs may also nest in the same general area, in a loose colony).

It was nice to do a bit of visual birding where I wasn’t making tallies for each species (as I am for the surveys I’m doing). I find when I’m at my parents’ I’m often caught up in other things and tend to bird by ear, identifying what’s around based on what I’m hearing, but not actually going out to look for the singers.

Baillie Birdathon

Magnolia Warbler

Over the last few years, every May I’ve been going out and participating in the Baillie Birdathon in support of the Tommy Thompson Park Bird Research Station here in Toronto. The Baillie is a fundraiser run by Bird Studies Canada in support of bird conservation initiatives in Canada. Participants have the option of directing a portion of their funds raised to a third-party organization of their choice – in my case, TTPBRS. This is the primary source of funds for the programs the station runs, so while I’m not much of a fundraiser at heart, I do try to do my part.

American Redstart

The idea behind the Baillie is that you pick a day, any day, sometime in the month of May, and tally all the species you observe in all or a part of a 24-hour period. You can be anywhere in the world, technically, but most participants tend to stay close to home, or bird a patch associated with their chosen organization. In my case, this would be Tommy Thompson Park, home base of the research station (the station does have programs outside of the park in other parts of Toronto, but this is the primary site).

White-crowned Sparrow

I chose to do my birdathon on Tuesday. I cheat a bit when picking my day, since I’m not as limited by other constraints such as a weekday work schedule. So I wait till a day when things are just hopping, and that becomes my day. This was true of Tuesday. I’m not sure what prompted everybody to move in to the site that morning, since the weather wasn’t exceptionally favourable or any different from the previous few days, but there they were.

Chestnut-sided Warbler

During the morning I tallied 23 species of warblers, including a few that were brand-spankin’ newly arrived overnight, “late” migrants that tend to come through in mid- to late May and June, such as Mourning or Blackpoll Warbler. There were also a few straggling “April” migrants, those that come through primarily in April or early May, such as Yellow-rumped or Palm Warbler. The best time for diversity is this mid-spring period, when both ends of the spectrum begin to overlap.

Scarlet Tanager

Since I’d done so well through the morning, I opted to head out to other areas of the park and see what else I could turn up. On my “hit list” were some rather notable misses that I’d somehow managed not to see during the morning – chickadee, cardinal, Brown Thrasher, all residents at the station. I also had my sights pegged on Scarlet Tanager, a few late-to-leave winter ducks, and some park specialties such as Black-crowned Night-Heron, Great Egret and Canvasback. I did manage to track down all these species with some hunting around.

Black-crowned Night-heron

However, I also missed a few that I’d figured would be pretty easy ticks. Savannah Sparrow, all these acres of meadow and where are you? Eastern Meadowlark, have you chosen not to nest here this year? And those several Orchard Orioles that have been hanging around the last week, disappeared. Rock Pigeon, what kind of birdathon doesn’t have a pigeon?

Red-winged Blackbird and turtles

I did get to see a couple of interesting things while out. One was the previous Black-crowned Night-heron, dead set on breaking off that branch to take back to the nest. He spent several minutes giving it his best shot, but eventually had to give up and moved off to another tree to try a different one. The second was the above female Red-winged Blackbird which was poking around at the edge of the pond looking for a good soggy old cattail leaf to take back to weave into her nest, while a line of turtles looked on.

Eastern Kingbird

I wrapped up the day with 82 species, which I felt was respectable given that I spent the first seven hours at the station, largely within the lab, and only birded for an additional three hours beyond that, during the afternoon lull period. Aside from the variety of warblers, the indisputable highlight of the day was a female Summer Tanager that very obligingly made its way through an area where I just fortuitously happened to be checking the mistnets. It had been discovered the day before by the station coordinator, and has hung about for a few days now. It’s the first record of the species for the station, and they aren’t recorded very often in Ontario in general during any given year.

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The TTPBRS coordinator pieced together a video of many of the species passing through the station currently. I could’ve sworn it included the Summer Tanager, but in re-watching it now I don’t see it, so perhaps he’s left that bit for another video. If you follow this link to the video’s page, you can watch it in HD (for those with HD-capable monitors – mine isn’t).

A mouthful of mud

Yesterday while down at the research station I spent some time watching a pair of Barn Swallows collect mud from a little puddle we have out front and carry it off to build their nest with. They spent most of the morning working on it, or at least the portions where I was outside to observe them (yesterday was an exceptionally busy morning, and as it was the coordinator’s day off I was the sole bander, which kept me inside for a good portion of it). Once things had slowed down enough in the lab, such that I had a bit of time to grab a snack and catch my breath, I took my camera out to shoot a few photos of the pair.

I believe the above two photos are of the male. The female Barn Swallow usually has a paler belly than the male. In Europe, where it’s simply called the “Swallow”, hers is nearly white. The species, Hirundo rustica, is found through most of the northern hemisphere, with six distinct subspecies across its range. The North American subspecies is H. r. erythrogaster, separated from others by the absence of a dark blue breastband separating the orange throat from the creamy belly.

I also noticed that the male appears to have a pale collar across the back of his neck, visible in these photos. I’m not sure what this is the result of, or even whether it’s just a plumage anomaly, or caused by an injury or somesuch. You see this sort of marking often with mammals, where the hair that grows in over a scar is white (this is the premise used behind branding livestock).

Here he picks up a leaf, probably more out of curiosity than desire to use it in the nest, since he dropped it quickly.

Both individuals of a pair will collect mud to build the nest with, and they were coming regularly to the little puddle, not much more than a few feet across. They would perch on the stones beside the puddle and were fairly tame, in that they wouldn’t fly if you walked by some metres away, providing you didn’t appear to be focused on them. The female is caught mid-step in this photo. I loved watching the two of them walk across the ground, since their especially short, stumpy legs meant they more waddled than walked. All swallows have very short legs, I presume so that they tuck out of the way and increase aerodynamics when flying, since much of their life is spent on the wing.

After getting what he felt was a satisfactory beakful of mud he took off to add it to the nest. Barn Swallows spend so much time on the wing because that’s their primary foraging method. They’ll chase flying insects in the air, demonstrating swiftness and maneuverability characteristic of swallows. They’ll skim the water’s surface with their mouth open to scoop up water to drink, and will even bathe this way. The wings of swallows and other aerial foragers are built for spending long periods in flight while minimizing the energy required to do so, and are characteristically long and narrow.

Along with the other swallow species, and other aerial foragers such as nighthawks and swifts, North American Barn Swallow populations have been declining over recent decades. The cause of this is unclear, but given the similar foraging habits of the group, it’s likely at least in part caused by declines in the flying insects they rely on for food. For those of you old enough to have been driving for a while, think of the number of bugs you see stuck to your grill or splattered on your windshield in the summer these days, compared to a decade ago – when you stop to consider it, probably you’re not seeing as many as you used to. In just the last 20 years, the Ontario population of Barn Swallows is estimated to have declined by 60% (and an even greater 75% Canada-wide), meaning only 40% of the swallow population from 20 years ago still remains today. Twenty years isn’t a long period of time, and it’s disturbing to think what may happen to this and other species in another twenty – within all of our lifetimes.

There are hardly any buildings in the area, so I knew the pair had to be building on one of them. The obvious choice was a nearby building, the other side of the parking lot from the research station’s building, which sported a nice broad covered deck. I walked around and across the deck looking for their nest, but didn’t spot anything. As I was pausing to consider other locations, the pair returned with more mud, alighting on a nearby picnic table to decide whether I posed enough of a threat to not want to give away the nest location.

Eventually the male decided I was harmless and flew up to the nest location, a spot I had completely overlooked. The nest was still in the early stages of construction, which is why I hadn’t spotted it immediately.

Barn Swallow nests are made primarily of mud layered up into a thick caked wall, and lined with softer material such as grasses, feathers, or hair. Before humans came about to offer excellent nesting locations, the swallows would build their nests on cliff faces or in caves, against the sheer vertical rock walls. They ordinarily either build it on a ledge, or butted up in a corner, but in either case it’s placed high up under an overhang. Human structures, with their eaves, rafters, porches, gables, etc, have been perfect for building nests on. Unfortunately, because of the droppings that tend to accumulate under a nest during the weeks it’s being lived in, they can also be an unwelcome tenant for some homeowners.

Perhaps because I’d moved in a few steps closer to get a better angle with the camera, or perhaps simply because I was still there, he was less inclined to go directly to the nest the second time he came back with mud. He flew up to the other light and stared pointedly at me until I turned to leave them to it. I’ll poke my head in next time I’m down to check in on their progress.