Winding Down in PA

Looks like my days as a Pennsylvania birder may be coming to a close. Since my wife has taken a new position in New Jersey, we've been house hunting and getting ready to sell our place here in suburban Philadelphia. Looks like our new home will be somewhere in The Garden State. We have an offer pending on a home on over 2 wooded acres that will offer a different set of yard birds from our current row home. For now, we're dealing with appraisals, home inspections, repairs, and all that other good stuff that comes with uprooting your life, but hope to be back birding and posting regularly soon.

Meanwhile, I've been enjoying the Chimney Swifts soaring over my house here, as well as the mockingbirds and other local nesters in my yard. Need.more.birds!

Great Urban Birds of Texas Tour 2011

For the past two weeks I've been in Texas, where I got to lead a 2,200 mile whirlwind tour of urban birds and birding sites from Houston to Beaumont to Galveston to Rockport to Harlingen to McAllen to Laredo to San Antonio to Austin. We found over 260 birds including some favorites like Green Parakeet, Monk Parakeet, Red-crowned Parrot, Audubon's Oriole, Scaled Quail, White-collared Seedeater, Clay-colored Thrush, Red-cockaded Woodpecker, Golden-cheeked Warbler, and Plain Chachalaca. Great to see how much birding infrastructure has been built along the Texas coast in recent years, and I was very happy with the birding opportunities in Laredo. It was great to see how projects that I had a small part in working on as the acting chair of the Audubon Texas board in the early 2000s have come to fruition (Mitchell Lake Audubon Center in San Antonio and Blucher Park in Corpus Christi) and great to visit with Paul and Georgean Kyle at the Travis Audubon Chaetura Canyon Preserve in Austin (see photo). Four days of the tour were spent at the International Urban Wildlife Planning and Management Conference in Austin, so great to visit with lots of fellow urban bird folks as well as visit old friends in Austin. Of course we spent some time out at Hornsby Bend, my birding home. Great trip, great birds, and great friends--to say nothing of the great TexMex and BBQ!

Peace Valley Waiting for Warblers

Had a good hour or so at Peace Valley this morning. Ruby-throated Hummingbird, Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Blue-winged Warbler, Great Crested Flycatcher and lots of Gray Catbirds are back. Was hoping for more warblers, but the trees are still aren't really in leaf yet, so any day now! On the lake an adult Bald Eagle soared overhead and a female Hooded Merganser swam by the bridge near the nature center.

Rickett's Glen State Park

Had a very enjoyable hike to see the 21 gorgeous waterfalls at Rickett's Glen State Park yesterday with my kids and some friends. Hard to hear birds on most of the trail due to water noise. On the Highland Trail heading back it was nice to hear some Brown Creepers singing--something I don't get to hear to often. Also had Red-eyed Vireo and Yellow-throated Vireo back from migration, as well as a Black-throated Blue Warbler. Spring is springing!

Neighborhood Bird Conservation Workbook

Finally, at long last, Audubon has published online a neighborhood bird conservation workbook that I wrote for them more than two years ago when I was their senior scientist for urban bird conservation. The idea was to provide a resource to get people started thinking and working together to make their neighborhood or community more sustainable for birds and people. So check it out, let me know what you think. Now that I'm no longer with Audubon, someday I'll be able to come up with a better and updated version of this based on everyone's input and field trials!

First of Season (FOS) Tree Swallow

Tree Swallows were reported last week at Peace Valley and elsewhere in SE PA but I hadn't seen one yet this spring until I was driving back from the gas station today and had one on a power line north of Perkasie. Spring is here more and more each day!

Birdchaser Quoted in Bird and Aviation Story

I am quoted a couple times in this interesting article on bird hazards to aviation in the trade magazine Flight International.

Nuisance Nightjars

So here's a fun email I got today. Any thoughts on what you would say if your neighbor had a complaint like this?

I have a Chuck Will's Widow that is nesting about 50 ft from my backyard in a wooded area. He sings ALL night long and even with the doors and windows closed he can be heard which is affecting our sleep. The neighbors are also complaining. Can anything be done?

Digiscope Fail: Red-breasted Merganser

Yesterday I stopped by Peace Valley and was able to find all three mergansers, though there were less than a dozen ducks on the whole lake. A female Red-breasted Merganser (uncommon here) was close by the shore, but by the time I got my scope up it dove and I wasn't able to get a shot of it until it was way out in the lake. Ugh! I got 15 seconds of blurry video, but it rivals the 2005 Arkansas Ivory-billed Woodpecker footage!

Poodle vs. Bird Poo

Got a great question today by email:

The front yard of our house slopes gently down to a small pond. Every year around this time we get three or four nesting pairs of Canada geese, then later another 40 to 60 geese show up to party for the summer. We don't mind seeing them on water or on the other three sides of the pond -- we just don't want to them on our lawn because they chew the sod and poo all over our driveway. We have two giant poodles that are trained to drive them back into the pond whenever they see them, but then they eat the goose poo which caused them to vomit. I'd like to find an inexpensive way to encourage the little vandals to stay on their side of the shoreline without interfering with mowing of our grass.

Canada geese problems are nothing new. But poo eating poodles. That's a new one for me!

NGS Guide to the Backyard Birds of North America

With several high profile bird guides being released this year, one deserving new guide may not be getting as much attention as it deserves--the new National Geographic Guide to the Backyard Birds of North America by Jonathan Alderfer and Paul Hess. Scheduled for release later this week, this attractive guide is a great book to give to those backyard birdwatchers in your life--or any friend or neighbor who might appreciate the birds in their yard.

This 256 page resource is attractively designed and chock-full of useful and interesting information--including two major sections, the first on backyard bird basics (by Paul Hess) and the second larger section (by Jonathan Alderfer) with species accounts for 150 of the most likely birds to be encountered in backyards across the United States and southern Canada. Most of the bird illustrations are from the larger original National Geographic guide, so they will be familiar to long-time birders, but the still do the trick. There are also many additional high-quality photos to round out the visual appeal of this guide.

I really like how this guide provides many ways to approach, identify, and enjoy birds. Each section includes noteworthy features that make it not only beautiful but useful.

Visual Indices: This NGS guide provides six different ways to find and identify birds, beginning with the inside and back covers. The covers fold out to reveal a visual index, showing each of the birds in the guide. This is takes advantage of the key innovation of several brands of laminated pocket guides (such as Local Guides and Pocket Guides) that have become popular over the past decade or so, allowing anyone to quickly see and compare many birds in order to find the one that most looks like whatever bird they are watching.

In addition to this visual index, there is a Color Index showing head shots of all the birds included in the guide, organized by overall color. This feature goes back to the original National Audubon Society guides. While this schema doesn't necessarily work as the only way to finding birds (which was a handicap for the original National Audubon Society guides), it may be useful here as four pages of indices, and is a great innovation.

There is also a quick index inside the front cover, allowing people to look up popular birds alphabetically. For those counting, the other ways to find birds quickly in the guide are the table of contents, index, and just flipping through the 150 species accounts.

Species Accounts: I have to admit that when I first looked at the species accounts I was a little put off by the layout. Each species is given its own page (some have up to two pages), with large illustrations from the original National Geographic guide, as well as a large map. The maps are large, well designed, and beautiful. The large size of the maps makes them especially attractive and is exactly what one would hope for from our friends at National Geographic! What put me off initially was the layout of the text into two columns, separated by a line, along with various icons and several different colors and styles of font. On first view the pages look overly busy. But with time, this became less bothersome as I became more aware of how the various icons and font colors organize what is a huge amount of useful and interesting text.

Each species account provides an Identification section, which is very thorough and includes a similar species section--something that is especially useful for beginning birders, and something that is often missing in recent field guides. There is also a section on range, which more than just describes the range shown on the map, butt also includes information on habitat. A food section describes the favorite foods of each species, as well as feeding notes on how to provide these foods in your backyard. Finally, a nesting section summarizes the location and type of nest, as well as number of eggs and information on incubation and fledging--perfect for people curious about the birds they are watching nest in their yard.

Overall these species accounts are well done and will be very useful for people curious about the birds in their backyard. Additional information is provided in sidebars--actually full-page accounts dedicated to special questions or topics of interest, including bird sex, sleeping birds, attracting bluebirds, and how birds stay warm. A section on bird age provides a table including the longest-lived wild birds of sixteen species included in the guide. These mini-essays are great additions that will be very interesting to backyard birders and sure to increase their appreciation of the birds in their yard.

Backyard Basics: While it is easy to focus on the species accounts since they make up the largest portion of the book, it would be criminal to only lightly mention Paul Hess's great initial Backyard Basics section, which includes 34 attractive and useful pages designed to educate and increase people's awareness and enjoyment of birds in their yard. This includes pages with tips on bird feeding, bird housing, landscaping for birds, how to find birds, how to identify birds, and how to connect with birders and additional resources. I was happy to see a nice Citizen Science section introducing readers to projects including the Christmas Bird Count, Project Feeder Watch, the Great Backyard Bird Count, and eBird. Sidebars include links to other organizations and useful websites.

This whole section is attractively illustrated with photographs and loaded with succinct but useful information. The How to Identify birds section is very basic, just a single page describing eight features or criteria for identifying birds--with another page showing how these features can be used to distinguish between several similar species (Downy vs. Hairy Woodpecker, Gambel's vs. California Quail, and Black-capped vs. Carolina Chickadee). While there is an illustration showing the parts of the bird (inside the back cover), it is very basic so backyard birdwatchers won't be overwhelmed with unusual plumage terms (though there is a glossary included in the back as well so they can learn what a patagium is if they really want to!).

In addition, National Geographic has set up a backyard birding website where readers of the book can hear the vocalizations of the birds covered in the guide, as well as find more information and help identifying the birds they see in their yard (Backyard Bird Identifier). So readers of this guide can easily plug into great online resources and the online birding community if they desire.

Final Notes: Overall I found this to be an attractive and well thought out book, and would highly recommend it for backyard birdwatchers. Since it only focuses on backyard birds, it might be a bit frustrating if it is the only bird book owned by someone who also wants to go birding in local parks or wildlife refuges--as soon as they show up at a wetland they won't be able to find any waterbirds in this guide besides Mallards, Canada Goose, Killdeer, and some gulls. So beginning birders who range away from home will need an additional guide. But if you have someone who has feeders in their backyard, this is a great and informative book that they will be sure to enjoy.

Disclaimer: This review is based on a complimentary review copy provided by the publisher.

Angry Birds is Evil

Angry Birds is Evil. With an uppercase E! According to Wikipedia, over 50 million people have downloaded this game, and globally people are spending 1 million hours a day playing it! That's a lot of time that could be better spent birding! Or saving starving children! Or something!

While I'm all for promoting birds, this is a bit crazy. If you don't know what Angry Birds is, just walk away now. Don't Google it. Don't download it onto your phone. If you want bird entertainment, put the phone down and go outside to look at real birds. Angry Birds is Evil I say! Evil!

(Yes, I did download it onto my Android phone. No, I will not play it an hour a day. But it's seriously calling my name!)

Tundra Swan Stopover

While I was scanning the lake at Peace Valley, 13 Tundra Swans flew in and landed across the lake. I watched them hop out of the water up onto some of the last of the ice on the lake. By the time I had driven around to the other side, they were all up on the ice and napping.

Spring is here and birds are on their way north!

Turkey Lurkey

Had this guy walking through the woods with a buddy this morning at Peace Valley. Looking for Henny Penny?

Not bad for a one handed point and shoot shot from the car.

GBBC's Fat Lady

Last weekend was the Great Backyard Bird Count, but the GBBC fat lady hasn't sung yet. If you saw birds last weekend, you have until March 1 to submit your sightings to the GBBC website. So make sure to get last weekend's bird sightings reported to the GBBC website this weekend. As they say, it ain't over 'til it's over, and the fat lady won't sing until after March 1.

Pennsylvania Barnacle Goose

At 11:30 this morning Paul Guris sent out an alert on the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club email list that Anita Guris and Marty Dellwo were looking at a Barnacle Goose in a flock of Canada Geese across from the high school in Red Hill, Pennsylvania near the north shore of Green Lane Reservoir. I was able to get there by noon and shoot 15 minutes of video through my scope and HTC Incredible phone over the next hour. Frustrating shooting again through the camera phone, I've got to figure out what I did with my Canon PowerShot camera! But at least the goose is identifiable. Nice to spend an hour with this bird since the only other ones I've had in PA was a flyby at Peace Valley after hours and hours of searching, and a clearly banded and escaped aviary bird at a roadside pond several years ago.

Eurasian Wigeon Digiscope Fail

This afternoon I abjectly failed to get an identifiable photo of a Eurasian Wigeon on Green Lane Reservoir, Montgomery County,Pennsylvania. The bird has been on the water and ice there for the past two days, but I waited until the Junior Birdchasers got home from school so I could take them to see this bird which was a lifer for them (state bird for me). The light was harsh, the bird was far away. We all got to see it, but the best I could do digiscoping with my Android phone on video was this crummy shot showing (if you trust me) the reddish head of the drake Eurasian Wigeon. For most of the video I had trouble keeping the image in the camera or the bird wasn't visible. So--Lifer (yeah!), Lifer (yeah!), State Bird (yeah!), photo (fail!).

Crossley ID Guide: Image Number Comparisons

So, in line with my comparison of text between the new Crossley ID guide and recent field guides, here's a comparison chart showing number of birds illustrated for the same species:

Again, note how Crossley ID stacks up to the others.

103 Big Sibley
84 Crossley ID
54 Stokes
37 National Geographic
33 NWF
31 Smithsonian
26 Kaufman

Again, note how well Big Sibley does in comparison. Book jacket claims 6,600 in Big Sibley, compared to 10,000 images claimed for Crossley ID (and 3400 photos in Stokes). As a direct comparison, many of the Crossley ID images are small and distant birds, especially distant flocks of birds--which is useful in itself, but not always the same way as illustrations showing additional variations.

I'm also impressed with how well Kaufman stands up, compared to the others in the middle of the pack--very respectable for such a trim guide (and he manages to show a juvenile Saw-whet Owl, which even Crossley ID doesn't pull off)!

So that's how the numbers stand in this comparison. But there are probably even more than 10,000 birds in Crossley ID--just check out his shot of the Black-legged Kittiwake colony, and it's anyone's guess how many birds are in there! For the record, here's the number of illustrations claimed for these guides:

10,000 Crossley ID (combined photos--who knows how many birds that really is!)
6,600+ Big Sibley (illustrations)
4,000+ National Geographic (paintings)
3,400 Stokes (photos--some are of more than one bird)
2,100 NWF
2,000+ Kaufman (photos)
2,000 Smithsonian

First Morning of the GBBC

The Great Backyard Bird Count is here! I took my kids out birding this morning, we checked out the duck migration at Peace Valley for 20 minutes or so. Lots of turnover from yesterday, and the highlight was 350 Snow Geese flying north in formation. Temps are in the 60s today, snow continues to melt. Spring is in the air! In addition to the geese, we had a large (for here) group of 27 American Wigeon, and 3 Hooded Mergansers with the more regular ducks. Also good looks at a Lesser Black-backed Gull eating a fish on the ice. Lots of fun, and the kids enjoyed posing for their birding photos!

Nothing like a good case of scope eye to cure the late winter blahs!

Crossley ID Guide: Text Too Short?

So in my initial review of the Crossley ID Guide, I mentioned that the text for each species account seems shorter than found in most field guides. But the more I read, the more I wondered. There seemed to be a lot more there than I had originally thought. So I had to break out some other guides and do a comparison. As I suspected, there was a lot more in the Crossley ID Guide than I had originally given it credit for. Here's a comparison word count for each species account in Crossley ID and several recent field guides, including the new Stokes guide, the original Big Sibley, Kaufman's guide, the Smithsonian guide, NWF guide, and 5th edition National Geographic Society guide.

As this comparison should make it clear, the Crossley ID guide holds its own against the other guides, with only the Stokes guide coming in with a consistently higher word count per species, and Kaufman coming in almost always below Crossley ID in word count.

Here are the rankings by total word count for these hopefully representative species accounts:

Stokes 2811
Big Sibley 1591
NWF 1191
Nat Geo 1141
Smithsonian 1093
Crossley ID 1014
Kaufman 611

So while Crossley ID does come in below most of the other guides, the text isn't that much shorter. And since Crossley ID spends almost no words on descriptions of vocalizations, the amount of words spent describing the behavior and plumage of each birds is very similar to that found in most of the other guides. Note that though this count is skewed by the Red-tailed Hawk account, which is probably the longest in the Stokes guide, even without it the rankings remain about the same.

One finding of this quick comparison that shocked me was how much text is actually in Big Sibley--which I've also thought in the past was a bit spare on text. Turns out it has more text per species than almost all the other guides. Of course, the new Stokes guide is the most wordy. And I have to say, actually counting the words in the Kaufman guide made me like that guide even more--nothing like a spare, beautifully executed format and design to warm the heart--at least the part of my heart that I inherited from several Danish ancestral lines :-)