Amazon Kingfisher! New Podcast Episode.

The famous Amazon kingfisher!

There's a neat new episode of my "This Birding Life" podcast available. This one is an interview with Jeff Bouton, the amazing birder who found the Amazon kingfisher during the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival last November about an hour east of Harlingen, Texas.

Jeff Bouton

 Many of you may know Jeff from his current role as a product specialist in the birder/naturalist markets for Leica Sport Optics. He's been to almost every birding festival in North America serving as a speaker, birding guide, and expert on digiscoping. Before that he was a field researcher doing bird surveys, a professional hawk watcher, and even a purveyor of the indoor sport known as karaoke. ALL of these experiences helped to mold Jeff into the top-notch field birder that he is today. His keen observation skills, honed over years in the field, were the reason he noticed something unusual about a kingfisher he saw perched on a tree as he drove past last November. Most of us might have passed it off as a poor look at a belted kingfisher. Not Jeff. He turned the car around to look again at the odd bird... and the rest is history.

Crowds of birders immediately converged on the roadside wetlands where the kingfisher was found.

Over the next few weeks, the Amazon kingfisher that Jeff found—only the second one ever recorded in the United States—was seen and enjoyed by thousands of people. The bird may have moved on, but Jeff's amazing find will be talked about for decades.

Have a listen to this new episode "Jeff Bouton and the Amazon Kingfisher" which is free to download over at Podcast Central as well as in the iTunes podcast library. At either of these links you can also enjoy any of the previous 44 podcast episodes. All for free!

 

"This Birding Life" is brought to you through the generous sponsorship of Carl Zeiss Sports Optics.

ABA Young Birders' Conference

On Saturday, September 22, 2012, I'll be speaking to and birding with a passel of young birders at The American Birding Association's Mid-Atlantic Young Birder Conference. This important event is sponsored by the ABA and Leica Sport Optics, in conjunction with the Delaware Nature Society and Ashland Hawk Watch and hosted by the Delaware Dunlins Youth Birders Club. It will be held at The Ashland Nature Center in Hockessin, Delaware beginning at 8 am. My fellow featured speaker is Marie McGee winner of The ABA's "Young Birder of the Year" contest.

It's so reassuring to see events (like this one) and clubs for young birders springing up all over the place. If you started watching birds as a young person (as I did), you probably remember wondering if there was ANYone else out there in the world who also enjoyed birds. It was a lonely feeling. Lucky for today's budding nature fans it's a billion times easier to connect with like-minded souls. And with events and clubs and regular field trips and camps where you get to spend time with other young birders—well it makes an older birding dude like me very happy to see that the future of birds and bird watching seems to be getting stronger all the time.


I've arranged for all registrants at the ABA's Mid-Atlantic Young Birder Conference to receive a copy of my Young Birder's Guide to Birds of Eastern North America. It's going to be a blast.

If you have a young person in your life who is interested in birds and nature, please encourage them to attend one of the many organized events for young birder/naturalists.

Another resource is the newly redesigned and relaunched Young Birders' section on the Bird Watcher's Digest website. It is sponsored by our friends at Leica Sport Optics. I'm especially proud of the birder/blogger content we're highlighting, as well as the list of clubs and organizations for young birders.

I look forward to meeting these new bird watchers—in Delaware later this month, and at events in the years ahead. How exciting!

New Site for Young Birders!

I have a great deal of respect for individuals who "pay it forward" at some point in their lives. By that I mean, doing something nice or supportive for someone else just because it's the right thing to do—not because there's some big payoff in it for them. You know what I mean, right? The dad who coaches a little league team long after his own kids have left for college; the teacher who runs an after-school science club on her own time, funded out of her own pocket; the teenager who mows the elderly neighbor's lawn; people who voluntarily pick up trash in parks just because it makes things better for everyone!

I also admire companies who invest in causes that they care about. One such company is Leica Sport Optics which has invested many thousands of dollars over the past couple of decades in support of programs for young birders. Leica has co-sponsored youth birding camps, conferences, young birder teams in birding competitions, optics giveaways for young birders, and special youth-oriented events at birding festivals.


Now Leica is the sponsor of a new online resource for young birders on the Bird Watcher's Digest website simply called Young Birders. The site is designed to help beginning bird enthusiasts to have a successful start in the hobby. And it gives avid young birders a place to share their experiences, adventures, images, tweets, and blog posts with others.


Three young bird watchers are sharing their regular blog posts on the Young Birders site: Corey Husic, Kristina Polk, and Kyle Carlsen. Other resources included in the site are: a directory of young birder organizations in North America, a photo gallery, a running stream of fascinating bird facts, tips for choosing optics and a field guide, and ticker-windows showing Leica's Facebook and Twitter feeds.


The Leica Young Birders site will be streaming tweets that use the hashtag #youngbirders.

I'm so thrilled to see all the resources available to young birders today. How I wish we'd had similar opportunities for connecting and learning back when I was a young birder (in the days when dinosaurs still walked the Earth).

My sincere thanks (and much admiration) to Leica Sport Optics for their years of consistent support for the growing community of young bird watchers.

That's what I call "paying it forward!"

New Binoculars for a Young Birder!

What might inspire a young birder as much as placing a live bird in their hands? [That's my daughter Phoebe with a baby bluebird in her hands.]

Placing a brand new, high-quality binocular in their hands would probably be on top of the list.

When I think about the optics I used for the first 10 years of my bird watching, it gives me a headache (or brings back unpleasant memories of the headaches my old binocs gave me.) I've said this many times before, we are living in The Golden Age of Birding!

Think about it:

• You can buy excellent starter binoculars for about $100.
• You can walk into any bookstore anywhere in North American and buy a field guide to the birds (or mammals, butterflies, moths, reptiles, etc).
• You can get bird seed and a feeder at any number of retail stores in your town.
• You can listen to any bird song in North America on your ever-present cellphone.
• You can get up-to-the-second info on bird sightings on the same device.
• You can brag INSTANTLY to all your birding friends about the Bachman's sparrow at your bird bath, via social media.

I remember the first time I look at a bird through a pair of really nice binoculars. And I also am regularly reminded about the power of good optics when I loan out my extra binocs to young bird watchers on the dozens of trips I lead each year. Hearing the gasp and "WOW!" when they get a really good look at a bird—well it's a special moment because it might just be opening their eyes to a whole new world.


That's what happened to me. And if you remember the moment you sparked on birds and birding, maybe you want to help someone else enjoy that same experience.

Our friends at Leica Sport Optics have joined up with us at Bird Watcher's Digest to find a worthy young bird watcher in the United States to whom Leica will be giving a new pair of Trinovid binoculars. If you read our magazine you know that this model is a top-rated binocular, so it's no small thing to give away. It's NOT a $100 starter binocular. That's why we're calling this giveaway Leica's Great Leap Forward for a Young Birder. We think it could provide that very thing for a deserving young person who is interested in birds.

If you know a young birder who would really benefit from some new (and really nice) binoculars, won't you consider nominating them?

The winner and five runners up will also receive an autographed copy of my new book The Young Birder's Guide to Birds of North America.

Thank you!

Birds & People at MBS 2011

I want to share some images with you from the 2011 Midwest Birding Symposium held September 15 to 18 at Lakeside, Ohio. If you were there, you know we had a really great time. If you weren't there, I hope these images will give you some idea of what the MBS is all about. I'll be posting about the MBS a few times in the coming weeks, but for this initial post, let's just take a gander at some of the birds and people. The image above is a male American redstart. The symposium was held at the peak of fall warbler migration along the Lake Erie shore.

Hoover Auditorium was filled with MBS attendees for both morning and evening keynote presentations by folks like Al Batt, Bridget Stutchbury, Peter Dunne, Julie Zickefoose, Kenn and Kim Kaufman, and Greg Miller (one of the three real characters from the book The Big Year). During the MBS, Hoover Auditorium was sponsored by SWAROVSKI OPTIK.

These are our friends Hugo, Irene, and Rafael from the Guatemala-based tour company Operador Latino. They were displaying their tours and materials in a booth in the Birder's Marketplace in South Auditorium. We had more than 60 vendors this year!

Avid Ohio birder/naturalist Sandy Brown keeps her birdmobile loaded with all the gear she needs to enjoy the natural world. Her license plate says it all.

Out at the six MBS designated birding sites, we had volunteer guides stationed, ready to take people out for some bird watching. All guides sported the official MBS guides' trucker hat: black with the MBS Caspian tern stitched on the front panel.

Over at Magee Marsh, many MBS attendees enjoyed looking at the trumpeter swan families. These birds are part of a reintroduction program that is aimed at restoring a viable population of these elegant birds to Ohio.

In South Auditorium on Saturday afternoon lots of bird book authors lined up to sign copies of their books. Shown here from right to left are: Mark Garland, Marie Read, Julie Zickefoose, Connie Toops, and Jeff Gordon.

Another fall migrant, a magnolia warbler. This beauty was photographed at Meadowbrook Marsh and official MBS birding site on the Marblehead Peninsula.

Bird sound expert and Zen master Michael O'Brien lead a walk to the Lakeside pier to listen for the sounds of migrant birds overhead. This was a nice add-on to his MBS talk "Things That Go Seet in the Night."

Super volunteers Marc Nolls and Mike and Karen Edgington helped to organize and run the MBS bird checklist as well as the conservation raffle. Thanks to their efforts, the generosity of our sponsors and donors, and the avid participation of our attendees, the 2011 MBS conservation raffle raised more than $11,000 for bird conservation causes. The Ohio Ornithological Society agreed to match up to $10,000, so our MBS conservation fund total was $21,000! I'm extremely proud of this.

Among the incredibly hard-working MBS staff were, from left to right: volunteer Sheryl Young, Jim Cirigliano, managing editor of Bird Watcher's Digest, and Ann Kerenyi, BWD controller and goddess of ossumness in charge of details for the MBS.

Guides from MBS sponsor Field Guides Birding Tours lead groups of MBS attendees at Magee Marsh. A total of 137 bird species were seen during the 2011 MBS, including a fly-by red-necked phalarope spotted by Cameron Cox at the Leica Lake Watch on the Lakeside pavilion.

My gratitude to the following photographers who took the images above during the 2011 MBS: Ernie Cornelius, Ann Oliver, Liz McQuaid, Sherrie Duris, Micki Hendrick, and Sandy Brown.

Opportunistic Anis

Smooth-billed ani.

Last July I was on a digiscoping trip to Trinidad & Tobago sponsored by Leica Sport Optics. On the second day of the trip, we left the friendly confines of Asa Wright Nature Centre for a bit of birding afield. We drove down out of the mountains to the Aripo Agricultural Research Station, where, after turning off the highway into the station's entrance, we encountered our first interesting birds.

A pair of tiny green-rumped parrotlets was exploring a natural cavity in a tree by the roadside and we stopped our vans to try to get photographs of them. We snapped a few shots, but needed to disembark from the van to let everyone see the birds. As happens so often, our stopping and unloading spooked the birds into flight. Even though hundreds of cars and trucks pass right by this tree each day, few of them probably stop by this tree. And our stopping was enough to encourage the birds to flee. We thought they might be nesting in the cavity, so we removed ourselves a bit and waited, hoping they would return.

Green-rumped parrotlets.

About this time a crew of workers down the road 40 yards started up their weed-whackers. The noise immediately over-rode all other sounds around us and the tall grass which they were cutting down began to fly, in pieces, in all directions. Along a fence line behind the workers a flock of smooth-billed anis began dropping down onto the ground and flutter-walking over toward the weed whacking action. I did a double-take. Conventional wisdom would have had the birds fleeing at the start of the noisy, smoky, grass-destroying trimmers. But these birds were attracted to the noise and activity.

Anis in my experience almost always look disheveled.

And then it dawned on me. The anis were after an easy meal. Just like bald eagles waiting below a dam spillway in winter, grizzly bears gorging on post-spawn salmon, or the barn swallows that follow my tractor when I mow, these anis had made the connection between weed whacking and easy-to-catch insect prey. The string trimmers (called, I once was told, "strimmers" in the United Kingdom!) cutting down the grass were disturbing and maiming lots of grasshoppers and beetles and other yummy bugs. Smart birds.]

Here's a short video of the opportunistic smooth-billed anis:

Judging from the height of the grass, the trimming had not been done here for a long time—maybe a few months. Yet the anis knew to associate the sounds and activity with an easy meal. Isn't that interesting?

Smooth-billed anis are reasonably common birds in the central part of their range: from the islands of the Caribbean, south throughout South America. But they reach the united States only in central and southern Florida, where the species seems to be declining rapidly. Where you find one smooth-billed ani, you are likely to find others since they spend their lives as a part of a noisy flock of a dozen or more birds.

Speaking of a flock of anis. I wonder what the term of venery for a flock of anis is? A showtune of anis? A yawn of anis? A Yanni of anis (for the horrible noise they make)? Your suggestions are welcome here.

Tree Snag Birds

Hey, what's that up there on the end of the snag? Can you see it?

Let's look more closely... It's a bird—a common potoo, to be specific. Potoos are similar to our North American nightjars—the whip-poor-wills and relatives—in that they are large-mouthed, nocturnal birds that fly around catching and eating large flying moths and other insects.

Part of the common potoo's survival strategy during the day, when it's resting, is to use its cryptic plumage to blend in. It perches on top of a broken tree stub or branch, and points its bill and head upward, looking for all the world like a part of the tree. Look how well this bird blends in!

We were taken to a roosting common potoo by our guide at Asa Wright Nature Centre. The bird was perched on a distant snag, inside the canopy, but we were able to digiscope it. While taking photographs and a bit of video, we saw something remarkable happen.

Here's the video I took, combined with a clip I shot a few days later. I hope you enjoy it.

I am trying to imagine being that fledgling common potoo, roosting in its mother's (presumably its mother, though it could be its father) breast feathers. It was about 90 degrees where we were standing. How hot would it be inside those feathers? I shudder to think.

Anyway, you have now been potoo'd here at Bill of the Birds—not by just one potoo, but by two!

White-bearded Manakins

Here, at last, is the white-bearded manakin video I promised to upload last week. I took these clips in late July on the main forest trail at Asa Wright Nature Centre, just past the giant sign that says White-bearded Manakin Lek.

I used a Leica digiscoping set-up to get the shot, and I was amazed at the quality despite the fact that the video was taken inside the forest with only indirect sunlight. The camera movement is all my fault—the result of my ongoing battle for position with my balky tripod.

In the background of the clip you can hear the following: forest cicadas, bearded bellbirds, white-bearded manakins, beardless Jeff Bouton, bearded Kenn Kaufman, Bill of the Birds (mouche/soul patch only), and unidentifiable whispering (probably from other beardless humans).

Tomorrow (or as soon as I can manage it) I will potoo on you.

Asa Wright: Beyond the Verandah

The verandah view at Asa Wright in Trinidad.

It's really hard to leave the incredible setting of the Asa Wright Nature Centre verandah, but if you want to see certain species of the centre's wonderful forest birds, you've got to hit the forest trails. Our first morning, after breakfast, we met our guide Roodal Ramlal at the foot of the verandah stairs. He took us down the main trail and into the forest. All around us we heard insects droning and birds calling and singing. Lizards scooted across the path. We kept our eyes peeled for snakes, but, sadly, saw none.

Roodal and Julie heading down the forest path.

From the dappled sunlight along the upper path, we entered the forest proper, stopping only to identify birds: a golden-olive woodpecker, a cocoa woodcreeper and a cocoa thrush—birds which prompted smart-aleck comments from nearly everyone ("I'm cuckoo for cocoa thrush!")

Jeff Bouton in full digi-pose.

Jeff Bouton, who works for our trip's sponsor, Leica Sport Optics, contorted his body into all sorts of shapes to get that perfect digiscoped image. This was Jeff's second trip to Asa Wright, so he knew (but only hinted at) what we were about to experience.

The manakin hunters scanning the forest.

Before long we were at one of the spots where manakins could be found. How did we know this? Well, there was a sign...


Actually, there were two signs. One pointing us to the correct spot, the other telling us more about the manakin species we were seeing and hearing: the white-bearded manakin.


A small group of about a dozen male white-bearded manakins was making noise and flitting about a few feet off the ground on the right side of the trail. We stopped and spread out to try to catch some of the action with out eyes, binoculars, spotting scopes, and cameras.

Linda and Pete Dunne in manakinland.

Male white-bearded manakin.

Soon one male stopped close by.And he showed us why the species is known as white-bearded manakin, by puffing out his throat feathers in a partial display to a nearby female whom we never saw.


Soon the forest underbrush was alive with male manakins, flashing about in streaks of black and white. Stopping long enough to strike funny poses, puff out their bearded throats, and do a little dance.


And then the birds came even closer. They seemed to be completely oblivious to our gasped exclamations and beeping, whirring cameras.

Then again, we were nowhere near the top of their must-impress list. That skulking female manakin was the object of their attention. And I have to say, even I was impressed with the energy and singing and dancing prowess that was on display that morning.

But this was just one of four separate, mind-blowing birds we would see on this day, on this trail, in this fabulous place. One of them, I've already shared with you prior to today's post. It was the bearded bellbird.

Tomorrow I'm going to throw down a bit of white-bearded manakin video.

Digiscoping at Asa Wright

Crested oropendola.

I've heard several well-traveled friends say that Asa Wright Nature Centre in Trinidad is an excellent destination for a bird watcher's first tropical birding experience. All of the characteristics of a tropical birding experience are present at Asa Wright: jungle/rainforest, amazing plant and animal life, heat and humidity. But the diversity of bird species present is not overwhelming.

Whereas a first trip to Brazil might place you in a spot with 25 to 30 tanager species and close relatives, (Costa Rica has 45 tanagers, Panama 42) Trinidad has about 15 tanagers and relatives. And this holds true across many of the tropical bird families. So it makes for a less confusing introduction to tropical bird watching.

But I believe that Asa Wright is also ideally set up for digiscoping tropical birds. The feeders at Asa are teeming with visitors. The elevated verandah is surrounded by trees and perches used by the birds coming and going to the feeders. Farther out but in plain view are more distant trees used by toucans, tityras, tanagers, and raptors that don't visit the feeders. And the trails! The local nature trails have lekking manakins and singing bellbirds that are regular as clockwork. More on that tomorrow.

All of the images in this post were digiscoped from the verandah (that's how the locals spell it) at the Asa Wright Nature Centre in Trinidad. These are just my "keepers."

Copper-rumped hummingbird.

Male green honeycreeper.

Immature male white-necked jacobin.

Forest elaenia.

Adult male white-necked jacobin.

Swallow tanager.