Our Two Nests!

Here at Bird Watcher's Digest we're intently watching two different—vastly different—birds' nests. One of them has growing nestlings approaching their fledging date. The other nest is still being built.

Our soon-to-fledge nest is a red-shouldered hawk effort, complete with three age-disparate nestlings. Here's a short video clip to show how this nest looks today (Thursday, June 21).



And here is a longer clip of the second nest, which a ruby-throated hummingbird female is busy building right outside my office window at BWD.



Both of these clips were taken with my iPhone 4s camera using a Macguyver'd iPhone camera adapter and my spotting scope.

It's really nice to be able to watch this all unfolding from my workplace. A distraction that makes working inside a tad more enjoyable.

Summer Nature Video Highlights

This summer I've spent a bit of time shooting high-definition video. I am a rank beginner and learning as I go, but it's been an incredibly fun new hobby.

So here is a handful of five-second snippets from the hours of video I've shot (most of which is undeniably deletable). I am saving a few choice clips for later sharing here and elsewhere, though it's tempting to let it all out at once.

I think my dream job would be to be the person who gets to film those "Charles Kuralt nature moments." No voice over, no on-screen graphics—just the imagery and natural sounds of some amazing phenomena: birds, animals, plants, or landscape. I remember his segments so clearly from the CBS Sunday Morning television show.

I hope you like my little montage of clips. There's lots more to come. Thanks for watching.

July/August 2010 eBWD!

The latest issue of Bird Watcher's Digest is now available via our digital edition interface. This issue is sponsored by the good folks at Swarovski Optik.

Among the highlights in the new issue is a great species profile of the cerulean warbler by author Howard Youth. We've augmented Howard's text in the digital edition (eBWD) with audio clips (from Nature Sound Studio) of the cerulean warbler's song plus clips of some of its sound-alike species (northern parula, Blackburnian warbler, and yellow warbler).

But wait! There's more!

We've added a great cerulean warbler video clip, courtesy of our friends at BirdFilms.com.


You can sample all of these various bits of ossumness via our free Look Inside feature here.

If you are already a subscriber to the print edition of Bird Watcher's Digest, you already get free access to every one of our digital editions. Simply register with your subscriber number (on your magazine mailing label) and a valid e-mail address at this link.

Non-subscribers can sample a portion of each issue, but of course, we hope you'll want to subscribe. It's just $15 for six all-digital issues delivered right to your computer, smart phone, or digital reader. And believe me, eBWD looks amazing and is a complete joy to read.

Still not convinced? Here's a page where all of this is explained in detail.

Wishing you great birding and happy reading!

Finding a Pileated Woodpecker Nest

Let's take a short break from our Guyana adventure and enjoy a bird species that's closer to home—at least for those of us in North America.

Two weeks ago I was walking in the old orchard on our farm and I heard the tell-tale sounds of a woodpecker excavating a nest cavity. I followed the sound until I was reasonably sure I knew which large, dead tree was going to be the nest site. However, the tree (a dead yellow poplar trunk) had at least a dozen large holes in it, several of which looked relatively new.

Two days later Julie and I heard the wood-chopping sound while checking the bluebird boxes in the orchard. She immediately thought "pileated" but I wasn't so sure since we have four other woodpecker species that nest on our place. We walked to the trunk and suddenly the head of a male pileated woodpecker poked out of one of the larger holes on the southwest side of the trunk. Not wanting to spook the bird from his work, we slowly backed away and left him in peace.

The following day I went out to scope the site from a distance, but before I could even set up, the male and his mate began drumming and calling to one another. The male swooped into the nest tree, glared at me for a minute, then swooped off into the woods. Now I was really paranoid that I was going to frighten the pileateds into abandoning the nest, which I assumed was still being excavated.

Later that afternoon I went out and listened for the tapping. I heard none and could see no activity in or around the nest hole. This was my chance. I ran back to the garage and grabbed my portable photo blind. Back out to the orchard I ran. I had the thing set up in three minutes. Unzipping the peephole facing the nest I saw that my activity had not gone undetected. The male was there in the nest glaring at me. Very calmly I stepped back out of the blind, zipped it closed and strolled away nonchalantly. The male resumed his excavation a few minutes later, the impacts of his bill sounding like someone using a hatched to split kindling.

I knew I wanted to digiscope the scene but not at the expense of disturbing the birds. Clearly there was no way to get in and out of the blind unnoticed. I decided to try anyway. I went back at 3:00 pm, knowing I had a bit more than an our before I'd have to go pick the kids up at the school bus stop. I carried my Leica digiscoping rig out to the blind and slipped inside. The sound of my footfalls, or perhaps the zippers on the blind, were enough to alert the nest occupant to my presence. When I opened the blind's peephole, there was the female looking out the hole directly at me.

I set up the scope, got good focus, dropped the Leica D-Lux 4 camera and adapter over the eyepiece and shot a dozen frames. The female resumed her work, bringing bill-fulls of chips and sawdust to the opening and dumping them out.

The female pileated (note her black moustache) glaring at me.

Then I flipped it over to video and got this:

I am completely over the moon about this nest and the opportunity to observe it over the next month or so, assuming all goes well with the excavation work, the egg laying, the incubation—you get the picture. And I hope I do, too!

You're the Gull for Me!

Some interesting courtship behavior by ring-billed gulls which I videotaped (actually digi-video) at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge in late January 2010. I've seen ring-billeds do a lot of things, but I'd never seen this courtship display, which I believe is known as "the long call."

Clearly he is saying "You're the gull for me."

Masked Duck: My Latest Lifer!

Here's a short bit of digi-video of my life masked duck. I love that you can hear Phoebe commenting on a flyover Caspian tern in the background. We were birding at Viera Wetlands south of Cocoa Beach in east-central Florida. Viera (a sewage-treatment facility, natch) is one of the primo birding spots of the area and is especially great for bird photography. The duck was at least 120 yards away when I shot this.

Special thanks to Jeff Bouton and Mike Freiberg for the directions to what is my life bird #668 (or is it 669?). I can't dismember.

Anyway, super awesomely cool bird! This species is one I'd dipped on many times in Texas. It's especially sweet to get to see such a rarity with Phoebe (whose life list is not that far behind mine).

Huzzah!

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.

For Whom the Bellbird Tolls

Bearded bellbird.

Not very far down the jungle trail from the main building of the Asa Wright Nature Centre, there's a sign that says Bearded Bellbird. When I first saw this, I thought "Right, like the birds always hang around right by the sign! How conVEEENient!"

Just then, the loud, ringing call note for which these birds are named clanged down from the forest canopy. There WAS a bearded bellbird and it was up there somewhere, calling repeatedly.

Moments later, Julie shouted "I've got the bellbird!" And she did. We scrambled into position to find the bird for binocular looks. Then we trained our spotting scopes on it. The bird was fairly close, reasonably well-lit, and every time it gave a note, its rastalike black wattles (or "beard") shook like wet spaghetti.

How sweet this was—my first decent look at a bellbird, one of those tropical species that jumps out at you from the field guide pages when you're dreaming of life birds. I'd heard bellbirds before. But seeing is bell-lieving.

I took a few still photos with my Leica digiscoping rig, then decided to shoot a short digital video. Here's what the bearded bellbird looked and sounded like at Asa Wright Nature Centre in Trinidad on Monday, July 20, 2009.

All I can add to this post is that bellbirds are LOUD! Talk about a bad bird to have around when you had a hangover. Not that that has ever happened to me. I'm just saying...

Asa Wright: Toast For Breakfast

Relaxed tropical birding from the Asa Wright verandah.

As dawn arrives in the Arima Valley of Trinidad, the birds are the first ones to stir, followed shortly by the bird watchers. In between these stirrings, there is a very important thing—a ritual you might say—that happens in the gardens that separate the rain forest from the buildings at the Asa Wright Nature Centre: the bird feeders are filled.

The well-stocked bird feeders at Asa Wright Nature Centre, as seen from the verandah.

I'd been hearing about the Asa Wright bird feeders for 30 years, at least. Twenty-one years ago, the very first article I worked on as the newly minted assistant editor for Bird Watcher's Digest was an account of birding at Asa Wright and Trinidad by Steve, Dave, and Karl Maslowski. Over the years thousands of bird watchers have made the pilgrimage to Asa, the first nature center dedicated to bird watching and conservation in the American tropics, and still one of the best.

When dawn begins her slow awakening, it is the voices of the forest birds that are your alarm clock at Asa. Each morning during our recent week there it was the bearded bellbird, the great antshrike, or the palm tanagers that awakened me. And then, when you wake up and realize where you are, you begin to move as rapidly as possible to get dressed and down to the main building—the original house that Asa Wright herself lived in—to get to what is probably the world's most famous porch, or as they call it at Asa Wright Nature Centre: the verandah! Yes, they spell veranda with an 'h' on the end, and I've got to tell you, the Asa veranda IS ah-inspiring.

The view, looking down the Arima Valley, from the Asa Wright verandah.

Sitting on the verandah at Asa Wright, you are never at a loss for birds. Bananaquits and palm tanagers are everywhere. The palm tanagers even nest inside the main building, coming and going just inches from the bino-toting bird watchers who have come to experience this bit of the American tropics. Beyond these ubiquitous birds there is a never-ending cavalcade of tanagers, euphonias, honeycreepers, motmots, hummingbirds, and doves flitting to and from the bird feeders. All the while the skies are filled with martins and swallows, vultures and hawks, oropendolas and thrushes, and a constant chorus of songs, calls, and fluttering wings. To sit on the verandah at Asa Wright is the tropical equivalent of sitting in Times Square in New York City for a bit of people watching. Sooner or later, everyone passes by you.

A male bananaquit gets his carbs from bread at the Asa Wright bird feeders.

So what makes these feeders so special? I've visited a number of tropical eco-lodges where nary a bird feeder could be seen. The difference at Asa is that the birds are accustomed to the feeders and they are tuned in to what is being put out daily just for them by the staff at AWNC.

So they must have some secret formula, right? Perfectly devised offerings for tropical bird feeding? Surely that's the secret of Asa's success!

Nope. It's toast, slices of watermelon, papaya, and some nectar in the hummingbird feeders, and that's basically it! I could hardly believe my eyes on my first morning on the world-famous verandah as I watched a staff member carefully placing slices of toast underneath the protective mesh wire that holds the food items in place. She had scarcely stepped a foot away before the bananquits and palm tanagers were on each of the platforms pecking out tiny billfulls of toast.

A preening palm tanager.

Most of the feeder visitors seemed to enjoy the bread, but a few, such as the turquoise-browed motmot, and the crested oropendola, come in just for the fruit. The hummers ( a half-dozen or more species) have eyes and bills only for the nectar in the feeders, though they will occasionally nab a small insect flying over the fast-ripening feeder fruit.

Blue-crowned motmot.

The experience of verandah birding made the folks in our party want to stay put, right there. The birding was that good, and relaxing. But we had trails to walk, birding expeditions to take, and other places, other birds to encounter. If I am lucky enough to return to Asa Wright for another week sometime, I believe I will allot at least 50% of my time there to verandah birding. There's just nothing better than enjoying the birds of the topics from the comfort of a covered porch elevated over the feeders, with a commanding view of the Arima valley.

Bay-headed tanager.

A constantly changing river of birds trickled through the trees surrounding the verandah, including many spectacular tanager species. Regular readers of this blog know that I have a soft spot for tanagers, so you won't be surprised to know that my first really good looks ever at the stunning bay-headed tanager made my knees weak.

I'm only sharing a fraction of the images and amazing birds I saw during our verandah sitting at Asa Wright. Our trip was filled with very talented birders, including our hosts Jeff Bouton of Leica Sport Optics and Mark Hedden of Caligo Ventures. Our fellow participants were Pete Dunne (of Cape May Bird Observatory and New Jersey Audubon) and his wife Linda, Kenn and Kim Kaufman (he of field guide fame and she of the Black Swamp Bird Observatory). To this we added the experienced guides from the Asa Wright staff, so you can be sure that very few birds were left unidentified. Leica sponsored the trip, the focus of which was digiscoping using the new Leica spotting scopes, adaptors, and digital cameras. I'll post more soon about the digiscoping. For now, let me just say that the Leica digiscoping rig is amazingly easy to use and the images (motmot, bananaquit, video in this post) will speak for themselves.

A tegu lizard looks for something to eat below the Asa Wright bird feeders.

And just in case you think we were far too bird-centric in our focus, I'll say that we saw at least five different species of large lizard on the Asa grounds, plus a handful of toads and frogs, and numerous colorful butterflies. Sadly (but perhaps fortunately) we did not encounter any of the snake species common to the Asa property.

One final thing to know about the verandah: It's coffes (or tea) in the morning; tea (or coffee) at the 4 p.m. tea time, then rum punch at 6:00 p.m. This is when most of the lively conversation takes place.

To learn more about the amazing history of the Asa Wright Nature Centre, visit the organization's website. To get a multimedia taste of what the feeder action was like on the verandah, check out this one-minute video I shot of bananaqits and a female green honeycreeper enjoying their morning toast for breakfast:

p.s. Sorry for the day-late posting. Re-entry to the real world is a mind-bender/time-eater.

20 Seconds of Rarity: McCown's Longspur

Here, as promised, is one of the three short videos I digiscoped of the McCown's longspur in Montana. The other two involve lots more grass and the annoying noise of my hand fumbling for the zoom button.

This short clip of a male McCown's is pretty sweet. It'll be a nice thing to look at when I'm old and gray and only able to go birding vicariously—from my Lay-Z-Boy recliner. In a few years.

I hope you like this short clip, too. I can certainly see how, if you had the right equipment, you could get heavily addicted to shooting video of birds. It's harder to do than taking still images, but the pay-off is so much greater.

The Swainson's Warbler Trip!

It's always a bit dodgy when you're asked to lead a birding festival field trip that is dedicated to finding one particular bird species. This is exacerbated by the following additional factors:

1. It's a rare bird, known for skulking in rhododendron thickets.
2. Lots of people sign up (and pay money for the privilege).
3. It's pouring rain.
4. It's the last day of the festival and everyone is COUNTING on seeing this bird.

And so it was last Saturday morning when my friend (and festival founder/raconteur) Geoff Heeter and I loaded 12 or so brave and eager souls onto a Ford Econoline van somewhere near the New River Gorge in West Virginia. This was the Swainson's Warbler Trip and it had but one target bird.

As we drove across WV 19 onto a country road that would take us to a spot that had at times hosted a Swainson's warbler, I was already drafting my apology for the trip participants in case we totally dipped out. The rain pounded on the van roof, pouring down like silver over the windshield, visibility nil.

"Well everyone, we tried our best. Some days you get the bird. Some days the bird gets you. Some days you feel like you've been flipped the bird. Sorry we missed it, but that's a great reason to come back next year!"

or this:

"Those Swainson's warblers are harder to find than a working microphone at a Milli Vanilli concert!"

or this:

"If I had a nickel for every time I've missed this bird, we'd be birding from a stretch limo instead of this rattletrap and eating caviar for lunch instead of flat meat."

Little did I know, I was wasting my time thinking up disappointment-softening excuses.

At our first stop Geoff and I heard two distant Swainson's singing along the creek in separate directions. Neither one was close enough to see or to lure in with a taped call. I decided to walk the group down to a nearby bridge while Geoff and Ned Keller got the vehicles.

From the bridge, one singing male sounded lots closer. Then he moved even closer, but was still out of sight in the thick rhodies, 30 yards upstream. I filled Geoff in about this new development and we motioned to the group to stay put while we carefully moved up the road for a better vantage point. Barely 150 feet farther along, I spotted the bird, teed up and singing against the trunk of a giant hemlock. Within seconds I had him in the spotting scope. Geoff beckoned our group forward and we all took turns drinking in this very rare sight. And the male Swainson's warbler sang and sang and preened and sang....

It felt SO great to show more than a dozen birders this cool and hard-to-find bird. It felt even better to locate a bird that was relaxed and singing from a favorite perch on its territory. No audio luring necessary! No trying to get bird watchers onto a het-up, moving bird. Just us, this beautiful male Swainson's warbler, some nice optics, and the rain, still falling down, but completely unnoticed.

Doing the Swainson's Warbler Life Bird Wiggle.

After we all got great looks I realized, in one of those I-could-kick-myself moments that I had ABSOLUTELY NO CAMERA WITH ME to take this bird's photo. No digiscoping rig. No 30D with a 300mm lens. Nope that stuff was warm and dry in the van. Hearing my remorseful cries, Geoff handed me his camera phone. I held it up to my Swarovski spotting scope and here's what I got!

Bee-eaters of Subic Bay

On the afternoon of March 3rd we spent a few hours bird watching around Hill 394 in the Subic Bay Freeport area. Subic Bay served as the location of a U.S. Naval base from the early 1900s until 1992, at which point the land was turned back over to Filipino control. Because of its years as a military base, there are large areas of undeveloped habitat at Subic Bay, and it's become a well-known destination for local and visiting bird watchers.

In the warm, late-afternoon sun, we enjoyed a nice list of birds, but the highlight for me were the encountered with blur-throated bee-eaters. Bee-eaters are specialists in catching flying insects, as their name suggests. In taxonomic terms, bee-eaters fall between the kingfishers and the hornbills and hoopoes. They are colorful birds with long central tail streamers and finely pointed, decurved bills. And they are often seen perched in the open on a wire or fence, waiting for a hapless insect to pass by.


On our final birding stop at Subic we found a nesting colony of blue-throated bee-eaters along the roadway in a residential neighborhood. They excavate their nests in earthen banks and other locations with dry, sandy soil. There were at least 25 bee-eaters buzzing around. I could have stayed there all afternoon taking pictures. Sadly, our schedule would not permit it, so we all snapped a few images (and I took a short video) and we were off to the hotel and dinner.

Such cool birds! Wish we had them in North America!

Moment of Zen: Preening on the Beach

Doesn't it feel great when you get everything in the right place after a good preen? This mixed flock of gulls, terns, and shorebirds got into the preening mood as I was watching it one February morning on Sanibel Island, Florida. One moment they were napping, then one bird started preening and its neighbors decided that was a really good idea, so they started preening, too. I captured about 10 seconds of the action on video.

In this flock are the following species: laughing gull, ring-billed gull, royal tern, Forster's tern, Sandwich tern, and red knot. I love that the birds kept on preening even as the two humans walked by just feet away.