A Postcard from Space Coast.

Birders on a field trip for the Space Coast Birding Festival.

Though I was late to the party this year, thanks to an overlapping event out west, the 2015 Space Coast Birding & Wildlife Festival was its usual spectacular self. A lot of trade-show activity, catching up with friends, seafood meals, and a bit of birding and photography were crammed into the 3.5 days I was in Titusville, Florida, home of this annual winter festival.

Space Coast has a lot going for it as a birding/nature festival. There's the amazing variety of birdlife present in central Florida in late January. There's the lure of warm weather, ocean beaches, palm trees, and sunshine. There's a huge auditorium full of vendors selling all manner of things birdy. And there's plenty of Florida-grown fresh fruit available to help fight off that case of scurvy you've been harboring all winter.

I'm always impressed with the number of field trips and talks that Space Coast puts on. And these aren't just for birders or about birds. There are events focused on manatees, tortoises, plants, and ecosystems, too, which makes this one of the most well-rounded nature events in North America—perfect for that non-birding spouse or friend who is interested in those aspects of nature that lack feathers. Also if interest is the fact that the region regularly lives up to its "Space Coast" moniker. This year there was a rocket launch of a satellite into space, which was quite the spectacle and easily viewed from anywhere in the area. Nearby Cape Canaveral hosts a huge NASA Kennedy Space Center complex from which most of our space-oriented launches and landings have happened through the last half-century. Interestingly this space complex is why there is so much undeveloped land in the Space Coast region—things like giant rocket launches require lots and lots of real estate to be conducted safely, not to mention all the design, construction, testing, and research that goes into such activity. We have the space program and its large footprint to thank for such magnificent natural places as Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge and Canaveral National Seashore, home to some very sought-after bird and animal species such as Florida scrub-jay, gopher tortoise, and Florida manatee.

This year I helped to lead two field trips at Space Coast. One was a relaxing walk around some of the the 400-acre Enchanted Forest Sanctuary, one of the largest in-shore patches of habitat along Florida's ancient coastal dunes. Even though the birds didn't cooperate so much (thanks to the rainy, blustery morning), we were treated to a tour of the native plants that thrive in the sanctuary by volunteer Elaine Williams.

On Sunday I was part of a team guiding a trip called Central Florida Specialties with Floridians Dave Goodwin, Jim Eager, and Mark Hedden. This trip left festival HQ at 5:00 am in order to make it to Three Lakes Wildlife Management Area in time for the morning stirrings of the red-cockaded woodpecker. Alas, despite our best efforts to get there, we somehow missed this endangered species (though it had been seen in the exact same spot two days prior). That was about the only miss in an otherwise amazing and full day of birding. Fifteen minutes after giving up on the woodpeckers, we were all looking at a Bachman's sparrow 50 feet away, then even close. Followed by a small group of brown-headed nuthatches in the slash pines nearby. Whooping and sandhill cranes, wood stork, every other eastern species of woodpecker, snail kite, merlin, American pipit, wild turkey (the smaller, darker Osceola/Florida subspecies), anhinga, caracara, osprey, Bonaparte's gull, white pelican, and a surprise vagrant Bullock's oriole from the West were among the day's avian highlights. Yes, it was a wow kind of day.

Wood storks.

Earlier in the week I got to spend a morning tooling around Viera Wetlands with my son Liam, who, despite never officially declaring himself a birder, seems to have picked up a lot of bird knowledge by osmosis from his mom and me. We saw loads of cool birds including a super-close loggerhead shrike, but perhaps Liam's favorite things were several sunning American alligators and an otter that galumped across the dike road in front of us. Liam ID'd it immediately, which made me really proud and happy.

American alligator.

 

Brown-headed nuthatch.

Male Bullock's oriole.

Loggerhead shrike.

 On Saturday night I was honored to be the keynote speaker for the festival. I gave a new version of my "Perils & Pitfalls of Birding" talk and the assembled crowd seemed to enjoy it. Afterwards Julie and Wendy Clark and I sang a few Rain Crows' songs to close out the show. You can hear an earlier version of my "Perils" talk in the archives for my podcast "This Birding Life."

If you've never experienced the Space Coast Birding & Wildlife Festival, you owe it to yourself to check it out. My kudos to Neta and Rhonda Harris and their fantastic festival team for putting on a can't-miss event. And to Brevard County for preserving wild places in this corner of the Sunshine State.

If you simply cannot wait to get to the Space Coast region of central Florida, there's a Bird Watcher's Digest Reader Rendezvous happening there in late February of 2015 (just three weeks from now as I'm writing this post.) We'll be visiting most of the nearby birding hotspots that the festival trips hit and seeing (we hope) all of the same fantabulous birds. More info is here on the Reader Rendezvous pages of our website.

Here's hoping our paths will cross again soon, somewhere out there with the birds.

Liam (right) and BT3 goofing off in the field.

Hey! What's That Big White Bird?

While guiding a field trip of bird photographers last weekend at Goose Pond Fish & Wildlife Area near Linton, IN, we had a special treat. We enjoyed a "Hey! What's that BIG WHITE BIRD?" moment.

Amid the thousands of migrating sandhill cranes were a few whooping cranes! During the weekend we saw 16 whooping cranes total—a significant percentage of the world population of this critically endangered bird. (There are about 600 whooping cranes total counting both wild and captive birds).

We were very careful to give the whooping cranes plenty of space. And they rewarded us with wonderful looks, if slightly distant. But that's what spotting scopes are for, right?


We watched the whoopers foraging in the wetlands.

We saw them in flight, and on Sunday, we even saw a few of them engage in some courtship dancing, which I'd never seen before in this species. To see this many whooping cranes in one place in one day, outside of their wintering areas in Texas and Florida, is really notable.

As the final field trip wound down on Sunday, we had one more BIG WHITE BIRD surprise. While watching northern harriers, rough-legged hawks, red-tailed hawks, and a young bald eagle coursing and soaring over a wet meadow, one of our group called out a flock of large white birds approaching us from the north.

It was a flock of 16 American white pelicans, newly arrived from the points farther south. The spring's first sighting at Goose Pond. And a great way to end the weekend, with the promise of spring's coming.

Vinyl Siding for Prairie Chickens

Did the title of this post make you wonder for a moment? I hope so. Sounds pretty weird, doesn't it? But it's true. Let me explain.

Out on the wide-open expanses of the Oklahoma prairie (and in a few nearby states) the lesser prairie chicken is holding onto its existence, barely. But the species' population is a fraction of what it once was. Prairie chickens were once so abundant that they fed pioneer families for entire seasons. Market hunters shot them until the hunters' arms were too sore to shoot anymore. And over the last two centuries, the species has decline significantly from hunting pressure, but more recently as a result of habitat loss and habitat alteration.

Native short-grass prairie is the specific habitat that the lesser prairie chicken prefers. Plow it up for wheat or soybeans or any other crop and the chickens have to go elsewhere. When trees naturally seed and grow up tall enough to cast a shadow, the chickens, feeling the trees might be ideal for a perching or hiding predator, go elsewhere. Plop down an oil derrick or a line of wind turbines—same result: move along LPCs.

All of these factors have contributed to the decline of this very special prairie species. But lurking just above ground level was another culprit in the lesser prairie chicken's decimation: barbed wire. Researchers in the field had discovered what farm hands and ranchers had known for a long time: prairie chickens often fly just above ground level, and because they often fly in to lekking grounds well before daylight, this flying style made them especially prone to colliding with barbed wire fence. The fence is essentially invisible in low light: rusty wire against sere-brown grass.

That's where the vinyl siding comes in. Field researchers looking for a way to reduce fence-chicken collisions landed on a seemingly ingenious solution. Small, three-to-four-inch sections of vinyl siding, with its interlocking channels, snapped perfectly into place on strands of barbed wire. The white hunks of hard vinyl fluttered slightly in the prairie wind, but held fast to the wire. Unlike pieces of white flagging, the vinyl siding lasted through the intense hot and cold and high winds of the Oklahoma seasons. Best, though, they made the wire fence strands visible to flying lesser prairie chickens, even in low light conditions.

My reason for being in Oklahoma was to deliver a keynote talk to the Lesser Prairie Chicken Festival in Woodward, Oklahoma. This festival offers the expected field trips to temporary viewing blinds set up adjacent to known display leks so attendees can see the chickens in action. Since the LPC was a life bird for me, I was excited to make the trip to Woodward. But the festival also offers something that I found to be even more meaningful—a chance to do something to actually help the lesser prairie chicken: by placing strips of vinyl siding on barbed wire fences in habitat adjacent to known lesser prairie chicken habitat.

One of the prairie chicken experts I got to meet in Oklahoma was Dr. Dwayne Elmore (above). He knew the location of most of the active LPC leks in the area.


We met a guy from the Oklahoma Department of Natural Resources who selected a section of fence for us to mark. He demonstrated how to mark the fence for the chickens, pointed to several large burlap sacks of cut-up vinyl siding, then pointed to a long stretch of as yet unmarked barbed-wire (locals call it "bobwire") fence.


We set to work.
The idea was to stagger the siding pieces every two feet or so on the top two strands of wire. This seems to be the most effective use of this collision deterrent, since it's right at the height at which LPCs do much of their flying at dawn and dusk.

Here's a piece of vinyl siding snapped into place. The channels in the siding are just the right size to snap down over a strand of wire, between the barbs/bobs.


As you can see, the white siding pieces present a visual image that's easy to notice.

After the fence was marked and we ran out of siding pieces, we felt a real sense of accomplishment. Here's hoping the fence-marking program results in greatly lower mortality from fence strikes, which could in turn mean more chickens dancing on the prairie.

I've got at least a couple more posts in mind about this wonderful part of the world and the great birds and people there. I'll try to get back for a BOTB visit to the big wide open of Oklahoma sometime soon.

Peregrine Nation

Once upon a time, when a bird watcher flipped through the raptor pages of his or her field guide, the image of the peregrine falcon probably engendered wistful and wishful feelings. Despite the fact that the peregrine is one of the most widely distributed raptors worldwide, in North America it has been an endangered species for as long as most of can remember. This was due to the lingering effects of DDT and other chemical toxins in the food chain, which inhibited the falcon's reproductive success.

A number of recovery efforts for this species—mainly hacking peregrine chicks into protected human-made nest sites–has succeeded beyond expectation. With the happy result that the American peregrine falcon was taken off the Endangered Species List in 1999.

Today we find peregrine falcons nesting in places where they never existed. Indeed this has been the subject of great debate among birders, wildlife managers, and both government and NGO biologists. Is it OK to put a super predator into a habitat where it never naturally occurred? For example: a peregrine nesting tower built in a vast, flat, coastal marsh which has chicks fledge successfully from it is likely to be where at least one of those chicks returns to nest. And when it does it begins to prey upon the local colony of least terns or piping plovers—two other federally endangered species. Depending on the location and landscape, historically such a habitat would only have passing visits from migrant peregrines.

And what if the local great horned owl comes by the peregrine tower and starts making owl pellets out of the peregrine nestlings? Big dilemma.

Setting aside the bio-ethical dilemma for un momentito, I have to say that I LOVE seeing peregrine falcons on a more regular basis. We even have them nesting on a bridge over the Ohio River between Belpre, Ohio and Parkersburg, WV. And in this area, my guess is that the falcons are living primarily on a diet of rock pigeon—which we have in abundance.

Last Friday as we were leaving a rather somber event in Parkersburg, I spotted a big female peregrine flying between buildings, heading away from the river. She landed on a six-story bank building and began to call. Within minutes her mate swooped in carrying food, landed briefly, then both birds took to the sky. What a thrill!

One of the birds landed on the Wood County courthouse and began drinking (we hypothesized) from a rain puddle on the roof. My guess is that this is the pair of adults that nested under the bridge last year, raising three birds to fledging.

Atop the Wood County, WV courthouse.

On my recent Bohemian waxwing adventure, I spied this peregrine in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, perched on a hospital.

Grand Rapids, Michigan peregrine falcon.

Many middle-to-large Midwestern cities now have a resident breeding pair of peregrine falcons. There are scores of falcon web-cams documenting the private lives of these aerial masters. As bird watchers, I would imagine that most of us are happy to see this impressive raptor. We have become, if you will, a peregrine nation.

I just hope that, when I leave this mortal coil, I'm not reincarnated as a rock pigeon in Parkersburg, WV.

Clean as a Rail

I believe I have discovered the secret of how the light-footed clapper rail keeps its feet so clean. After all, if you made your living striding around in the marsh mud, do you think you could live up to the name "light-footed?"

This sub-species of the clapper rail is found along the Pacific Coast of southern California, south of Los Angeles. It is critically endangered due to a number of factors: habitat loss, increased predation, rising ocean levels, and the effects of pesticides. Efforts to help the species to recover have been fairly successful where there is enough appropriate habitat.

Our "Birds Along the Border" field trip at the San Diego Bird Festival encountered this bird in the salt marshes in a park along San Diego Bay. A handful of us lingered to watch this bird after the rest of the group headed back to the bus and we were rewarded with a nice long view of the rail taking a bath.

Scratching the Rhino

The special surprise offered to participants in The Ohio Ornithological Society's Wilds Winter Birding Extravaganza on Saturday, January 16, was a trip behind the scenes at this endangered animal breeding and research facility. Where behind the scenes? To the rhino building to see the southern white rhinoceroses, including Anan the new baby rhino born last Halloween! This was perhaps the only thing that got our kids to go along on the trip—the promise of seeing rhinos up close.

Anan and her mom.

After a bit of bus hopping and a short introductory talk from The Wilds' rhino experts, we were ushered into one of the two rhino barns, tucked deep in a valley, and surrounded by industrial-strength, rhino-proof fencing.

We were told we could touch the rhinos—that they even liked it! But that we needed to be very careful when sticking our appendages through the metal pipe fence lest a rhino accidentally lean toward us and pin our body parts against the fence.


Clearly these animals were used to humans and approached our curious group for a closer look.
SO MASSIVE! My gosh these things look and feel like armored tanks, but their eyes are soft and small.Look at the massive feet on these surprisingly mobile and nimble mammals.


We all took turns petting, scratching, and admiring the rhinos as they stood next to our reaching hands.
The rhino skin was hard and dusty, like mud-spattered heavy canvas overlaying concrete.


Anan made her appearance, walking right up to Julie and Liam. Julie, of course, kissed her right on the snout. Watch for her blog post soon, likely titled "Frenching the Rhino."

But Zick The Animal Charmer did not stop there. Oh noooo. As soon as the mama rhino came over to be scratched, Julie began scratching her inside a giant crease in her skin on the flank in front of the hind legs.

The rhino gave many signs that this felt good: leaning in closer, relaxing her skin to let Julie scratch more deeply, exhaling deeply, breaking rhino wind (true!), and finally, as if feeling the ultimate in relaxation, dropping slowly to the ground.

But Julie was not the only one with a special connection to these animals.

Liam immediately felt he had "special rhino powers" much like the "special gorilla powers" he experienced at The Columbus Zoo (which is affiliated with The Wilds). Who were we to disagree, when we saw how the adult female rhino seemed attracted to Liam, and how calmly he stood there petting and talking to her, when others in our group backed away?

Phoebe would be mad if I did not include her rhino photo here, too. And since she and I are about to spend a week at a birding festival together I need to stay on her good side.

Even I got a chance to scratch the rhino, and I really dug it.
What a completely cool addition to our winter birding adventure at the Wilds. I've still got a buzz from those rhinos. So much so that I am thinking of changing this blog to Bill of the Rhinos. What do you think?

Buck Fever at The Wilds

The rolling grasslands of The Wilds, a "reclaimed" strip mine that is now an endangered animal facility and a birding hotspot.

Heading back to The Wilds for another post or two...

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, we took the kids on a drive to The Wilds, near Cumberland, Ohio for a day of birding and animal watching. Deer-hunting season was set to start in two days. Because The Wilds has vast areas of fenced grassland where endangered animals are captive bred and studied, hunting is not allowed inside its boundaries.

The local white-tailed deer know this, and they spend hunting season inside the fenced areas, practically thumbing their noses at the hunters driving the perimeter roads. The hunters, for their part, can barely see out of their truck windows because their hyperventilating has caused the glass to fog. Why are they hyperventilating? Because right across that tiny little fence is a group of monster bucks practically begging to be "harvested." Aside from the bounty of meat these giant deer would provide, their heads and awesome racks would look so righteous on the den wall back home.

The bucks gather in loose groups, loafing, grazing, casting glances at the trucks driving slowly past—trucks with heavy sighs and even sobbing coming from them. Each buck we spotted was bigger than the last. Eight-pointers looked puny. Ten pointers and larger were the norm.

But there are other, even more impressive antlered creatures at The Wilds. The super-rare Pére David's deer from Asia is bred at The Wilds. Its antlers branch upward impressively, dwarfing the largest of the white-taileds. This species, extinct in the wild in its native China since the late 1800s, was saved by a French missionary named Father (or Pére) David Armand. Captive breeding in Europe throughout the last century has permitted the species to be reintroduced to small parts of its former range in China.

Pére David's deer, digiscoped at great distance.

While we were enjoying a northern harrier coursing low over the fields, a herd of sable antelope trotted over the rise. These handsome dark brown animals have long, tapered horns that arch up and backward. Native to Africa, sable antelope are prized by big game hunters for their amazing horns. The herd here at The Wilds seemed to be about a dozen animals, including at least one well-horned male which stood out in the crowd. Unfortunately I did not get a decent photo, so I borrowed this one from The Wilds' website, where you can see images of all the animals being bred and studied there.

Sable antelope. Image ©The Wilds.

With the day's end drawing near, we enjoyed the sunset and began the drive home. Just a mile down the road, we found the last monster buck of the day, crossing a field rather nonchalantly. He was outside the fence but seemed to think he was still off-limits because he scarcely made a move to run as we lowered our windows and snapped photos. The light was poor, so the pictures were less than ideal, but this regal creature seemed the picture of health.

We hope he's still that way now, several weeks later.

A trip to The Wilds may yield some great looks at birds, but there's a lot of other stuff to ogle, too. By the way, for those of you within driving distance of The Wilds, The Ohio Ornithological Society will be holding its annual winter birding day at the Wilds, on Saturday January 16, 2010. You can get more info on this free event at the OOS website.

Episode 21: This Birding Life Podcast

Cebu flowerpecker painting ©Richard Allen.

I've just finished and uploaded episode 21 of my This Birding Life podcast and it's available for free downloading at Podcast Central on the Bird Watcher's Digest site. You can also get it in the iTunes Store's Podcasts section, in the Games and Hobbies (MP3 version) or Literature (M4a version) categories.

This episode is based on an interview I conducted during my trip to the Philippines last March. My guest is Lisa Marie Paguntalan a conservation biologist who is working to save two critically endangered birds on the island of Cebu in the Philippines: the Cebu flowerpecker and the black shama. Lisa has been working with a team of field researchers and forest wardens to study and protect the forest remnants where these two species are barely hanging on. It's been a tough, long road.

She has had to convince the local farmers and villagers that protecting the forest is in their own best interests. She has worked to convince local politicians that recovering forest is better than the construction of yet another winding mountain road. And she has accomplished these things on behalf of a bird (the flowerpecker) that is small, shy, and vanishingly rare: there are just 100 or so Cebu flowerpeckers in the world, all living in three small forest fragments on Cebu. In fact, it's so hard to find and see that there never has been a decent photograph taken of this species.

Lisa Marie Paguntalan

The Philippines have suffered from centuries of exploitation due to the islands' rich resources. Mining, logging, agriculture, and subsistence farming and hunting have affected nearly every part of this country. Lisa and her fellow bird conservationists face an uphill struggle, but if you listen to her story as she tells it in Episode 21: Saving the Cebu Flowerpecker, you'll see there is reason for hope.

I owe a special thanks to all my Philippine birding and tourism friends for inviting me on the trip. To Tim Appleton of the British Birdwatching Fair for including this lone American on an otherwise 100% Brit birding trip. Thanks to Richard Allen for granting permission to use his beautiful painting of the Cebu flowerpecker. To Godfrey Jakosalem and David Tipling for their excellent photography included in the enhanced audio (M4a) version of this episode.

And I am especially grateful to Lisa Marie Pagutalan and her colleagues for the work they are doing in the forests of Cebu.

Lisa Marie Paguntalan and a colleague recording bird data on Cebu.

Lisa Marie and a contingent of birders and tourism officials from the Philippines will be attending The British Birdwatching Fair in England next month. The Cebu flowerpecker is just one of the species included in the event's Critically Endangered Birds fundraising efforts benefiting BirdLife International.

Happy listening!

Mystery Shorebird: Knot or Not?

While spending a morning last week on the beach on Sanibel Island, Florida, I was seeing the usual shorebird suspects: willets, sanderlings, and a few ruddy turnstones. Then a flock of chunky birds dropped in, settling among a resting mixed flock of terns and gulls. My first pre-bins guess was dunlin, but when I got them in my binocs I noticed that they were bigger than dunlin, plumper looking, and lacked the dunlin's longer decurved bills. They settled down and immediately tucked their bills under their wings to rest. Could they be tired migrants?


These birds were in drab winter plumage, with uniformly gray-brown backs. They had a medium-length bill. A fair amount of scalloping was on the breast and flanks and the legs were dull yellow and relatively short. There was the hint of an eyebrow and a darkish cap.


This was adding up to be a pretty neat species. Finally the snoozing birds raised their heads and and I felt solid in identifying them as red knots. This is one of our most imperiled shorebird species. Red knots winter along the southern coasts of the U.S. We almost never see this species in Ohio.

I've seen red knots many times before—usually along the Delaware Bay where they stop in spring migration to feast on the bountiful eggs of horseshoe crabs. Nature in its infinite wisdom and perfect timing, aligned the nesting of horseshoe crabs, which come to shore to deposit their eggs by the millions in spring, with the passage of migrant shorebirds—especially the red knot. The knots fatten up on the tiny green eggs and put on fat necessary to fuel their remaining journey to the northernmost sliver of the North American continent to nest.

The fishing industry in the East has been over-harvesting horseshoe crabs to use as bait. The resulting reduction in nesting horseshoe crabs has drastically reduced the primary migration food source for the red knot. And this has affected the red knot population, which has dropped more than 50 percent since the 1980s.

It was a privilege to see this small flock of red knots, as yet unbanded, spending the winter here on this beautiful beach. I wished them well in their season of travel to come.