In Dead Horse Bay, thousands of Great Scaup, Aythya marila, are rafting together.
Posts Tagged 'birding'
A Raft of Ducks
Published February 21, 2012 Fieldnotes 4 CommentsTags: birding, birds, Brooklyn, Dead Horse Bay
Coot
Published February 16, 2012 Fieldnotes 4 CommentsTags: birding, birds, Brooklyn, Prospect Park
The American Coot, dwarfed by a juvenile Mute Swan in both perspective and actuality, is a Prospect Park regular, but never in very large numbers. There were several on the Lake last week, and a surprising dozen plus at the Boat House. Although duck-like, Coots (Fulica americana) are actually Gruiformes, or rails (I saw their cousins the Common Gallinule in St. John). The most notable distinction, besides the very un-duck-like bill, is that they don’t have webbed feet. Their toes are lobed, which helps them move through the water. And they do come ashore, so you can see these interesting toes.
Feeders
Published February 13, 2012 Fieldnotes 4 CommentsTags: birding, birds, Brooklyn, Prospect Park
Approaching the bird feeders in Prospect Park, I heard several Blue Jays screeching. The feeders themselves were completely abandoned, which is a sure sign of something going on, although there were Downy Woodpeckers, House Finches, Red-winged Blackbirds, and Mourning Doves all around in the trees. The male Red-wings are generally one of the earliest birds to return north in the spring, but some will stick around through a mild winter like this one. They generally don’t vocalize this early, but these boys were wound up. They all knew what the Blue Jays knew. 
A Cooper’s hawk, Accipiter cooperii, was nearby, raptor-eyeing the scene. Cooper’s Hawks, which are similar looking to the smaller Sharp-shinned Hawks, Accipiter striatus, are Accipiters, or woodland hawks, built to maneuver through forests swiftly. They have long stripped tails, relatively short, rounded wings (as compared to the long pointy ones of falcons and the large, broad wings of soaring hawks, or Buteos, like the commonly seen Red-tailed Hawk). Their usual prey is other birds, which they take by surprise, suggesting this was not this particular bird’s hour. A mature bird, it had its post-juvenile characteristic red eyes and horizontal russet stripping across the chest. There is another North American Accipiter, the Northern Goshawk, which is an extremely rare bird in the city, although there was a juvenile in Prospect Park a few years ago.
While watching this Cooper, and the active, vocal song birds in the area (though they totally boycotted the feeders), I saw a juvenile Red-tailed Hawk make a pass over the feeders, which also attract squirrels. 
This squirrel, representative of what is normally a pretty vivacious species, hunched very, very still, trying to blend into the branch. The Red-tailed hawk landed below and back from the Cooper’s, which made the Cooper’s give it neck-twisting looking-over, but otherwise they seemed to ignore each other.
I know, I know… it look a lot of observation to be able to get a bit of a handle on identifying the raptors (for instance, there are a dozen species of raptors on the Prospect Park bird checklist), who are often just a fast blur. But the more you look, the more you’ll see. Deep breath. Patience. Awfully helpful is the richly illustrated, but too heavy for the field. Wheeler’s Raptors of Eastern North America.
For the last few winters, I’ve been noticing Cooper’s in my part of Brooklyn, Cobble Hill-Carroll Gardens. Last week I also saw one fly over the bus I was on going up 5th Avenue in Park Slope. Where there are bird feeders, there are song birds, and where there are groupings of songbirds there will be raptors.
Short Note on Winter Birding
Published February 11, 2012 Fieldnotes 1 CommentTags: birding, birds, Prospect Park
The New York City region is, for some birds, “the south” they migrated to in winter. Open fresh water and sheltered salt water bodies attract ducks like Pintails, Wigeons, Gadwells, Canvasbacks, Red-heads, Scaups, Mergansers, Buffleheads, Shovellers, Teals, Long-tailed, and Scoters. The Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in the late afternoon is home to an amazing display of Snow Geese returning to the shelter of the ponds after a day of foraging elsewhere. Long skeins of the white, black-wing-tipped birds fly out of and into the setting sun. It is an amazing sight, and it’s accessible by public transportation. North Atlantic pelagic species, those birds that spend the majority of their lives at sea, are more likely to be seen close to shore this time of year. Last week, two Razorbills were sighted from the Coney Island Boardwalk. A few Snowy Owls, in this major irruptive year, have been seen along the city’s shoreline. Loons, who nest in fresh water, can now be found off-shore. On solidly dry ground, a White-Winged Crossbill was spotted briefly in Prospect Park last week; this northern finch is an infrequent visitor to our city.
Cycles, the nature of nature blogging: a year ago I posted this about the thousands of Greater Scaup in Gravesend Bay.
Northern Shovelers, Anas clypeata, with the males in full breeding plumage. Called “shovelers” because of their unusually long bills, which they use to strain food from the water. Here, on the Prospect Park Lake, they’re clustering in a tight scrum and moving around in circles to stir up plankton, seeds, etc.
Field Trip: Croton Point
Published February 7, 2012 Fieldnotes 2 CommentsTags: birding, birds, Croton Point
Croton Point Park is an hour north of the city by train ($18 roundtrip, off-peak). The park itself is just to the west of the Croton-Harmon train station – which inspired this line I donate to Country music gratis, “my heart’s as empty as a commuter parking lot on Sunday” — across a bridge spanning the train yard. In winter, I mean real winter, when ice is on the Hudson and snow on the ground, the park is an excellent place to see bald eagles. Piscivores, the eagles come south in search of open water. The water intake at the nearby Indian Point nuclear plant is also big draw since it chops up fish.
You have not lived until you’ve seen a bald eagle perched majestically — the cliche is true — on a chunk of ice swept down the river. (It is not unheard of to witness this from the west side of Manhattan, by the way, in a hard winter.) But, because it’s been such a mild one, it was quiet on the bald eagle front compared to previous Februarys. One juvenile bird was seen, repeatedly going after some food in the water and harried by a trio of gulls as it did so. The Scavengers’ Ball. A mature eagle, with signature white head and tail, was also seen overhead, and then later — probably the same bird — perched on a snag in Croton Bay.
Croton Point was for many years a Westchester Co. garbage dump. The hill at its center is a grasslands covered pile of off-gassing landfill. Some English yew trees, planted in the mid 1800s (and purchased in Flushing), a couple of wine cellars (now closed off, but open when I first visited), and a shoreline littered with locally manufactured bricks, are some of the remnants of the place’s unexpected history. By a telling irony, the Point is also the site of Native American middens, piles of oyster shells and the like, that give evidence of thousands of years of human habitation.
While our walk started quietly, we ended up spotting these species in addition to the Bald Eagles: American Black Duck, Bufflehead Duck, Ring-Billed Gull, Greater Black-Backed Gull, Red-tailed Hawk, Mourning Dove, Rock Dove, Carolina Wren, Golden-crowned Kinglet, White-breasted Nuthatch, Black-capped Chickadee, Brown Creeper, Belted Kingfisher, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Northern Flicker, American Crow, Fish Crow, Northern Mockingbird, Song Sparrow, House Finch, Starling. And was that the bark of an owl? Next time, we’ll stay later.
Picture by T. Paris
St. John Birds II
Published January 27, 2012 Fieldnotes 1 CommentTags: birding, birds, St. John, Virgin Gorda
Last year on Virgin Gorda, the Green-throated Carib was the hummingbird species we saw everyday. The island’s other hummingbird, the Antillean Crested, waited until our last morning to put in an appearance. This year, on St. John, the Antillean was the omnipresent species. GTCs were around, but nowhere in the same abundance. The Crested is tiny, looks black in flight, and, if male, has a diamond-shaped crest that, when the light is right, shines like a jewel.
These photos give only a hint of this little bird’s startling beauty. Like most hummingbirds I know, they move very fast and are very hard to photograph with the technology and skill level at hand.
Another relatively common species on St. John, as on Virgin Gorda, is the American Kestrel. We seemed to be staying in a pair’s territory. One day I saw the male being chased off by three little black bolts: they were these hummingbirds. Small, but fierce.
Small islands are tight confines for birds, particularly when the mix of habitats (dry and moist forests, mangrove, salt pond, shoreline) on them is only a portion of the whole. There are just a handful of resident songbird species on St John. [See under: mongoose.] The ubiquitous Bananaquit is one:
Its whistle songs enlivening mornings and evenings. Another is the Lesser Antillean Bullfinch. I watched a pair of these “rob” flowers of nectar by going to the base of the long blossoms, which are perfect for hummingbirds, with their short bills. By robbing, I mean they don’t pay the toll of picking up much pollen this way.
The richest bird habitat on the island are the salt ponds, which are often ringed by mangroves. I was halfway around the Francis Bay Trail at Mary Point despairing of seeing anything but Pearly-eyed Thrashers and Zeneida Doves, when I noticed the gallinule above. Which gallinule was the question. A new bird can often be discombobulating. It looked like nothing in my Princeton Field Guide to the Birds of the West Indies. (James Bond, where art thou?) There was a touch of red on the forehead. While I was trying to follow this with my eyes through the reeds, something else swam back and forth furiously, but for only a moment. It was much smaller than the chicken-like thing I was looking at. Two mysteries at once. The smaller bird resolved into a Sora, which I didn’t realize could swim. (As it happens, I saw my first Sora in Prospect Park.) When I got to the observation platform, the mysterious red-forehead began to make sense when I saw an adult Common Gallinule (Gallinula galeata), which used to be called Common Moorhen (G. chloropus).
From the observation platform, two more life birds: the White-cheeked Pintail
which I had hoped to see, and the Least Grebe, which was unexpected.
Here’s all the birds I saw, with life species in bold: Least Grebe, Brown Booby, Brown Pelican, Magnificent Frigatbird, Great Blue Heron (St. Thomas), Great Egret, Green Heron, Blue-winged Teal, White-cheeked Pintail, Osprey (resident birds have very white heads), American Kestrel, Common Gallinule, American Coot, Spotted Sandpiper, Rock Dove (St. Thomas), Zeneida Dove, Common Ground-Dove, Mangrove Cuckoo, Smooth-billed Ani, Green-throated Carib, Antillean Crested Hummingbird, Gray Kingbird, Pearly-eyed Thrasher, Yellow Warbler, Hooded Warbler, Bananaquit, Black-faced Grassquit, Lesser Antillean Bullfinch, House Sparrow (also seen inside the St. Thomas airport terminal). (This is the checklist I used.) The only “common” resident species that eluded me was the Scaly-naped Pigeon.
Winter Bright
Published January 13, 2012 Fieldnotes 1 CommentTags: birding, birds, Brooklyn, Prospect Park
House Finch, Carpodacus mexicanus, in Prospect Park. This is the colorful male; the female is drably stripy.
The species is native to southwestern North America. The birds were sold on the East Coast by the pet trade as “Hollywood Finches” until dealing in wild songbirds was made illegal in 1940. Pet store owners, an appalling lot throughout history, dumped their birds to avoid prosecution. A small colony of these finches managed to survive on Long Island before spreading like Levittown up and down the East Coast. The rise in bird-feeding, another symptom of suburbia, is thought to have contributed to this expansion: small flocks of these finches are often found at feeders.
(Confidential to TP: my edition of Peterson, the 5th, definitely describes the Purple Finch, C. purpureus, as “like a sparrow dipped in raspberry juice,” not toxic Kool-Aid.)
Brooklyn’s Grasslands
Published January 11, 2012 Fieldnotes 10 CommentsTags: birding, birds, Brooklyn, Jamaica Bay
You can’t see them in this picture, but there are thirty-five or so Horned Lark on the ground here at the northwestern corner of Floyd Bennett Field. One of the few open ground bird species on the East Coast, Eremophilia alpestris breeds at the tundra top of North America. The Lower 48 are their wintering ground. Grassland species like this are becoming rarer because grasslands are becoming rarer. This is actually a cricket field. 
While a forest is obviously a forest and a swamp clearly a swamp, a grassland to the short-sighted is often no more than an empty space, a waste land, ripe for something else.
Landing in Albuquerque, NM, some months ago, I saw a prairie dog from the window of the plane as it taxied. Airports preserve grasslands by default. Floyd Bennett Field, built atop the waste reclamation factories of Barren Island, was NYC’s first airport. After decades in military service, Floyd Bennett became part of Gateway National Recreation Area. Some of its grasslands are being restored and maintained, but threats of development (casino! NASCAR! fairgrounds! etc.) ever abound.
After all, to a lot of people, it looks like nothing is going on in this field…
And in winter things do look still. But yesterday, I watched a female American Kestrel hunting here. She was hovering, facing the wind with her tail fanned out, her wings beating. She can stay relatively motionless like this in the air as she scans the ground for food. Pickings are slim this time of year, of course, but these raptors can go several days without eating. She made several drops to the ground. Back in the air at one point, it looked like she transfered something from talon to beak. I wonder what it was? Kestrels are our smallest falcons; in summer, they eat insects (grasshoppers, dragonflies, moths etc.), generally plentiful in grasslands, as well as amphibians and reptiles, small mammals, and small birds. In winter, prey choices are reduced to small mammals and birds. 
Two Habitats
Published January 8, 2012 Backyard , Fieldnotes 2 CommentsTags: birding, birds, Brooklyn, insects
1.) A Rufus Hummingbird has been hanging out by the entrance to the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History. This species, Selasphorus rufus, is more generally found in the Northwest and West, so its continued presence in Manhattan since December has been cause for comment. The bird is clearly hardier than you might think for a .21 oz/3.4 g animal, (yes, that was POINT 21 ounces), although our winter has been an almost complete wimpfest so far. The museum — which has a world-class ornithology collection and world-famous ornithologists preserved in formaldehyde — has put up a hummingbird feeder for the zippy little bird. The usual East Coast hummingbird species is the Ruby-throated, which spends the winter far to the south and can generally be glimpsed in the city during migration periods.
2.) An assemblage of found wood, shells, and a tile made by the Federal Seaboard Terra Cotta Corp. of New Jersey. I thought the wood looked a little cobwebby the other day and picked it up to dust. A spider has colonized it.
