The Nemesis Bird » Bird Science

Blackpoll Migration thru Lancaster County

Drew — Fri, 07 May 2010 19:03:29 +0000

I felt like I was hearing a lot of Blackpoll Warblers earlier than expected this year so I dug thru some data on eBird and found that they are actually right on time. First reports start coming in the first week of May if you look at the average birds reported per hour over all the years that have been entered into the eBird database.

Click to zoom in on the graph.

It looks like we can expect the big push to come in the first week of June. I wonder if that first little bump is due to the excitement of seeing them for the first time, which wears off after a week or so.

They can’t all spend the night..

Drew — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:26:26 +0000

And so we learned with a recent saw-whet that we attempted to track. She was released from the banding station at around 10pm and we tracked her for several hours but by 3 am she was gone, presumably having flown to the south out of range of our equipment.

This is a picture of Feist, another owl that left without giving us much time to track it. We were able to get one days roost data before the weekend, and when we came back, she was gone.

Feist (nscnaowls.blogspot.com)
Was it something we said? (nscnaowls.blogspot.com)

Eastern Screech Owl

Drew — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:04:02 +0000

This is one of the eastern screech owls we have caught at the saw-whet banding operations. There are usually one or two that get curious enough each year to get caught in the nets.

Fall Owl job

Drew — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:36:27 +0000

A couple weeks ago I started at a new job as the field tech for the Northern Saw-whet Owl telemetry project run by the Ned Smith Center for Nature and Art in central PA.

So far most of the time has been spent training and waiting for the owls to begin migrating thru our area. Due to several factors including weather, saw-whet migration is behind normal schedule but we have radio-tagged one saw-whet owl so far, Xena.

We also radio-tagged a screech owl, Skreech, for training purposes while we were waiting for our first saw-whet. Here is a shot of her, high up in a chestnut oak staring down at us.

Field season summary

Drew — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 17:54:59 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

My third and final field season for the 2nd Pennsylvania Breeding Bird Atlas is over. This last season I covered quite a bit of new territory for me in central and northern PA, visited 7 state parks I had never been to and camped in 4 of them.

I started off the season in southeastern PA where the highlight was several Blue Grosbeaks, Kentucky Warblers and lots of grassland sparrows including Vesper, Savannah and Grasshopper Sparrows. Warblers were few and far between although I did hear quite a few Tennessee, Blackpoll, Chestnut-sided and Canada Warblers that were still migrating through at the beginning of the season.

Mid-season I was doing surveys on both sides of the Susquehanna River north of Harrisburg where there were more warblers, particularly at higher elevations. Yellow-billed Cuckoos and Yellow-throated Vireos were fairly common. I stayed several days at Raymond B. Winter State Park where the most common birds singing at the campsite were Blue-headed Vireos and Blackburnian and Magnolia Warblers. I also had my first Golden-crowned Kinglet of the season at my site as well as my first Whip-poor-will’s in Pennsylvania.

I ended up the season further west, in Clearfield, Elk, and McKean Counties. I did lots of surveys on reclaimed strip mines that ranged from grassy mountain tops to scattered groves of locust to young forests. Sparrows were definitely the highlight of the reclaimed mines with the best being a single Clay-colored Sparrow and quite a few Henslow’s Sparrows.

Warbler diversity increased in the last part of the field season, especially in places with lots of mountain laurel. While I never happened across a Mourning Warbler, I did find a single Nashville Warbler singing in a sphagnum bog. Other northern species I picked up on surveys were Alder Flycatcher, Winter Wren, Brown Creeper and Golden-crowned Kinglet.

Interesting mammal sightings were several beaver at Parker Dam State Park, a black bear while doing a point count and several porcupines.

Overall it was a good season, although car problems did put a little damper on things. I managed to crack an oil pan and needed to replace my spark plug wires, both which were inconvenient when you are trying to work 7 days a week.

Feeding actually beneficial to birds

Drew — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 01:45:00 +0000

As seen on the front page of Nature.com, feeding birds during the winter is not only fun for the people feeding them. According to a British study, feeding birds in winter benefits them during the breeding season by allowing them to lay their eggs 2.5 days earlier on average than birds that did not have access to winter food. Birds that had been fed all winter also managed to raise an average of almost one more chick each year.

House Finches and American Goldfinches

The researchers looked at 500 nest boxes in N. Ireland, feeding some lucky birds more than 6 tons of peanuts and allowing the others to find their own natural food sources. The researchers think that the nutrients in the peanuts allow for better egg laying so the benefits may be different for various kinds of bird food. Another possibility is that the extra food allowed the birds to get into breeding condition more quickly.

Some birds can come to rely quite heavily on human provided food, relying almost entirely on feeder handouts. The researchers are unclear about how this affects the migrant species that arrive in the spring to search out possible nest sites. By the time they arrive, prime nesting locations may be taken by the birdfeed reliant birds and result in lower numbers of the migrant species hatching each year.

So, it’s hard to say how feeding bird affects all species but for the birds that stick around for the winter, the extra food source can be a real boon. The extra chick/year could really increase certain populations which, depending on the species, could be good or bad. The article also points out how important it is to keep feeding areas clean to avoid the transmission of diseases such as trichomoniasis which can be fatal to young birds.

Link