Enough, already

Got back last week from southwest Florida, where I gave a series of lectures, including talks at Ding Darling NWR and the Southwest Florida Birding and Wildlife Festival.

It was, as most of my visits to Florida are, a mix of the sublime and the emotionally wrenching. It was wonderful to revisit favorite haunts like the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park and Collier-Seminole State Park with Amy and a couple of friends in tow, to watch big flocks of warblers and gnatcatchers moving through the pine flatwoods, or finally see my first wild indigo snake, an endangered species – though the fact that the snake was being eaten by a young red-shouldered hawk left us with decidedly conflicted emotions. It was nice to escape the snowy mountains for a few days, chasing purple gallinules and wood storks, watching short-tailed hawks, or finding a baby red rat snake.

But. There's always a very big "but" for me when it comes to visiting this part of Florida.

For a long time, this was the forgotten part of the Sunshine State, but that hasn't been the case for decades. Naples and Ft. Myers are metastasising with little apparent thought or planning, just a binge that will only end when every inch consumed by a tide of overpriced homes, golf greens and an endless, soulless swarm of Publix, CVS and Winn Dixies.

Yes, there are good things happening in southwest Florida for conservation, attempts to undo the wrongs of the past on the big chunks of land that are protected – like the ongoing work to close up 1960s-era drainage ditches in the old Golden Gate Estates boondoggle, which wrecked the hydrology of much of the Fakahatchee Strand, Florida Panther NWR and the Ten Thousand Islands and Rookery Bay estuarine reserves.

The problem is, the insane rush to build on every square meter that isn't formally protected more than offsets the gains, and (though this is a small thing in the great scheme) manages to rob my time in Florida of much of its pleasure. For a week, virtually every road and highway I drove was under expansion – two-lanes going to four, four lanes to six, six lanes to eight. Coming down I-75 and then Rt. 951 toward Rookery Bay, the longest stretch I drove without passing new construction was maybe half a mile. The redundancy of it all surpasses understanding, but the most surreal moment came when I found myself looking at competing Dunkin' Donuts and Subway shops, facing each other across the intersection like mirror images.

I felt like an accessory to a crime just being there, and the obscene recklessness of it cast a pall on my mood much of the time. By the end of the week, driving back to the Ft. Myers airport past one new golf course subdivision and shopping mall after another, I'd seen enough. It was time to get back to Pennsylvania Dutch country, cold though it may be.

But I had one more gantlet to run. The airport, itself carved out of pine flatwoods, has of course become the nexus for still more development, and several patches ranging from a few dozen acres to more than a hundred were freshly scraped down to the sandy soil.

But what stopped me dead, made me close my eyes in a laugh-or-cry moment, was the yellow "Panther X-ing" highway sign - right next to the biggest clearing of all.

If I were a panther, I might throw myself in front of a car just to make an end of it. But no matter. Looks like Lee County will be able to retire that sign pretty soon anyway, and save itself a few bucks.

Hummingbird update, and a Vermont sojourn

Even though the mid-Atlantic region has been in the meteorological mixer the past few weeks -- with several ice storms, snow, a mild spell and now a blast of Arctic cold that sent the mercury to near zero on our back porch last night -- there are still a few hummingbirds hanging around.

At one home in northern Lancaster County, Pa., which had been hosting two rufous hummingbirds for several months, one is gone but one remained earlier this week. An immature male that my colleague Wayne Laubscher banded in October left on Dec. 28, but an immature female that I banded Nov. 18 was still there at last report.

Another immature female rufous, which I banded in mid-November in southern Berks County (only a few miles from the birds mentioned above), made it through the big ice storm on Dec. 18-19, and left on Dec. 20 after feeding heavily in the morning. An adult female rufous that I banded on Halloween in Dauphin County was last seen Dec. 16.

There's a female Selasphorus hummingbird, probably a rufous, in northern New Jersey that's been coming to a feeder since November, and continued two days ago…if it sticks around into next week I'll be making the drive to band it, though I wouldn't be surprised if both of these lingering hummers decide to head south Monday or Tuesday, with the unseasonably milder temperatures being predicted.

If they do, it would fit the pattern we often see – many times, wintering hummingbirds ride out extremely cold or stormy weather at a feeder, then depart when there's a break, usually after feeding heavily for a couple of hours in the morning.

* * * * *

It's been a bit cold and bit snowy here in Pennsylvania lately, but nothing to what the Green Mountain State has seen.

We spent five days last week with Amy's family, snugged into a 200-year-old farmhouse near Rochester, Vermont, on the eastern slope of the Greens. It was snowing when we arrived, it snowed most of the time we were there, and we slipped out New Year's Day morning to try to beat still another storm that dumped more than 16 fresh inches on the region. The weather weenies on the radio said it's been the snowiest December in Vermont since 1874.

In between storms, the place was a classic, New England winter wonderland; fresh powder draping the pines, sugar maples, hemlocks and spruces, the chance to do some sledding (Amy, with her sister and 2-year-old niece) and snowshoeing and photography (me). The birding was pretty slow; mostly ravens, blue jays, and some mixed songbird flocks of chickadees, creepers and kinglets (no boreal chickadees, though not for a lack of trying).

The ornithological highlight was an old, gnarled apple tree in the pasture below the house, which attracted flocks of pine grosbeaks throughout the week, and one exciting but too-short visit by about 15 Bohemian waxwings. Both of these are rare boreal visitors showing up in the East in record numbers this winter, and the grosbeaks were a life bird for Amy (who, sadly, missed the waxwings).

And sadly, I was always either a bit too far from the tree for good photos when the grosbeaks were there, or didn't have a long lens handy if I was nearby. So you'll have to make due with a nice landscape, looking west into the Greens, the horizon framed by one of those iconic sugar maples.

Perspective

There are always at least two ways of looking at pretty much anything, including the weather.

Some years ago, I was in northwest Alabama, not far from Muscle Shoals, to speak at an ornithological conference. It was late January, but a huge cold front blustering through from Mississippi was spawning tornadoes left, right and sideways. And it was coming right at us.

The conference was in a state park resort, and as I was getting dressed for the opening reception, I kept a nervous eye on the local TV station, which was giving breathless updates. Just about the time the weather guy jabbed a finger at a huge blob of intense red on his radar screen and said, "If you are two or three miles northeast of Muscle Shoals, you should be taking shelter now," the sirens all went off outside.

I skedaddled for the main building as a sheriff's deputy drove past, his voice tinny over a loudspeaker, ordering everyone inside. All the conferees were already there, gathered in the only interior, basement room available – the men's restroom. It was a little tight, but we all had our "Hi I'm ---" name tags, and little paper cups of white wine.

"So you're from Pennsylvania!" one older woman said brightly, as the sirens continued to keen. "I could never live up there – y'all get such nasty ice storms."

I must have looked at her as though she were speaking Urdu. "At least," I said, my voice rising to a tense squeak, "at least an ice storm won't suck you up the chimney and smear you across the landscape in a million pieces!" Her smile froze, and she backed away. Slowly.

So here we are, with our second big ice storm in four days, and it's nasty, all right. But it could be worse. I just got off the phone with a good friend in Oklahoma, where the epic ice storms of the past week have left him without power for seven days and counting, and with all 14 trees on his property smashed and down. I told him my Alabama story and David said sure, he'd take tornadoes any time.

And there are two ways to look at this storm, too. The freezing rain stopped about 3 p.m., and I was crunching around the backyard, assessing how best to remove the big limbs that came down off one of the white pines and took out part of the back fence. Then the clouds parted and shafts of low, late-day sunlight illuminated the landscape. I've lived in this old farmhouse for more than 20 years, and I don't think I've ever seen our valley look as breathtaking.

The yard was swarming with birds, trying vainly to get purchase as they landed in the iced-up branches of the crabapple and birches. I heard a slightly strange note from the goldfinches on the thistle feeder, and realized that a couple of common redpolls had joined the flock, the first time in six years that I've seen this Arctic finch down here.

I was hurrying, trying to scrape clean the walkways while taking pictures as the light kept shifting; by now the whole sky was brilliant blue, the land glittering, the drip of meltwater off the trees a cascade that sparkled with backlighting. Yet still more changes were in the offing; the forecast was for 45 mph winds by nightfall, and already, the northwest horizon was gathering dark squall clouds. Once the wind starts to roar, I expect the power will fail as heavy-laden limbs crack and fall throughout the valley, and the ice sheathing the branches of the catalpa trees will shatter against the sides of the house like kids throwing gravel at the windows.

With my friend's experience fresh in my mind, it was an ominous thought. But then, a final band of light hit an isolated clump of trees in a neighbor's field, creating a halo of golden light against the blue-black of the approaching clouds. I grabbed the camera and squeezed off several frames in the second and a half just as the sun vanished and the light went out – and as my perspective changed, once again.

And now to sleep...

We've wrapped up what can only be described as a remarkable season of saw-whet owl banding, and I suspect everyone on my crew is enjoying the chance to get caught up on their sleep. I know I am.

We’ve been banding migrant owls since 1997, and last year was one of the worst seasons on record – only 202 of the miniature owls, the product of two solid months of netting, every rainless night from dusk until midnight at three sites in central Pennsylvania.

This year was a stunning difference, though. As I've explained in earlier posts, this autumn marked the peak in a four-year cycle in saw-whet populations, and coincided with a crash in the number of small rodents in Canada. The result was an "irruption," a great wave of owls flooding south into the eastern U.S.

When we furled our nets for the last time a week ago, we'd netted 895 saw-whets – 393 of them at our Hidden Valley site in Schuylkill County, 284 at Small Valley in Dauphin County, and 218 at King's Gap in Cumberland County. Each owl was ringed with a lightweight, government-issued band stamped with a serial number, measured, and released.

Twenty-three of the owls we caught, though, were already banded, and these so-called foreign birds are always an exciting highlight. Thanks to a network of owl researchers called Project Owlnet, and the federal Banding Lab's online reporting system, we were able to quickly determine where most of these birds came from – and the results often surprised us.

Where our autumn 2007 owls came from.

Not surprisingly, many of the recoveries were of owls banded to our north, at places like Prince Edward Point Bird Observatory, on the north shore of Lake Ontario (seven owls) or Timiskaming and Hillardtown Marsh, near the Ontario/Quebec border (two owls). While many of the owls were banded earlier this fall, about half had been banded in previous years, including two banded in 2006 in the Shawangunk Mountains of southern New York, 2005 owls from Long Point, Ontario and Williamstown, Massachusetts, and a 2004 bird from Prince Edward Point.

The most remarkable foreign owl was the first of the season, netted Oct. 7 at Hidden Valley – a bird that had been banded at the end of July as a juvenile at Whitefish Point, on the upper peninsula of Michigan. It was one of more than 700 saw-whets the Whitefish Point Bird Observatory banded this summer, most of them in the "chocolate" juvenile plumage. Given that our site is almost 600 miles east/southeast of the UP of Michigan, it's an indication of how widely these birds wander.

Even though we've wrapped our nets for the season, the migration continues; Holiday Beach, Ontario, reports a few saw-whets still passing through, and I'll continue to net in the yard the rest of the month. And last week, my good friends and colleagues Bob and Martha Sargent netted a couple of saw-whets in north Alabama, where I suspect the big push has yet to arrive.

Upcoming events

Shameless promotional message: I'm scheduled to appear Thursday, Nov. 29, on NPR's "On Point" program, from 11 a.m. to noon EDT. I'll be discussing my new book, Of a Feather, a history of birding and ornithology in America.

That weekend, I'll be giving the keynote for the Ohio Bird Conservation Symposium at Deer Creek Resort south of Columbus, and sponsored by the Ohio Ornithological Society and The Nature Conservancy. And on Tuesday, Dec. 4, I'll be addressing the Birmingham (Alabama) Audubon Society.

Hummingbirds in the snow

Hummingbirds in the snow…I'll admit, that seems like an avian non sequitur, since everyone knows that hummingbirds are the jewels of summer, little tropical hothouse birds that would faint at the first hint of cold weather, never mind an actual flake or two of snow.

Which is why I especially love days like this past Sunday, when I was driving over the Kittatinny Ridge in heavy snow showers. Down in the valley an hour south of my house it was slightly warmer, and the snow was coming down as rain, while I set up a cage trap on the porch of a lovely old 1800s farmhouse. A nectar feeder hung inside, and within minutes, I'd trapped an immature female Selasphorus hummingbird, which Deb and Jim, the homeowners, had spotted a couple of days earlier.

If that seems remarkable, it isn't; western hummingbirds have become commonplace in eastern states like Pennsylvania every fall and winter, often lingering until well past Christmas, and through nights when the temperature may dip below zero.

In fact, the only remarkable thing about this situation was that this was the second hummingbird to show up at Deb and Jim's home this month. A week earlier, my colleague Wayne Laubscher of Lock Haven (covering for me while I was out of town) had banded an immature male rufous hummingbird here, a sparkling bird the color of a new penny, with its fiery orange gorget almost completely molted in. The little guy was still hanging around on Sunday when I was there, and buzzed us a couple of times after we had the trap set up.



A rufous hummingbird, banded in late December 2004, Middletown, PA (©Tom Johnson)



Once I had caught the new hummer, it was a matter of about five or 10 minutes to band her, take a few measurements, some photographs, and then release her. The measurements allowed me to make a firm identification; female and immature hummingbirds of the genus Selasphorus are almost impossible to identify in the field, but by measuring the width of her outermost tail feathers, her wing and bill, and by looking for a distinctive notching in one of the central tail feathers, I confirmed that she was a rufous hummer, and not one of the look-alike Allen's or broad-taileds.

Wait a minute, though – what would any of those decidedly western species be doing in Pennsylvania, especially on a snowy, late-November day? The answer appears to be bound up with the rapid development of a new migratory route, and a glimpse of avian evolution in action.

Traditionally, all of these species – rufous, Allen's, calliope, black-chinned, broad-tailed and others – nested in the U.S. and Canada but wintered primarily in Mexico. To get there, they follow a genetically coded orientation that propels them south in fall – flying individually, not in flocks or with their parents, depending solely on the instinct inscribed in their DNA.

But DNA mutates, and when it does, sometimes you get birds that head in the wrong direction. That's probably what's happening with these hummingbirds; programmed to head east instead of south, they wind up in the mid-Atlantic states in autumn, then work their way down to the Gulf Coast, where thousands and thousands of them now pass the winter.

By catching and banding these birds, which may be recaptured miles or years later, we can document this evolution of a new migratory route and wintering ground. I'm one of a loose network of hummingbird banders in North America studying this phenomenon, and at this time of year, I'll drop everything to race out and band a newly reported hummingbird.

On Wednesday I drove to northern New Jersey to band what is only the fifth calliope hummingbird to be seen in the Garden State. This little immature female (calliopes, which weigh about 3 grams, are the smallest birds in North America) was snugged down in a small but lavishly landscaped backyard in Denville, where dozens of birders had been coming to see her.


She was a snap to capture, and calm in the hand as she got her own, custom-made band, a minute thing only 5.4mm long, hand-crafted into a neat circle and laser-printed with a serial number, N99797. The bands are so small it takes more than 5,500 of them to weigh an ounce, and are no hardship for the bird.

Within a few minutes of her release, she was feeding again at one of the feeders, her movements followed by several big telephoto lenses. At night, like all of these cold-hardy westerners, she'd be tucked in a dense thicket, where she'd turn down her internal thermostat from a daytime high of about 109F to about 50F, going into a profound, death-like torpor to save energy. (That's why these western hummingbird species, which can be found above 9,000 feet in the Rockies and as far north as the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska, are not bothered by sub-freezing temperatures in the East. If they're healthy, they can even tolerate lows below zero for a few nights.)

A couple of times she zipped out from her perch to snag a small, passing insect – even in cold weather, these birds are adept at finding invertebrates, often picking dormant bugs out of foliage and from the crevices in bark. Nectar, either natural or from a feeder, makes up less than half of their diet at all times of the year.

The calliope was in good shape, except for some missing throat and tail feathers, perhaps from a collision with a wire or twig, which she would soon replace. And I was just in time – she apparently left this morning, Thanksgiving, a lovely, mild day and a perfect one for heading south. She took with her a tiny band – and my thanks, naturally.

The Flood from the North

The boreal forest is emptying out – I can see it at our feeders, and every night we see it in our owl nets.

Last year, the forests of eastern Canada provided an incredible bounty of food, in the form of mast – the broad term for nuts, berries, pine and spruce seeds. Many trees "mast" unpredictably, as a strategy for thwarting seed predators like birds and mammals; some years they bear very little, keeping predator populations low, then they will flood the market, so to speak, with vast quantities of mast, so that at least some of the seeds will survive to germinate.

As it happens, 2006 was a year when most of the species in the eastern boreal forest heaped the table with a feast – mast in great abundance. Many species of seed-eating birds, like finches, nuthatches and chickadees, stayed north.

Because the mast provided food for huge numbers of mice and voles, many northern owls also stayed home last fall and winter, and those of us who band migrant saw-whet owls down here in the eastern United States had our worst season ever.

But my, how things have changed. This fall, the trees of eastern Canada shut off the spigot; the mast crop was meager to nonexistent in many areas. Faced with poor prospects, many northern birds have been flooding south in a phenomenon known as irruption (the term is the opposite of eruption – a rushing into, as opposed to an explosion out of, something).

Irruptive birds include purple finches, pine siskins, red and white-winged crossbills, common and hoary redpolls, red-breasted nuthatches and pine grosbeaks. They also include many northern raptors, among them northern shrikes and a variety of owls. Unlike most migrants, which travel predictable routes at predictable seasons, the irruptive species strike like lightning, appearing and disappearing as though on a whim.

(This has nothing to do with the severity of the coming winter, by the way. The last really good winter finch year we had down here, back in the late 1990s, was also one of the warmest on record. It's all about food, not temperature.)

But with the food growing scarce, the birds are getting out of Dodge. Night after night, my crew of owl banders have been catching record numbers of saw-whet owls, up to 75 in an evening. These birds have been in exceptionally good condition (we check their fat stores and muscle mass), but if they'd stayed north, chances are they might have starved.

Birders here in the mid-Atlantic states are also excited by the arrival of large numbers of northern finches and other seed-eating species. We noticed a huge influx of black-capped chickadees and white-breasted nuthatches starting in late August, and in recent weeks additional boreal species have been coming in; this morning, purple finches and a red-breasted nuthatch, both irruptive species, joined the melee at our feeders.

This past week, there have even been growing numbers of reports of evening grosbeaks across Pennsylvania, a stunning species that was unheard of in Pennsylvania prior to 1890, but which began to invade the state in winter more and more frequently, and in greater and greater numbers, in the early decades of the 20th century. Many of us remember fondly their biennial invasions in the 1960s and '70s, when they would crowd feeders, sometimes by the hundreds, consuming vast quantities of sunflower seed and earning the nickname "gross-pigs" from birders who got tired of shelling out for so much food.

Then, they were gone. Since the 1980s, evening grosbeaks have been almost completely absent from our region. In this case, though, there is more at work than simply the boom-and-bust cycle of northern mast production.

Evening grosbeaks nest across the boreal zone from Newfoundland to British Columbia, and south in high conifer forests into southern Mexico. Across much of their range, a favorite summer food is a moth larvae known as the spruce budworm, a cyclical species that can reach plague dimensions in spruce forests.

Many boreal songbirds depend upon spruce budworm, including Cape May and Tennessee warblers. Like the grosbeak, their populations rise and fall in lockstep with the fortunes of the budworm. The last time we had lots of grosbeaks coming south into the eastern U.S. was during a spike in the budworm cycle in the 1960s and '70s, when millions of acres of across Canada were defoliated. But since then the caterpillars have been on the wane, and the populations of many of these budworm specialists have been on the decline as well.

So while the lack of mast this year is obviously driving the grosbeaks south, they will probably not come in the great numbers I remember from my childhood, because there just aren't that many grosbeaks these days.

There may be more at work with the grosbeaks than simply the budworm cycle; while research in eastern Canada suggests evening grosbeaks are strongly linked to budworm numbers, that doesn't appear to be the case in part of the West. And in fact, there is evidence that at least some of the irruptive grosbeak flocks that reached the East in the good old days were actually from the West, crossing the Plains and eating the seeds of box-elders, planted in shelterbelts across the prairies.

There is still a lot to learn about this beautiful finch, but for now, I'm just keeping my fingers crossed, hoping that a few will show up at our feeders.