Guest Photos by Daniel Arndt, Calgary birder and nature photographer
Dan has also written a terrific post for the Birds Calgary blog on these sweethearts of the boreal forest and many other birds that share their habitat. You can check out more of his stunning bird photography on his Flickr page too.
Read more about boreal chickadees on the Boreal Songbird Initiative Blog.
As significant results emerge from the analysis of five years of Maritimes Breeding Bird Atlas (MBBA) data, efforts have now shifted to communicating Atlas results to support conservation action. With funding from Environment Canada’s Habitat Stewardship Program (HSP) for Species at Risk, communications products are being developed for stakeholders whose land-based activities may impact species at risk habitat in the Maritimes.
The MBBA database contains the most comprehensive and up-to-date information on Maritimes birds, particularly those recently listed as Endangered, Threatened, or of Special Concern by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC), such as Olive-sided Flycatcher, Rusty Blackbird, Canada Warbler, Common Nighthawk, Whip-poor-will, and Bobolink.
Distribution, and abundance maps for several declining bird species illustrate important changes in population and distribution since the first Maritimes Atlas was published in 1992. Stakeholders, including industry, municipal and rural planning commissions, as well as land trusts and nature conservancies, will now have evidence-based information to help plan their conservation strategies for species at risk habitat.
During fieldwork, Atlas volunteers focused on collecting detailed habitat information for all rare birds. The data are now being used to develop Maritimes-specific descriptions of habitats used by recently listed species. These will help with the identification and protection of critical habitat for bird species at risk, and the recovery of their populations in New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia.
For more information on the MBBA, to order a copy, and/or if you are a stakeholder interested in Atlas data, please see the Maritimes Breeding Bird Atlas webpage.
Source: Bird Studies Canada
Spectacular Snowy Owls are on the move!
The owls are irrupting well south of their usual winter range in Canada, with reports as far south as Kansas. To read more about the phenomenon in eBird, select this link. If you don’t see a Snowy Owl in your birding ventures, you can still appreciate how truly magnificent these birds are by watching this video from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Source: Bird Studies Canada
Posted by Janet Plante
Living in the Boreal Forest is great, but it is even better when we get Chinooks. A Chinook is a warm wind that brings warmer temperatures, often above freezing. We have experienced going from -40 degrees Celsius (-40 Fahrenheit) to 10 above Celsius (50 above Fahrenheit) within 24 hours. The warmer weather allows us to get outside and enjoy the birds. In this picture, taken in January, you can see the water dripping from the tree branches.
This year we are blessed with an abundance of not only the traditional chickadees and common redpolls but pine grosbeaks seem to have taken over our feeders. We have a wonderful chorus and it is great to have more than the usual chick-a-dee-dee-dee.
At times we have counted more than a dozen pine grosbeaks both male and female.
Occasionally we see an evening grosbeak but it seems they have moved on to allow the pine grosbeak cousins a chance at the feeders. There even seems to be a red-breasted nuthatch or two that remains in residence, just to balance off the songbook.
In the middle of December during of one of those Chinooks I was able to watch both the pine grosbeaks and the common redpolls taking a bath in the snow. It was wonderful! They would burrow into the snow and then throw it off. Difficult to take a picture, but great to watch.
You can tell this bird has been having a bath as his feathers look wet. If you look close you can see the water coming down from the spout just in front of this pine grosbeak.
The common redpolls were bathing too. It looked like they were digging a hole in the snow. What fun!
Abstract From The Wilson Journal of Ornithology:
I report a case of snow bathing by House Finches (Carpodacus mexicanus), apparently the first for this species. As many as 15 finches bathed together, three to four at a time, in 18 cm of fresh loose snow in a manner typical when birds bathe in water or dirt: wings fluttered near the sides to spray the snow over the body with back and head plumage erected while the breast was pressed into the snow. Relatively few accounts of birds bathing in snow have been published. I found 23 prior reports of snow bathing for 16 North American species, mostly Passeriformes but including Falconiformes, Galliformes, Strigiformes, and Piciformes. Bathing in loose or uncompacted snow occurred more often than in wet or crusted snow, and there was a tendency for more than one bird to engage in snow bathing during each event. Brevity of accounts prevented identification of other factors that may be frequently associated with snow bathing. Bathing in snow is a routine behavior for some bird species, such as ptarmigan, and European accounts indicate that it is undoubtedly more widespread among North American species than shown by review of the literature.
Paul Hendricks, Montana Natural Heritage Program, Natural Science 205, University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812, USA
No, not really, but that’s what it felt like.
The last week of December, my husband and I took a short vacation to Indian Wells, California. It was more in the nature of a non-work, off-computer break than a birding trip, but of course I did some research beforehand to see where the birds were.
One of the places I decided any self respecting birder should visit was the Salton Sea. I’d heard many good things about this place from other birders, and being so close we had to make a visit.
Formed in 1905 when an accidental break in a canal diverted water into the dry alkaline basin of the Imperial Valley, this saline lake covers more than 380 square miles. It’s more than 200 feet below sea level, and saltier than the Pacific Ocean. It was like nothing we’d experienced before.
What looks like a nice sandy beach is actually billions upon billions of tiny shells.
Piles and boulders of crusted salt also dotted the landscape, along with obligatory empty plastic bottles and soft drink cans.
The shell/salt beach was littered with thousands of thousands of dead fish, a long way up the shore from the water. Nothing was feeding on them, as they were completely dried out.
There were also a lot of these salt/slime pools dotted around.
We were the only people there. The atmosphere was very unnerving, especially since there was no noise. At all.
Freshwater estuaries along the northern edge held a few birds. Most of them flew long before I could get close enough to identify the smaller species, and none of them were making any sound.
White pelicans were predominant, but there were also (way too many) juvenile plumage gulls, that shall remain anonymous.
This cattle egret took me by surprise – it seemed impossible for there to be any food in this water although the deeper water was very grebey, but they never came close enough to identify.
There were a lot of Black-necked stilts walking along the salt shore, as well as a few other shorebirds that flew before I got close enough for good look. I did, however, manage to identify (TA DAA!!) a winter plumage shorebird without looking in my bird guide. Some of my readers will appreciate the significance of me recognizing American Golden Plovers out of breeding plumage…
A busy Say’s Phoebe was flycatching from atop one of the salt piles.
And everywhere we looked, distracting me from the birds, were the dead, dried out fish. We did find a sign explaining what they were, but no indication of why thousands (milllions?) of them were washed up on shore.
If you read the birding books there are lists of must-see places, and Salton Sea is on most of those lists. To be fair we didn’t drive down the west side, as after completing the east side, we kind of lost heart for more birding there. If anyone asks I can now say yes, I’ve been to the Salton Sea. I just hope I can say it without shuddering, and will quickly change the subject.
You may have noticed Bird Canada has been sadly lacking in posts lately. If someone would just give me 48 hours in each day…
We have been working our tail-feathers off around here for the last two months. No time for birding drives, scarcely any time to look out the window and see what’s in the yard.
Four weekends in a row we arranged things so we could go for a weekend drive look for snowy owls. Three of those days produced a snow storm, the fourth brought near hurricane force winds.
On the rare occasions I managed to look up from my computer, my yard didn’t seem to contain any exciting birds. Except for last week…
While waiting for the kettle to boil so I could make a cup of mid-afternoon tea, I glanced out the window and was astonished to see a male common grackle chowing down at my deck feeder. When he had eaten his fill, he flew to the spruce trees at the back of the yard.
Peering intently into the trees to see if he was alone, I was absolutely, totally gobsmacked when a SNOWY OWL flew through the yard. He entered from the north east corner, and flew diagonally across the yard. I was so excited I loudly exclaimed “did you SEE that?!” before realizing the only other creature in the room was the dog. She didn’t see it.
I ran to the front window just in time to see him fly up the street and out of sight. This was the fifth owl species to visit my yard (great-horned, boreal, long-eared & northern saw-whet) but I don’t think I have ever been more flabbergasted at a yard bird.
I owe that grackle – big time! And yes he’s still hanging around the neighborhood, and hopefully will remain here until the Christmas bird count on Sunday.
Things will get back to normal on Bird Canada early in the new year. Or with some extraordinary luck, I’ll even manage to get a post up next week. Maybe.
At the fall meeting of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) held in Ottawa, only one bird species was assessed – the Yellow-breasted Chat. Under the federal Species at Risk Act, COSEWIC is required to reassess the status of species every 10 years. Hence, the chat assessment was a reassessment of the three recognized populations that occur in Canada.
Photo © BSC
COSEWIC upheld its earlier decisions on the status of the western “auricollis” subspecies of Yellow-breasted Chat in the Southern Mountain region of southern British Columbia (Endangered) and in the Prairies region of southern Alberta and Saskatchewan (Not at Risk). However, since the last assessment, the situation has worsened for the eastern “virens” subspecies in southern Ontario.
Ten years earlier, this subspecies met COSEWIC’s criteria for Threatened, but had been assessed as Special Concern, because it was believed that the Canadian population could be “rescued” by populations in the northeastern United States. Since then, however, the chat’s breeding range has been dramatically contracting across much of the northeast, and the Ontario population has continued to decline.
The Yellow-breasted Chat requires fairly large patches of early-successional, dense shrubby habitat, which is becoming increasingly rare in southwestern Ontario. “Owing to its habitat specificity, small and declining population size, and diminished prospects for population rescue from the U.S., the outlook for this species is quite bleak,” said Jon McCracken, Bird Studies Canada’s Director of National Programs and co-chair of COSEWIC’s Bird Species Specialist Committee.
Check out the COSEWIC website to learn more about the other 21 species of wildlife assessed at the meeting.
Unusual winter weather may be connected to rapid Arctic climate change
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Canada’s wild species are in excellent hands
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Unpublished report finds 100% of Cultus Lake salmon found with deadly virus
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Video about the caribou’s troubles with black flies
B.C.’s forest watchdog barks warning over reporting
Second rescued green sea turtle in BC dies
Canada doubles its wind capacity in 2011
Wetlands issue in Saskatchewan needs carrots, sticks
B.C’s pine beetle battle leaves legacy of clear-cuts and untold environmental harm
The Christmas Bird Count (CBC) season is less than two weeks away.
Beginning on December 14th and continuing through January 5th, about 12,000 Canadian bird lovers will be combing the wintry woods, counting everything they see and hear.
There are almost 400 counts held across the country, each done on a single day in that period.The data are accessible online and you can also search the database for all results from 1900 to the present.
If you would like to be a part of the 112th Christmas Bird Count, visit Bird Studies Canada’s (BSC) website for details on counts that are held near you. Choose your province from the drop down menu, and view the contact person for your area.
Source: Bird Studies Canada
He's not injured, just wearing some of his lunch.
Juvenile raptor identification is a wonderful challenge, isn’t it? What do you think – did I have a Cooper’s Hawk or a Sharp-shinned Hawk in my backyard?
Peruse the photos, make your decision and leave a comment below. It will be interesting to read what folks have to say about my beautiful yard visitor!
