local ecologist

Marie Winn’s fascination with the birds of New York is are told in her books “Red-Tails in Love” and “Central Park in the Dark: More Mysteries of Urban Wildlife.” Winn and others track and observe screech owls, orioles, and moths among other wildlife in Central Park, at night. If I lived in New York I would be a participant in these moon- and ambient-light lit adventures!

Birding also happens in Prospect Park (Brooklyn), Pelham Bay Park (Bronx), and Forest Park and Alley Pond Park (Queens). New York Times reporters Anne Raver (she writes engrossing essays column in the Home & Garden section) and Katherine Zoepf offer some online for birders: the blog, Urban Hawks; nycadubon.prg; prospectpark.org/calendar/audubon_center_events; and Sibley and Peterson field guides.

Closer to home, the East Bay Regional Park District offers “Tuesdays for the Birds” bird walks in its regional parks. The next walk is scheduled for July 22, 7 to 9:30 a.m. in Carquinez Strait Regional Shoreline. Bethany Facendini will lead the walk; call 510-525-2233 for the meeting place. The park district hosts additional birding programs: Thursday Birding; Wonderful World of Water Birds; Bike ‘n Bird; Biking, Botanizing, and Birding the Bay; and Family Birdwalk!.

Source: Wiki Commons

In her article, Times reporter, Katherine Zoepf, mentioned a birder’s life list. A life list is “a list of all the bird species [a birder has] identified with absolute certainty during [her or his] whole lifetime of serious birding.” As a novice birder my life list is short but it does have a “good bird” on it: a yellow-billed kite seen from a canoe in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. I fell out of the canoe while peering at the kite.

The Ecology Center in Berkeley is a great resource for many things eco, from reference books to housewares, from posters to playing cards like the ones pictured above. These six cards are from a deck titled “Local Birds - Northern California Backyard and Trail Birds.” The six species pictured on the cards are commonly seen in my backyard.

I have not done anything special to attract these species. All the plants in the backyard where there when I moved into the duplex four years ago. I have added new plants to the front and side yards. I borrowed a book from the library about attracting birds, but it is not useful for the Bay Area; it’s perfect for folks living in the Prairies or on the Atlantic seaboard. I turned to my personal copy of American Wildlife & Plants, a text I have mentioned several times on this blog.

The list of cultivated and wild plants visited by hummingbirds in warmer parts of the U.S. and on the Pacific seaboard are numerous, so I will only list the ones with which I am familiar:

Butterflybush (a favorite of butterflies, hence the name)
Sage (which I planted in the side yard)
Lemon (my neighbor has a tree)
Geranium (I planted several in the front yard)
Hollyhock (my seeds have not germinated)
Horsechestnut (no trees on my street)
Rose (there is a pink rose in the backyard)

The wild plants include manzanita and milkweed (I plant to sow seeds of the latter in the fall).

Last week the backyard was visited by many House Finches. Its red crown stripe and specked belly are good markers. In California, filaree makes up at least 50% of the house finch’s diet. Filaree is classified as a “weed plant” and Martin et al. note that the finch’s “main diet consists of weed seeds.” In my backyard they eat buds.

The Cedar Waxwing is one of my favorite songbirds. I love the soft yellow color of its belly as well as its crown tuft. Waxwings, also known as cedarbirds, consume mostly fleshy fruits which in the Pacific are from the California peppertree, cultivated cherry and grape, mistletoe and strawberry. The waxwings also eat animals like beetles, ants, caterpillars, grasshoppers, and crickets.

I think I’ve seen a Chestnut-backed Chickadee, but according to Martin et al., the chestnut-backed chickadee is “found in relatively wild, timbered tracts” which my backyard is not. Joseph Grinnell and Margaret W. Wyth did sporadically observe Santa Cruz Chestnut-backed Chickadees in their 1926 (!) publication, Birds of Berkeley Campus).

I’ve definitely seen the Song Sparrow though it’s less common than the first four birds described above. Martin et al. describe it as “the commonest, best-known and most loved songster in the United States. It is nearly equally at home in town or in country.” Although the bird is shy it eats in the open; it eats animals (beetles, grasshoppers, crickets, caterpillars, and ants - there are a lot of ants in my yard!) and plants which in California include pigweed (10-25% of its diet), knotweed, and minerslettuce.

I’ll close this Bird Watch with a quote from Suburban Safari about hummingbird physiology:

Like tiny bears, they slow their breathing and depress their heart rate from 1,000 beats per minute to just 150. On a cold spring morning like this [Holmes is writing about her yard in Maine], my hummers may need fifteen minutes to power up to flying temperature (13).

I’ve found pigeons to watch; three blocks away, pigeons hang out on the overhead wires across from a 7-Eleven store. I received my Urban Bird Studies/ Project Pigeon Watch a few months ago and have been looking for a spot to observe pigeons for ten-minute stretches. I can submit my data online as well as share essays and photos. The project is sponsored by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Four of seven color morphs from the Project PigeonWatch poster are show below (red, spread, white, and checker - counterclockwise from top left).

In response to my post about International Bird Day, Mary Guthrie of the Cornell Lab commented

thanks for your support of the Cornell Lab. I thought you might like the url for IMBD - http://www.birdday.org/history.php. From their home page “Now, IMBD is celebrated almost year-round. Most U.S. and Canada events take place in April and May, while fall events are the norm in the Caribbean and Latin America.” Come visit us in Ithaca!

Susan Bonfield of the International Migratory Bird Day NGO wrote

I ran across your blog and wanted to let you know that International Migratory Bird Day is alive and well, and I’m sorry you had trouble finding information about it. Please visit our website (www.birdday.org) for lots of information, downloadable materials, and ideas. Officially, IMBD is celebrated on the second Saturday in May each year; May 10 in 2008. Because birds’ schedules don’t coincide in all locations, we encourage groups to host in event at the best time.

Source: Ken Thomas, photographer

Yesterday I told another person outside my household about the cedar waxwing that died after hitting one of the living room windows. Now I share the death with you. It was aweful: I heard a thud, I saw a small feather stuck on the window, and by the time I made it outside, the waxwing was literally taking its last breath.

Cedar waxwings are no longer visiting the yard, at least not in the quantity they did in February when there were many, many berries on the tree I thought was a mountain ash, forgetting that ashes have compound leaves! The red-berried tree in my yard has simple leaves. Dr. Mike Wilcox (in Trees of the World), writing about the mountain ash, notes that its also known as rowan. He describes the tree as follows:

Something about its strongly ascending branches, its lacy foliage or the masses of its striking red berries has connected it with witchcraft from ancient times. It’s very name, rowan, is believed to be derived from the Norse word runa, meaning ‘charm.’ Rowan trees were often planted outside houses and in churchyards to ward of witches (39).

A diversity of birds visit the yard like Cedar Waxwing, Robin, Anna’s Hummingbird, and House Finch. I’ve heard a woodpecker recently; it could be Nuttall’s Woodpecker or Downy Woodpecker. I like to think that the yard offers a variety of niches. There’s a hedgerow of sorts, though Julie Zickefoose would call it a hedge (it’s a monoculture except for some pioneering blackberry). It’s located along the western fence in the neighbor’s yard. A proper hedgerow “is a tangled, assorted mixture of various plants, small trees, and vines” (Zickefoose, 116). Dr. Mike Wilcox uses the word hedgerow and hedge interchangeably in his description of Welsh hedgerows. He writes that “in different periods of history people have favoured different hedgerow plants. An ancient hedgerow will often have giant coppiced trees; hedges of the Tudor age are identified by their maple and dogwood; pre-Tudor hedges feature hazel and spindle; and in post-1800 hedge hawthorn is common” (46).

There are other niches in the yard. The honeysuckle has formed a thicket along the neighbor’s porch. It’s a vine so it’s also crawling along a utility wire that is strung across the front part of the parcel. I had a brush pile, but it was “cleaned up” by gardeners hired by the landlord. The half dead sidewalk tree, a purpleleaf plum, acts as a snag.

Coincidentally I was trying to grow a meadow, another niche recommended by Zickefoose, but the California poppies did not take and I am crossing my fingers for the sunflowers. I got the seeds of the latter from the Bay Area Seed Interchange Library (BASIL) at the Ecology Center. The yard is also lacking coniferous evergreens. The red-berried tree is evergreen, but Zickefoose highlights the “seeds and shelter” offered by pines, spruces, firs, and cedars.

Although the poppies were a failure and the sunflowers have yet to germinate, there are lots of flowers in the yard. The rose, the quince flower, the lemon flower (the tree is in yard of the neighbor to the east), and the “orange” flower, pictured above (note: this is not the actual name of the plant).