One of my new year's resolutions which was actually not a resolution, and wasn't made in January, was to lose the extra pounds around the waist (there's a resolution no one ever thought of before...), so I have been walking, walking, walking for several months now. When the new camera landed in my hand, and there were fewer field trips and no geology, I started concentrating on photographing the local bird species in my neighborhood. That neighborhood includes some irrigation canals and cow pastures near my home, and a small "mini-wilderness" on my campus that includes a cat-tail ringed drainage pond and a small forest of mature oak trees and eucalyptus.
I have discovered much to my surprise (but of no surprise at all to my birder friends) that there is large diversity of species to be seen when one begins to look carefully. In my (freely admitted) ignorance, I dismissed all the small birds up in the trees as sparrows, but now that I am getting out on foot and looking carefully, those little black shapes are remarkably diverse. I've photographed more than thirty species so far, and I'm seeing new ones all the time.
One of my favorite discoveries early on were the Cedar Waxwings
(Bombycilla cedrorum). They were out one morning a month or so ago, and then disappeared again, and I didn't see any for weeks. This morning they were out in force once more, and weren't very skittish about the guy standing in the middle of the road snapping pictures of them.
The waxwings nest in the northeastern part of the country and migrate into our area in the winter. They eat berries for the most part which actually protects them in an odd way. Cowbirds have been displacing lots of songbirds by laying eggs in the nests of the unsuspecting birds of other species. The young cowbirds hog all the food and sometimes kill the other chicks. But the cowbirds can't survive on fruit alone, so they don't tend to make it in waxwing nests.
The name of the bird comes from the
waxy red secretions that are found on the secondaries. I managed to get several decent shots of the red feather tips. They maybe have something to do with courtship and mating (bling!).
Unlike many songbirds these days in North America, the Cedar Waxwings are doing pretty well. They are classed as
a species of least concern, and there are an estimated 50 million plus of them living in the country. It's nice that we aren't destroying all of the interesting species that we share the planet with.
Okay, if you are worried that Geotripper isn't geological enough these days, don't! We will be headed out to Death Valley in a few weeks to take a look at the only place in California that is not suffering an exceptional drought (talk about the ultimate of ironies...). My new hobby of bird-watching prevents cabin fever!
I'm home, but since I had the idea of this blogpost while I was on the road, it still counts as a dispatch. I've been in Hawaii, and I used several posts to describe the problems of non-native species on the islands, especially the birds. I complained that I didn't get any good photos this time of some of the native species, but that wasn't entirely true. We stayed in Kailua on Oahu right next to Hamakua Marsh, which is a critical habitat for four endangered Hawaiian native birds. Our red-eyed friend above is a Black-crowned Night Heron, which arrived in Hawaii in prehistoric times, but is little changed from its continental relatives.
Also found in the Hamakua Marsh (and at Waimea Canyon) are the Common Moorhens, or 'Alae'ula (Gallinula chloropus sandvicensis). Unlike their name, they are not common at all, as there are only 1,000 or so left on the islands (the presence of tags on their legs is a good clue that they are endangered). They have problems with habitat loss and predation.
The rest of my native species pictures come from earlier expeditions to the islands. On a hike through the Alakai Swamp on Kaua'i last year, I met up with an 'Elepaio (Chasiempis sandwichensis). This is the sole species of flycatcher that made it to the islands by natural means. It's doing ok in the highland swamp where I saw it, but is endangered on Oahu
The same day I saw the 'Elepaio, I was thrilled to catch a Hawaiian Short-Eared Owl or Pueo (Asio flammeus sandwichensis) roosting on a stump at the lower end of Waimea Canyon. I try to imagine the journey that its ancestor had to get to the islands; I don't think of owls as flying over thousands of miles of ocean, but it only had to happen once in the last 5 million years.
I've had the least luck catching glimpses of the Honeycreepers and related species. On a foggy day at the Na Pali overlook on Kaua'i, I played "Where's Waldo Apapane?" among the beautiful Ohia trees. The Apapane (Himatione sanquine) is one of the few native finch/honeycreepers that is not in serious danger of extinction. The original finch that colonized the islands diverged into around four dozen species, but most are already extinct, and many others are on the verge of the abyss.
A few million years ago, a Canada Goose (or flock of geese) got misdirected to Hawai'i, and decided they liked the environment. They evolved into the Nene (Branta sandvicensis), becoming less adapted to water (losing some of the webbing of their feet), and preferring life in fields and on lava flows. The arrival of cats and mongooses on the islands almost spelled their doom and they were nearly extinct by 1951. An intense captive breeding program stabilized their population, and their reintroduction to Kaua'i (where there are no mongooses) has been successful. I saw the group below on the slopes of Haleakala on the island of Maui.
