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“And now for something completely different.”

Posted in Birds, Natural History, United States, Washington, Western Forests with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 26, 2013 by Brendan McGarry

Oregon White Oak, Early Spring

Strip malls are the essence of vitriol, rising at the back of my throat. Who do people need several Starbucks or Walgreen’s within blocks of each other? The driver of the truck that was pushing us through this distracting mess of concrete read my mind.

“Lovely isn’t it?”

If I blurred my vision against the skyline, between the squat McDonald’s and Taco Bells, I could see twisted crowns here and there. Letting myself imagine we were in fact cruising through a Oregon white oak forest instead of what had replaced it, my heart rate slowed a bit. I’d driven this road half a dozen times with Simone, my friend, contributor to wingtrip, and pertinent at the time, a Falconer.

Rounding a corner, I looked at a corner lot that used to be full of mature Oregon white oak, now full of tasteless condominiums. They were built right up to the edge of the parcel of land that was our destination. Looping through the cemetery, we parked and geared up.

I’m always embarrassed by how much fussing I typically need to do when embarking on a photographic endeavor. But Simone had me matched, not with gadgets, but with animals to curtail. Otis, the diminutive beagle-jack Russell cross was quivering with excitement. He got a shock collar slipped over his head, not because he’s a bad dog but because we’d be close to a road and he’s prone to disobedience when on the scent of rabbits. Simone had to don her vest, a glove for holding her bird, grab a bloody container of miscellaneous animal bits, and grabbed an ax handle for beating brush. Finally, the man of the hour, Chase the red-tailed hawk, needed to be taken out of his box. All this was done in the parking lot of the funeral home, where, judging by the number of cars, a service was taking place. Simone’s been coming here since she first started as an apprentice and no one has ever said a thing to her about parking here. Then again, would you reprimand a woman holding a hawk?

We started out through the scotch broom and blackberries that are slowly being hacked back by the nearby community college. This is good for the potential of restoring a small bit of native Western Washington prairie but no necessarily great for Simone’s ability to go hawking. We were headed straight for the imposing mass of Himalayan blackberries.

You almost always look regal when carrying a bird of prey on your gloved arm. With Otis bounding behind her, Simone walked partway down the field before removing Chase’s hood. Releasing his jesses, he flew off with a jingle of bells, heading straight for his hunting perch, an adjacent telephone pole.

Falconry is not a hobby, it’s a way of life and something that you dedicate your life to. That’s one of many reasons why I’ve never delved into it myself, despite knowing that if I was interested, I’d have a teacher and support. When it’s hawking season in Washington, Simone is fully committed to flying her birds. She spends her time plowing through trashy lots of blackberries in Western Washington and agricultural fields East of the mountains with Chase, cruising random ponds for her Cooper’s Hawk Hula, and training her other two imprint falcons in between. This is a full time job, not a half-hearted hobby.

One day a few months ago, Simone, our visiting friend Danner, and I were headed up to go birding in the Skagit Flats. Danner and I met at her house around 9AM on a cold December morning, a lazy hour for birders, and apparently even more so for falconers. Moments later Simone burst through the door, soaking wet, holding her Cooper’s Hawk. She was beaming and informed us that Hula had gone for a drake mallard in the middle of a pond. Being at most a third of the weight of a mallard but possesing the notorious tenacity of an Accipiter, she wasn’t going to let go of her quarry. Simone had to crash into the pond, filling her pockets with water (containing her iPhone amongst other items) to keep Hula from drowning herself. This was all recounted joyously, while Danner and I stood and listened incredulously.

I stood by the edge of a blackberries as Simone crashed through, disregarding the brambles clawing at her. Otis, following suit, wiggled beneath the hooped vines and quickly began to whine in excitement. Chase watched from above, calling occasionally, waiting for his partners on the ground to flush prey.

Early on Chase made a dive and narrowly missed a rabbit dashing through an opening. While my intention was to stand back and watch, I quickly got caught up in the hunt. Cars zipped by a few hundred feet away, but easily forgotten as we were all focused, watching to see if Chase spied anything from his perch.

Chase started calling more frequently and soon we heard the scream of another red-tailed hawk. A pair of them circled in, unhappy that Chase was here, probably quite near their nest. They were a distracting element, always on the periphery, taunting and threatening this interloper with bells and loops on his feet. However, despite outnumbering him, they never got close enough to lay a talon on Chase.

Plummeting down and pounding into the ground, Chase was impressive. There were many near misses. I held my breath and I watched him try to find an opening on a rabbit that was frozen mere feet from me. All the while Otis was baying with excitement sounding like he was being killed, not following the trail of a rabbit.

The bloodlust I felt during this hunt is abnormal. I didn’t necessarily wish any of the rabbits we were chasing harm, but my presence inherently meant I did. Intellectually I enjoy the idea of hunting for my own meat and I’ve taken the lives of other animals in order to eat them but this rabbit was going to go to Chase. There’s an ethical cascade of issues that can arise hunting with a bird of prey, especially a bird that was once in the wild, like Chase. But I’m not one to start a debate on the subject of Falconry. I will say this: every Falconer I’ve met is beyond doting of the birds they partner with and respectful of the lives they take. If you find fault with this practice, I suggest you spend some time out in the field with the practitioners before you truly judge.

Our jaunt ended without rabbit blood but we’d had a good ramble though the patch. Simone lured Chase back with tasty cut up quail bits and we wandered back through the oaks, imagining we were in expansive prairie and not a remnant grove. Even with his hood on, he looked regal with beautiful coloration and an inherent power that had been demonstrated all afternoon. Red-tailed hawks may be common in numbers, but their grace in the air is breathtaking and you can’t help but admire every bird seen after hunting.

Yet, I still don’t completely get the dedication. Simone and Otis were covered in scratches, Otis had blood streaks across his face. I remembered that this favorite hunting spot was spitting distance from a cemetery, an wrecking yard, and a housing development. Did I mention that Simone is vegetarian?

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Living in Proximity to the Sea

Posted in Alki, Birding, Birds, Environmentalism, Natural History, Seattle, Washington with tags , , , , , , , , , , on January 25, 2013 by Brendan McGarry

Sea lions barks echoed across the water. Wintering sea ducks foraged near the rocky shoreline. Out where the river washed  into the bay Western Grebes and cormorants worked the currents. On land, a Fox Sparrow chipped annoyance at an interloper. A group of crows (could they be Northwestern?) searched the tide line for morsels washed in from the marine world. Below the surface a myriad of epics I’d never know about were unfolding; salmon would begin their runs into the funnel of freshwater irrupting through salt in the coming months.

You’d likely not guess that I was standing spitting distance from the second largest port on the West coast of the United States. That I was less than a mile from two superfund sites created by Boeing and other industrial giants. That I was gazing out across Elliot Bay to downtown Seattle.

 

Now I’d be the last to suggest that this, even with all the wildlife going about their business before me, was a healthy environment. However, the menagerie was somewhat awe inspiring considering. Puget Sound, particularly where the Duwamish River outlets into Elliot Bay (and more appropriately dubbed the Duwamish waterway because it is so altered), isn’t a spectacle of clean water. And yet, here were all these creatures.

I was here for a short sojourn away from the life of an urbanite. As much as I wish to distinguish myself from the city, it is where I am from and where I’ve lived for most of my life. In part I am responsible for the problems lurking in this ecosystem. Yet, that knowledge doesn’t detract from enjoying a world, one I am not intrinsically a member of, unfold in a little parcel of my favorite inland sea.

 

Subconsciously, I ask more questions than I realize, a slim number of which are answered. For instance, I wondered where the Barrow’s Goldeneyes I observed were going to disperse to for nesting. The males were beginning their masculine shows of head tossing, giving wild chase to each other. Pairbonds were being (re)established here, I knew that. But would pairs fly off to a secluded Cascadian lake together or head further North or East?

 

At first when I saw the movement, I was alarmed. Was that the bloated corpse of a marine animal, or….something worse? My immediate thought of death when gazing on the industrial wastes of shoreline below wasn’t unreasonable. Instead, I was pleased to discover four harbor seals, relishing an afternoon nap. They even seemed to be smiling in enjoyment of a secluded spot, free of annoyances, to doze. Their biggest issue appeared to be the occasional boat’s wake wafting in and jostling their half-submerged derelict dock. True seals, even when resting, are such excruciatingly awkward sausages on land.

 

Sleeping seals were pleasant enough to see, but not terribly captivating overall. However, a hilarious slapstick show was unfolding out in the middle of the channel. California sea lions, just like their seal relatives, are far from uncommon, but the bellowing, writhing mass of blubbery animals stole my attention. The object of all the upset was limited space on two floating anchors. Several smaller sea lions were in constant spiral around each float, looking for a entry point, occasionally wiggling into a small crack. This would typically catapult another into the water or annoy someone else enough to howl and bite their neighbor in misplaced anger. In the two hours I was near the floats, this never seemed to stop because the bellyaching groans were constant.

 

While the mammals seemed to be spending a lot of their time sleeping or jostling to do so, most of the birds appeared to be in constant search for food. On a dock down the shoreline I kept flushing a group of goldeneyes attempting to feed on morsels attached to the pilings. A red-necked grebe was ambitiously trying to swallow a large fish who was determined to not be swallowed. Bird life on the water seemed to be in a pedantic whirl of diving, resurfacing, and swallowing.

 

A rocky bit of shoreline along Alki often hosts some surfbirds or black turnstones, resting mere feet from the joggers and bikers trolling the coastline. Their sleeping forms blended well with the surf stained rocks, but here were a group of twittering, pretty birds, within arms length and no one seemed to notice. The wind picked up and I shivered a little bit.  Watching the shuffling, half asleep birds, I did not envy their daily exposure. A man in shorts biked by, discordantly spouting “the harder they come,” no doubt bound for a cozy retreat.

 

One of my goals for the coming year and beyond is to get better at using eBird to record my observations, so I attempted to count everything I saw. There’s value in this because I am abysmal at taking notes of scientific worth (unless it’s actually for science of course) and looking back at my notes from traveling or local haunts I’m rather embarrassed by what I choose to scribble. Diligence of this manner might actually inform my wending words, but probably not my daydreaming.

The mind wanders, and again I was watching behavior instead of counting gulls or simply gazing over the distant water and across to the snowy Olympics. Pleased by what I could see in such proximity to a major, industrialized city, I still couldn’t help but imagine this shoreline a hundred and fifty years ago. It would have been free of cement detritus, the summer home of the Duwamish people. Would there have been more birds wheeling about out there? Where would the seals and sea lions have chosen to rest instead? Would someone have been doing what I was doing, looking wistfully out to sea?

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A 2012 (Photographic) Year in Review

Posted in Birding, Conservation, Malheur Bird Observatory, Mt. Rainier, Olympic National Park, Oregon, Seattle, Washington, Wisconsin with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 18, 2013 by Brendan McGarry

Forming habits around my creative work is always a boon. So, I figure that since I did this last year, I might as well do it again. Some of the photos may be redundant from previous posts but my guess is that most won’t notice or won’t mind.

Another year has passed. My best friends are no longer school peers but life colleagues. My association with the Pacific Northwest region deepens, I’m at a point in my life where a lot of naturalists begin to recognize their home ecosystem. Yet, I also recognize there are many new things yet to see all over the world. That makes me antsy.

Comparing years to one another is a bit of folly but one can’t help but do it. The year of 2012 immediately seems less vibrant than 2011 simply because I didn’t spend over a sixth of the year in the Asian tropics (the farthest I got from home was Wisconsin, a wonderful place nonetheless). However, I did continue to broaden my understanding of the natural world which is the point. My time in 2012 was spent on home ground, on familiar ground. The thing is, that we never know everything.

I’ve never spent so much time in the Olympics or on Mt. Rainier. Even if those repeat visits were to the same spots, guiding people, repeating the same facts, things were always different. I saw magical things in 2012, some of which I managed to photograph and some of which I didn’t. For example I watched a male and female peregrine falcon catch a pigeon in swirling victory mere feet over my head from a kayak near the Ballard locks. That spectacular display of teamwork suffices as memory. The young black bear at Sunrise on Mt. Rainier licking the sap from a freshly peeled fir trunk? I photographed that.

This year I (nearly) made summit on the Brothers, a double peak most Seattlites recognize across the Sound in the Olympics. I got my hands dirty in my friends’ fields, helping build an organic farm, while ravens checked our progress overhead and Pacific chorus frogs jumped between my feet. Regular attendance to the bounty of mountain wildflowers found me all the more impressed with my home. I’d say 2012 was a success.

So for the next year? Somewhat financially grounded from international travel (only momentarily), I plan to see more birds, more corners of my state, and learn even more. That’s always the goal. This year might see me pursuing science or pursuing writing and photography or both (why not?). I’ll probably add farm hand (in the beautiful San Juan Islands) to my title as well. I’ll keep guiding people and sharing my passion. I’ll keep my childish imagination and poetic fascination for this planet. And this problem with verbosity.


A good year to everyone.  Thanks for all the support!

(A finale note – as I attempt to move in the direction of supporting myself with my work, I’d like to point out that all photos can be viewed and purchased at http://www.brendanmcgary.com.  I’m open to all inquiries on writing, photography, and naturalist work.  I love guiding and teaching and would be happy to do either in the Pacific Northwest.  Thanks so much for reading, looking, even peeking!)

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Musings from the Desk of the (Un)Epic Birder

Posted in Birding, Birds, Brendan's Musings, Natural History, Seattle, Washington with tags , , , , , , , , , on December 30, 2012 by Brendan McGarry

 

The major curse of being a birder is that you find yourself evaluating your day based on species counts and the relative obscurity of your observations.

When days are pleasant and birds are numerous enough all is well in the universe. I can stroll about and simply enjoy being outside, communing with nature. What about when it’s miserable outside?

 

Birders above the 40th parallel spend a good portion of the year bundled up, squinting through scopes or shivering in wait of a rarity. We always hear about the good times but what about the bad times? The weeks we go out birding and don’t really see all that much. I’m not suggesting I don’t enjoy just getting out. I find birding and photography very similar, the more one does it, no matter the conditions, the better one gets.

Common birds are no less enjoyable than rare ones. I always enjoy Golden-crowned Sparrows.

However, ruts happen.

A summer tanager showed up in Seattle. A huge bird for Washington State, let alone Seattle. I managed to sleep through my alarm on one cold, dark morning, which turned out to be the only time it was at either place it made appearances when I had time to visit.

The Eastern Phoebe. Well, I saw it, but for two seconds, after spending hours walking around in soggy grass. When I realize what most normal people do (not that I desire to be normal), I’m rather perplexed by what drives me to walk around gloomy, wet meadows in December with complete strangers. Sometimes I feel like someone lost their keys in the field and we’re all just do-gooders trying to lend a helping hand.

What rare birds could be out there?

At least some things are given this time of year. Drive up North and descending into the Skagit Valley, the brightest things around (because the sun can’t break through the oppressive cloud layer), are the hoards of swans and geese. This regularity may not get every seasoned birder excited but I’m always flabbergasted by the sheer numbers of snow geese, particularly when thousands thunder to wing mere yards from you. The swans too are quite the spectacle, some of the largest birds in North America just hanging out on the farm nibbling old brassica shoots. No big deal.

In the city, with a keen eye or ear, there’s always a few things to take note of. I continually out nerd my co-workers (at a non-profit for birds), by getting wound up by birds outside our office. A Bewick’s wren clinging to the tactile brick wall, pretending it’s a creeper. The almost daily red crossbills that fly over almost any time I am outside. Even when work and weather don’t allow for extensive adventures, there’s room for my mind to broaden, (…ok, so maybe thinking about birds doesn’t count as broadening).

Spend some time with a Common Raven and you'll find they're not all that common in their behavior.

But while I’m not out exploring distant or difficult terrains in search of feathered species or scoring rare birds by the dozen, my mind is cemented in those things. Asking questions, like: Do other people see at least 20 red crossbills a day in Seattle, no matter where they are? Or what a male King of Saxony Bird of Paradise is doing right at this moment? Or if that short-eared owl I watched in a field with my friends a couple weekends ago knew that the world was supposed to end in the next week? Probably not.

A Short-eared Owl cruising over its domain, oblivious to human travails.

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A Skinny on Dippers

Posted in Birds, Field Work, Migration, Mt. Rainier, Natural History, Sierra Nevadas, Washington with tags , , , , , , , , , , on November 26, 2012 by Brendan McGarry

“[H]is music is that of the streams refined and spiritualized. The deep booming notes of the falls are in it, the trills of the rapids, the gurgling of margin eddies, the low whispering of level reaches, and the sweet tinkle of separate drops oozing from the ends of mosses and falling into tranquil ponds.”

- John Muir The Mountains of California, 1894

The seasons can change quickly in the high Cascades. A day in early November, a crust of fall hung over Paradise Valley, but a few juncos, Audubon’s warblers, and varied thrushes were still about. Visiting Myrtle Falls, an American dipper rattled by, the latest I’ve ever seen one there. Three days later, a foot of snow was on the ground and Myrtle Falls was all but ice. All the birds were gone, including the dipper, back to lower reaches of the mountain. The dippers gave me pause, did they just fly downstream, or was something else going on?

Considering a constraint that appears rather limiting, being obligates of running, relatively clean water, the American dipper (Cinclus mexicanus) is an extremely versatile species. They range from Alaska to Panama, generally west of the Rocky Mountains when in North America. Migration South, for a plush winter hideout in a tropical creek isn’t part of the deal either. They are not migratorial in a latitudinal sense. Rather they are altitudinal, yet a pair will often occupy a productive territory throughout the year. So if a territorial pair stays in the same place (believe me they are territorial) and these birds exclusively inhabit rivers and streams, how does their dispersal work? Where do they go when the weather gets bad up in the mountains, assuming there’s others downstream? Being territorial, generally solitary birds, it’s not as if they gather up in winter flocks.

John Muir, among his other florid labels, would have called dippers “water ouzels.” The name dipper describes not their habit of dipping into water to find food, (for they and their three congeners are the most aquatic passerines in the world), but for their movement on land. Anyone who has spent even a few minutes watching a dipper will have seen them alight and bob their body up and down in a weird little jig. A more agitated bird will even dip more rapidly; this might be a method of display that doesn’t require them to constantly raise their voices above the torrents, although they are fairly adept at that too. Most times when I see them, I hear them first.

So back to the initial question – where are the birds nesting in places that receive snow and freeze during the winter going? Dippers are extremely hardy birds (reportedly enduring -50°C winters in Alaska) and if their stream doesn’t freeze and has food, they’ve been noted year round where they breed, relying on a low metabolism and extra thick coat of feathers to endure. Multiple pairs of dippers can occupy a single drainage, simply dividing up the waterway in parcels, and in cases where a pair above disperses seasonally, it’s surmised they may skip over a pair wintering below them. These answers are about what I expected but I always enjoy delving a bit deeper to test my ideas with research that’s been done. I’d have never known that in some places, winter densities can get quite high, including a finding of 35 birds/km along British Columbia’s Okanagan River. For a bird that will fiercely chase away interlopers during the breeding season, it’s funny to think of them in such proximity. Frozen water is only one thing forcing these birds to disperse, the underlying reasons revolve around the dipper’s exclusively animal diet.

A few years ago I had the pleasure of spending several afternoon with a family of dippers in the Sierras. Beneath the bridge that crossed a rushing creek to my summer quarters, a pair of dippers had raised their young. One afternoon in particular was spent watching a youngster being fed. The interim between parents stuffing food down its gullet the fledgling spent singing a mangled dipper slurry. It was so charming I couldn’t help but giggle at this bird that appeared to lack all self awareness at his butchered song. Had he noticed me, I suspect the reaction would have been that of a teenage caught singing boisterously off key.

After his parents had finished their job of raising him, he’d eventually disperse to another drainage nearby. But while he flew off, his parents would do something pretty astonishing, they’d molt all flight feathers simultaneously. This means that they cannot fly for a short period, fully relying on water for protection from predators. For a passerine, this is incredibly peculiar.

I’ve never seen a dipper anywhere but along running water or the occasional lakeshore or coastline but these youngsters have to disperse between drainages at some point. This means they might occasionally cross land. Some have surmised this happens at night since there are no observations of cross drainage dispersal during the day. This only sort of makes sense to me. On the one hand, traveling out of their element at night would be safer. However, you’d also think that they’d just go downstream till they found a fork and follow that elsewhere.

If I got to choose, I’d imagine them waiting till the cover of darkness, listening for the moonlit tinkle of running water as they hurry through the forest or high above on their search. A night exodus in search of the torrent.

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In a Rut

Posted in Natural History, Washington, Conservation, Environmentalism, Current Events, United States, Olympic National Park with tags , , , , , on August 9, 2012 by Brendan McGarry

Sometimes the birds just don’t want to cooperate. Sure, I could hear many but I couldn’t see a damn thing. Down the slope of Hurricane Ridge I was squinting across, only six trees were likely candidates for a Olive-sided Flycatcher I could hear pipping away, but no tapered silhouette materialized. American Pipits spirited about overhead and in open alpine meadows directly in front of us, apparently invisible. Don’t get me wrong here, I love wildflowers, but I was begging to lose steam talking about them. Something alive and lacking roots was in order for variety’s sake.

Those snow patches were in an oddly exposed southern face….No, not snow, Mountain Goats!

There’s a million and one stories about introduced species, intentional or otherwise, the vast majority are not positive. How Mountain Goats got to the Olympic Peninsula isn’t a mystery, a few sportsmen got it in their heads in 1920s that they could do with some more things to hunt in the Olympics. Apparently Black-tailed Deer and the largest subspecies of Elk in North America, the Roosevelt Elk (Cervus canadensis roosevelti), weren’t enough.

In a place that designated a National Park, a Biosphere Reserve, and a World Heritage Site partially because of marked floral endemism, (and notable endemic fauna) you might guess why a significant introduced goat population is be a problem. (Ok, ok, they are actually goat-antelopes but who’s counting?) The point is they trample, munch, and wallow in all those gaudy, endemic, fragile plants I was half complaining about earlier, (I also incessantly have to remind my fellow mammals to not trample them so I can’t really blame the goats too much).

The goats have been a point of contention for a long time. The park service initially tried to remove the over 1000 strong population by live capture during the 1980s. This was dangerous, eventually deemed impractical at best, taking care of 521 animals. Between some hunting outside the park and the removals, the population dropped back to a somewhat reasonable number. In 1997 there was a push to shoot the remainder but public opinion apparently shut that idea down.

So then this guy hiking in the Olympics in 2010 got gored by a male Mountain Goat in rut. He died. People got upset (understandably) and there’s a lawsuit pending. Knowing full well that mountain goats are aggressive and potentially dangerous, it’s still easy to want to get closer and we hiked on intent on better views.

We’d been watched the group of seven goats, three of them adorable yearlings, when the largest and closest animal, dashed inexplicably closer to where we stood on the trail.  While rushing away in terror I also noticed he was shedding his winter wool coat quite rapidly, tufts wafting off as he sprinted.  I thought of the warm blankets the people of the Olympic Peninsula would have traded for with tribes from near the goats’ native range in the Cascades. Then I noticed the man running in our direction and realized why the goats were running.

I’ve never had a ranger at park tell me to throw rocks at a wild animal until this year. Much less have I ever seen a ranger running full-tilt down a trail shooting a paintball gun at Mountain Goats. They’d gotten much too close to the trail, following about all the wonderful annual foliage in the subalpine swale just below us.  Deterring animals from living in areas where high numbers of people visit is the temporary solution.

I don’t envy the National Park service, trying to appease animals rights interests by not killing the goats but being asked to do so by concerned hikers (and likely a few botanists). Sure these animals shouldn’t be there, but they are always enjoyable to see. And quite honestly I didn’t mind seeing rangers shoot hot pink paintballs at seven caterwauling goats. It was possibly the funniest thing I’ve seen all summer (however let’s pray next summer consists of something better).

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My City’s Bird

Posted in Birding, Birds, Natural History, Seattle, The Montlake Fill, Washington with tags , , , , , , , , on July 26, 2012 by Brendan McGarry

Great Blue Herons (Ardea herodias) are ubiquitous and easily observed. So common, widespread, and obvious that they are easily written off. You’ve seen a lot of them and will see many more, as they are one of the most adaptable waterbirds in North America.

These are gems we should really cherish. Species we can become truly familiar with, because in the case of birds, familiarity doesn’t breed contempt. We should not just note their presence, but really make an effort to know them. In Seattle, we share our city with herons anywhere there’s shoreline and we’ve even made them our city bird. Some people become heavily involved in their natural history, anointing themselves caretakers of heronry sites, keeping watch. Others merely notice them standing at the Ballard Locks or flying over their house in the middle of the city. Most people in Seattle know them because of their size alone, which makes them easy to observe. I’d hazard they are as iconic of birdlife to the general public as Bald Eagles.

Yet, while I always note a GBH, as many birders call them, I wouldn’t suggest I spend tons of time thinking about their habits or that I have an intimate understanding of them as a species. I generally know what most birders know: that they nest in colonies, they eat fish but have quite varied diets, that they are the largest herons in North America, and are very common.

I always try to push myself to learn more, not by reading or studying photographs, but by observation. When the opportunity presents itself, I try to not keep walking and do what is all too easy to say.

“It’s just a heron.”

I resisted the urge recently and was graced with some decent photos and some enjoyable behavior.

This particular bird was obviously hunting – standing intensely still over a clear patch of water on the edge of Union Bay on Lake Washington. I decided to settle down, take a few shots, wait, and observe. Of course as I decided this, the bird made its move, diving almost completely into the water.

Wet and gangly, the bird flopped back out of the water with a small catfish adorning the end of its spear-like bill. Blood began to trail down the protruding bill tip and it began a series of head waggles to loosen the quarry. Eventually the fish slid off and at the same time the bird deftly tossed it up and caught it head first. Swallowing the catfish in this orientation, a creeping lump that slowly slid down the heron’s gracile neck, reminiscent of a snake’s dinnertime.

As I watched this mealtime, one of thousands this bird would have all summer, I realized I’d never seen a heron swallow something so large. I’ve been watching birds for 18 years, much more of my life then I haven’t, and I’ve never seen this simple act in person. There’s always something new to see, even when you think you’ve fully explore your backyard, you’ll discover some nook, casting everything in a new light.  With Summer flying by, I always need to find small pleasures.

Mulling this over, I watched the bird go through the post meal motions. Bill rubbing, splashing the blood off in the water, and a series of yawns that left its tongue dangling at odd angles. All of a sudden, it turned to look at me, as if suddenly realizing what I was, and took off with a raucous squawk.

Thanks Heron.

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Summertime?

Posted in Birding, Birds, Migration, Natural History, Seattle, United States, Washington with tags , , , , , , , , , on June 23, 2012 by Brendan McGarry

It’s rather amusing to think about the Summer Solstice in the Pacific Northwest, especially considering the weather today. Here in Seattle, we don’t consider it summer until after the fourth of July. Yet many of the breeding birds are done singing by then, having had at least one brood. So many of us grow up with these strange ingrained memories of birds singing on bright summer days.

I’ve been bemoaning that I feel like I missed spring. I did plenty of birding and it’s not as if the birds are totally done. Yet, it feels like the weeks are slipping by, as work not specifically ornithological keeps me distracted. I guess I’m feeling out of touch. My journal, of what I’ve heard and seen almost every day helps, but doesn’t make up for the early hours traipsing about during point counts or banding.

So, I’ve decided that I wanted to commemorate the passing of our the longest day of the year by listing some of the more notable bird encounters, sightings, and aural identifications during this spring away field biology. These are encounters not sought after. In a way I’m grasping for content where I haven’t had time to seek it out; however I think noting the every day is just as valuable as seeking out the obscure. Establishing a norm is understanding for stasis, for conservation.

March 23, 2012 17:10 – The air feels of spring and technically it is. Sitting on a bench on the edge of Union Bay at the Montlake Fill, I’m privy to territorial stirrings. Three Virginia Rails call within 80 meters of my seat. One suddenly appears, bounds across an opening in awkward half flight, jumping gait, and crashes into another rail at the edge of a bank of cattails. This is the first time I’ve ever seen rails physically attacking one another, presumably because of their veiled lives. The attack lasts a second but feels monumental.

April 21, 2012 15:20 – Spring in the Hoh Rainforest. Blooming Salmonberry with Rufous Hummingbirds in attendance. Varied Thrush are tantalizingly close but still unseen, their insect calls reverberating in my ears. Pacific Wren are always singing but they seem particularly brazen today, standing ground on their nurse log perches when I approach. Everything is bathed in a sunlit lime.

April 29, 2012 6:45 – The pair of them are flying right at eye level in early morning glow. The tiercel, he’s notabley smaller, lofts up to land on a light pole along the freeway. The hen, seemingly floating by, suddenly tucks and drops out of view below the bridge. I can’t complain about having Peregrine Falcons on my morning commute.

May 26, 2012 12:20 – There’s an adult Bald Eagle flying over the freeway, being dive bombed by a Red-tailed Hawk. I’m driving with my mom, trying to split my attention between the road and the birds. An American Crow joins, focusing on the hawk. The eagle does a series of barrel rolls, extending its talons at its oppressor. They form a strange triple tiered circus act that begs a giggle. Birders aren’t always the safest of drivers.

May 30, 2012 15:40 – My first Willow Flycatcher is calling somewhere amongst the Red Alder stand before us. I’m guiding a group through the Hummock Trail in Mt. St. Helen’s National Monument. There’s no time to suss out the bird, to actually see it. Satisfaction in hearing a fitzbew will have to suffice, and it does.

June 3, 2012 11:00 – Hurricane Ridge is coming to life. American Pipits are already twittering about the matted ground where the snow has been peeled back by the sun. An Olympic Marmot lay sunning itself, probably just now unburied from a winter slumber. The precipitous icy peaks, gashed by glaciers and the elements, remind us that it’s not yet spring. In trade for a good portrait, I let a hungry Common Raven take a look in the car trunk.

June 13, 2012 13:00 – I’m talking to one of my Wilderness First Responder classmates during lunch. I hear the piercing call of an Osprey and look up to see one high up, performing a display I’ve never seen. A second bird joined higher still, the first continued a series of shallow dives while thrusting its legs out, screaming insistently. Getting home I discover (as I surmised) that this was likely a male bird displaying to a female. Nuptial displays are bizarre no matter the species.

June 14, 2012 15:20 – Two Common Nighthawks are flying over the field by the Environmental Learning Center at Discovery Park. I’m supposed to be listening to a lecture on reducing dislocated limbs in my Wilderness First Responder class but I’m highly distracted when we’re outside. These two goatsuckers are a surprise and are high enough that they only caught my eye by the pattern of their flight. Normally I detect them by their strange mechanical call. I wonder if they are nesting nearby.

June 21, 2012 12:57 – As I am writing this, a group of exceptionally noisy Bushtits are at my window, dangling about the birch just outside. I presume this is the pair I’ve been seeing all spring, now towing around their fully grown young, just barely discernible from their parents. The fledglings are incessantly crying for food, the parents hurriedly searching for morsels, shoving them in ravenous mouths. Just as I am about to turn away, a crow swoops in, presumably to grab a little bushtit morsel. Alarm calls irrupt but in seconds things are back to normal.

I feel a bit better now that I look at it this way.

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Happy World Oceans Day!

Posted in Environmentalism, Current Events with tags , , , , , , , , on June 9, 2012 by Brendan McGarry

Happy World Oceans Day!  Hope everyone takes a second to think about the beautiful oceans on this planet we live on.  I’ve never been a big swimmer, but I sure as hell cherish the ocean.  Here are a few photos that came to mind when I thought about today.

We all know things aren’t what they used to be out on the open oceans.  The world is mostly water.  It takes care of us.  Let’s take care of it.

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Life. Death. All in the backyard.

Posted in Birds, Conservation, Environmentalism, Natural History, Seattle, United States, Washington with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on June 7, 2012 by Brendan McGarry

Feathers were strewn everywhere. Body and head asunder. Something had been eating the skull custard. A murder in my backyard.

I’d been walking my bike to the back patio of my urban home in Seattle when I’d been stopped in my tracks. A bird lay there, dead, left in the middle of the cement. Immediately my mind tore into superstitious, paranoid thoughts. Was this an ill omen? Who was the culprit? The neighbor’s cat, who roams freely, accompanying me while I tend my vegetable garden? Was I responsible because I’d not chased him away? Or was this something entirely more natural, a Cooper’s, a Sharp-shinned Hawk?

This mess was a female American Robin (Turdus migratorius). Most likely the one I’d been watching collect heaping billfulls of earthworms for nestlings nearby. I had a selfish moment of annoyance. I’d just swept the patio, now it was littered with feathers and a half eaten corpse. What a strange reaction to a gruesome death. Annoyance at the inconvenience?

Walking inside, I pondered how I should be reacting. A couple attitudes, moral directions presented themselves.

On one hand, this is just a part of life. Mortality, particularly in short-lived species like American Robins, is commonplace. Death is often apparent during the breeding season. Failed nests, naïve fledglings, there’s a reason many species have large clutches. The American Robin population is generally increasing, so certainly there was nothing to worry about. While I know these things are true, I’ve never been able to fully submit to this scientifically objective tone. I’d argue that most good biologists have emotional attachment to whatever they study and generally care more than their publications admit.

(And, I do enjoy seeing a natural predator catch prey, but that doesn’t mean I relish death.)

On the flip side is my desire to honor or rather cherish all life. Assigning values to different species seems absurd, horrible in fact. Yet we do it all the time, from valuing vegetables over weeds or killing mosquitoes while encouraging lady beetles. Life isn’t so simplistic to totally adhere to one train of thought. I’d be lying if I said that I wouldn’t be more upset if I’d found say a Cooper’s Hawk or even an American Crow dead in my yard.

However, what if I was indirectly responsible for the death of this bird? I connected the dots: petting the neighbor’s cat, encouraging it to come back, giving it an opportunity to catch this mother robin. There’s an entirely different issue here:  this cat was outdoors in the first place. Outdoor pet cats probably kill hundreds of millions of songbirds every year. This is an inflammatory issue, but you can’t ignore that fact that house cats are not natural and can have a serious impact. With an estimated 60 million pet cats in the United States alone (many of course are kept indoors), if even half are outside and kill a bird every year, that’s around 30 million birds dead of just one of many human causes*. I myself have had pet cats that went outside too.

So basically, should I be moved to tears or stoically look on as a trained scientist? As usual, I landed somewhere in the middle. There’s a good chance that if this female had a nest, it would now fail and that was a sad image; baby birds wasting away in the nest. Males do help with rearing young but it’s not typically a one bird job. Yet, as I said, American Robins are extremely common and that this was not a disaster for the species.  However, whether or not we choose to acknowledge it, humans have impacts on other species, even the common ones.

Mulling it all over I’d concluded that another bird had likely killed the robin based on the state of the corpse. The scientist in me decided that I might as well use this as learning experience, I started to do a little research on American Robins.  Maybe I could also figure out the age of the bird or something else. Time for some forensics.

Just as I had that thought, I heard the ominous rush of scavenger wings outside. Crow wings. It doesn’t take long for a mess to be cleaned up. More wingbeats and knocking on the gutters. I crept outside to watch the crow and its prize.  I wasn’t quiet enough. Flushing, it left a robin corpse in the gutter. Maybe that full crop was going to some babies. From death comes life? I continued thinking about how to approach life and death in my backyard and I heard the crow return two more times.

Inspecting my patio a half an hour later, I found no head and no body.  Somehow this resolved the issue for me.

As I stood there with feathers strewn about my feet, Bewick’s Wrens were noisily herding their shakily flighted fledglings about the yard. Death and life were spinning about, even in my urban yard.

* a few sources and extra info for those who get up in arms about cats: http://library.fws.gov/bird_publications/songbrd.html ; http://www.fws.gov/birds/mortality-fact-sheet.pdf ; http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2011/06/cats-tnr-birds-feral

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