Those Amazing Birds

OK, here's a different blog. We use bird names or references everyday in our lives. Here are a few lists I have come up with. Can you add to them?

Birdy Sayings, Proverbs, and Descriptions

A little bird told me.
That's for the birds.
A bird's-eye view.
A lame-duck politician.

Crowing about her accomplishments.

Chickening out.

She eats like a bird.

Ducking one's responsibilities.

His swan song.

To hawk one's wares.

To have an eagle-eye.

Proud as a peacock.

He's a dodo.

Stool pigeon.

The early bird catches the worm.

She's a loon.

To sing like a canary.

He's a Cardinal in the Catholic Church.

Sitting in the catbird's seat.

To crane one's neck.

To grouse about something.

She's cuckoo.

Birdbrain.

They are lovebirds.

Wise as an owl.

To rail about a subject.

To call someone a turkey.

Running around like a chicken with its head cut off.

Towns with bird names

Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania

Wren, Oregon

Birdseye, Indiana
Chicken, Alaska

Eagle, Alaska

Bird City, Kansas

Goose Pimple Junction, Virginia
Parrot, Kentucky
Turkey, Texas
Turkey Scratch, Arkansas

Some Birds in Literature Titles

The Raven- Edgar Allen Poe
Ode to a Nightingale - John Keats
The Eagle - Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Owl and the Pussycat - Edward Lear

Birds - Aristophanes
The Birds - Daphne du Maurier
Nightingale - Hans Christian Anderson
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Send me your additions!

         I just returned from Wyoming, where I have spent the last 28 summers. With only 530,000 people, it's the least densely populated of any of the lower 48 states. There are more antelope than people in the state. I live in Dubois (circled on map), population 954, the most isolated town in the lower 48.  At 7000 feet elevation and 80 miles from the nearest traffic light, only 3500 people live within a 60 mile radius. Needless to say, there are lots of wide open spaces.

Western Wyoming is in the Rocky Mountains, and a good chunk of it is in the mountainous Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. Mid- and eastern Wyoming are in the dry and windy Great Plains, and the entire state is cold in the winter. As a result, bird diversity in Wyoming is not nearly as great as it is in California, with its relatively mild weather and greater variety of habitats. California, although 40% larger, has nearly 40 million people, 80 times what Wyoming has.

        There are about 400 species of birds in Wyoming, while closer to 650 can be seen in California fairly regularly. So Wyoming is not a destination birding spot for most people. But I've seen things here that I've never seen anywhere else, bird-wise. My house is in the sagebrush and I see dozens of Vesper Sparrows (right) every day, and occasionally Lark Buntings. 

About a mile from my place there are two Golden Eagle nests close to each other on the face of a rock wall. Near them is a Peregrine Falcon nest. Last year I watched the male falcon catch a Western Bluebird, pluck it absolutely clean, and feed it to the young falcons. I commonly see Ruffed Grouse, Gray Jays, and Clark's Nutcrackers in the mountains.

        The Greater Sage-Grouse makes its home in Wyoming and in high desert ecosystems throughout the Intermountain West. Three of the largest remaining complexes of courtship sites, known as "leks," are located in pristine habitat in Wyoming. The fascinating Greater Sage-Grouse courtship ritual is imitated in dances by Plains Indian nations such as the Sioux, Cheyenne, Blackfoot and Shoshone.Sage grouse have been declining dramatically since the 1960s as a result of habitat fragmentation and degradation, resulting from fences, roads, oil and gas development,overgrazing, prescribed fire, spraying of herbicides and farming. Fossil fuels and mineral mining are the economic lifeblood of Wyoming, but energy production by wind turbines is gaining momentum. Wind turbines, however, are a major environmental controversy here as they pose a danger to migrating birds and the towers provide perches for predatory birds that prey on the Greater Sage- Grouse (left).

The only more controversial wildlife subjects than sage grouse in Wyoming are wolves and grizzly bears. I think they are all cool, but I have to admit that running across fresh wolf or grizzly tracks in the woods gives me a somewhat different kind of thrill than seeing a sage grouse.

On occasion someone e-mails me telling me that they have just spotted an Ivory-billed Woodpecker. It is almost certain that what they saw was the Pileated Woodpecker (left), found throughout the eastern U.S., the Pacific Northwest, and southern Canada, and a close relative of the Ivory-billed.

There have been no confirmed sightings of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker since 1948. This black-and-white bird lived in old-growth forests of the southeastern U.S. and Cuba. Its food was primarily beetle larvae which it obtained by stripping the tree bark with its ivory-colored bill. Because of its specialized feeding habits, the bird required a large area of mature forests of dead standing trees where the beetle larvae live. The species disappeared after forest clearing destroyed millions of acres of virgin forest throughout the South between the 1880s and mid-1940s.  According to Wikipedia, "In 1938, an estimated 20 individuals remained in the wild, some 6-8 of which were located in the old-growth forest called the Singer Tract in Lousiana where logging rights were held by the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company. The company brushed aside pleas from four Southern governors and the National Audubon Society that the tract be publicly purchased and set aside as a reserve, and clearcut the forest. By 1944 the last known Ivory-billed Woodpecker, a female, was gone from the cut-over tract."

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) was one of the largest woodpeckers in the world, 20 inches in length with 30 inch wings. In 2004, reports of a sighting were investigated but could not be confirmed. In June 2006, a $10,000 reward was offered for information leading to the discovery of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker nest, roost or feeding site. In December 2008, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology announced a reward of $50,000 for leading a project biologist to a living Ivory-billed Woodpecker. In spite of many claims and several expeditions by ornithologists, no clear evidence has found for the continued existence of the Ivory-billed. It is almost certainly extinct.

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker, like the Labrador Duck, Passenger Pigeon, Carolina Parakeet, and Great Auk have all slipped into extinction in the past century or so, but they did exist, as photos, skins, and other evidence attest. And it's easy to understand why people confuse the similar Pileated Woodpecker with the Ivory-billed. What I don't understand is why some folks still believe in Sasquatch, the Abominable Snowman, the Loch Ness Monster, or that supposed dinosaur that still lives in the swamps of the Congo. There is no good evidence for any of these supposed creatures.

If there were a Sasquatch living in the well-populated Pacific Northwest, don't you think that we'd have found bones, fossils, skins, or other evidence that could be DNA tested?  But some people enjoy believing in the supernatural, and reject the more boring scientific evidence. Reminds me of the rash of UFO sightings in the 60s and 70s. All kinds of unconfirmed sightings and fuzzy photos were entered into "evidence" for alien vehicles from outer space. Isn't it interesting now that nearly everyone carries video camera capabilities with them that there are no more sightings?

           Birds have a skeletal system with a number of adaptations for their way of life. Flying especially requires a number of adaptations to make the birds' bones lighter and stronger. Many bones are fused into one, some are hollow, and most have internal struts for strength. Flying birds have a keel extending from their sternum to which the flight muscles are attached. If you debone chicken breasts, that's the big bone you remove in the process. Flying birds, swimming birds, and flightless birds all have special skeletal adaptations.

Ever wonder why a sleeping bird doesn't just pitch forward and fall off the branch it is perched on in the middle of a nap? How about the birds perched in trees and shrubs or on power lines on a windy day? Are they just hanging on for dear life, hoping they don't get blown off? The answer is that songbirds are well adapted to their perching life. In fact, in ornithological parlance, the terms "songbirds" and "perching birds" are interchangeable.

You may have heard of the Achilles's tendon, the tendon that extends from our calf muscle around the back of our foot to the heel. Reach down right now on your leg  and feel it. This tendon enables us to flex our foot up and down - try it. If the Achilles tendon were injured, the foot would be almost immobilized. This is how, in mythology, Achilles was killed - Paris shot an arrow into Achille's tendon.

Look at this diagram of a bird's leg. There are the toes, of course, but notice that the long bone above the foot is actually the ankle (tarsometatarsus)! The tibia and fibula, which make up our lower leg bone, are hidden by the bird's feathers, as is the femur. So while humans have two long bones leading from the hip to the foot, birds have three.

         In birds, the Achille's tendon runs from above the ankle to the back of the foot and then along the bottom of the toes. When a bird lands on a branch, the ankle bends and the Achilles' tendon is stretched. When the tendon stretches, it pulls on the toes and curls them around the branch. There is no muscular effort involved in holding onto the branch - it's automatic. When the bird takes off, the legs straighten, the tendon relaxes, and the toes release their hold on the branch.

          Well, now you might wonder why you don't occasionally see a dead bird sitting on a branch, having died in its sleep from exposure to cold or just old age.In death, the muscles initially relax and the bird just falls out of the tree. In another blog I'll tell you why you don't see as many dead birds as you do mammals, either in the woods or as roadkills.

       Until I read about Ornithophobia in a newspaper column, I had never heard the term, although I know there are people who are afraid of birds. Perhaps the oddest e-mail I ever received was from a woman who was convinced birds followed her everywhere, even to different countries, waiting to attack her. A man was similarly convinced the same Black Phoebe appeared everywhere he went. I've had e-mails from people who swore blackbirds, crows, ravens, jays, hawks, or some other avian menace was attacking them every time they took a walk or entered their back yard. And I can't tell you how many times I've been asked by fearful humans how they can protect their cat, dog, pet rabbit, or small child from the local hawk, owl, eagle, or , egad, the  menacing Great Blue Heron.

Alfred Hitchcock's movie The Birds has hundreds of birds attacking people. The director supposedly was inspired by a 1961 incident in which gulls attacked the terrified residents of Monterey Bay in California.

 Recent research has shown that the birds were suffering the effects of ingesting contaminated plankton and were probably just disoriented. I suspect this movie has something to do with some folks' fears.

I have been studying and watching birds for half a century now (good grief!) and have handled thousands of them. I've climbed up to Osprey nests to band the young, retrieved injured owls, hawks, and eagles, waded into colonies of blackbirds, terns, gulls, pelicans, cormorants, grebes, and banded hundreds of birds. I've been bitten, scratched, pecked, clawed, and dive-bombed but any injuries inflicted were very minor. No bird has ever touched me when it was free-flying  (note the photo of Arctic Terns harassing me);

 the injuries were from birds I held in my hands. There are diseases carried by birds that can be transmitted to humans but they are relatively minor compared to the general realm of diseases. Avian flu can be serious but it is almost totally restricted to people who work with large numbers of domestic fowl. West Nile virus is carried by birds, but not transmitted by them; you can only get it from a mosquito bite.

So why are some people afraid of birds? I can understand the fear of snakes (ophidophobia) as their unblinking eyes make them seem evil, big ones can inflict a painful bite, and some are poisonous. Although I am not afraid of spiders (arachnophobia), I've had two major painful bites from them, so I can understand why some people are fearful. And of course, there is a plethora of other animal-related phobias.

Has anyone been seriously hurt or killed by wild birds? Well, yes. Ostriches, both domestic and wild, are big 300 pound birds and have attacked humans with their large claws. There is a New Guinea bird called the Pitohui that has poison in its feathers. It makes the bird distasteful, but whether it has killed anybody, I don't know.

But unless you are close to an Ostrich, there is nothing to fear from birds. Now horses, that's a different story J

For many years, ornithologists classified birds on the basis of their anatomy and behavior - feather color, plumage patterns, leg length, bill curvature, song, nest structure, and hundreds of other characteristics. In the last twenty or so years, however, DNA has been used to clarify relationships among birds, as we do now with humans.

Without getting too scientific, I'll try to briefly explain the process without talking about the details of the chemistry involved. A blood sample is taken from the birds, usually by clipping a toenail and the DNA is extracted from the blood. The DNA, normally double stranded (like a ladder with rungs), is split in half (like a ladder vertically sawed in half ). These half strands are then mixed with half strands of another bird. The half DNA strands will combine with other half strands, some of which will be pure (one bird) and some will be mixed- a half strand from each bird. These hybrid DNA molecules are then heated. Since hybrid halves do not exactly match, they will eventually spit apart from the heating. The more the strands are alike, the more heat it takes to split them. So the higher the temperature before the strands breaks provides a relative measure of how closely the two birds are related. This is the process of DNA hybridization, very simplified.

Almost all the 10,000 species of birds in the world have been examined in this way. For the most part, DNA studies have affirmed the classification determined by anatomy and behavior, and only minor changes were made. One big change, however, is the discovery that storks are more related to vultures than they are to herons and egrets. Looking at a stork's bald head you can see the resemblance. We now know that  falcons are more closely related to songbirds than they are to hawks or eagles. And hummingbirds are just a specialzed version of the nighthawk!

Based on DNA, we have split species into two (the Plain Titmouse became the virtually identical Oak Titmouse and Juniper Titmouse) 

and have lumped two species into one (The Audubon's Warbler and Myrtle Warbler became the Yellow-rumped Warbler). And the Yellow- and Red-shafted Flickers became the Northern Flicker.

DNA has also determined that several bird species such as Hooded Warblers and Eastern Bluebirds are rather promiscuous as one third of the eggs in a typical nest do not belong to the mate of the female tending the nest.

We can see evolutionary changes by studying bird populations over time - the reason museum collections exist. DNA studies give us much more detailed and accurate information over a shorter period of time.

One of the most active debates is the relationship of birds to dinosaurs, which ornithologists generally believe is close. Some say that birds are just modern dinosaurs. When we can reliably extract DNA from dinosaur fossils, we'll have solved another great problem in the fascinating field of evolution. 

There are a number of birds with "tit" in their name. In the U.S. we have the Oak, Juniper, and Tufted Titmouse (Titmice), the Bushtit, and the Wrentit. "Tit" comes from the Norse language, meaning "small", as all these birds are.

Found only in the western and southwestern part of the U.S., the Bushtit is one of the smallest songbirds in North America at four and one half inches long. Gray-brown, with a large head, a short neck, a long tail, and a short stubby bill, the Bushtit lacks major identifying markings, so it is often identified by its shape, calls, and behaviors.

Very gregarious, Bushtits are active, foraging in mixed species flocks containing species such as chickadees and warblers with perhaps ten to forty individuals in a flock. Members of the group constantly contact each other with a short tsit call. In cold weather, the group may roost together to stay warm by sharing body heat. They glean insects, insect larvae, and insect eggs from leaves and twigs, often hanging upside down to get at the undersides of leaves, separating the leaves with one foot. They will occasionally eat berries and seeds and sometimes visit suet feeders. 

In the spring, they pair off for breeding.

The nest, constructed over 3-5 days, is a woven, hanging basket with a hole on the high side of the nest leading to the nest chamber at the bottom. It may be a foot long, and is generally built of spider webs and other fine plant material. The nest may be lined with feathers, fur, and moss. Both parents incubate the four to ten eggs for 12-13 days, sometimes at the same time. Bushtit parents glue the eggs to the bottom of the nest with saliva so they are not and the swinging of the nest in the wind substitutes for turning the eggs during incubation. 

The nest is so well insulated that the eggs need only be insulated 40% of the daylight hours. Both brood the young and bring them food until shortly after they leave the nest at about 18 days. Sometimes there are helpers at the nest - birds other than the parents that help to feed the nestlings. Typically these are adult males, probably those that could not find a mate. During breeding the breeding pair, helpers, and young all sleep in the nest. After the young fledge, all the individuals sleep on branches instead. They generally raise two broods a year.

Their small size and calls are well described by their scientific name of Psaltriparus minimus, literally "the small player of lute or zither." The song of this tiny active bird is a high trill that sounds like "tsip, tsip" .

Bushtits are around all year; they love birdbaths, if you want to attract them to your yard.

Advertisement: I will be at Lyon Books in Chico at 7pm on Wed July 28 talking about my book "The Birds of Bidwell Park".

Albino birds are not particularly unusual. I've seen white robins, jays, crows, peacocks, and others. And of course there are white domestic chickens, ducks, geese, and turkeys. The whole explanation of feather color is fairly complex, but we will just discuss pigments for the time being. These pigments fall into three main groups - those that cause yellow, red, and black/brown colors. The pigments are deposited into the feathers as they grow and the combination of pigments and feather structure form the colors and patterns of the birds' feathers. (There are no blue pigments in birds; blue birds are actually brown-pigmented, the feather structure producing the blue color.) Since most birds have a summer and winter plumage, there  may be two or more plumage patterns in one species every year and the proportions of pigments change. Ptarmigans, chicken-like birds of the far north and tundra, molt to an all-white plumage in the winter for camouflage.

With such a demanding physiological process, it is no wonder that occasionally things go awry. Sometimes there is a total lack of pigments and the result is a totally white bird with a red eye - a true albino. Some birds are totally white but have colored eyes (the iris) and are not true albinos. Just a short time ago my friend Janet Hubbell sent me this photo of an albino hummingbird.

Occasionally there is a dilution of the pigments which produces a faded version of the bird. I had a gray and white Yellow-billed Magpie visiting my backyard with a flock of normal colored black and white magpies. This is called incomplete albinism. There are a number of birds that have light and dark phases, where incomplete albinism has become a permanent condition in the species.

There is also partial albinism in which the bird shows patches of white or individual white feathers among its normal plumage. This is very common in House Sparrows for some reason, but can be seen in many other birds, especially the soaring hawks. The Red-tailed Hawk shows a gradation of feather darkness from very dark to very light.  Populations of the Fox Sparrow on the Pacific coast are darker in the southern part of their range and lighter as one goes northward.

Ever notice that many birds that are almost all white have black wing tips - their primary flight feathers? This is typical for gulls, terns, Snow Geese, Wood Stork, White Pelican, and others. The reason is that the black pigment (melanin granules) strengthen the feathers which are most subject to wear and tear. Herons and white swans are the only exceptions as they have other adaptations in their primary feathers to avoid excessive wear.

So what happens to the hapless white robin or jay in its habitat surrounded by normal colored birds? If not eaten by a predator because it stands out, it is rejected by any potential mates. White may imply clean and pristine in the human world, but the meaning is very different among birds.

 Birds and mammals like us, are homeothermic (warm blooded is a misnomer as tuna and lizards and worms are warm blooded at times) which means that we maintain a fairly constant body temperature at all times. It also means that we have to use a lot of energy to maintain that temperature and shiver or sweat when necessary. Birds have a bit higher metabolism than mammals, are generally smaller, and use more energy to warm up or cool down as necessary.

The East Coast has been experiencing record high temperatures lately. Government and private agencies are making efforts to see that the homeless, the elderly, and poor have some way to escape the heat and humidity. A similar heat wave in Europe a few years ago killed hundreds of people.

What about the birds caught in this heat? How do they cope with it? Unlike mammals, birds have no sweat glands. If they did, their feathers would mat down from the moisture and they would be unable to fly. Instead, they cool themselves primarily by panting. Breathing in and out rapidly removes moisture from the lungs and throat, and like sweating, the loss of moisture off these tissues serves to cool them. Mammals, like us, exude droplets of water from our sweat glands with little physiological effort. The panting of birds works as well to cool them, up to a point. When we exercise, we heat up and sweat more. When birds pant, they use energy which generates even more body heat, requiring even more panting and more energy use. 

The House Sparrow breathes 57 times a minute at 90⁰ F and 160 times a minute at 110⁰ . The point of diminishing returns comes quickly, and birds die fairly quickly in high temperatures.

Besides panting, birds do have a few other mechanisms to prevent overheating. They can lose a bit of body heat off their skin by raising their wings and body feathers. Birds avoid the sun by resting in the hottest part of the day, or if incubating eggs in the open, they orient their back to the sun. They will also shade the eggs or young. Albatrosses raise their feet off the ground and spread their wings to shade their feet. The Herring Gull orients the white part of its body towards the sun to reflect heat. The Wood Stork, when hot, directs its liquid excrement onto its long legs. The domestic chicken splashes water over its comb and wattles. The Egyptian Plover wets its belly in puddles and cools itself and its eggs and the sand around the nest. Pelicans and cormorants vibrate their large throat pouches (called gular fluttering).

I received an e-mail the other day from some New Yorkers, asking what to do about the pigeons nesting outside their office windows. The parent birds are panting endlessly and the chicks are dying. It's hot in Chico, too. Birds don't need feeders now, but a bird bath would be a welcome addition to your yard.

When I arrived in Chico in 1972, I discovered that there were no Northern Mockingbirds in Butte County. Mockingbirds were rare in northern California then but are very common now as you are probably aware. Mockingbirds expand and contract their ranges with the climate, preferring warmer ones, and they have been increasing in numbers in California since the 1940s. The House Finch, common over the U.S., including Chico, has, over the past 40 years, expanded its range northward over 270 miles. The Purple Finch, found in the far west and east of the Mississippi, has expanded its range northward over 430 miles. Migratory robins in Colorado are arriving two weeks earlier than they did 20 years ago.

Audubon analyses of bird populations over the past 40 years indicate that birds of every type have moved an average of 35 miles northward during spring migration. (http://birdsandclimate.audubon.org/). Similar changes have been noticed in Europe by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (http://www.rspb.org.uk/news/details.asp?id=tcm:9-211878). Recent scientific studies of birds and their response to climate change are available at the Partners in Flight website 

http://www.partnersinflight.org/climate_change/bibliography.cfm. An excellent overview by the American Bird Conservancy can be found at http://www.abcbirds.org/conservationissues/globalwarming/global_warming_factsheet.pdf. 

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature indicates that one out of eight bird species in the world is in danger of extinction, and that climate change is a major cause (http://cms.iucn.org/index.cfm?uNewsID=947).

Birds migrate in response to photoperiod (daylength), not temperature, but their food supply emerges with warming temperatures, so global warming is skewing the normal rhythms that birds evolved with. Instead of arriving on their breeding grounds at the peak of insect, plant, flower, and seed abundance, birds are arriving later, at a time of less food. But birds, like other organisms, are subject to natural selection, part of the evolutionary process, so the birds that arrive the earliest or go farthest north, are now at an advantage and thus reproduce more successfully than those birds that arrive later or stay farther south. Over the years, the more successful birds become more abundant, and this is what we are beginning to observe. Birds are arriving earlier and/or migrating farther north and this response is correlated with the increasing temperatures of the earth.

Birds face other problems due to climate change. Habitats are drying up due to drought, snow fields are melting and allowing predators to more easily approach nests, trees are being destroyed by insect outbreaks as the insects are not killed in the warmer winter, more and more severe wildfires are occurring, weather patterns are changing, islands and wetlands are being inundated by rising sea levels, and sea water chemistry is changing, affecting the food webs of seabirds.

If we simply look at the data provided by changes in bird populations over the world, we have to conclude that something is happening, even if we didn't have climate data. And the only logical conclusion for these changes in bird movements is a warming environment. Like the canary in the mine, birds are telling us something.