Snowy Owls?

Hello, readers. It's been an absurdly long time since my last posting here. I hope to get back to at least a weekly post. I'll do my best.

I wanted to offer up a bit of a cautionary tale here. It seems as if a half-dozen people I've spoken with lately have sworn that they've seen a snowy owl in our area, or as one acquaintance put it today, "one of those big white owls."

It's not impossible that a snowy owl could be seen in the Northwest Corner and vicinity. On the Lakeville-Sharon Christmas Bird Count, exactly two have ever been recorded -- one in 1971 and the other in 1993.

But as you can surmise, it's extremely unlikely -- and the appearance of a snowy owl would be highly noteworthy, if not sensational.

By way of background, the snowy owl (Nyctea scandiaca) -- aka Harry Potter's familiar -- is a large owl, mostly white, with various degrees of blackish flecking on its plumage (adult males are the purest white, while young females have the most dark, mottled feathering). Snowy owls normally inhabit the Far North, where their white plumage provides them with outstanding camouflage in their snowy tundra habitat. They are skilled hunters and feed on small rodents and birds. In the North, lemmings make up a large part of their diet, and it is thought that the owls' populations and movements may be related to the "boom-and-bust" cycles of lemmings.

Whether lemmings or some other factor is the cause, some snowy owls are prone to coming far south or their normal range in winter, particularly young birds. Some years they may be few; other years they may appear in impressive numbers. But before you go out and start reporting snowy owls in droves, you should know that there's a catch.

When snowy owls wander south of their home range, they most often end up on the coast. There are at least two possible reasons for this: First, many vagrant birds -- not just snowy owls -- "overshoot" their range and keep going until they reach the coast, which is a natural barrier. Rare bird aficionados know this well. In this year alone, Connecticut and New York beaches have hosted a Townsend's solitaire (way out of its range, which is the northwestern U.S.) and a Western tanager. Second, the expanses of beach and dune are probably the best match of the owl's native tundra habitat, and also have a ready supply of moles, voles, and other small rodents that are the object of the owl's wanderings.

In some years there have been occasional sightings of snowy owls inland, particularly along the Hudson River and, strangely enough, in cities and towns, where the odd snowy owl is often found perched on the rooftop of a building. But, again, snowy owls have not been found much around our area.

Now comes the hard part. My skepticism of the putative "snowy owls" of the Northwest Corner is borne of the fact that another bird is all-too-often confused for a white owl: the red-tailed hawk, our most abundant raptor. I am not one to want to discourage the eager and novice birder -- not by any stretch -- and my saying "red-tailed hawk" often earns me a groan or a "whatever you say, but I know I saw a snowy owl." Nevertheless, I've had enough experience with "owls" actually turning out to be hawks to know that this is most likely the case.

Here are a few things to remember: The red-tailed hawk is a large raptor -- and not only large, but very robust of body (like a snowy owl) and large-headed (also like an owl). A redtail will often sit for long periods on a branch, utility wire, or fencepost, turning its head side-to-side while scanning for prey (perhaps reminiscent of an owl). And, a redtail is a pale hawk, particularly on its underside; aside from the dark "belly band," which is variable anyway, the underparts of a red-tailed hawk can be mostly white. Finally, red-tailed hawks are very variable in their plumage from one bird to the next, and extremely pale birds -- even partial albinos -- are not uncommon. (You might have heard of the famous New York City redtail named "Pale Male.")

So, you can begin to get the picture: Large, light-colored raptor, flying over an open field to hunt for prey, very possibly backlit by the sun, making it look even lighter . . . and your first reaction just might be "snowy owl!" And if that same bird lands to perch on a fencepost, and is facing toward you, revealing only its light underparts, turning its head slowly . . . .

Here's one other thing to bear in mind, however. A snowy owl would almost never perch on a branch or utility wire. With the exception of the aforementioned "rooftop snowies," these birds tend to stay very low. On the handful of occasions I've ever seen snowy owls -- none in this area -- they have been standing on the ground (on a snowdrift or beach dune) or perched on a low fencepost.

So what do you do if, after all this, you see a snowy owl? Send me an e-mail via Hedwig, pronto!

A Trio of Sparrows for Valentine's Day

When today's Nor'easter hit, our bird feeder suddenly came alive with activity. It goes to show how vital supplemental feeding can be for winter birds. In addition to black-capped chickadees, tufted titmice, and white-breasted nuthatches, there was a sizable flock of dark-eyed juncos working the snowy ground under the feeder along with three white-throated sparrows.

Whitethroats are large sparrows, crisply plumaged with mottled brown upperparts, bold white stripes on the head, yellow lores (the area in front of the eye), mostly gray underparts, and clean white throats outlined in black.

When our girls went out to play in the snow, one of them left the door of our enclosed porch open, and then must have walked back toward the porch, shooing the three whitethroats inside. After a brief episode of the poor birds hurling themselves against the windows, I managed to gently pluck each one in turn from the windowsill and send them on their way.

Before I released the last one, Jenny took a nice picture of a bird in the hand for her blog.

Missing in Action: Winter

It's 8:00 in the morning and already the temperature is at 61 degrees. A report has come in from the Hudson Valley that spring peepers were already calling -- in mid-January!

Winter Finches

The other day, while stuck at home with my daughter (who had a most unexpected case of chicken pox), I watched an American Goldfinch perched in a little tree outside our window.

At first (this just goes to show that even experienced birders are susceptible) I wanted to think that it was the oriole that has been hanging around Sharon, but on closer examination it was clearly a male goldfinch in winter plumage.

I spent a good long time studying it while it obligingly sat still, and I recommend to anyone interested in honing their birding skills to do the same. Learning the appearance of goldinches in winter is very useful for ruling them out when suspecting a less common species.

Male goldfinches in winter look much different than they do in spring and summer. They lack the bright yellow body coloration and the black cap. But they retain their largely black wings, with wide white wingbars and much white edging on the wings and tail. The bill is short, conical, and pinkish. The male has rich (if not brilliant) yellow coloration, particularly around the throat and face, while the female is more grayish. The tail is fairly short and notched.

If none of that convinces you, listen as it takes to the air. Goldinches often call in flight, an easy learned, pleasant, four-note per-chick-o-ree.

John Bull

John Bull, author of "The Birds of New York State," passed away last Friday at age 92. A full obituary is on the New York Times website.

I grew up two blocks from John and Edith's Far Rockaway home, and John was an early influence on getting this shy birder out into the world. I treasure my first-edition copy of the Birds of New York State and still refer to it. In it is a clipping from a local paper in which John talked about his favorite birding spot -- and mine -- a little woodlot, now long since paved over by a highway. Thankfully, John soldiered on to a ripe old age, ever optimistic and introducing new generations to birding.

Thank you, John.

More or Less?

As nature columnist for the Journal, I receive a steady stream of e-mails from readers with interesting observations. The great majority of these communications can be grouped into one of two categories: (1) “I’ve seen so many of [creature X] this year. They seem to be everywhere. Why?” or (2) “Where have all the [creature Y] gone this year? I haven’t seen one in weeks.”

What these questions have in common is…they are very difficult to answer! What I try to explain is that the observations of a casual observer – even my own – are subject to a great many variables. In any day, week, month, or year we may be more or less attentive to a particular critter or natural phenomenon than at another time. Short-term weather cycles or the type of activity animals engage in (such as nesting, feeding, resting) may account for them being more or less evident during a particular period. Presence or absence may even be very localized. This seemed to be the case recently when one reader in Salisbury told me he hadn’t seen any robins in weeks. Funny, I thought I’d been seeing them with great frequency in Sharon! Could there be a reason why they’re not hanging out in a Salisbury yard? Perhaps, but it’s impossible to say.

The point is this: It’s one thing – human nature, I suppose – to have the impression of relative abundance or paucity (and I don’t mean to discourage observations, or e-mails). It’s another thing, however, to translate these into actual population trends, as we are often tempted to do. For one thing, human memory is notoriously unreliable. More important, scientists spend many years developing methodologies for surveying species, and only through this slow, steady accumulation of data do we know, for example, that robins are doing quite well, thank you, but that many other species of songbirds, such as the lovely wood thrush (a cousin to the robin), have experienced serious declines in their populations over the past half-century.

Again, such declines may not be obvious to us. I’m still graced by the song of the wood thrush in my backyard and other local woodlots. But they are no less real – and this is where our focus should be: on understanding and supporting efforts to mitigate the causes for these real population declines.

The Birds from T.H.R.U.S.H.

After many months' hiatus, I'm rededicating myself to updating posts on "That Bird Blog."

Those of you growing up in the 1960s will recognize my jokey reference to the TV show "The Man from UNCLE" (with Robert Vaughan), in which the bad guys worked for "T.H.R.U.S.H."

In this week's Lakeville Journal, I wrote about the veery, a common species of thrush found in our area. See the full column, below.

To round things out: there are five regularly occuring members of the thrush family in the Northwest Corner, plus three encountered only on migration. The five regularly occurring, in size order, are:

• American Robin: The largest and most familiar. A year-round resident, though some may migrate, and a prolific breeder. It's song is a well-known, melodic caroling (cheerily, cheer up! cheerily, cheer up!).
• Wood Thrush: The largest of our spotted forest thrushes, smaller than a robin, with warm brown upperparts, bright reddish-brown on the head and tail, and bold spots on the breast. Its beautiful song is a rich o-ee-o-ee-o-lay, the last note a kind of glassy trill. Strictly a summer breeder here.
• Hermit Thrush: Smaller than the wood thrush, with a rusty tail (but lacking the reddish-brown head) which it habitually pumps up and down. Its haunting song starts with a single flutelike note, each time on a different pitch, than breaks into a cascade of resonant tones and overtones. In our region, the hermit thrush nests at higher elevations; although most migrate, it is the only spotted thrush normally found here (in small numbers) in winter.
• Veery (see below).
• Eastern Bluebird: Yes, our beloved bluebird is a member of the thrush family. (Young bluebirds, like young robins, have spotting on the breast, betraying their kinship.) The smallest of our thrushes, bluebirds avoid the forests in favor of open fields and clearings. Many also spend the winter.

The three migrant species of spotted thrushes are the Swainson's Thrush, the Gray-cheeked Thrush (rare), and the Bicknell's Thrush (the rarest -- it breeds only on high elevation peeks in New York and New England). The Sibley or Peterson guides can help you learn how to identify these species.

Lakeville Journal "Nature's Notebook" -- July 13, 2006:

Although I grew up in New York City, my first encounter with nature in the Northwest Corner took place many years ago, when I was on summer break from college employed as a counselor at a sleep-away camp near Winsted (now long vanished). On my occasional evenings off, I would grab my binoculars and flashlight and head into the ample woods surrounding the camp. Other than a close encounter with a skunk, my most vivid memories of these walks are of listening to the sunset serenade of the veery.

The song of this small, tawny-colored thrush is one of the most beautiful birdsongs in nature. Many thrushes have lovely songs – just think of the melodious caroling of our area’s largest and most abundant thrush, the American robin – but the veery’s is especially mystical, a series of breathy, rolling flute-like notes descending the scale. One guide describes the sound as resonating as if the bird is “singing into a metal pipe.” The vocal apparatus of many thrushes allows them to produce more than one tone simultaneously, and this is true of the veery.

Veeries breed in moist forests with adequate understory or shrub cover for nesting. They prefer forests with some disturbance or regrowth to more mature forests, while at the same time favoring fairly large, unbroken areas of forest. For this reason, veeries may be an indicator of the quality of forest habitat in our region. They are long-distance migrants, most spending the winter in a small region of southern Brazil.

Small thrushes tend to be furtive, hewing to the shady forest floor, but a veery flying across the road can be recognized by its overall bright tawny coloration. Its cousins (hermit, wood, and Swainson’s thrushes) are more brown or reddish-brown by comparison.

Whenever I hear the evening concert of the veery, as I did the other night from a friend’s backyard in Sharon, I hark back to my Winsted woodland walks more than a quarter of a century ago. Whether out of nostalgia or not, I think of that song as one of the most characteristic and evocative songs of our Connecticut forests.