Massive Berserker Post

Although we are now in Ross's Goose season, this was a bird of spring. With a dent in its head for some reason, but more importantly, a bird from last spring. As you can guess, I have much blogwork to do. Stafford Lake, Marin County, CA.

Where did September go? Well dorks, there is one thing that we can all agree on...I have a lot of catching up to do with this blog. So with that unfortunate fact on the table, this post is going to be a photo blitz! No time for ruminating on the state of birding affairs or the usual bullshit. I typically don't include so many photos in a single post, but these are not typical times...

This Black-and-white Warbler was a totally unexpected find in a mixed flock at Point Reyes in mid-April. Most spring BAWWs in California are found in May. Five Brooks Pond, Marin County, CA.

I'm not used to seeing chipmunks at sea level, but then again Marin is the place to be to see mammals both of land and sea. I'm not familiar with this richly-colored species, which was also at Five Brooks Pond. Anybody? RT? JK?  Christian and TaxMan helped with the ID - this is a Sonoma Chipmunk.

I am used to seeing Pacific Wrens at sea level, though I pretty much never get to photograph them. 

This bird was singing from an exposed perch, with no apparent urge to hide as usual. Thank you Pacific Wren.

One day, Billy, Annabelle and I headed to the Santa Cruz coast to see a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher. We failed in this endeavor, and were forced to look at this pair of nesting Western Gulls instead. Not unexpected, but still unfortunate.

One of the big upsides to moving south from Albany to San Jose is that now I'm much closer to Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge, a great place for shorebirds and waterbirds in general. This Forster's Tern, which breed there, was in the midst of a display flight. Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge, Alviso, CA.

And this Forster's Tern had a wiggly cap.

I've pointed it out a couple times before, but it bears repeating...Forster's can have a gray wash on the underparts, like Commons, which is visible on all three of the above individuals.

Crushing terns brings me great joy.

This is one of my favorite FOTE shots I've ever taken, and I've taken a great many. I rarely get head-on shots with perf composure and focus, not to mention lighting.

These terns were discretely having some sex. Other birds were not so discrete that day.

Caspian Terns breed at the refuge as well. I think it is safe to assume that all the birds foraging behind my house (in the Los Capitancillos Ponds) all summer were commuting to and from nests here at the refuge - it's cool to see the home base of my backyard fish fiends.

These exhibitionist avocets decided to get down to some avosex right next to the trail.

This is how avocets are made.

The cloacal kiss!

The avocet version of a post-coital cuddle.

Black-necked Stilts were hanging around, doing it in the open as well.

Crossing bills and a wing-cuddle while copulating? I don't think PDA can go much further than that.

The male dismounted when finished but continued with the kissing and cuddling. Gross.

Thankfully, their display of raw stilt hedonism came to an end and we could all part ways without making eye contact. 

There were a few local rarities around on this morning as well, the best of which was this lingering Glaucous Gull. After going years without seeing any, I've seen them in three different counties so far this year. And so it goes...

A Savannah Sparrow, one of the local breeders, teed up briefly next to the trail. I would say more about it, but if I am being completely honest with you...I need more coffee.

Confessions of Filth: Birding After the Death of the Perpetual Weekend

Meet Troglodytes pacificus meligerus, the form of Pacific Wren found from Buldir Island to Attu Island, in the western Aleutians.  Some birds can't be chased...you just have to go where they live.  Buldir Island, AK.

There are castes of birders.  It is known.  I know this, you know this...the Global Birder Ranking System (GBRS) knows this.  There are the birding legends and pioneers, there is birding scum (chronic stringers, of course), and there is everything in between.  While some take decades to build their reputations, be it good or bad, others can see their GBRS rank skyrocket in a single moment. San Luis Obispo birder Bill Bouton recently experienced this when he photographed a Black Scoter in Crescent City, CA.  Looking at his photos a week later, he realized that something was wrong...and so he put the word out.  He had found, and documented, a Common Scoter...a rarity to end all rarities. He had told people where to find the Common Scoter.  And the next day, birders ventured forth and refound and the Common Scoter.

Bill Bouton became a birding hero.

I've never met the guy, but I know this.  Deep in the bottom of my heart.  And so does everyone else. He may even be a bad person, but he will always be a hero.

Which is neither here, nor is it there.  We are not here today to worship our heroes, or demonize the villains.  We are here to talk about one of the commonest activities that fall under the umbrella of birding...we are talking about chasing.

Black Tern.  I have been blessed to see many thousands of Black Terns, and I hope I will see many more.  I highly recommend seeing hundreds at once instead of a wayward migrant. Photographed somewhere in North Dakota.

Why does this come up?  Well you may remember, not long ago, I experienced something called the Perpetual Weekend.  Year after year I would get to bask in the warm glow of the Perpetual Weekend, and bird to my heart's delight.  I was birding at will.  I could go abuse myself with gulls, or go after some rarity.  I had ample time to do both.  Often I would chase, often I would not.  You remember that Common Cuckoo that showed up?  You want to know what I was doing that day when I heard the news?  I was sitting at home, drinking coffee, hitting "refresh" on my browser over and over again waiting for news of a rare bird.  When the initial report of a "probable" Common Cuckoo showed up, I just sat there waiting for the inevitable confirmation or denial of the bird.  When I got the green light 20 minutes later, I was already packed and ready to go.  I saw the bird very well, had prolonged and sustained views, and managed to beat the hordes of birders that showed up later that day.  It was glorious.

But no more.

Now I work 5 days a week.  No more sitting around on weekdays, casually pondering if I should go out and flog the shrubbery myself or wait for some Vague Runt to be dropped into my lap via the internet.  I no longer have the luxury of birding at will, because I feel the need to maximize my available birding time.  Like most wage slaves, now I can only bird 1-2 days a week. And what do I find myself doing more and more often?  Chasing other people's goddamn birds.  If one wants to see the most unusual birds for the smallest amount of effort, this is what many birders end up doing.  It's completely understandable.  But I've been doing it so fucking much lately that I just feel...dirty. Filthy, even. For reasons I cannot explain, I'm experiencing a sort of anxious guilt. And let me tell you, not every chase has a Common Cuckoo kind of ending.  The singular worst birding experience of my life (that did not feature horrific car accidents or getting robbed at gunpoint) was the monumental misery that was the treacherous Ivory Gull Chase of Y2K10.  I was left in a catatonic state of depression for months afterwards, and Dipper Dan almost died of a broken heart. Things have never been the same since then, and I dread having to relive it over and over again with a constantly changing cast of rare and awesome birds.

And I haven't even told you about BRAMBRING yet.  I could...but it will wait another day.

Osprey.  This bird flew over us as we were forlornly staring at the sea lion carcass that the Ivory Gull had just been feeding on.  I felt like the sea lion.  I felt like that headless fish. Sometimes, I still do.  Pismo Beach, CA.

Of course, if you don't dip on the birds you are chasing, everything is aces.  It's great.  That's how birders can stand to do big years (not counting modest county-level big years), which consist of mostly just chasing birds other people find.  They end up seeing most of the shit they chase.  It works, I suppose.  That said, just thinking about spending an entire year doing that or compulsively chasing all over the state just to inflate some county lists leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  There are birders who do nothing but chase other people's birds...all of the time. And by all of the time I don't mean just regularly, I mean pretty much every time they go "birding".  They almost never find interesting birds on their own...they don't care to try.  They don't care to bird without rarities on the brain.  I can't imagine that. Travelling is fun, yes, but never birding for the sake of birding?  It's kind of gross.

I've chased my share of Chestnut-collared Longspurs here in California.  But seeing all of those birds doesn't come close to watching crippling males bust out song-laden, facemelting flight displays on the prairie in summer. Photographed at Medicine Lake National Wildlife Refuge, MT.

So why do I chase at all?  Why does the #7 birder in the United States stoop to chasing birds other people find?  For the same reasons that #1-6 and #8-10 chase birds...we fucking love birds.  We are hopeless bird junkies.  We love looking at birds we've never seen before. We love looking at birds we've only seen a couple times before.  We love looking at birds we only get to see every few years, or once or twice a year. In fact, we love looking at birds.  That's why I've never understood birders who are revolted by the very idea of chasing.  Don't you like looking at birds?  Especially ones you don't get to see very often?  It's bizarre.  Sure I like to pad my California list and a few counties, but I am fully aware that no one gives a fuck how high my lists are except me...and if anyone did care, even a little bit, they certainly wouldn't tell me.  So it's not like I'm competing with anyone.  It's not like I'm doing a big year.

It's time to put this rambling screed to rest, I think.  As I've said, though I love Vague Runts, I feel a bit dirty these days...though it might be the BRAMBRING talking.  In time, I will find a balance.  I've never birded the bay area in spring before, and soon I will be hurling myself at common migrants left and right. I'm looking forward to it.

Right.  I like birds.  Pretty big news I suppose.

Bad Scene, Everyone's Fault: Listers vs. Nonlisters

"This is a nonlister's worst nightmare." - Anonymous longtime lister and gull aficionado. First-winter Herring Gull, San Francisco, CA.

Birders. There are all kinds of skill levels and personalities out there....from the feeder watcher to the power birder, from the seemingly homeless recluse to the life of the birding party...a Felonious Jive figure, if you will. Birders are usually pretty open-minded about other birders (we're just a bunch of weirdos anyway), and do not attempt to label others beyond extremely skilled or unreliable. But there is one concrete category that gets bandied about, often to the detriment of us all.

Birders are often separated into two camps; listers and nonlisters. Today's blog attempts to identify what this entails, and the problems associated with such stereotypes.

On the surface, the definitions are simple. Listers keep lists of the birds they see. This can be just limited to a life list, or can go on to almost microscopic levels of specificty...ABA Area lists, country lists, state lists, county lists, year lists, yard lists, location lists, etc. Several birders I know record species they see while taking a dump.

Nonlisters are even easier to define....they do not do this.

But what is not immediately clear with these simple explanations is the stigma associated with belonging to either camp...particularly the persecution of listers by nonlisters.

In the mind of the ignorant and vengeful nonlister, listers are a crime against nature. The nonlister will always look down their nose at the lister...a bougouise-proletariat metaphor would not be inappropriate here. They see the lister as a birder who does not appreciate nature, does not appreciate the birds...no, they see the lister as an addict, a junkie. The lister's fix is the new bird on the list...once properly identified, it is thought that the lister dismisses their quarry and moves on to the next bird.

"After seeing a couple of these, a lister would consider them a hideous blight upon the earth." - Anonymous jaded nonlister. Yellow-headed Blackbird, Camas National Wildlife Refuge, ID.

To add new birds to the list, of course, one must do a lot of birding. This often is comes down to nothing but "chasing" rare birds...birds unusual to the area that other birders have already located. Thus, in the nonlister's eye, listers are reduced to nothing but driving hours at a time to find another bird that someone else found.

So, to sum it up: listers don't give a shit about enjoying wildlife, finding birds themselves, and will burn insane amounts of fuel to see birds they can't find on their own.

Listers, on the other hand, do not take nonlisters seriously. To the lister, it is inconceivable that any serious observer of birds would not want to keep track of what they see. Don't even keep a life list? You're crazy!!!!!! And it follows that if a birder is not very serious, they must therefore be not very skilled at their craft....thus they are cast aside as worthless casual observers, more prone to misidentify a common bird for a rare bird then make any contribution to the birding community (whose currency is usually rare birds). They probably don't even care about birds that are hard to identify...let the Sprague's Pipit go extinct! The less "LBJs" the better.

"If nonlisters were in charge of bird conservation, every little brown bird would be left for dead." - Anonymous bitter lister. Juvenile Pacific Wren, Buldir Island, AK.

As with practically all stereotypes, there is some truth to all of this. I have met a number of people who seem to fit in well with all of the above personalities. The complete die-hard lister strikes one as being essentially worthless, and the staunch nonlister can be terrified at the thought of identifying shorebirds or gulls, which is just no fun for anybody. But overall, the bulk of the judgement and misunderstanding being cast here is undeniably coming from the nonlisters. I'm sorry, it's true, and we don't appreciate it, assholes. I've never seen a birder meet another birder and ask if they were a "nonlister", whereas the other way around is a frequent occurrence. You can just hear the scorn in their voice when they ask...more often than not the question comes from a young field biologist who learned birds existed in their first ornithology class. The vast majority of listers are welcoming, encouraging and understanding of those who do not relish in making checkmarks and obsessively filling out Ebird reports.

As for me? The only list I am currently updating is my Año Tranquilo list (472...last new bird was Ruddy Turnstone). I do keep mental track of my life list, of course, but I couldn't tell you what that was without some research. That said, I do consider myself a bird addict....not for the lists, but who doesn't want to see a whole bunch of birds? Why would you not be secretly plotting birding trips to Cape May or Big Bend or Saint Paul Island at any given moment? There's so much to see....and birds are sick.

Can't we all just get along?

And that is my nerd rant for the day. Go see new birds, it is good for you...but for God's sake don't ignore the familiar feathers.

All The Brutal Tactics That You Always Employ

The Aleutian subspecies of Pacific Wren (juvenile) and Song Sparrow (adult), whom I asked to pose together for your convenience. You're welcome. Photographed on Buldir Island, Alaska.

There's been a lot of bird-blog-buzz lately about the Ivory Gull down in Arroyo Grande, and inevitably the larger discussion has been brought up about how there have been so many records (comparatively) of them in the lower 48 in the last decade, which may be indicative of some foul shit going down in their normal haunts.

Rather than play Devil's Advocate and discuss how dubious it is to draw any conclusions from this tiny sample size (14 south of Canada...much more interesting would be looking at numbers recorded in someplace like Newfoundland, where they are more prone to occur), lets accept the theory that they are having a more difficult time finding food and are putting more time and energy going to faroff places in search of delicious dead things. This, of course, is almost completely attributable to global warming, as Ivory Gulls are one of the few lucky birds who have never been threatened by direct habitat loss or overhunting.

The question is......what are you going to do about it?

The view from the Fish And Wildlife Service bunkhouse in Homer, AK. The fog is concealing Kachemak Bay, which is probably brimming with Stellar's and King Eiders at the moment.

The excuses people often use in situations like this (where it is obviously impossible for a single person to solve everything) is that there is nothing they can do, that the odds are too stacked against us, that people don't care, or that only elected officials will be able to do anything to make any difference. This, my friends, is lazy, self-serving, defeatist bullshit. There are few things that irk me more than my otherwise bright (and vivid!) friends being resigned to not even attempting to make a dent in the world they live in.

Need an example? Ok, let's take the United States. First of all, we are not a colony of England. That was pretty big. We are also not a Confederacy. Also huge. Slavery has been abolished. We have fundamental legal rights. We defeated the Japanese, then the Nazis in WWII. Women can vote. Women can have abortions. We live in an unsegregated society, with equal rights. Its OK to be gay. You can adhere to any religion you want, or none at all. We have a black president who actually took office in a legitimate fashion. Do you get where I'm going with this?

This one-footed Northern Fulmar frequently flew by my murre/kittiwake plots on Buldir Island. If you are ever down in the dumps and want to cash in your chips....remember.....somewhere out there, against all odds, is a one-footed fulmar kicking a whole lot of ass.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm no patriot and am all-too-aware of all the other things we have to be ashamed of as Americans (really, painfully so), but these are not events and freedoms to be taken for granted, especially when you look at how the majority of the people in the world are living. Lots of sacrifice here. Lost lives. You get the picture.

My point? Do something, regardless of the size and scope. It's not all hopeless. Jesus...start a garden, get some solar panels, ride a bike, buy local, watch where your food comes from, consume less, get involved with one of the many great organizations that are trying to make the world a better place for Ivory Gulls and your kids. If everyone walked around with the same hopeless, cynical attitude, saying remarkably dumb shit like "Only the politicians can do anything about that", that would be a world none of us would want to live in. Nazi Germany anyone? Yeah.

Stay posi ya'll!

Burning Exploding Sound

Gray-crowned Rosy-finches are common in the Aleutian Islands.  This one mingled with auklets and puffins on Buldir's Main Talus.

Huh.  When was the last time I posted a picture of a passerine on here?  I don't even remember.  How embarrassing!

Verdins.  The Jedi of nest-builders.  This one was at Patagonia Lake State Park in southeastern Arizona.

Whenever working on a (field) particular project, you often meet people who have a narrow view of what they would like to be working with.  Some people are way into raptors, some are way into seabirds, some are only into songbirds.  Seriously though, whats up with that?  I love all those birds.  Why limit yourself?  Perhaps when people take their first field job they just keep going with whatever group of birds they were originally working with......which is understandable, but also pretty lame.  I mean, this is BB&B, and honesty is our policy.

One of the many Pacific Wrens that hung out inside our sleeping cabin on Buldir.

And therein lies one of the fundamental differences between biologists and birders.  Birders, in their lust to see as much as possible (be it on a local or global scale), are interested in anything with wings and feathers.  Biologists are less likely to be so open-hearted in their bird love, preferring a particular group of birds.  But they share many of the same basic elements.  Both groups are badly dressed, are catatonically awkward, are overwhelmingly nerdy, have an absurd obsession with wildlife, and are stunningly unsavvy in any given situation that may require anything resembling "people skills".  Consider yourself warned, lest you be foolish enough to attempt a coversation with one of these people.

In other news, Ive been pretty sick.  A cocktail of whiskey, tea, excedrin, ibprofin, nyquil, sudafed and multivitamins has been deployed, but to little avail so far.  Ive also updated my ABA list, which now stands at a healthy 620.  For those who dont know the ABA (American Birding Association), its one of the bigger organizations that lords over the mainland United States and Canada, for whatever reason ignoring Hawaii and other islands under U.S. jurisdiction.  Seeing 620 species in these parts is not the biggest of accomplishments, but considering that I'm not exactly wealthy and I don't spend all my time tracking down new birds, its a pretty good number.

Right.  Time to go drain some more snot.  Have a positive day.

A Dusky-capped Flycatcher.  A common and depressing breeder in southeast Arizona.  This bird was photographed in the Chiricahua Mountains.

You Were Not As Good As Bad Religion

A Thick-billed Murre ponders the meaning of cliffs.

Tremble at the eye of the auklet (crested). 

North Bight Beach, next to our field camp. Vagrant magnet.

 

I never thought I'd get the chance to say this, but its time to go!  Here are a few shots to hold you over while I migrate south.  I can't believe I'm about to come out the other side of this thing, relatively in one piece.  Best of all, I'll be liberated from the workforce for a couple of month, so I'll have more time devoted to YOU, devoted BB&B reader.  I've got a momentous backlog of photos that will fall upon you like a landslide of Awesome.  You will be crushed with glee.

Puffins do an impressive amount of Nothing.  It essentially looks like this.

Buldir Island is thick with Pacific Wrens.  Behold the long bill of the Aleutian subspecies.

Parakeet Auklet rafts.

Northern Fulmar.