Mid-November
Update
Since my last report there has been a lot
of travelling, with mixed results. After returning to the lower 48 after my
‘Great Skua cruise’ with Christian, then a week of birding and organisational
stuff, I decided to follow Christian and Laura all the way back up to the
Northeast – and then some, to St John’s Newfoundland, to see the Yellow-legged
Gull that as predicted had made a November reappearance in the vicinity of Lake
Quidi Vidi. Whether or not this bird is the same individual that has been seen
around the same haunts during the past few years, from mid-November to February
or March, is not certain. But there does seem to be a good chance that ‘it’ is indeed
the very same bird that gave me such a challenging time early in the year – when
I missed it during two multi-day searches. I successfully twitched a different
Yellow-legged Gull in western Massachusetts in February, though this sighting carried
with it the complication of less than unanimous consensus among gull experts as
to the certainty of its identification, and in the fullness of time there has
been a persistent expression of the view that it will be deemed too risky for the
relevant ABA-related rarity committee to declare the identification of the bird
as a Yellow-legged Gull versus a hybrid lookalike.
Irrespective of any eventual rulings concerning
the Massachusetts gull, I had personal business with ‘the’ St John’s bird, and
had hoped all along for an opportunity for a ‘round three’ crack at nailing it.
I arrived at the St John’s airport on Thursday night, the 28th two days
after Laura and Christian had arrived. They’d managed to pick it out of the
masses of other gulls on both mornings – and saw it particularly well the
second time, when it appeared right where it was supposed to be – tucked in among
many hundreds of roosting Herring Gulls that assemble early each morning on the
sports fields and adjacent clearings near Lake Quidi Vidi. The usual pattern is
for these birds to take to the air some hours later, presumably to get to the city
landfill, where gulls by the thousands swarm for relatively easy winter pickens.
When Lake Quidi Vidi eventually freezes over,
large numbers of gulls begin roosting on the ice between forays to the landfill,
oftentimes making it easier to pick out the slate-mantled Yellow-legged from
amongst the many lighter coloured Herring Gulls and much darker Great and
Lesser Black-backed Gulls. To make it a little less straight forward however,
there are usually a few hybrid gulls with similar mantle colouration to that of
the Yellow-legged, but these are easily separated by the presence of dark
streaking on neck and head. The principal reason I missed the St John’s
Yellow-legged Gull (again, it’s my unsafe assumption that this is a single
returning bird) during the first winter of 2016 was that I waited too long, and
the lake thawed prior to my first attempt, where after the gulls shifted their
roosting to elsewhere – including, in the thousands, sections of the landfill
that are off limits to birders.
I caught up with Laura and Christian at their
hotel for a drink and chin-wag, before checking into my room elsewhere. Laura
would be flying out in the morning in order to participate in a pelagic birding
trip off the coast of Oregon, but Christian stuck around to join Jared Clarke
and I for his third morning stakeout of the park lawns and ball fields Saturday
morning. Jared knows these birds probably as well as they can be known, and we
drove a circuit to four or five vantage points of Quidi Vidi Lake and its
grassy surrounds, and of course the ball parks across the road from the lake. We
hadn’t looked long before Jared received a text message indicating that it had
been seen briefly quite near the lake, but had disappeared shortly thereafter.
As the morning progressed, more and more gulls descended onto the sports
fields, and eventually local birder Lancey noticed the targeted bird amongst
big numbers of lighter mantled Herrings and more similar Lesser Black-backed
Gulls and slaty-coloured hybrids that apart from having slightly streaky necks
and heads were dead ringers for YLGU. Finally! I figure that owing to the
amount of travelling I’ve done in pursuit of this species, it would have to be
the most ‘expensive’ species on my year list. Indistinguishable from the
Massachusetts bird, it nevertheless will most likely help me avoid a certain
amount of unwanted dramas further down the road.
They’d seen the gull that morning and Laura
was leaving the next morning to get to Oregon for a pelagic trip – and she
figured, a final chance in 2016 to see a Mottled Petrel.
Halloween morning sunrise saw me connecting
with the Amazon Kingfisher in Laredo, Texas, just a few minutes before the
next-earliest birders arrived near the junction of the creek with the Rio
Grande – the US and Mexican border. In spite of the distinct smell of sewage in
the narrow creek, there were a surprising number of kingfishers that comprised
the grand slam of ABA kingfishers: a single Amazon, several highly vocal Green
Kingfishers, two active Ringed, and a single Belted Kingfisher. The enormous
bill of the Amazon was reminiscent of our Aussie kookaburras.
With the kingfisher mission accomplished, I
headed to Tucson where I rendezvoused with Robyn. The main purpose of that
visit was to spend time with Ken Blankenship – proprietor of East West Birding,
who I struck up a friendship early in the year. Ken has been working with me to
put at least my year-bird sightings onto eBird retrospectively. I’m happy to
say that with Ken’s help, that massive task is nearly complete, and eta to
launch is about a week. Whew.
Robyn and I then headed to Harlingen,
Texas, where we were intending to participate in at least a couple of field
trips associated with the Lower Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival (LRGVBF),
and one or two of the scheduled social nights. As it happened however, given
our late arrival to Harlingen and a tonne of unanticipated homework flowing
from my eBird workshop with Ken, we were lucky to make a visit to the evening
function on Thursday night, and to attend Neil Heyward’s keynote talk (The
Accidental Big Year) on Friday night. It was a sensational talk, and also gave
me the chance to catch up with some of my US birding friends.
The other thing that happened during our
stay in Harlingen was receiving word about a sighting of Gray-headed Chickadees
north of Kotzebue, Alaska began filtering through. John Puschock helped Michael
Wald of Arctic Wild Wildlife Tours – who found the birds a week or so earlier, cobble
together a group of four big year birders – past (Jay Lehman) and present
(Laura, Christian and I), for a one day bush flight excursion to the site where
Michael saw the mysterious Arctic slopes on two sequential days a week earlier.
The four of us, plus Arctic Wild birding
guide Dave Shaw and legendary Alaskan bush pilot and hunting guide Eric Seih.
It was a terrific trip, with several candidates for Gray-headed Chickadee in
the mix of Boreal Chickadees, but alas, I didn’t get a tickable encounter. Laura
and Christian both wrote up the experience on their blogs/Facebook pages. We
all flew back to Anchorage, from where Laura and Christian continued on
overnight flights to chase the Fork-tailed Flycatcher in Michigan. I rejoined
Robyn at our Anchorage hotel, and spent a sleepless night contemplating the
Chickadee mission and what I ‘might have’ and ‘should have’ done differently to
have achieved a better outcome. At 3AM I began writing emails to the relevant
people, and by 9AM had a plan for returning to the chickadee site the next
morning (Wednesday).
Wednesday’s weather was a lot clearer than
it had been on Monday, and the views from Eric’s Piper Cub – which has a
payload of only one passenger - and tops out at 95MPH as we flew low across the
tundra, hills and rivers, and the occasional herd of Caribou or Musk Oxen was
in a word - unforgettable. As on Monday’s mission - when Eric shuttled us in
the Piper Cub from the creek pebble bar landing site of the bigger and faster
Cessna 226, we landed on a small frozen lake about a mile from the spring-fed,
and therefore largely unfrozen lake around which chickadee-favoured spruce and
willow habitat occurs. As per Monday, I was struck by the extent of mammal
foot-traffic revealed in the shallow snow: Moose, Wolf, Fox, Lynx, Snowshoe
Hare, and of course, lots of Brown
Bear sign. It seems we were. And what a spectacular day Wednesday proved to be –
enhanced by rare blue skies to set off the scenic southern slopes of the western
Brookes Ranges, providing what was undoubtedly one of the best experiences of
my year of American travels.
During our limited window of daylight we
encountered considerably more Boreal Chickadees than had been the case two days
earlier, and on two occasions we both saw birds that were clearly Gray-headed
Chickadees, with extensive white cheek patch and overall lighter presentation.
I didn’t notice the existence or otherwise of white edging to greater coverts,
and can’t say for sure if the tails appeared longer than those of Boreals. Apart
from the large white cheek patches, the thing that stuck out most was the
namesake dark gray (not brown, and not black) crown that seemed to merge
seamlessly with the nape and back colouration – unlike Boreals which have three
discrete colour changes, from cap to nape to dorsum.
'Chickadee Lake', southern slopes of Brooks Range, Alaska
Encounters with all of the chickadees in
the spruce forests on both days were brief and frustrating, as the birds seem
to never stop moving. A choice had to be made between binoculars and camera,
and after the frustrations I experienced on Monday, when trying to juggle both
may well have cost me a proper look at a bird I ‘nearly’ photographed, that
Eric now feels confident was a Gray-headed Chickadee, I led with binoculars
throughout Wednesday. It’s perhaps notable that the bird Eric referred to on
Monday, plus both sightings I had on Wednesday (which may have been the same
bird twice) were all within close proximity of the spot where Michael and his
group of photographers had seen two Gray-headed Chickadees flitting around a
Salmon carcass a week or so earlier, on two consecutive days. They too
struggled unsuccessfully to photograph the jittery birds.
Kotzebue, Alaska from above
During my chickadee chases Robyn patiently
waited in Anchorage, though we managed to choof off to rendezvous in Nome Monday
night for a Tuesday morning search for early-arriving McKay’s Buntings. We were
lucky, and celebrated with a late breakfast at the Polar Cub Café. After my
return to Anchorage Wednesday night, with the absence of new rarities to chase,
we decided to chill for a day before heading south to Kansas City to visit my
parents, recharge my batteries, and follow up on a recent report of Smith’s
Longspur at Baker Wetlands an hour west, near Lawrence. Dad, Robyn, and I duly headed
out for an enjoyable Sunday morning of birding, and though we couldn’t find any
longspurs, my dad, who never ceases to amaze me first heard, then located a
Harris’s Sparrow – the ‘other’ common bird species still on my wanted list. We
saw a total of five species of Sparrows, including several Harris’s Sparrows and
two Le Conte’s Sparrows at the restored wetlands in the short span of an hour. Our
plans for a few additional kick-backed days and relaxed local birding ended
with yesterday’s NARBA report of Common Scoter in Oregon.
Going for a spin in Dad’s new boat. Robyn (sitting with Dad) and I get first ride in the new fishing boat – given to him by on the event of his retirement in September. Dad ran the Urology residency program at the University of Kansas for decades.
Environmental
Considerations
As my ABA area big year moves towards its
wintry end, and I reflect on just what a mad year its been, I continue thinking
about outcomes other than the number of bird species on my year-list. I’ve
continued throughout the year to work with partner organisation Global Wildlife
Conservation (GWC – www.globalwildlife.org
) on fundraising and support for Devil Ark, and a presently embryonic yet remarkably
ambitious ‘Aussie Ark’ (watch this space, exciting developments are well underway),
dedicated to preserving a range of threatened marsupial species. I promise that
before the end of 2016 to give an account of funds raised over the course of
the year, in association with my birding activities. For the moment I can say
that it is clearly many times greater than the amount that I’ve spent
personally in pursuing my year on the road – which of course is money that will
not be recouped through my conservation work.
Also as planned, GWC is providing me with carbon
offset options – one of which has been decided upon – purchase of an as yet
unquantified area of land in the Amazon basin. Director Don Church has at this
stage roughly estimated that that ‘my’ land package will be somewhere between
10 and 20 hectares in size. It will extend the boundary of a GWC-owned property
known for exceptional bird diversity and density. We have agreed upon a price,
and my commitment is in place. Again, I’ll provide specific details on this
blog by year’s end. As many of you know, the carbon offset aspect of my big
year has been an important consideration from the get-go.
Obviously, any plans that Robyn has held
for our eventual retirement have long since been relinquished. Fortunately, we
both still love what we do, and I cannot wait to get back to it in early
January. From humble beginnings when Robyn and I started with a good idea in
the early 80s – and hardly two dimes (er, ten-cent pieces) to rub together, the
Australian Reptile Park has grown and grown. With the remarkable management and
leadership qualities of our co-directors – Tim Faulkner and Liz Gabriel, the business
has taken on a seemingly unstoppable life of its own, having become the leading
tourism attraction in the region, allowing full time employment of 50 highly
talented men and women, and allowing us to create and participate in a number
of ambitious yet achievable conservation actions, from invasive Cane Toad
control to in situ conservation of
Komodo Dragons and Broad-headed Snakes in conjunction with our partners at
Sydney University. Our spider and venom production activities continue to be a
vital link in the production of antivenoms that save some 300 lives a year. Both
of us enjoy a great sense of satisfaction in our work – and as if it isn’t half
obvious to everyone I’ve spoken to or corresponded with in recent weeks, I cannot
wait to get back. But not until the job here is done!
Late add: Robyn and I saw the Common Scoter
in Oregon today!
John Puschock and Andy, one of a stream of birders (Robyn and I included) who enjoyed scope views of Common Scoter from John's third floor hotel room balcony.
