Photo Quiz 4: Fall Gets Confusing

(Click photo for larger version)

It’s technically still fall, even if we do have snow on the ground already. Perhaps the warm colors in our photo quiz will bring back some toasty memories of birding a couple of months ago. Did you see any of the above species? For that matter, what are the species up there? It’d even be helpful to know the genus for starters.

As always, our photo quiz welcomes answers from all comers, whether you know what these birds are, you’re outright guessing, or you’re just thinking out loud the way you might on an outing with your friends. In the scheme of things, these aren’t the absolute hardest little songbirds we could throw at you—but there’s nothing straightforward about them, either. Newer birders, in particular, have lots of odd anatomical features to focus on here.

We’d love to hear a description of what aspects of each bird and photo lead you to your identification, and not just the final identification you come up with. It’s like in math class: show your work for full credit. Thanks for playing!

Like these photo quizzes? Check out Quiz 1, Quiz 2, and Quiz 3.

(Images via Birdshare. Clockwise from top left: [spoiler alert: clicking on these links may give away the IDs] Ganesh Jayaraman, Greg Page, kellycolganazar, Ganesh Jayaraman)

Recording Mauritius: Return to the Kestrel’s Nest

A couple of weeks ago we checked in with Jon Erickson in Mauritius. He had just climbed into the hills of Black River Gorges National Park, where he had a brief encounter with a Mauritius Kestrel, a species whose population had dwindled to just four birds in the mid-1970s—but has now climbed back to nearly a thousand. This bird was a male looking for a mate, so Jon decided to camp out on the cliffs to track the bird’s progress and to record any calls the bird made. Here’s how things turned out:

Hear the kestrel:

When I arrived at the clifftop, sweating after carrying two days worth of food and gear, I searched the nearby tree branches for my friend, but he was absent—probably hunting. I decided to peek over toward the nest to see if his search for a mate had been realized.

I felt that strange sensation when you know someone else is nearby without having heard or seen them. I turned around slowly and, sure enough, there he was about eight feet away on a low branch. The Mauritius Kestrel is not a big bird, I’d say about the size of a Blue Jay, but they have this particular way of glaring over that small and deadly curved beak. It’s very unsettling when they apply that gaze in your direction.

I slowly backed away, but he apparently decided he’d had enough of this giant nest-raiding mammal and flew directly at my face. I’d like to think I ducked fast enough to prevent a direct talon to the eyeball, but I’m pretty sure that he meant this flyby as a warning.

Back in safety I readied my gear, pointed the microphone at the bird, and pressed record, but he wasn’t in the mood. After a while he began preening and stretching his wings.  It looked as if he was having a hard time staying awake.

From behind me, I heard the shriek of an approaching kestrel. I spun to point the parabola in its direction as the bird swooped toward me. It alighted next to my dive-bombing friend with a large lizard in its talons. The two birds began to chatter and chirp to each other and finally, the second bird relinquished the lizard to the original bird and flew away.

So I had rushed to conclusions! My friend had found a mate after all and this is whom I had been watching all along. Watching her eat her lunch, I felt a small rush of excitement.  The male-female ratio of kestrels on this side of the island is not as balanced as it is on the eastern side.  Many males go through the breeding season without finding a mate.

This male had a beautiful mate, but he also had his work cut out for him. During the breeding season, the male kestrel spends a majority of his time hunting for small lizards and mammals and carrying them to the female, which perches near the nest and tries to conserve energy in anticipation of the egg-bearing process.  I sat the rest of the day and watched as the male returned time after time (averaging about 45 minutes per round), with meals for his mate.

After several hours I had accumulated a fair number of good recordings and had also affectionately named the birds “Archie” and “Edith.” I was thoroughly enjoying myself, but it was getting late and I needed to find a campsite. I located a nice spot overlooking the valley, laid out my bivy, and began cooking some noodles. As I did, dozens of Ring-necked Parakeets were flying up into the valley shrieking their particular brand of vocalization. A giant fruit bat, the size of a crow, flew past me headed for the forest. White-tailed Tropicbirds soared above me in majestic spirals.

The crepuscular species began to come alive around me and my instinct was to grab my microphone and begin recording. But I had to resist, as I had used a fair amount of battery life during the day and needed all I had to fulfill my kestrel commitment. I made a mental note to return and record the parrots, the bats, the tropicbirds, and the day turning into the night. It took me a long time to fall asleep.

My work with the field recorder has changed my way of thinking. I hear the noises around me differently now and my mind cannot help but try to identify the species and determine if conditions are sufficient for recording it. I listened to the geckos and the bats flying overhead and, at one point, heard the snuffling sound of what may have been a tenrec rooting through the leaves and soil nearby.  I finally did fall asleep, although it’s difficult to distinguish awake from asleep in a place like this.

(Mauritius Kestrel image and sound recorded by Jon Erickson)

New eBird/iPhone app puts local knowledge in your pocket

Here comes another leap forward in knowing where to go birding: the BirdsEye iPhone app. Combining the huge data stores and mapping abilities of eBird, photos from VIREO, sounds from the Cornell Lab’s Macaulay Library, and descriptions from Kenn Kaufman, BirdsEye can help you plan your birding outings on the fly.

Ever since the days of rare bird hotlines and birding listservs we’ve been getting better and faster at telling each other where our best sightings are. BirdsEye now lets you tap into any species recently reported to eBird in North America north of Mexico, making it useful to beginners and hardcore listers alike. (The eBird sightings database, a joint project of the Cornell Lab and Audubon, gets upwards of 1 million reports per month.)

BirdsEye allows you to choose your location and browse maps of nearby sightings reported in the last few weeks—it even tells you how long ago the last sighting was. Or you can choose a species and find out if it’s been seen near you recently. You can even get directions to it. As developer Todd Koym says, “It’s like having thousands of local birding experts in your pocket.”

Once you’re out birding, BirdsEye gives you resources to identify the birds you’re looking for. You can see photos of each species, listen to recordings of the birds singing and calling, and read tips on behavior and habitat written especially for the app by birding veteran Kenn Kaufman. You can use BirdsEye to keep track of your life list (and the app will even tell you how many birds near you would be lifers!).

BirdsEye is on sale now on the App Store, and it works on both iPhone and iPod touch. For $19.99 you get information, sounds, and photos for 470 frequently seen North American species. You can upgrade to the full complement of 847 species for another $19.99—or purchase groups of species like warblers and hawks at smaller increments, according to a nice review of BirdsEye at Birder’s World magazine.

BirdsEye is produced by Birds in the Hand LLC of Virginia. Portions of BirdsEye sales go back to the Cornell Lab to help support our research, education, and citizen science projects, and to the Academy of Natural Sciences to support VIREO, the world’s largest collection of bird photographs.
Apple, the Apple logo, iPod, iPod touch, and iTunes are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. iPhone is a trademark of Apple Inc. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc.

Introducing the Bird Watching Answer Book

One of the most-visited pages at All About Birds is our Frequently Asked Questions page. With their bright colors, funny antics, and tendency to show up in unexpected places, birds are an unending source of questions for the people who watch them. We’ve calculated that the Cornell Lab staff answers some 80,000 questions per year from the public.

So one of the things that our science editor, Laura Erickson, has been doing for the last year is compiling those questions into the Bird Watching Answer Book, handily sized to fit onto a crowded bookshelf or next to your favorite bird-viewing window.

With more than 200 answers, it’s like a never-ending conversation about your favorite subject. [We feature some of the answers on our rotating Question of the Week feature.] The book’s web page has more, including a video where Laura Erickson explains how and why she wrote it. Or go here to buy your own signed copy.

I asked Laura a few questions about writing the book, starting with How long did it take you?

Laura: Theoretically, it took me about a year to write this book, but a lot of it was based on questions I’ve received over the past two or three decades. Some questions are asked a lot: “Do hummingbirds ride on the backs of geese?” (A: No.)  “Help! A woodpecker is chopping holes in my house! What do I do?” (A: See our woodpecker problems page)  “How do vultures find their food?” (A: They smell it out, preferring many meals to be not just merely dead but really most sincerely dead.) “Help! A cardinal (or a robin) is bonking into my windows all day long! Why is he doing this and what can I do to make him stop?” (A: See our birds-attacking-windows page)

RR: How does somebody learn enough to answer 200+ strange bird questions?

Laura: I was a wildlife rehabber in northern Minnesota for over a decade, and so I got the inside story on a lot of birds. That made it easy to answer questions like “Why is bird poop white?” (A: The “poop” part is dark, and the white part is the urine, composed of uric acid rather than urea.) “What part of an egg turns into a bird?” (A: The yolk is the single-celled ovum which develops into the bird.) “Should I put eggshells out for birds?” (A: Yes. They need the calcium.)

RR: Birds are seasonal creatures. Are bird questions seasonal, too?

Laura: Are they ever! This time of year people often ask a most seasonal question: “Why do chickens and turkeys have dark and white meat while geese and ducks have only dark meat? (A: Red muscle fibers—making up dark meat—are necessary for the legs and the wings of birds that both swim and fly long distances. White muscle allows huge bursts of flight without the heavy weight and maintenance of red fibers, but chickens and turkeys need red muscle to power their walking habits.)

RR: Well Happy Thanksgiving, Laura, and thanks for writing the Bird Watching Answer Book.

And readers, be sure to check our Question of the Week—and send us your own questions. Laura’s already gathering questions for the follow-up volume!

Recording Mauritius: Birding the Black Gorges

As winter settles in on North America, Jon Erickson is sweating his way through tropical forest in Black River Gorges National Park, perhaps the finest remaining tract of forest on the island of Mauritius. Read on for sights—and to hear the sounds he recorded—from his first day looking for the endangered Mauritius Kestrel, one of the highest priorities for his recording trip to Mauritius. Here’s Jon:

From an overlook high in the mountains, the Black River Gorges park splays out below me in all its majesty. Green, tropical vegetation covers the landscape.  Waterfalls drop in that slow motion effect that can only be created by large phenomena at great distance.  White-tailed Tropicbirds stand out against the green and glide across the forest below me.

A Mascarene White-eye lands in a small tree right next to me and courteously begins singing. I have my parabolic microphone pointed at the bird before the song even starts and the recording is a success. Also called the Mauritius Grey White-eye, this bird is the most common endemic species on the island. I’m happy for the recording, but scanning obsessively for rarer species.

Back on the access road, I see two men parking their motorcycles at a pull-off. One is wearing a Mauritian Wildlife Foundation t-shirt. I’ve been hoping to meet members of this group, which is responsible in large part for helping many of the island’s endemic birds return from the critical danger of extinction. Fortunately, I find they’ve heard of me, too through my efforts to contact the foundation.

They introduce themselves as Richard and Andy and tell me they are climbing the cliffs on the west side of the gorge to investigate a few Mauritius Kestrel nests. Would I like to come along? I’m ecstatic and follow them up the trail.

At the top of the cliffs, as we are resting briefly, a kestrel swoops through the trees above us screeching. It lands 20 yards away with a large lizard in its talons. I frantically get my gear out and point the parabola at the bird, but it places the lizard in a cache near the top of the tree and flies off. I’m disappointed, but Richard assures me there will be more opportunities.

We hike down the cliff a little ways and locate the bird’s nest tucked into the rocky crag. Richard looks inside, face grim. “No eggs. This guy hasn’t found a female yet.” An hour later the bird returns with a freshly killed gecko, landing on a branch in front of the nest.  During his approach he shrieks his announcement, and this time I get the recording.

Hear the kestrel:

(A group of Mascarene White-eyes call for a few seconds before the kestrel flies in, making a sharp call that sounds surprisingly similar to the American Kestrel’s call.)

The Mauritius kestrel is a bit of an anomaly. Back home, we typically see kestrels hovering over open fields hunting for small mammals. This species, though, has evolved shorter and rounder wings that give it the ability to dart and dash through forest and underbrush with amazing agility. This maneuverability allows it to pick off its favorite food of gecko even in dense vegetation.

Unfortunately, this trait has nearly been the bird’s downfall. The kestrel’s natural habitat has been reduced significantly as Mauritius’ forests have been leveled to make room for its expanding sugarcane industry. It’s ironic to think that a kestrel could be threatened by the creation of open fields, but that’s its situation.

Before we head home, Richard and Andy inform me I’m welcome to come to the nests whenever I’d like. November is the kestrel’s breeding season, so I plan to return soon.  Hopefully next time I will have the opportunity to record two birds: a male and a female.

(Photos and sounds by Jon Erickson. Read more about Jon’s experiences on his own blog.)

Photo Quiz 3: How Many Species in This Photo?

It’s nearly winter, and those of you lucky enough to live near some beaches or mudflats probably enjoy gazing out over motley assortments of shorebirds like this one. Until you can get outside, though, cast your eyes over this photo and help us answer the question: How many species are in this photo? (Of course, we’d also like to hear which species you think are in the photo—and how you can tell.)

One thing I love about this kind of birding is there are always a few birds on view that draw your eye as either pleasantly familiar or at least easy to figure out. I can gauge the intensity of my bird watching partners by how long they’re willing to scrutinize the other birds, like those little inkblots at the top of the frame. I also love the stark contrasts in size. I always find myself surprised by how my mental picture of a bird’s size in isolation doesn’t stack up against reality when two birds are side by side.

So have at it! Let’s try to compile a complete list of species for this photo. And if we need to I’ll try and get one or two of the Lab’s eBirders to weigh in on those mirage birds at the top.

(Click the picture to sink your eyeballs into a larger version. Image by Birdshare contributor Robinsegg, taken October 4 in Utah. It’s a crop of a much larger image, with even more species in it. Spoiler alert: following the link will reveal some of the bird IDs in this picture.)

For Tropical Bird, Violin More Resonant Than Aria

Birders visiting the New World tropics rarely have to wait too long before hearing male manakins at their leks. With a bit of careful creeping through the undergrowth, you’ll often find a bizarre gathering of the little fist-sized birds hopping, strutting, or sidling along their perches in the hopes of attracting a mate.

The soundtrack is no less weird: each species has a characteristic pop, snap, ruffle, or whir typically produced mechanically with their wings. No vocal cords required. (You can listen to a selection by searching the Macaulay Library for “manakin.”)

One species, the Club-winged Manakin of Ecuador and Colombia, makes a thin violin-like whistle by knocking its wings together behind its back. This bird is near to the heart of Kim Bostwick, curator of the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates. In 2005 she used high-speed video to reveal how the bird does it: by rubbing a stiffened wing-feather tip across seven remarkably precise ridges set into the thickened shaft of the adjacent feather. (It’s this feather that gives the bird its common name.)

The flurry of vibration as the male bird flaps its wings produces a tone at 1500 Hz (pretty close to an F-sharp played 3/4 of the way up a piano keyboard). Listen for it in this video clip:

Now, in a paper just out this week, Bostwick and colleagues have found two unusual ways the manakin’s wings modify that feather-scraping-on-ridges sound. First, that thickened feather shaft picks up the vibrations and begins to resonate, making the sound louder much the way a violin’s body amplifies the sound of a bow against strings. Next, the researchers looked at other feathers up and down the bird’s wing. Using lasers to watch the feathers vibrate, they saw that even these “normal” feathers picked up the sound. They began to vibrate in phase, adding some harmonic effects to the sound and possibly making it louder still. That short, reedy sound you heard in the video is the complicated result of an entire wing (or two) working together.

Fascinatingly, they conducted the same test with close relatives—other manakins that don’t make wing sounds. Those feathers also tended to vibrate at 1500 Hertz, though much more weakly and not in phase with each other. That result hints at how evolution could have yielded the Club-winged Manakin’s sound, using as raw material an inherent quality of manakin feathers and slowly modifying it.

But what makes evolution head off in such oddball directions? It’s thought that manakins court acrobatically rather than vocally because of sexual selection, a branch of natural selection. Although playing the world’s smallest violin behind its back doesn’t help a male Club-winged Manakin find food or fend off predators, it does attract mates—so birds that are better at it pass on that ability to future generations. What’s neat about this process is that it puts females in a powerful position. So-called choosy females, by selecting certain abilities in males and ignoring others, actually drive the evolution of their species as much as external events do—even to the point of producing outlandish thickened feathers that work like a musical instrument.

Bostwick and her colleagues note that this kind of sound production is basically unknown among vertebrates. Plenty of insects do something similar called stridulation. The peaceful chirping of crickets on a summer night, for example, comes from hundreds of cricket legs rubbing against hundreds of hard cricket exoskeletons, amplified by resonating throughout their little cricket bodies. But among the vertebrates their only peer known so far is the Club-winged Manakin. As Bostwick and colleagues put it:

“The mechanism employed by male Club-wing Manakins crosses taxonomic boundaries and places these birds squarely among more arthropod-typical mechanisms of sound production…. The presence of these extremely rare traits in a bird highlights an arthropod-vertebrate convergence enacted by choosy females, with the structural features of the modified secondary feathers appearing to have been exaggerated from resonant characteristics that probably existed in the ancestral feathers.”

Of course, none of this answers the question of why the males don’t simply open their beaks, whistle an F-sharp, and have done with it. While they were at it, they could probably throw in some slides, a trill, or a crescendo, like a “normal” songbird. Except that apparently female Club-winged Manakins just don’t find that version of the sound attractive. And as any rock star, stand-up comedian, tap-dancer, skateboarder, footballer, or husband can tell you, that’s the whole point.

(Read more about Bostwick’s research in this 2005 BirdScope article and in this post by Carl Zimmer at Discover magazine’s blog. If you’ve never seen a manakin moonwalking, this clip from Nature is a must-see. Image by Kim Bostwick)

A Thousand Photos Added to All About Birds

Back in April when we launched the new version of our All About Birds website, we picked 51 common species and gave them the full treatment: expanded ID and life history information, sound and video clips, related links, and lots of photos of each bird in all (or nearly all) its plumages.

But commenters fairly soon started asking us for more photos of the other 532 species in our online species guide—birds that aren’t quite as common but still come in a variety of plumages: juvenile, immature, male, female, breeding, nonbreeding, dark-morph, light-morph, rufous-morph, and so on. We had a stockpile of some of these photos that used to be on our website, but owing to our new database structure we couldn’t incorporate them at launch.

So today we’re glad to announce that we’ve restored all 1,000 or so of those photos (including about 60 new photos of nests and eggs) to All About Birds. They flow seamlessly into the new site’s photo viewer, which means you can enlarge each photo and scroll through the collection until you find the plumage you’re looking for.

This doesn’t mean we’ll stop adding photos to All About Birds. The incredible photographers in our Flickr group, Birdshare, have now sent us more than 27,000 photos to work with, and we’re still intent on incorporating them into the species guide for the benefit of bird watchers everywhere. In the next few days, look for updates to Gambel’s Quail, Evening Grosbeak, Pine Grosbeak, Pileated Woodpecker, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, and other birds. Thanks and good birding!

(Image: Eastern Screech-Owl, gray form, Michael J. Hopiak/CLO. Thanks to France Dewaghe and Greg Delisle for handling the technical side of this upgrade.)

Recording Mauritius: Tropical Island Sound-Check

Thanks everyone for weighing in on our photo quiz! Meanwhile, halfway around the world on Mauritius, recordist Jon Erickson has been unpacking his bags and aiming his microphone at the tamarind tree in his yard. Here’s his first impressions of life in the middle of the Indian Ocean:

On the third morning after arriving on Mauritius, I woke up invigorated and refreshed.  Unfortunately, it was 2:30 in the morning.  Instead of fighting it, I decided to befriend the jetlag and put on a pot of coffee.

My wife and I are living in Flic en Flac on the western side of the island. The beach here sprawls along the coast, protected from the pounding of the Indian Ocean by a coral reef that lies several hundred yards offshore.  The beach is covered with European holidaymakers, but plenty of locals are present, too, underneath the myriad snorkels breaking the surface of the water.  Mauritius is well known for its mixture of cultures and religions, and it is not uncommon to see a group of Hindu worshipers offering flowers, clay idols, and coconuts into the ocean, or a Muslim woman snorkeling in full burka.

For a sound recordist like me, one unfortunate byproduct of this tourist town is the ever-present noise from vendors, taxi men, diesel trucks, scooters, barking dogs, etc.  But, at 2:30 in the morning, the noise is at bay.  I decide that this is a good time to check my equipment and see if everything survived the 25-hour flight from the States.

Bringing the various microphones and field recorders onto the patio, I focus on the massive tamarind tree hanging over our apartment building. During the day, birds create such a cacophony that even the diesel lorry with a punctured exhaust is in danger of being drowned out.  The primary ruckus-maker is good old Passer domesticus. But many of the island’s other species gravitate to the tree; the Madagascar Fody (pictured), Red-whiskered Bulbul, Common Myna, Spotted Weaver, and, to my surprise, a pair of macaque (monkeys). But right now, even the tree is silent.

Switching on the recorder and putting on the headphones, I am happy to see and hear that everything is working. Turning up the gain, I can hear some distant details that I wouldn’t be able to pick up with a naked ear:  some dogs barking near the beach, an impatient rooster, the waves hitting the nearby jetty.  The barking escalates and I begin to wonder what’s going on.  I decide to let my imagination run freely and dub this test recording “dogs chasing monkey.” Shortly afterward, I record my second masterpiece “monkey chasing cat.” Two recordings destined for my personal collection only.

With the equipment checked out and working, I start imagining the recording field trips to come. With erratic buses, expensive taxis, and the prospect of theft looming over any bike or scooter I might buy, there’s some planning to be done. I’m hoping the local conservationists in the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation can help out. Since the 1980s this foundation has been instrumental in bringing back many of the island’s endangered bird species from the brink of extinction, including the Mauritius Kestrel and the famed Pink Pigeon, which at one point numbered only 10 individuals. I am eager to meet with them to see, first hand, the work that they are accomplishing, and to ask some advice about my own project.

Outside of the more elusive endemics, the island is rich in interesting birds. My initial impression is that nearly any abandoned lot will reveal a decent number of species. Fortunately, I live near Black River Gorges National Park, home not only to the kestrel and Pink Pigeon, but also the Mauritius (or Echo) Parakeet, the Mauritius Cuckoo-Shrike, and the Mauritius Bulbul. It’s only a short bus ride followed by a 3-mile hike to the visitor center.

I’m hoping that, by the end of the week, I will begin producing some recordings that will rival “dogs chasing monkey” and “monkey chasing cat.”

Photo Quiz 2: Funky Birds With Bright Markings

We got such an enthusiastic response to our first photo quiz that we’ve decided to launch another one. This one’s certainly not a tricky-ID problem—few people would look at these two photos and see two closely related species requiring keen attention to detail to separate.

And yet, they aren’t your everyday species and, despite their bold markings, they can be somewhat hard to locate when flipping through a field guide. I only noticed their overall similarities as I was assembling our November featured photographer portfolio, for Matt Shellenberg (spoiler alert: other photos of these two species are identified there).

Wait a minute, I said to myself, these are two strongly marked brown, yellow, gray, and black birds with big beaks. Identifying them is pretty straightforward—but why? What is your brain doing to separate these two birds from each other and from everything else? What advice would you give to a beginner to nudge them toward the right part of the field guide? As I said last week, we’re thinking a lot about the process of bird ID right now, and we’d love to know how you get to your answers.

Not only that, but they’re two cool birds, aren’t they? Here’s a closer look.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Thanks in advance for your answers. We’ll post a roundup in a few days.

(This photo quiz is powered by Birdshare contributors Stephen Parsons, Greg Page, and Kaustubh Deshpande. [spoiler alert! the birds are identified on those pages too])