Grackles declared as "Near Threatened" in Canada

                                                                                                 Photo by BarrytheBirder

COMMON GRACKLE

(Quiscalus quiscalus)

BirdLife International, the official Red List Authority for birds, has just released its 2018 update and Bird Studies Canada reports that the updated list now declares the Common Grackle as 'Near Threatened'.   This is a shock as the population of this backyard bird now appears to have plummeted by over half since 1970.   The Common Grackle is thought to have thrived from land clearing that European settlement brought to North America.   However the starling's use of agricultural land had led to it being declared a 'pest', which has prompted intensive control measures in some areas, which appear to have led to significant declines in recent decades.   My observation is that the grackles at my backyard feeders, here in southern Ontario, are as plentiful as at any other time in the last 25 years...maybe more so.

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BarrytheBirder

"Air traffic control... we have a problem"

                                                           Photo: Dibyangshu Sarkar / AFP / Getty Images

A Purple Heron (Ardea purpurea) flies over a Little Egret (Egretta garzetta) at the Mangalajodi Bird Sanctuary, which is 65 km. south of Bhubaneswar, in eastern India, near the Bay of Bengal.   The sanctuary is a popular area for spotting migratory birds along with native species.

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BarrytheBirder

A sunflower squabble...

                                                            Photo: Paolino Massimiliano Manue / Alamy

A European Goldfinch (Chloris chloris) struggles with a Eurasian Blue Tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) in the Italian countryside.

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BarrytheBirder

"Excuse me..."

Photo: Ashwini Bhatia / AP

A Himalayan Crow sits on the back of a Himalayan Griffon Vulture (Gyps himalayensis), one of the largest birds of the Himalayas in Dharmsala, northern India.   In fairness, the vulture is young and may not have developed his or her full complement of assertiveness yet.

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BarrytheBirder

Oxpeckers in Kenya...

Photo: Amir Cohen / Reuters

Red-billed Oxpeckers (Buphagus erythrorhyncus) sit on a buffalo at Nairobi Natural Park in Kenya.   They eat bugs and insects on the animal's hide and will also suck blood from small open wounds in the buffalo's skin.

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BarrytheBirder

Eastern Curlew threatened by sand...

                                                                                        Photo: Doug McCutcheon / Alamy

An Eastern Curlew catches prey as it wades through an incoming tide in Cairns, in north-east Australia, on the Coral Sea.   The curlew is threatened by the dumping of sand onto its mudflats habitat.

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BarrytheBirder

"...and a partridge in a pear tree"

Photo: Jose Ardaiz / Fotonatura)

RED-LEGGED PARTRIDGE

(Alectoris rufa)

The Red-legged Partridge is native to south-western Europe, being found from Portugal and Spain, to France, Italy and southern Germany.   It has also been introduced to the UK., Ireland, Algeria, Greece and New Zealand.   Its I.U.C.N. status is 'least concerned'.

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BarrytheBirder

Greater Sage Grouse in Wyoming...

Photo: Tom Koerner / USFWS Mountain Prairie

LOSING PROTECTION

Greater Sage-grouse are seen above at Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge in Wyoming, US.   Land management plans released last week would open more areas to leasing and allow waivers for drilling pads to encroach into the birds' habitat, undoing protections for the Greater Sage-grouse enacted in 2015 by Barrack Obama.

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BarrytheBirder

A magpie and a moose...

Photo: Tom Koerner / USFWS

A young moose and a Black-billed Magpie have an encounter at Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge in south-west Wyoming, US.
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BarrytheBirder

A chummy group...

Photo: Gary Meredith

Rainbow Bee-eaters (Merops ornatus) are seen in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia.   They are also found in in eastern Indonesian, New Guinea and occasionally in the Solomon Islands.

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BarrytheBirder

Wisdom ... once again

Photo: Madalyn Riley / USFWS Pacific Region

Wisdom, a Laysan Albatross (Phoebastria immutabilis) and the world's oldest known wild bird, incubates her egg on the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in the North Pacific Ocean.  Wisdom is 68 years old and has returned home to Midway Atoll for over six decades, raising at least 30 to 35 chicks.

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BarrytheBirder

Rain shower brings little flock together...

                                                                                         Photo: Back To Nature / care2 

MAMA CHICKEN UMBRELLA

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BarrytheBirder

Bald Eagles ~ British Columbia ~ lower mainland

Photo by Dave Kemp

"I can't hear you - speak up"

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BarrytheBirder

Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition 2018 winners

 Photo: Kristian Bell / Deakin University 

Behaviour Category Winner

Kristen Bell was the photographer of the two Royal Terns seen above.  A beautiful morning on a Florida beach seemed to prompt the pair to begin an intricate courtship dance.

Photo: Alwin Hardenbol / University of Eastern Finland

Ecology & Environmental Science Category Winner

Bohemian Waxwings (Bombycilla garrulus) gorge on  rowan berries in winter.  The one above came to the trees outside the photographer's office in Finland.

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BarrytheBirder

How did I get so many field guides?

Photo by BarrytheBirder

31 Field Guides & 1 World Checklist

Pictured above is the last bird field guide I purchased. It is the Stokes Field Guide to the Birds of North America which I purchased five years ago.   I now have 31 field guides plus one copy of the World Checklist by Monroe and Sibley (1993), where I have checked off 425 species.   The checklists are by people that range from Roger Tory Peterson to Don & Lillian Stokes and from organizations like the National Audubon Society to National Geographic.   Others are field guides for particular countries such as Australia to Mexico to Venezuela.   Then there are individual species field guides from hummingbirds to hawks.   Interestingly, I have collected the 31 field guides over 31 years, from 1987 to 2018.   There was a time I thought I would go birding all over the world, but now that I am 77 years old I realize that Canada, the US. and the Caribbean will have to do ... no regrets however.   I'm still captivated by birds, even if most of them are in the backyard.   The last few years I thought maybe I should have an online checklist of all the birds I've seen, but now I can't think of a really good reason for doing so.   I can only imagine the looks on the faces of my grandchildren when I hand over a dozen, old, field guides to each of them.   As I was about to sign- off here, I remembered an old field guide that was gifted to me many years ago by a co-worker named Allister Macrae.   He bought it at an auction sale.  It dates back 92 years, to 1926 (see photo below).

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BarrytheBirder

...as the crow flies

Photo:Julien Stratenschulte / AFP / Getty Images

A Carrion Crow (Corvus carone) carrying a large nut flies over barbed wires in Hanover, northern Germany.  There are 34 species of crows around the world.
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BarrytheBirder

No rhyme or reason ... this is sick!

Photo: RSPCA / PA

2  Mute Swans and 5 cygnets shot,
wrapped in plastic bags 
and thrown down bank of a stream.

A family of Mute Swans has been killed in a "senseless" airgun attack, in Benenden, Kent, England.   "It's clear these poor Mute Swans have been shot and killed deliberately - one of the birds was peppered with pellets" an RSPCA inspector said.   "It's absolutely disgusting that someone would purposely target and kill these beautiful birds, and it's heartbreaking that an entire family has been wiped out".   The Guardian newspaper said that the RSPCA is calling for better regulation of air weapons after receiving 884 calls reporting air-gun attacks on animals across England and Wales last year.  The Telegraph newspaper quotes Stephen Knight, a trustee of the Swan Sanctuary in Shepperton,  Middlesex, saying the royal birds are targeted in such attacks because of their relationship to the Queen, who owns all the unmarked swans in England and Wales that swim in open water.   Mr. Knight said: " The reason they pick on swans is because it is widely know that they belong to the Crown, so they are a symbol of the Establishment".   

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BarrytheBirder

I wonder how much plastic these herons swallow?

Photo: Fachrul Reza / Barcroft Images

A siege of herons looks for food among the waste at a landfill in Lhokseumawe, Aceh, Indonesia.   Reports say plastic waste in Indonesia reaches 64m tons per year.

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BarrytheBirder

World population estimated to be over 310 million...

Photo: Vincenzo Pinto / AFP / Getty Images

A murmuration of starlings flies over the Altare della Patria monument in Rome.   Authorities have enlisted falcons to scare off defecatings starlings, as the Italian capital plays host to a growing menagerie of animals including gulls, wild boars and sheep.

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BarrytheBirder

Pretty little thing...

       Photo above: Warren Little / Getty Images

Photo below: Bjorn Christian Torrisson

RED FODY
(Foudia madagascariensis)

A Red Fody, sometimes known as the Madagascar Fody, Red Cardinal Fody or Common Fody is a small bird native to Madagascar and introduced to various other islands in the Indian Ocean.

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BarrytheBirder

What is the special attraction?

Photo: Anushree Fadnavis / Reuters

Seagulls flock over a man rowing down the Yamuna River, near New Delhi, in northern India.

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BarrytheBirder

Short autumn migration in Hamburg, Germany

Photo: Focke Strangmann / EPA

MThe Swan-fatherM

The "Swanfather", Olaf Niess, corrals some of the Mute Swans on the Alstern lakes into a lock in order to catch and then carry them to their winter quarters.   Every Year in late autumn, the birds are moved to a lake nearby that is kept free of ice.

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BarrytheBirder

Bird species with most feathers?

                                                                                                 Photo: Ian Duffy

The EMPEROR PENGUIN
(Aptenodytes fosteri)

In the decades I've been a birder I've never asked myself which bird species has the most feathers ... until today.   Now I know.   According to Mary McCann at BirdNote, penguins can claim the current feather record, because they have a multitude of small feathers all over their bodies, and the bigger the bird - the more feathers.   The largest penguin species is the Emperor Penguin (Aptenodytes fosteri).   One project counted 80,000 feathers on a single bird (nearly 60 per square inch).  That should keep them warm and dry in the harshest of cold climates.

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BarrytheBirder

Australian threatened bird species populations halved in 30 years...

WANDERING ALBATROSS

Photo: Graham Robertson

A Guardian newspaper story by Calla Wahlquist reports that populations of threatened bird species in Australia halved in the past 30 years, according to a new national Threatened Bird Index.   The index is part of a large data consolidation undertaken by the Threatened Species Recovery Hub, along with Queensland University and Birdlife Australia.   Over 180,000 surveys from 35 monitoring programs on 43 species that where listed as vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered found an average population decline of 52% between 1985 and 2015.   Populations of migratory shorebird species dropped by an average of 70% over the same period.   Last month, the Living Planet Index reported a 60% decline in global animal populations since 1960.   The alarm bells continue to ring.   Are we deaf?

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BarrytheBirder

The Harpy Eagle...

                                                             Photo: David Tipling / Yale University Press

...longer talons than the claws of a Grizzly!

The Harpy Eagle is found in sub-tropical and tropical Central and South America.   It's likely the most powerful avian predator in the world.   It has talons longer than the claws of a Grizzly Bear.   Its conservation status is 'near threatened'.

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BarrytheBirder

Whither Antarctica's largest protected sanctuary?

Photo: Paul Hilton / Greenpeace

A Gentoo Penguin (Pygoscelis papua) displays agility at Brown's Station, Paradise Bay, in the Antarctic.   The area forms part of a proposal to create the largest protected area on the planet; an Antarctic ocean sanctuary.  China, Russia and Norway have blocked plans to create a huge new reserve in the Antarctic that would have been a sanctuary for whales and other species.

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BarrytheBirder

Not as uncommon a sight as you might think

Photo: Brent Cizek / Audubon

Female Common Merganser and her mob

This female Common Merganser has over 50 ducklings trailing along behind her.   The first 10 or 12 behind her are likely her own but the next 40 or so are pick-ups or hitchhikers who have lost their mothers. The photographer of this picture returned a week a later and discovered the string had grown to over 70.   The missing mothers may have been preyed upon by raptors or snapping turtles, or become accidentally separated, or shot.   It is a surprisingly common occurrence. 

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BarrytheBirder

Welcome to Antarctica...

Photo: Stefan Christmann / NHU / BBC

Above is a four-week-old Emperor Penguin chick in Atka Bay, Antarctica.  At this age, parents will persistently encourage their young to leave the pouch and stand on their own two feet ... poor little devils.

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BarrytheBirder

Puerto Rican Parrots pummeled...

Photo: Carlos Giusti / AP

Puerto Rican Parrots (Amazona vittata) huddle in a flight cage at the Iguaca aviary.   Biologists are trying to save the last of these endangered birds after more than half the island state's population disappeared when Hurricane Maria destroyed their natural habitat and food sources on September 20th of last year.

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BarrytheBirder

Snow Geese take over bird sanctuary

Photo by Andrew Soong / Xinhua / Barcroft Images

100,000 Snow Geese (Chen caerulescens) have congregated at the Terra Nova Bird Sanctuary in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada. to feed before migrating further south to warmer areas of the US., including the states of Washington and California.   (See also blog on Nov.19th).

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BarrytheBirder

Blood-sucking Yellow-billed Oxpeckers

Photo: Veronika Patrovska Vernerova

Yellow-billed Oxpeckers (Buphagus africanus) are seen  above, on the back of a zebra in Lake Mburo National Park in Kenya.   Oxpeckers are passerine birds in sub-Sahara Africa and in several parts of the southern African continent.   They eats insects, ticks, and larvae from the backs of large wild and domesticated animals, such as cattle, antelopes, wildebeest, giraffes, zebras, etc.   They prefer however, fresh blood which they take from opens wounds on the large mammals' backs, which the creatures tolerate.

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BarrytheBirder 

Barred Owl is a beauty...

    Photo by BarrytheBirder

BARRED OWL

(Strix varia)

This is the first Barred Owl I have ever photographed and it was a thrill.   It was so close and patient with me.   It stayed for several minutes until I had finished.   This was near my home in King City.

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BarrytheBirder

Dendroica cerulea

The Cerulean Warbler photo (at left) was in an email I got from the Cornell Lab eNews for November.   What caught my eye and surprised me was the colour of the warbler's legs.  It's legs and toes are blue.   I'd never noticed this before but one learns something new every day.
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BarrytheBirder   

22,000 kilometre round-trip migration each year...

Photo: Vagabond Images

AMUR FALCON

(Falco amurensis)

Over the course of  12 months, this remarkable bird of prey flies from Siberia to south-east Africa, and then back to Siberia, finishing an extremely long 22,000 kilometre migration.   These falcons breed in south-east Russia and northern China, followed by a migration through India and across the Arabian Sea to southern Africa where they spend their winters.   Along the migration route, they spend a month in Nagaland, one of India's smallest states in the far north-east of the country, where they fatten up and strengthen themselves by feeding on insects.   Their winter diet appears to be a wide range of insects either in the air or on the ground, but they also take small birds, mammals and amphibians to feed feed their young in the breeding range.  As many as 1 million Amurs will make the stopover in Nagaland (see photo below).   Their immense and spectacular roost in Nagaland is reputed to be the largest by any species of falcons in the world.

Photo: Rami Sreenivasan

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BarrytheBirder

Night sky above the capital of Italy...

Photo: Tiziana Fabi / AFP / Getty Images

Here is a simple photo that creates an impression of purpose and intention.   Starlings are seen flying in front of the moon above Rome.

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BarrytheBirder

A new namesake discovered...

Photo: Ch'ien Lee / Minden Pictures / Alamy / Yale University Press

WALLACE'S HAWK-EAGLE

(Nisaetus nanus)

Photo: Kenth Esbensen

Until today, I did not know there was a bird of prey with the same name as my surname: Wallace.   The raptor is the Wallace's Hawk-Eagle (Nisaetus nanus).  To my surprise, it is one of the smallest eagles in the world.   It weighs no more than a large pigeon.   It is found in Southern Myanmar, southern Thailand and the Malay Peninsula, Borneo and Sumatra.   Sadly, it's conservation status is 'vulnerable', like several others of the world's eagle species.   The photo at top is from a newly published book 'The Empire of the Eagle: An Illustrated Natural History', by Mike Unwin and David Tipling.   Their book, newly published by Yale University Press, celebrates the world's 68 eagle species in all their grandeur.   Its release follows the release in February of last year of The Enigma of the Owl.
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BarrytheBirder

2018 Audubon Photography Awards

                                                                                                    Photo: Dan Ion /Audubon

Pictured above is one of the photos from the 2018 Audubon Photography Awards.   A young Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) is accosted by a Blue-gray Gnatcatcher (Polioptila caerulea).   To see all category winners plus the top one hundred contest photos go to the 2018 Audubon Photography Awards website.

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BarrytheBirder

Goldfinches...oceans apart

Photo: Thomas Warnack / AFP / Getty Images

A multicoloured European Goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis) is seen above on a withered sunflower in Langenenslingen, Southern Germany.   European Goldfinches are native to Europe, North Africa and western Asia, plus they are now found in Australia, New Zealand and Uruguay.   Below is an American Goldfinch (Spinus tristis) which I photographed in my backyard in King City, Ontario.   American Goldfinches are found from southern Canada to northern Mexico and do make short migrations, although the goldfinches in my backyard are here year-around, including the cold, snowy winters.  American Goldfinches are very chummy  and congregate  and feed together regularly (see photo at bottom).   There are five goldfinch species in the world. 

Photo above and below by BarrytheBirder

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BarrytheBirder