Christmas Ornaments

In a previous post I noted that I had visited Trinidad and Tobago. Patty and I left on December 22nd and returned on December 31st. We were on Trinidad form the 22nd to the 28th, transferring that day to Tobago. After three days on Tobago we returned to Trinidad to return home.

While on Trinidad we stayed at the Asa Wright Nature Center and Lodge, which is nestled in the Northern Range rain forest. We had signed up for a tour and were met at the airport by the Center staff and taken to the lodge to relax and enjoy the grounds.

The lodge has a veranda that overlooks the rain forest valley. More importantly, it overlooks a number of bird feeders which attract a bewildering number of colorful birds. Having never been birding in the tropics before it really was overwhelming.

And since we were there at Christmastime, and the birds were so colorful, and in trees, I saw it as a large Christmas tree with the birds as the ornaments.

So here are some of the ornaments. Look at them, noting the differences between sexes in the same species. And then imagine you're seeing all of them at the same time, flitting about, trying to make sense of it all. And that you woke up at 3:00 am to make your flight. and that with one exception, you've never seen any of these birds before.

Without the staff at the lodge, pointing out the different birds, it would have been impossible to make sense of it all.

Female Silver-beaked Tanager

Male Silver-beaked Tanager

Male Green Honeycreeper

Female Green Honeycreeper

Juvenile Green Honeycreeper

Male Purple Honeycreeper

Female Purple Honey Creeper

Juvenile Purple Honeycreeper

Crested Oropendola

 Bananaquit

Grey-fronted Dove

Golden-headed Manakin

(Manakins are the "Moon Walking" Birds)

White-bearded Manakin

White-necked Jacobin

Tufted Coquette

(The 2nd smallest Hummingbird on Earth)

White-chested Emerald

White-chested Emerald

(Note the apparent color difference base on how the light hits the feathers)

Cooper-rumped Hummingbird

Green Hermit

Great Kiskadee

Blue-grey Tanager

Green-backed Trogon

(Green?)

Tropical Mockingbird

(Even the familiar is different)

Male Violaceous Euphonia

Female Violaceous Euphonia

Female White-lined Tanager

Male White-lined Tanager

Turquoise Tanager

Trinidad Motmot

Female Barred Antshrike

Male Barred Antshrike

Spectacled Thrush

Northern Waterthrush

(The one bird I had seen before this trip)

Not everything was close, but they were still in view of the veranda.

Orange-winged Parrot

(These were very noisy, and would fly in very close but always land on the other side of the tree!)

Channel Billed Toucans

(These birds never came close)

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This is not a complete list of what we saw at Asa Wright, as I wasn't able to shoot them all! On the trip overall I saw 186 species, 146 of which were life birds.

And what a civilized way to go about it. The veranda at Asa Wright had a bar, comfy chairs, a staff calling out any new arrivals, coffee in the morning, tea and pastries at three everyday, and the complimentary rum punch at seven each evening.

If they could just something about that humidity!

Bird in Hand

A couple of years ago I went to see northern saw-whet owls being banded. I went twice again this November. It is still just as cool.

First we went back to the site I visited in central Pennsylvania two years ago, run under the auspices of the Ned Smith Center for Nature and Art, and we were not disappointed.

The owls are weighed and measured, with running commentary by the bander, explaining what is going on and why.

The owls, for the most part, are quite docile. Except for the occasional snapping of their beak, they remain calm in the bander's hand.

After the science is done, it's time for portraits. And "adoptions". Alas, you don't get to keep the bird.

You don't even get to hold it. The bander holds it for your adoption portrait, while you hold the band number that identifies "your" bird (and sometimes more than one person adopts the same owl - what a scam!). At this banding site the weighing and measuring happens indoors. Previously the adopter was allowed to hold the bird, but after one got away and flew around in the building in a panic that practice was ended. So now only the banders handle the birds. Once outside to release the birds you can hold it on your arm, as the owl reorients itself to the dark of night. Some sit on one's arm only briefly, others for five or more minutes. And then they're gone into the night.

The second site was a nature preserve outside of Philadelphia, Rushton Farm, which we visited six days later. At the Ned Smith site, the property is such that the visitors are not allowed to walk out to the nets, the terrain is just to rocky to have people walking around in the dark. The farm is much easier to get around, with easy to walk trails, and we were able to see the process from capture to release.

How embarrassing it must be to get caught and then have all these people watching. But again the birds were very calm.

We were able to watch, but only the trained banders could handle the owls in the nets. Once untangled the owls are put in bags for transport to the banding station.

The banding station was in an open air structure, so we were, under supervision, allowed to hold the owls for release. The protocol was the same, hold the bird for five minutes in the dark to allow it's vision to adapt, and then place the bird on your arm and wait for it to fly away.

The owls are quite tiny, and it somewhat magical to hold them, however briefly. This small wild animal, so calm and trusting. I wonder what it thinks of the whole experience. What memories does it have of these strange giants who poke and prod it and then send it on its way?

Continuing Owl Week here at Recycled Photons ...

Last April I had a business trip to Long Beach, California.  Since I had to spend six hours on a plane, to say nothing of the time at the airport, twice, I figured I'd make the most of it. So I spent the weekend in California, exploring the greater Johsua Tree National Park area and the Salton Sea.

And one of the things I wanted to see were these guys.

Burrowing owls.

The directions to find them were very easy. Head down Highway 111 until you come to a sign that says Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge. And turn in the opposite direction, toward the prison.

We were told that the owls would be perched along the sides of the road and that's where we found them. There seemed to be an owl every hundred or so yards. We saw a dozen or so birds in under two miles. Each manning their own territory.

They were perched on sticks, mounds, fence posts, the highest point in their area. And they seemed completely unconcerned about us as we went about photographing them.

Here we have Patty lining up her shot as the owl poses obligingly.

The reason they're called burrowing owls is that they nest in holes in the ground. The owls don't actually burrow, rather they use holes dug by other creatures, including man. As we drove up we spotted one run down into a drainage hole along the side of the road. I walked up to take a look and found this.

I backed away, not wanting to stress the bird, and waited for it to pop up and peek out. I didn't need to wait long.

I have to agree with my friend Laura, they are rather cute.

In their burrows they make a sound similar to a rattlesnake when they feel threatened. I must not have been scary enough as I heard nothing.

They seemed much more concerned with the swallows zooming about overhead.

I'm not sure what this one was doing, a quail imitation?

The easiest owls I ever found.

And by far and away the most photogenic.

More Owls

Continuing a theme from the last two posts, I give you two more owls (and a nightjar).

I had to go a bit farther to get these though. Instead of day trip to Pennsylvania or an easy ten mile drive, this was an over five hour plane ride and then a van trip down a mountain road to an agricultural research site in north central Trinidad.

This was our second visit to the Aripo Agriculture Research Station, this one for night birding.

After a nice picnic dinner of chicken and rice, and the signature rum punch, we gathered under the "owl tree".

The chap with the gold watch is Dave Ramlal, our guide from the Asa Wright Nature Center, where we were staying while on Trinidad. And he is looking for an owl.

This owl:

A ferruginous pygmy owl, which sat up in the tree looking at us looking at it. After getting it's fill of human watching it closed its eyes and went back to sleep.

But the tree wasn't done yet. There was another owl in this tree. And as we were walking away we heard it call. And then it flew. We saw it and it appeared to fly into another tree. But it had fooled us by landing on a fence post. We searched the tree to no avail. Bummed we started to follow the path from the original tree, to see where it might have gone. And there it was right out in the open. So we all turned to look and of course the owl took off.

To another tree. Where we all got great looks ...

... at a tropical screech owl. Which didn't give a hoot about us standing there gawking at it.

After the owls we went looking for nightjars and we found plenty. Which made Dave happy, as he is concerned for the birds due to the loss of habitat. The birds were sitting on the road because the roads were warm and that is where the bugs were. And for us, it made them very easy to see.

Unfortunately autofocus doesn't work in the dark. And the manual focus on my lens chose that day to stop working. So I got few good images.

Representative is this one of a common pauraque.

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This was just one of the field trips we took while on Trinidad and the only night jaunt. It was a very nice way to end a day (I got four life birds). The entire trip was a good one, and I'll have more posts about it in the days to come.

Found Them

In my last post I told of how we went looking for long-eared owls and found a saw-whet owl instead. Patty had never seen a long-eared and was understandably disappointed.

Jump forward into the new year. We were at a local nature park to see a rufus hummingbird that had obviously gotten lost and which was spending the winter in New Jersey (they are a species of the American west). A birder friend we met there asked if we were interested in seeing owls. Of course we were. And off we went.

Here is an image of the owl. See it? It is dead center in the image (click to bigafy).

Had we not been led to the bird we never would have found it. Here's a close up:

The owl has its eye on us, clearly aware of our presence and thus we kept our distance, not wishing to disturb it.

The roosting site is one I had visited a number of times before, but I was unaware of the owls. Patty had visited specifically to see owls, but that day there were no owls to be seen. This suburban woodland also had roosting saw-whets and we observed several that day. We learned later that both species have been using the site for years. The owls have likely moved on by now, leaving winter roosts for breeding territories. Hopefully they will return next winter. I find it amazing that less than ten miles from my home, in a relatively small woodland in suburban New Jersey, there are not one but two wintering species of owls, and have been for years. Nice.