Cold Weather Consequences

White-winged Scoter

It's been a long cold winter, much worse than last year, and we have weeks to go before we can expect any permanent change. For us, it means days off school for the children, and dangerous driving conditions for the rest of us. But as long as we have power, we can endure and life goes on pretty much like always. I try to keep the feeders filled in my backyard, although it's hard to keep up with the ravenous appetites of the Starlings who seem to be my most frequent visitors.

 

Last week when the sun was out, I went birding for Snow Buntings, and mentioned to a friend that I'd like to add the Long-tailed duck to my life list. This morning, when we got home from church, I found a message from him that the ducks were at Ashland Park near the Falls of the Ohio in Indiana right then. I quickly changed into warm birding clothes and sped across the river (using the bridge, of course). Well, I "saw" two Long-tail ducks waaay out in the middle of the river. Using another person's good Swarovski scope, I saw some white on their heads, but mostly, they were just duck-shaped blobs to me. Think I'll keep looking before adding this one to my life list.

 

Common Goldeneye

The Common Goldeneyes were a little closer to shore, and I had a good time watching them. The light wasn't very good though, and they look gray in this photo instead of the shining white of a live bird on the water. I think this guy is practicing some moves on his girlfriend.



White-winged Scoter

This winter we have been seeing White-winged Scoters on the river. Today I ran into Brainard Palmer-Ball, the top birder I know. I remember birders getting really excited to see one of these in previous years, and I asked Brainard, "Aren't these supposed to be rare birds?" He replied that until this year, he'd only seen 3 White-winged Scoters around here in his long birding career. Yet this month, he and another birder counted 116 of them in one day!

 

Surf Scoter (orange bill)

He said he was heading upstream a few miles to see if he could find a Surf Scoter again, so I went that way too. After finding a place to park, and carefully crossing River Road in traffic, I tramped through the snow following a group of scoters as they floated downstream. Brainard said the Surf Scoter has white on the back of his head and an orange bill. Sure enough, there was ONE Surf Scoter floating with all the others. LIFE BIRD!

 

 

When I got home, I started doing some research. Isn't the Internet wonderful? If I'd tried to do something like this 20 years ago at the library, I never would have found this much information! Scoters and the Long-tails all breed far, far to the north, and winter along the coasts, or around the Great Lakes. These are all diving birds, rather than dabblers like Mallards. Rarely diving in water that exceeds 30 feet deep, Surf Scoters forage in the zone of breaking waves, and habitually dive through foaming wave crests. Hundreds of thousands winter in the coastal waters off British Columbia alone, and 200,000 scoters could consume about 43 tons of mussel meat daily.  So what in the world are they doing on the Ohio River?

 

 

Google to the rescue again. Are the Great Lakes freezing in 2014? Yes indeed! Look at this satellite photo of the Great Lakes. In fact, the Great Lakes may set a record for ice cover this year. Lake Superior is 92 percent frozen on the surface, breaking a 20-year-old record of 91 percent set on Feb. 5, 1994. So that may partly explain why we are getting so many unusual water birds this winter around here. When the water froze, and their food sources disappeared, they just took off and headed south looking for open water, and the Ohio River was the first open water they found.

Unofficial Birding Day at the Falls

The official events calendar at the Falls of Ohio said Saturday would be Archeology day, and sure enough, the Falls of the Ohio Archeology Society was in full swing with atlatl demonstrations, a sandbox "dig" for children, pottery shard examination. Good stuff.

However, the real action was on the Birding Deck. When I arrived, several Beckham Bird Club people were set up with scopes, watching the shore birds on the far fossil beds. Some photographers with Mount Palomar on a tripod set up shop down on the fossil beds. You see, it finally rained on Friday, not too hard, but the first we've had for more than a month, and the skies were still low and gloomy. Perfect weather to see who was sheltered along the river. Before the morning was over, a group from Audubon Society of Kentucky in Lexington arrived for an outing.

Remember, mother nature designs shore birds to be invisible as much as possible. At that distance, any small bird I can see looks like a Killdeer to me. My birding friends have sharper eyes and better scopes though, and the list they compiled was truly outstanding-- Ruddy Turnstone, Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs, Semipalmate Plover, Black Bellied Plover and Sanderlings. By carefully squinting through my government issue scope from the Falls, I could see movement, but darned if I could tell what those mud colored birds on the mud colored rocks were!

I did OK with the bigger birds though. A pair of noisy Kingfishers chased each other up and down the river. We don't normally see Snowy Egrets at the Falls, just the larger Great Egret, but this summer, one came to visit, and I saw it too yesterday. The Caspian Terns were soaring, and a few Ring Billed Gulls checked out the accommodations for their winter lodgings. As I drove down the road to the Falls early in the morning, a Peregrine swooped after a Dove, but despite the poof of feathers, breakfast got away from him. The Vultures found something dead, and their buffet was crowded. An Osprey flew over several times, and I found a Kestral through the scope. Shovelers, Mallards, Cormorants and Canadian Geese completed the list. When a group of canoes pulled ashore, all the birds took off.

Constant chirping in the bushes led me to look for the noise maker, and I found this bald headed Cardinal fledgling. Kind of late to be fledging, isn't it fella? Mama was nearby, and he has enough feathers to fly apparently, but this one will want to stay hidden for a while till he looks beautiful. Hope he grows fast before cold weather arrives.

In the woods, some warblers flashed by. Fall warblers, shudder. The Black and White Warbler was a sure ID. Yeah! Another really small bird looked like a Kinglet. A third warbler had a lemon yellow belly and spot on his rear. The book says this would be an immature Magnolia Warbler. Everyone else was warbler olive-yellow, and I had no chance to ID them. I disrupted some Chickadees and Tufted Titmice were searching for bugs, so they chastised me.

My final bird was big - yellow bill and dots on the bottom of his tail- a Yellow Billed Cuckoo! Not the most flattering picture, but I wasn't sure anything would come out at all! You don't have time to accomodate photographers who come pishing at you by posing in the sun when you are busy eating bugs.