April Rendezvous - Greater Sage-Grouse

March is the beginning. The beginning of the time when the sun returns to this side of the world and the landscape and it's inhabitants respond. One of the important milestones of the annual return begins in March too, but really peaks in April. This is the time for the prairie grouse to gather on their traditional leks and perform their spring-time ritual displays. As a result, April is a month I look forward to each year, and even more so now that I am much more confined in where I live and where I work. Lek therapy I call it.

So far this April my lek therapy has been limited to one morning on a Greater Sage-Grouse lek south of Billings. It is  ironic that a bird that indirectly causes me so much stress in my professional life can provide so much stress relief when I get to spend time with them directly. My morning last week was no different.

I arrived late in the afternoon just as the trailing clouds from the most recent snowstorm were progressing to the southeast and the sun was making another appearance. There was a tattered blanket of snow on the ground and I grabbed my blind and tripod and headed across the sage to the edge of the lek.  I got the blind situated and headed back to the truck for the night. After my quick dinner I crawled under the topper in the back of my truck settled in for a bit of reading before getting to sleep. That didn't last long - it was a lot colder than I was expecting and despite my preparations I realized pretty quickly that I wasn't going to be able to keep warm enough that way. So off I trundled to the cab of my truck with my sleeping bag and blankets where I spent the rest of the night alternately sleeping and starting the truck every two hours to run the heater. At least until 5:00 that morning. Just as the sun was lightening the eastern sky I gathered my camera and headed to the lek. Once inside my blind I could hear birds already around me and soon I could hear the swishing sound of others winging in around me and the dark space in front of the porthole in my blind slowly filled with birds and light. When the sun finally breached the sky above the Pryor Mountains the birds displaying in front of me were bronzed in the light.

I spent the next four hours watching the birds display and interact. I spent some of the time taking photos, but I also spent a good portion of the time just enjoying the intimate time I had with these birds before they flew off into the surrounding sage.

Yard Birds

I have ventured out in a number of different directions from Billings looking for birds and other wildlife over the last few weekends with the results being that I have found a lot of interesting places to explore, but very little in the way of wildlife to observe and photograph. The highlights have been a few Rough-legged Hawks hanging around here and there and what appeared to be a large migration of Horned Larks moving through last weekend. They were in flocks ranging from about 10 birds to well over 100 birds flying low and fast directly north. I observed a number of these flocks passing through the landscape north and east of Billings, often right over or through the resident Horned Larks that were displaying, singing, and fighting on their territories.

So this weekend I decided to stay home and try to photograph the diversity of birds in my backyard. There was one of the early resident American Robins.

There were a few lingering Common Redpolls too.

But the best birds were the Red Crossbills that have been frequenting the back yard. At times I have had around 70 individuals coming to the feeders and water. Most often it is smaller flocks of 20 or 30.

Wingwraith

This afternoon I glanced out the back window and observed this youngster perched on a brushpile I have along our back fence. A few minutes prior to this the yard was filled with a wider variety of bird species than I have observed all winter. Now the diversity was down to two species - this young Cooper's Hawk Sharp-shinned Hawk and whatever bird was ensconced in the tangle of grass and twigs below him. She was determined to dig his prey out of the sticks and pretty much oblivious to me.

First she worked from the top of the brushpile, peering into the maze of sticks.

Then she started working at the side of the pile.

She must have narrowed down where the bird was hiding and he concentrated on this small area for a while. She wasn't able to pull anything out of here and finally appeared to get frustrated and she quickly darted to the top of the brushpile and began jumping up and down and flapping her wings at which point the House Sparrow she had cornered darted into the nearby hedge. The hawk gave pursuit, but the sparrow had the advantage then and easily outmaneuvered the hawk.

She came back to the brushpile and looked around a bit more, but then retreated to the fence along the backyard where she stayed for a short while before darting into the neighborhood, undoubtedly heading towards the nearest bird feeder.

Early Bird

I was out for a bit yesterday and found this guy singing. I found quite a few other Horned Larks perched and singing too.  Horned Larks are one of our earliest breeding birds in Montana and I would guess that it is the earliest nesting passerine here. Tony Leukering noted the Colorado Breeding Bird Atlas noted fledgling Horned Larks in Colorado as early as April 7th, meaning that the nest was initiated in early March and he suggests that there may be a few pairs that nest even before that.

The earliest I have observed fledged Horned Larks in Montana was May 6th, although this was in Valley County and there are most certainly birds further south in the state around Billings that nest earlier than that. Although probably not quite as early as in Colorado, I would bet that the birds around here might not be too far behind that. The photo below shows the female and that recently fledged chick I observed in May.

Book Review - The Unfeathered Bird

The Unfeathered Bird
Katrina van Grouw
Published by Princeton University Press (a review copy was provided by Princeton University Press)
Cloth 2013  $49.95  ISBN: 9780691151342
304 pp.  10 x 12 with 385 duotone/color illustrations.
eBook 2013  $49.95  ISBN 9781400844890

Earlier this week I gave another presentation on penguins to a second grade class. One of the first thing I do when I begin my presentation is ask the children "what is a penguin?"
I usually get a rather quick response that a penguin is a bird, but when I ask "why?" I tend to get quite a few different answers before a child answers "feathers?"

I was reminded of this conversation when I began to read van Grouw's wonderful exposé of the bird underneath the feathers. Even though they are very un-birdlike, penguins possess feathers - this distinctly avian feature - as do all other birds.  Feathers are what immediately separate birds from other (extant) life forms. Van Grouw presents us wonderfully rendered and designed illustrations of birds without this most defining feature and does it with a deep knowledge of avian anatomy and behavior.

The Unfeathered Bird is, at it's heart, an illustrated book of birds of the world broken into two parts. The first part provides us with a primer on the generic bird. The second part depicts how the structure and form of various bird families deviate from the basic bird design. This description sounds like a myriad of other books, however van Grouw has produced a book anything but ordinary. Instead of the appearance of the feathered generic bird, she shows us what's under the feathers, skin, and muscle of the generic bird and then shows how skeletal frame and muscular body have evolved in various bird families to support their specialized lifestyles.

But this isn't a book of just bird anatomy either as the author pointedly states in the first sentence of the Introduction. There are no arrows and labels identifying the bones or muscles, no detailed descriptions of  the how the trochlea of the metatarsal bone of the fourth digit possesses an accessory trochlea in piciform, cuculiform, and psittaciform birds, no detailed line drawings of occipital region of the skull, just wonderfully rendered depictions of the bird underneath the feathers and skin.  The depictions of the generic bird start with a sketch of the rather shapeless bird trunk - no head, legs, or wing, just a football shaped mass of muscle wrapped bone. Further illustrations depict the skeletal features and the muscles of the trunk, the head and neck, the hind limbs and the wings and tail of various species to illustrate basic bird anatomy. The section of the wing and tail also often depicts these structures with the covert feathers removed to better convey how the major flight feathers and tail feathers relate to the muscular and skeletal features underneath.
The second section is the heart of this book - works of art depicting the bird at its most basic for various bird families. The illustrations range from full skeletons to small body parts such as tongues and feet, all rendered in a soft, pleasing sketch-like layout. My favorite illustrations are the birds rendered in typical environments doing the things these birds do - a porpoising Gentoo Penguin, a Wilson's Storm Petrel pattering on the surface of the ocean, or a Eurasian Sparrowhawk plucking its Eurasian Collared Dove prey. The twist is that the penguin is depicted without its skin, the storm-petrel is a skeleton pattering on water, and the sparrowhawk is without it's feather covering shown removing the feathers from it's prey (the only fully feathered bird illustrated in the book). There are a number of these types of illustrations and they are so well done, with an obvious deep knowledge of how birds are put together and how birds behave, that I was easily able to see the feathered bird in my mind.

The other twist in this book is the organization of the bird families. Van Grouw chooses to arrange the birds according to the Systema Naturae of Linnaeus which was based on the structural appearance of birds. It  works well given this book is a depiction the structural appearance of birds and it allows the author to discuss convergent evolution in the text and depict the convergent elements in the illustrations.

The associated text is written in a pleasing non-technical voice and conveys information on the behavior, physiology, and taxonomic relationship between various birds depicted in the book. My only quibbles with this book are minor. I wish that there was at least some attempt to provide a scale with the illustrations. Often I was not sure just how an illustration compared with the actual size of the bird or bird part depicted. I also would have liked to see fewer illustrations of fully fleshed out bird feet.  For instance, one whole page is devoted to the depiction of a fully fleshed Gentoo Penguin foot and I would have loved to see at least one depiction of the skeletal elements of the very distinctive penguin foot. She also missed a great chance to discuss the recent revelation of the relationship between falcons and parrots which becomes very believable with the illustrations of their respective skulls.

This is a book that everyone interested in birds should own and in particular, every bird painter, sculptor, and carver should be required to have this book and study it well. Overall the level of detail in the text is well matched with the artwork  resulting in a comprehensive whole that I think meets the authors goal of making this book a well done "convergence of art and science; accessibility and erudition; old and new; - without compromise and without apology."

More information on the book with examples of some of the illustrations which can be purchased as limited edition prints can be found here.

Winter Greater Sage-Grouse

A couple of weeks ago I was in northeastern Montana for some meetings and I managed to carve off a few hours one morning for a quick trip out to an area where I knew Greater Sage-Grouse have wintered in the past. I also had a local resident tell me that she had observed a number of birds in the area recently so I was hopeful that I would run across a few birds.
The weather that morning was fairly nice but somewhat windy, which is pretty typical for that area this time of year. The worst part was that there was a pretty heavy overcast too, which didn't provide for the best light for photography.
I had to search quite a bit for any birds, but finally found a small group of about 5 birds just off the road, just as I was about to turn around and head back towards town. They got nervous when I stopped to watch them and they flew off a short ways to the south, making the rather miserable light conditions even worse as I would be looking directly into what light there was.
I moved off down the road a ways and pulled off to check to see if I had any phone messages and there they were. A large flock of about 80 birds just off the road, plucking sagebrush leaves from the exposed sage in the snow.

I am not surprised that I had a hard time finding these birds. They are very good at blending in to a snowy sage landscape.

 After a short while the bird relaxed and continued to forage in the sage next to the road I was on.

 Maybe next time I can find them with a bit more light to work with, but it certainly was a nice way to spend a morning.