Crane Hawk, Geranospiza caerulescens

Widespread but never a common bird (and even a record of a vagrant in southern Texas), the Crane Hawk quite an interesting bird. You hardly ever see them fly, or if they do fly, it's not for long – they seem to mostly hunt by sitting and waiting or walking around on the their long, red legs.

This was on the entrance road to Pouso Alegre lodge in the northern Pantanal on my WINGS tour just this past week, a lucky shot from the van window as it flew from a roadside bush to the ground.

I and the Rheas

I’ve just finished the second of my two Marvelous Mato Grosso tours, and I’ve decided this tour was well-named. We birded three main spots from the north-central border to the south-central border of this huge state (a bit larger than the size of Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada put together). I haven’t tallied the total bird list yet, but it’s pretty overwhelming.

On our last day we arrived at our Pantanal lodging at the working ranch of Pouso Alegre and a troop of six Greater Rheas wandered in for a drink next to the buildings.

People are always tired on these tours – seeing so much biodiversity is hard work. Even if they get an opportunity for 9 hours of sleep each night, people are too tied to go owling after dinner. So this evening we set out in the late afternoon, did some light birding, watched water birds for about a half hour at an oxbow until dusk, and then looked for owls. On the way to the oxbow we stumbled across this Red-footed Tortoise, Chelonidis carbonaria.

And then owling was as good as it gets. While we didn’t hear the Black-banded Owls from the previous tour, the Striped Owl (an adult and 3 full-grown begging young) and a Mottled Owl took minimal effort to see. We didn’t even really try to see the Tropical Screech-Owls that were calling since we had seen one in the daytime a few days earlier.

The Striped Owl, a little known bird from the area.

Mottled Owl. In reality, this rather scarce inhabitant of tall forest is a totally different species from the common bird of open woodland and gardens of Central America and west of the Andes. Although it’s not recognized by any of the checklist committees, naming it as a separate species would be less of a split than merely correcting a stupid mistake from whatever list we started out with.

We had a very relaxing last morning, wandering the grounds of our lodge, going a bit down a trail, and enjoying the dawn sounds. Here, a trio of Hyacinth Macaws doing their morning preen.

Pantanal Birds in Action

Just a few day's quick photos from my WINGS birding tour in the Pantanal yesterday.

Great Kiskadee knows that Toco Toucan is an egg predator.

Purplish Jay looking for ticks.

Jabiru deftly handling an hors d'oeuvres.

Nighttime Goodies in Mato Grosso

This past week I’ve had a chance to go birding on my own between two tours I’m leading in Mato Grosso, Brazil, the most biodiverse state in this huge country. I drove up and over the continental divide (a whopping 556 meters or 1824 feet elevation) to visit the weekend resort and ecological lodge called Jardim da Amazônia (Garden of the Amazon) about 12 kilometers south of the town of São José do Rio Claro.

Despite its fragmented nature (which all happened before our very eyes in the past 30 years only), the forests here are still full of birds and wildlife, and in just 2 ½ days I logged 225 species of birds.

Since I wasn’t with a group, I chose what hours I went out birding, and I found it hard to stop. On my last day, I did something I’d probably not do with a group and set out at 2:45 p.m. to walk a trail, went until it started getting dark, and then slowly worked my way back to the lodge to have dinner at 8:15 p.m. before they closed for the night. It was fun, though tiring. Dusk was interesting as I stood stock still for 25 minutes: I heard and recorded a very close Gray Tinamou (with absolutely no desire to see it) but saw its shape as it flew 15 meters up into a tree to roost and continued to sing. I accidentally recorded the one evening song of a Red-billed Woodcreeper (a bird I’ve seen once before), and before long was surrounded by tooting Tawny-bellied Screech-Owls and whirring Ocellated Poorwills. On a tiny sapling in the middle of the dry forest as I started back was this tree frog, probably in the genus Osteocephalus.

I continued to hear Ocellated Poorwills, Common Pauraques, and Blackish Nightjars on my way back, seeing a few eyeshines dart off as I approached. But when one bright pair of eyes off the side of the trail didn’t budge, I knew what I had: an Ocellated Poorwill on a nest.

Then just about a couple hundred meters later, an eyeshine about 6 meters off  the ground in the forest midstory had me puzzled. Only when I fully sized up the creature did I realize it was a Long-tailed Potoo, only the third I’ve ever seen. It’s darker than Common Potoo, with a more contrasting white wing patch (not so visible here) and whisker mark, but it’s the very long tail that’s the clincher. It looked to be on a nest as it didn’t budge, but I wasn’t sure. When I was about 150 meters away, I played song to see if the male was in the area, and he came in almost right away, singing from the opposite direction of the nest and perched right over me and sang both song types, one sounding much like an owl. I presume then that the female was the one on the perch.

Then I went back the next morning, as getting good photos with flash is always tricky. I’m glad I did. The Ocellated Poorwill was still there, but this time looking a lot more rufous. This is probably the female, while the grayer male had incubation duties at night.

I don’t know if the potoos have similar roles in nesting. But during the day, this bird took on a much more cryptic posture and shows the more prominent wing patch. Maybe this one is the male. I should note that I walked right past both of these birds the day before with the charming local guide Marcio, who I think has gone back to see the potoo by now.

When I moved around to get a view of the bird’s amazingly long tail, it shifted a bit and revealed a tiny downy chick. Precious. There are a couple online photos of Long-tailed Potoos on nests in SE Peru and in Ecuador, as well as a scholarly article describing the first nest from French Guiana, but I can’t find any mention of a nest in Brazil. It’s a pretty uncommon thing to find in any event. But then how many people go walking in the forest at night?

Or, at Jardim da Amazônia, you can just hang out by the lodge and drink Caipirinhas and be treated to sights like these Blue-and-yellow Macaws and not be in the least bit disappointed.

Griseotyrannus aurantioatrocristatus and Fire in the Cerrado

So, just in case you're wondering what "griseotyrannus" means...a gray tyrant-flycatcher, right?

And then "aurantioatrocristatus?"

This Crowned Slaty Flycatcher turned around and faced downwind in the hot afternoon breeze for just a second, showing me something I'd never seen. This was once the longest scientific name of any bird, but it was decided that this bird was in many ways much like Variegated Flycatcher, so now its official name is Empidonomus aurantioatrocristatus. Still a mouthful, but it's nice to see the gold-and-black crest embodied in the species name.

These past couple of days I've been doing some light birding, exploring, and catching up between two Mato Grosso tours, though today I used up much of the day driving back to Cuiabá, though miles of construction sites (my bus driver last week called Cuiabá a giant armadillo dig), and exchanged my rental car for one that actually works. On my way back to Chapada dos Guimarães I stopped in some recently burned Cerrado woodland and came up with a few nice things.

This Coal-crested Finch is a rather missable bird here (indeed, I missed it on the tour I just led, but we had two days of cold gales from a cold front to deal with).

Things were greening up nicely, as all of the plants here are highly adapted to fire. This is Anemopaegma arvense, family Bignoniaceae.

This sedge is obviously quite happy to have been burned.

This belongs to the genus Chamaesyce, formerly lumped in with Euphorbia. We have several of these in North America, known as sand mats.

I think this pea might be in the genus Desmodium, some of which we also have in North America.

Pinal Mountains During The Day

A few posts ago I shared a series of moth and other bug photos from the sheet that my friend Margarethe hung at our campsite in the Pinal Mountains south of Globe, Arizona in mid-July. We also did some productive birding and bugging during the afternoon of our arrival, as well as the following morning.

The habitat is extremely varied near the top of the Pinals due to a turbulent fire history as well as the differences in soil and exposure. A few miles from the top the road traverses the south-facing slope covered in a dense chaparral, and plants normally from much lower elevations rise to near the peak. Margarethe took the photo of me at the top by a large stand of Agave chrysantha, Golden-flowered Agave. These agaves were being worked over by many Rufous/Allen’s Hummingbirds (in all likelihood Rufous, but you can’t tell in this plumage), and it was on this warmer side where we had most of the bugs.

One of the most interesting was this Thistledown Velvet-ant, Dasymutilla glorisa. This is actually a wingless female wasp, and some species are known to have a very powerful sting.

A Meridian Duskywing was one of few leps active on this mostly overcast day.

This is Dipalta serpentina, the Serpentine Bee Fly. I like bee flies because they have distinctive patterns on the wings and body that are usually visible and easy to photograph. All we need now is a field guide to the bee flies.

Very large plants of the lovely Wyoming Indian Paintbrush, Castilleja linariifolia were in full bloom in a couple spots. (Thanks to Mark Egger for confirming the ID.)

We worked our way even higher to an area just barely on the N slope where there was a taller and moister forest, but what was presumably an old burn had created a nice thicket of Ceanothus fendleri, still with lots of flowers.

If it had been warm and sunny we surely would have seen a lot more stuff, but it was still pretty good. This beetle is probably in the genus Attalus, in the odd family Melyridae, the soft-winged flower beetles.

There were a lot of these colorful case-bearing leaf beetles, Urodera dilaticollis. Notice how much smaller the male is than the female.

Though lep diversity was low, numbers of Southwestern Azures were everywhere. Here’s one overshadowed by a handsome Taxiles Skipper, Poanes taxiles.

This ant, probably a carpenter ant, genus Camponotus, is probably getting a sweet honeydew exudate from this caterpillar, almost certainly that of a Southwestern Azure, Celastrina echo cinerea. In turn the caterpillar presumably gets some protection.

The Arizona Thistle, Cirsium arizonicum var. bipinnatum, was strangely absent nectaring insects.

But maybe it was just too cool, having been overcast all day, as this Nais Metalmark, Apodemia nais, was trying to get warm in a patch of sunlight.

I managed to bring in a very large flock of warblers, tanagers, nuthatches, Yellow-eyed Juncos, and Black-chinned Sparrows with my pishing and pygmy-owl imitations. Some of the birds, all apparently locally breeding birds, came in quite close, such as this Blue-gray Gnatcatcher.

We drove to the very top of Pinal Peak, not expecting to see much other than a fantastic view. But we were surprised by the incredible numbers of Convergent Lady Beetles, Hippodamia convergens. They were in the low vegetation all around the buildings and antennae at the peak.

And despite the cool weather, a Greater Short-horned Lizard, Phrynosoma hernandesi, was active.

On the morning after buglighting we awoke to a beautiful dawn in the oak-chaparral area where Spotted Towhees dominated the dawn chorus. Most other species weren’t singing much at this late date.

We birded and looked for insects just up from our camping spot where the canyon narrows and a moister pine-oak forest dominates, with Arizona Sycamores, Arizona Walnut, and even a stand of some very large Arizona Alders along the canyon bottom. Hairy Woodpecker, Painted Redstart, and Red-faced, Grace’s, and Olive Warblers were among the birds we found here, but a Sulphur-bellied Flycatcher was a nice surprise and a first record for the Pinals.

There wasn’t time for much botanizing, but I did have to pause to figure out this holly-like bush, Rhamnus ilicifolia, Hollyleaf Redberry. It’s in the same family as ceanothus but even more closely related to the Cascara of my native Pacific Northwest; I don’t know if it has the same laxative in the bark, as we didn’t try to roast hotdogs or marshmallows using the branches.

Oregon's Aldrich Mountains

Oh gosh, yes, here’s another mountain top that takes my breath away. Aldrich Mountain is yet another place that I can take my WINGS tours to Oregon only if the road is open, usually after mid-May, but sometimes not until much later after winters of heavy snowfall. I created this panoramic from a series of photos just a week ago on the last day of my Oregon tour for a group from the Venice Area Birding Association. Click on it to see a much larger version. It’s a spectacular view.

The Aldrich Mountains are a netherworld between the Ochocos and the Blue Mountains, west of the Strawberry Range, south of the John Day River, and east of the South Fork John Day. Many native Oregonians have never been here and have no idea where it is. You must go.

A huge forest fire obliterated much of the rich coniferous forests in the fall of 2006, but the resulting wildflowers (here mostly Fireweed and Pearly Everlasting) are amazing.

As you get close to the top, Scarlet Gilia (here in an interesting frosty pink variety) are common.

Last year I took a picture of this curious, big-eyed fly at the very peak of Aldrich Mountain and subsequently got the attention of some evolutionary biologists who have been looking at the genetics of botflies and their hosts. They weren’t positive, but this appears to be a hilltopping male Cuterebra polita, a parasite of pocket-gophers, the one species that was missing from their analysis and one that had never been photographed in the wild before. I was sorry I hadn’t collected it, but that’s a different kind of trip. (It turns out the female botflies – after mating with the males they find on isolated hilltops like this – lay their eggs on rootlets of plants at the burrow entrances of the woodrats. The eggs then hatch when they sense the heat, and the larvae subsequently burrow into the woodrat. The upshot of the study was that our diverse botflies here evolved earlier than the ones that specialize on internal surfaces of Old World mammals such as horses and elephants.)

OK, most people might be grossed out (while my friend Kate certainly wants more), so I’ll end with a super cool beetle, also one I found last year (on my hat), Priacma serrata. It’s not rare but is found only in the coniferous forests of NW North America and belongs to this obscure family called Cupedidae. While many beetle families contain hundreds or thousands of species, this one has only 30 worldwide, just four in North America. How cool is that?