A Gambel's White-crowned Sparrow Irruption

This blog isn’t dead yet – I’m still here and do have lots to share. I have much that I could have been blogging about these past three months – so much that the idea of catching up seems too overwhelming a task to even start on. But here I am, and I can’t let the amazing White-crowned Sparrow migration I witnessed in the yard this past spring go undocumented.

I’ll briefly review the subspecies of White-crowned Sparrows we have in Oregon and then share some photos from the phenomenal migration of Gambel’s White-crowned Sparrows that birders experienced in western Oregon in mid-April this year. It would be nice to at least to have a written record of what transpired on my blog, since it seems to have been a rather rare event, with essentially nothing published of this phenomenon, at least in the literature covering Oregon ornithology and in the available species accounts of White-crowned Sparrow.

In Oregon we have three distinct subspecies of White-crowned Sparrow.

1. Zonotrichia leucophrys pugetensis is the population that breeds in western Oregon, from just east of the Cascade crest to the coast, and much of the population is either sedentary or short-distance migrants. Presumably those that breed at the highest elevations migrate the farthest, and our resident birds are augmented by some wintering here from farther north. Apart from the voice, a pale yellow bill and dull blackish back stripes separated by buffy stripes are characteristic of this subspecies.

This pugetensis White-crowned Sparrow was at Cape Meares on the Oregon coast where a common breeder.

2. Zonotrichia leucophrys oriantha breeds in scattered brushy mountain meadows east of the Cascades. This entire population is migratory and winters mostly in northwestern Mexico, with occasional individuals in southeastern Arizona. The black lores and reddish bill are more like the nominate subspecies of eastern North America.

This oriantha White-crowned Sparrow was at Yellowstone National Park, where they breed.

3. Zonotrichia leucophrys gambelii is the widespread breeder in the high arctic regions of NW North America and is essentially entirely migratory, mostly wintering in eastern Washington and Oregon south to NW Mexico. It’s the abundant wintering subspecies in the SW United States. Its bill is an orangey yellow, and the dark back stripes have a reddish hue, with the pale stripes being grayish white.

A migrant gambelii White-crowned Sparrow where it is an expected migrant near Lakeview, Oregon.

Very much like the winter of 2019-2020, this past winter I had two or three White-crowned Sparrows of the locally and regionally breeding subspecies Z. l. pugetensis in the yard as part of the winter flock of passerines. They used the brush pile for cover and took advantage of my practice of scattering bird seed on the ground all around the yard. This species is not common nor unexpected in suburban Eugene, though if you go just outside town to slightly more rural areas, winter flocks will have dozens of them. These are essentially all Z. l. pugetensis, which also breeds throughout most of western Oregon (especially in brushy areas on the coast and in clearcuts in mountains), and there is some regional migratory movement that is little understood. If you go back just a couple blogs, you’ll see where I documented that a Canadian bird was passing through here at the end of March, presumably wintering somewhere not far south of here and heading back to breed in southwesternmost Canada.

These are photos of a first winter and an adult pugetensis that wintered in the yard.

Note the pale yellow bill and blackish back stripes.

Suddenly on April 13, there was a huge increase in White-crowned Sparrows at my brush pile, rising to 24 total birds on April 15 and 16, and continuing for a couple of weeks in decreasing numbers before the last ones departed by April 30. It turns out all these new birds were the high-arctic breeding subspecies Z. l. gambelii. I got many photos of them and recorded their distinctive songs several times. It’s worth noting here that a year ago, while I was paying very close attention to bird movements in the yard and neighborhood, there was no such influx of migrant White-crowned Sparrows. In any event, it was that song, instantly transporting me back to my back yard in Tucson, that clued me in.

The first five notes of George Lloyd's Symphony No. 5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqBsMfn8fy8

The actual status of Z. l. gambelii in western Oregon is poorly known, though the references I checked  (albeit dizzyingly circular) simply state that it’s the common migrant east of the Cascades and less common west of the Cascades. It seems the only published evidence of their presence in western Oregon  is a mention of a late April specimen (“and at other dates”) from a collector Portland in the late 1920’s. Since then, it seems little has been done to document this subspecies. Recent eBird submissions do show that that they occur from time to time, but when exactly, how many, how often, and under what circumstances? Unfortunately, the lack of awareness and apathy from birders who can’t count it as a species on their lifelists has resulted in few attempts to document the status of what actually may be a perfectly legitimate species.

This gambelii White-crowned Sparrow in my yard shows the orangey bill, and the often brighter and broader white head stripes are apparent.

One of the 24 or so gambelii White-crowned Sparrows in my yard. In this light the reddish brown streaks on the back are very obvious.

I’m an ear birder with a notoriously poor visual memory, so my mental map of the various White-crowned Sparrow subspecies (and their dialects — maybe the subject of a later blog but perhaps too complicated…) is based on their songs. I grew up in western Oregon becoming very familiar with the classis pugetensis song of “Teeew, titit-ti-tieew, titititi,” with some variation on the ending. Then I spent some years (decades) living in Arizona where gambelii dominates as a migrant and winter bird, joined by birds of the interior breeding oriantha in migration and occasionally in winter. Birding Colorado, Utah, and SE Oregon in summers familiarized me with the visually distinctive oriantha birds, but it was always their distinctive song that struck me.

In Arizona, the abundant wintering White-crowned Sparrows, numbering into the 1000’s on a good day, were 99% gambelii. In the growing daylengths of the early year, the males would practice their song, and there was little variation. I’ve always likened it to the first five notes of George Lloyd’s Symphony No. 5. (It might be a relatively obscure piece of music, but it’s apparently his most famous work and worth knowing. I think of it as a mix of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with Holst’s The Planets, maybe with a bit of Bernstein’s West Side Story thrown in.) It was a common sound in my Tucson back yard.

I moved back to Oregon finally in September 2019, back into the land of our reliable resident, year-round pugetensis, and their song familiar from my youth. That’s all I saw here until I led my Oregon in Late Summer tour for WINGS in early September 2020, and we saw an abundance of southbound migrant gambelii as soon as we reached the central Oregon lava lands and Great Basin sagebrush steppe. I didn’t try to discern them using any possible field marks, going on the common knowledge that migrant White-crowned Sparrows east of the Cascade crest are all gambelii. And that’s still the apparent truth.

On October 24, 2020, while I was birding the Philomath Sewage Ponds about an hour north of where I live, I was watching the sparrows coming to a known seed drop, and I heard the obvious five notes of Lloyd’s Symphony No. 5, saw the bird, and took some photos, thinking maybe these will prove to be distinctive, should I ever try to find the time to tell the subspecies apart visually. In any event, that was the first time I had knowingly heard Gambel’s White-crowned Sparrow in western Oregon. This is my best photo of that bird. I can now see in the photos that the more orangey bill and reddish stripes to the back are quite noticeable. From looking at eBird submissions, it appears that this bird actually spent the winter here.

We had some very unusual weather here this spring (though there aren’t many on planet who couldn’t say the same thing these days). In early April just before these stray Gambel’s White-crowneds showed up, we had several days of persistent north and northeast winds and clear skies. Throughout the month we had drier weather (the driest April on record, in fact), colder nights, and warmer days than usual. It seems that these sparrows normally migrate only east of the mountains, and that makes sense considering that they’re coming from winter grounds in inland areas south and east of here and are returning to inland Arctic areas to breed. A route west of the Cascades would direct any northbound migrants along the coast and to Pacific forests of SW Canada and SE Alaska, not the interior Arctic. This is the route taken by our abundant migrant Russet-backed Swainson’s Thrushes and chryseola Wilson’s Warblers, for example.

So my guess is that this spring the unusual weather patterns, specifically the strong winds from the NE at the crucial altitude, led these sparrows to stray west of the Cascades. But if that is indeed the answer it only brings up more questions. If we were to have the exact same weather pattern next year, would we also see Gambel’s White-crowned on the west side? Or does it only happen in years with a bigger than normal winter population moving back north? How often does this happen? I’d love to keep track next year, but I’ll be leading my Jamaica tour in the middle of that same time frame. And I hope that a greater awareness will also result in more birders paying attention, documenting their sightings, and submitting their sightings to eBird.

This Cooper’s Hawk, one of our resident neighborhood pair, took note of the sudden influx of sparrows and spent several days in the yard, though it wasn’t very successful at catching any of them.

Answer to Sound Quiz

The Sound Quiz I posted the day before yesterday is a Purple Finch.

This was given by an adult male Purple Finch, which had been perched next to the female, and both were giving call notes. The female flew to a tree about 20 meters away, and the male then began a series of soft call notes and subsongs. The subsong is often just a softened version of the long song, incorporating just a bit of mimicry, so I thought this one was unusual in being rather loud and having no Purple Finch sounds at all.

Twelve species were mentioned in the answers I received from my post to Oregon Birders On Line, and the top guess was Ruby-crowned Kinglet, which I found interesting. That species has a ridiculously complex song of very similar length and pitch, but it has only limited variety based on a set of three elements. Once you know those elements well, this song doesn’t sound like a Ruby-crown any more.

Observers who realized that mimicry was involved immediately thought of Lesser Goldfinch, which makes sense, as it is our most notorious mimic. Lesser Goldfinch incorporates many other species’ calls and song bits in its normal long song, and it does so many, so fast, your brain can’t quite keep up. Once you’ve recognized Violet-green Swallow and American Robin call notes and thought “wow”, it’s already gone on and mimicked five other species. But when it does this, the song is several seconds long and also incorporates many stereotypical Lesser Goldfinch sounds.

This quiz bird’s song is 100% mimicry though. This song differs from a mimicry-packed Lesser Goldfinch song in being only 2.5 seconds long and is not interspersed any goldfinch calls. It’s also a bit lower pitched than a typical Lesser Goldfinch song, and though it might be indistinguishable from the same song type given by a Cassin’s Finch, this was recorded in my Eugene backyard, where Cassin’s Finch doesn’t occur. Mimicry in House Finches seems to be rare or even undocumented.

The full recording starting with call notes, and unfiltered traffic noise can be heard here:

The one song phrase I used in the quiz is the last one at 2:30. Here’s a screen shot of the sonogram that I marked up using Preview.

I interpret there to be eight mimicked elements smashed together. The first is Northern Flicker, and the next two are both different call types of American Robin. The fourth I figured is the rattle call of Hairy Woodpecker. I had originally thought it was a close match for the fast rattle of White-headed Woodpecker, but I’ve since determined that that recording in my library is a mislabeled Hairy.

The next element is a rapid buzz, which I think might be Dark-eyed Junco or maybe Pine Siskin. Then there is one slurred note that is too fragmentary for me to place; and it might actually be a continuation of the previous element.

The next-to-last element is two notes that only when hearing them in complete isolation can you realize that they are Barn Swallow. Finally, the last element is a perfect Hutton’s Vireo.

To illustrate the last two, I created phony recordings by copying and pasting these same elements into a rhythm that might be heard in nature. When done this way, the mimicked species becomes more obvious. 

A Song Quiz

I posted this song quiz to Oregon Birders Online, and it's been fun to see how different people hear it. I'll add the ID and my analysis tomorrow.

I recorded it in my Eugene back yard on the morning of March 30 and saw the bird, so I know what it is.

A Visitor from Canada in the Brush Pile

On the bright and frosty morning of March 30, I spotted what is quite likely the most unusual bird I have seen in my yard so far (having lived here in north Eugene for a year and seven months). The only real rarities I’ve had so far have been Lark Sparrow (a common bird only in eastern and far SW Oregon), and a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker (a state-wide vagrant that was a one-day wonder). No, this bird wasn’t a vagrant, though it was much rarer than either of those two: it was the White-crowned Sparrow pictured above, and while this species doesn’t usually strike one as being out of the ordinary, I draw your attention to its right leg.

I nearly shrieked out loud when I saw it. I’m not really well-connected to the bird banding community, though I enjoy banding and have personally banded several hundred birds (including over 500 in one single, insane morning on an islet in Germany’s Baltic Sea 24 years ago). But I am fairly confident that no one is banding in my immediate neighborhood. And I’m quite aware of how rare and exciting the random sighting is of a banded bird in the wild, especially a passerine. This bird was present all this day and the next, and I snapped over 700 photos in the first few minutes. Fortunately, this bird was unafraid of my presence as I sat comfortably on my deck chair while it scratched around my brush pile, foraging on seed that I frequently scatter on the ground. The band was loose enough that it moved around, and the sun was bright enough that I was able to get a fast shutter speed, and I also knew to underexpose the shot by at least two full stops in order to not “burn” the image of the reflective band.

Out of all of those images, I needed no more than three in just the right poses to be able read the entire nine-digit number. I entered the data on the USGS website https://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/bbl/bblretrv/, and instantaneously I had an automated response:

INFORMATION FROM OUR FILES:

Species: Puget Sound White-crowned Sparrow

Date banded: 04/20/2018

Banding Location: NEAR RICHMOND, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA

Age: HATCHED IN 2016 OR EARLIER

Sex: UNKNOWN

Richmond is a southern suburb of Vancouver, and the age of the bird at the time of banding shows that it will be at least five years old this summer. I’ve been watching the brush pile assiduously all winter, and especially in the past week inspecting the leg of every bird, and it’s definitely a new bird as of March 30 and was here just two days. I’ve been hoping to receive an email directly from the bander, as surely they’re at least as excited as I am to have such an amazing band recovery. They must have received the same automatic email that I did, and they would probably be the only one who might have answers to the many questions that this sighting leads to. The only question that this sighting answers is “do any of the White-crowned Sparrows we see here in March come from Canada?” But I wonder where this bird spent the winter. I wonder where it was going to. Does it return to the area where it was banded every year? Are there other sightings of this same bird? Have other banded White-crowned Sparrows from this part of BC been spotted elsewhere? Unfortunately, the USGS reply doesn’t tell me who banded it, and eleven days later, I’ve heard nothing. I'll post here should I receive any news.

Spring has sprung, and birds are on the move, and seeing the changes is fun. I’ve had just two immature White-crowned Sparrows all winter, and one had started molting in the black into the brown head stripes well before the other. Starting a few weeks ago, they were joined by an adult every few days. Finally, as of today I have three adults and one immature; one of the adult-plumaged birds is probably the more advanced immature that I slowly watched molt in, while the same lagging immature was here until about two days ago.

And also suddenly as of April 8, there is a new adult in the yard, a very loudly and persistently singing bird that has the classic NW Oregon pugetensis dialect.

I’ve had one Lincoln’s Sparrow call the brush pile home all winter. Suddenly on March 4 it was joined by a second bird, though they don’t tolerate each other’s presence in the same brush pile for long. As of this morning, at least one is still here.

I had a single Fox Sparrow all winter too. A second bird popped in briefly and wasn’t tolerated on March 12, then March 28 was the last I saw of my winter bird. A single Song Sparrow has been here as well every day, last on April 3. It did not like the Lincoln’s Sparrow, and it also regularly chased only one of the White-crowned Sparrows.

Eleven Golden-crowned Sparrows rounded out the brush pile flock all winter, but there’s changeover there too. I now have five, and since I didn’t notice much molting going on, it’s quite possible that the five stunning alpha-like adults now are totally new birds, while the immatures all moved on to molt farther north.

And it’s also a bit sad to see the Dark-eyed Juncos move on to breed in more forested habitats. I had over 40 all winter, though they don’t mind forging in the open and were much less bound to the brush pile. There are fewer than 10 left this morning, and while I’ll miss them, they’ll be back soon enough next fall, and I won’t miss the chore of scattering seed for them all over the yard. This "cassiar" junco has been here all winter. It's like a Slate-colored with a more contrasting dark hood.

I like to say I won’t miss the Pine Siskins. There are still over 40 in the yard this morning, and they are swine, shoveling food out of the feeders and edging out the shier American and Lesser Goldfinches. But their presence and sounds are cheerful, and I’ve enjoyed hearing all the species they mimic in their jumbled song. The other day I recorded one doing a very good Olive-sided Flycatcher.

March also saw a lot of movement of Red-tailed Hawks and Bald Eagles, but overhead, not in the brush pile. Only once did I see them in the same patch of sky, and the frisky hawk decided to harass an eagle.

Nocturnal Duck Commutes: Is a Flying Duck a Sitting Duck?

I think I’ve finally solved a huge mystery that has been bugging me for nearly a year. The very foundation of the scientific world is shaking, and the journal Nature is begging to publish my earthshattering discovery: Lesser Scaup, American Wigeon, and other ducks are commuting in the dark between the Willamette River and Fern Ridge Reservoir twice each day, and their route takes them directly over my house.

Ok, I was being facetious. I know full well that no one in the world cares, and that this is only barely worth blogging. And though my neighbors are nodding in a polite way of wanting to share in my excitement, I actually feel like I’ve cracked the DaVinci code here. Such are the simple pleasures during a year of quarantine.

The whole intrigue actually started well over a year ago, when my next-door neighbors’ son Thomas was visiting between seasonal birding and natural history jobs (yes, I’m envious). He texted me at dusk as he was jogging just a block away and saw a Barred Owl fly right towards our houses. I looked at the text maybe a minute too late but ran outside anyway, and of course I never saw the bird. That sighting, plus Thomas’s having seen a Barred Owl in their yard a few years ago when he was in high school, started my habit of having an evening glass of wine or herbal tea up on the carport roof, hoping to see or even hear an owl as it slowly got dark. I probably gave it up after a few days, but I sporadically continued my vigils over the next several weeks when it wasn’t raining, and in early April a year ago, I saw 11 ducks zip by right at dark, headed west-northwest. Over the next few days I noticed a pattern of this late evening fly-by, and at one point was confident enough only to call one bird an “Aythya sp.”, meaning it was either Lesser Scaup or Ring-necked Duck (both common here), but it was just too fast and and there wasn’t enough light to see details. A few days later I got good views of a pair of Hooded Mergansers making the same fly-by. But until now, “Aythya sp.” has been a dirty mark on my yard list. It has counted as a species, because I had not identified any other member of that genus to species.

Barred Owl from Tillamook County, Oregon. I'm still waiting to add this to my yard list.

This winter I’ve become a more regular fan of sitting out on the back or front deck as it gets dark, still hoping for a Barred Owl. And I noticed that every night, about 20 minutes after official sunset, a total of about 18-35 smallish, fast, diving ducks would fly over in 3-4 small groups. All were headed in exactly the same direction, and it was a nightly thing. The birds I was seeing each dusk were consistent with Lesser Scaup – not tiny like Bufflehead, and not long-billed like mergansers – but I couldn't be sure they weren't Ring-necked Ducks. Finally, one evening I got a longer and better view of the commuting ducks on one of their earlier arrivals, and I was convinced they were Lesser Scaup.

Dusk Vigil from my front deck

At about the same time in mid-January this year, I noticed that a similar number of Lesser Scaup were feeding along a ¼-mile stretch of the Willamette River just over a mile east of me. (It’s awesome to have bike paths along both sides of the river here, with a pedestrian and bike bridge due east of me – one of five such bridges in Eugene, as opposed to just four for cars.)

West Bank Bike Path along the Willamette River in Eugene

I suspected these might be the birds that are flying over my house.

Lesser Scaup on the Willamette River

I used Google Earth to draw a line from where this loose congregation of feeding scaup were to my house, and then extended that line to the next body of water, and bingo – Fern Ridge Dam! For these ducks, this would be a commute of about nine miles.

The flight path commute of Lesser Scaup

On March 1, just before dark, I biked over to the area of the Willamette River where the ducks tend to feed most often, and just a few minutes after I got there, a group of some 20+ Lesser Scaup pattered across the river into flight, zipped downstream as they gained altitude, circled around, flew right over me, and headed in exactly the direction of my house. That’s when I knew I had basically confirmed the identity of the commuting ducks.

The westernmost bend of the Willamette River closest to Fern Ridge Reservoir

One thing I have not done is positioned myself at Fern Ridge Dam to see the ducks arriving. Given that it would probably take them at least seven minutes to get to the dam, it would be too dark to see by the time they got there, and then I’d have a 45-minute bike ride back in the winter dark along busy roads. No thank you. Still, I’d like to know whether they are roosting just above the dam on the reservoir or on Kirk Pond just below the dam.

I’ve also been having my early morning coffee on the back deck well before light, and I can hear the ducks flying back to the Willamette River each morning. But a just like every scientific inquiry that has been answered, more questions are raised.

Why these birds are making this commute only while it’s dark? My guess is that it’s safer. Peregrine Falcon is not a rare bird in this region, and they almost exclusively prey on birds in flight. Once a Peregrine has gained altitude above its target, there is little chance to escape its terrifyingly fast dive, and diving ducks, while built for horizontal speed and efficiency aren’t the most agile of birds in flight. As long as the ducks are on the water, they are safe from Peregrines, but in flight during the day, they are, well, sitting ducks.

Another bonus of my daily sunset vigils has been adding American Wigeon to my yard list. For several nights in a row, at least 10 minutes after the Lesser Scaup, when it’s much darker, I’ve been able to hear a flock of wigeon, and at least twice managed to spot the flock as they commuted in more or less the same direction. I presume these birds forage during the day at Delta Ponds and also move to roost on the reservoir. But this was a phenomenon that begun suddenly at the end of January and ended in early March. Why just then, and not earlier in the winter? Could these have been migrants and not locally wintering wigeon?

I’ve also started wondering how identifiable ducks are solely based on the whistle their wings make. There have been about five Common Goldeneye foraging on the Willamette River alongside the scaup, and I’m almost certain that I’ve heard them in flight when it’s been too dark to even see shapes; they have a very loud wing whistle, and I managed to get one pretty solid recording of them. I’ve determined that the scaup don’t have much of a wing whistle, but how distinctive is Common Goldeneye whistle? How does it differ from Hooded Merganser, or the obvious wing whistle in some dabblers, like Mallard and Wood Duck? Are the spectrograms of the wing whistles of each species diagnostic? My own sound library is lacking recordings of most of these, and while a Cornell compilation has an amazing recording of a Common Goldeneye whistle, it’s of a bird taking off, not one in mid-flight. The primary frequency and first harmonic of my recording match that one well, but it's not strong enough to show the higher harmonics nor the shape of each individual wing beat sound.

Incidentally, I’ve also noticed a pattern to the flight direction to many of the Double-crested Cormorants I see here. While a few seem to be clearly just commuting between the Willamette and Fern Ridge, a majority are off to the NE of my house by a few blocks, quite high, and headed in a NNW direction. I drew a line between the location on the Willamette where I frequently see numbers of them, just downstream from the Greenway Bridge, to the Junction City Fish Pond, which also is the only other place regionally where I see numbers of them. And bullseye – the line I draw between those two places on Google Earth falls exactly on the flight path where I see them. Curiously, this flight is almost exactly the same distance as what the ducks are doing.

Presumed Double-crested Cormorant commute

A Willamette Riparian Jewel: Hileman Landing County Park

I’ve known about this park since shortly after I moved to Eugene, and though it’s only 30 minutes by bicycle from my front door, I only finally visited it weekend before last. My friend Thomas said it was his favorite birding spot in Eugene while he was a birder here in high school (he lived next door to where I am now, and his parents still do). I was even close several times this past year as I visited the delightful Small is Beautiful Farmstand for their incredible selection of veggies, eggs, milk, flowers, and other goodies. I also rode right past it on a 40-mile biking trip with my friend Andrew Broan and two other friends last August. I even pointed it out to them as a well-known birding hotspot. Hileman Landing is the largest swath of undeveloped riparian habitat near the city of Eugene, on the west bank of the Willamette River. As an undeveloped, natural park, it’s not a place for disk golf, soccer, or such. Wear your rubber boots, be prepared to brush against stickers and thorns, and enjoy the nature. I was only five minutes from home when I realized I left my camera at home, oops. So this blog is populated with photos from my mobile phone.

This isn’t a truly natural area though, and we can only guess at what this place must have looked like just two hundred years ago. Through a mere century and a half of deforestation in the surrounding mountains as well as through prevention of fires and floods, European immigrants have upended the very nature of disturbance in nature. Where there wasn’t, there is now too much. Where there was once much disturbance is now much less. Then add to that the immense effect that introduced plants and animals have had, it is forever changed. In this photo you can see the main forest of cottonwoods isn’t old (they grow very fast), and the understory is dominated by introduced Himalayan Blackberry.

One source of disturbance that remains the same is that from the American Beaver. It’s amazing how they can chew through huge trunks. There probably aren’t as many of them now as in pre-settlement times, but there are more than some people would like.

This wasn’t always a park though, and while some people consider things like this truck and these trestles to be historical markers, I think they are just old trash that should be removed.

Much of the park is actually along a small side-channel of the Willamette River, and with the current high water levels typical of this time of year, it was flowing fast and clear, giving me the impression that I was on a secluded wilderness river (if you ignore the trash that has floated down from Eugene and got caught in the driftwood). Black Phoebe was here.

I eventually emerged onto the banks of the main channel of the Willamette, and the gravel bar here had a roosting group of about 20 Killdeer (it seems to be little known that this bird is largely nocturnal – just think about it: what do you usually see Killdeer doing during the day? Actively foraging? Or just standing there? Their activity kind of reminds me of Burrowing Owls, actually.) I also saw a Spotted Sandpiper and heard a Greater Yellowlegs here.

One of the most exciting things I saw was our first true sign of spring – which in western Oregon begins in January and lasts through early June: the flowers of Oemleria cerasiformis, which I grew up knowing as Indian Plum and is now more commonly known as Osoberry. It’s a member of the rose family and the fruits are indeed edible. I have four that I planted in my yard, and I hope to have enough fruits to follow a recipe I found for jam made from our native Osoberry, Red-flowering Currant, and Oregon Grape. This is also a hummingbird plant, and here, miles from any feeders, were several territorial Anna’s Hummingbirds feeing on the Osoberry flowers, beating the first arriving Rufous Hummingbirds to the punch by a couple of weeks.

This is the growing season for Polypodium glycyrrhiza, the Licorice-root Fern. I used to like the sweet, licorice flavor from chewing on the rhizomes, but I now don’t care for the lingering bitter aftertaste. My grandmother made a tea from the dried rhizomes.

One of the banks rises quite a bit above the floodplain, and the few Douglas-firs here looked old enough to pre-date European colonists in the area. But I wonder if they are old enough to have been seen by the Native Americans before their populations were wiped out by introduced human diseases.

This beautiful bracket fungus is Rhodofomes cajanderi, the Rosy Conk.

I look forward to coming back here as the spring progresses and migrant birds begin populating the air with their songs.

A Murmuration of Ring-billed Gulls and Hybrid Ducks

This blog post is a bit out-of-date, but I’m still gobsmacked every time I watch my short video. Monday, January 11 was my last day with a rental car, so I decided to explore the Willamette Valley of north-central Lane County and the Willamette River landing parks north to the Linn and Benton County borders. I was just into Linn County, south of Harrisburg when I spied a field full of gulls. I was about to start sifting through them to ID them all when they took off and appeared to be avoiding a predator. They formed a murmuration, which until now I had only seen in European Starlings, Dunlin, and Yellow-headed Blackbirds. When they finally landed again, I determined that they were at least 90% Ring-billed Gull, the rest Mew Gull, and the total came to about 3700 birds. I posted this video to Facebook and it also seemed to surprise a lot of my birding friends that gulls would do this.

Back on the west side of the river, I stopped to check Brown Landing park, where I found this Orange-crowned Warbler, the fourth one I’d seen this year so far. It seems to be a very good winter for this species, most wintering well south of us.

I also stopped to check a wetland west of Junction City that seems to be a private duck reserve. It’s basically a flooded field full of Northern Pintail, and the hedgerow along the ditch makes it nearly impossible to see into. So some of my birding was right along the road where I saw this Swamp Sparrow and heard a second one, a rare species in much of Oregon.

Much more cooperative was this Marsh Wren.

At one of the very few spots I could peer over the bushes and see the pond, I found this strange duck that appears to be an American Wigeon x Mallard hybrid.

Just three days later, I biked to another flooded field with large numbers of ducks just 20 minutes northwest of me and found another hybrid duck. This one is clearly at least half Green-winged Teal, and the other parent (or perhaps a grandparent) is probably Northern Pintail. I know I’ve seen a few hybrid ducks before (though I have none in my photo library), but I don’t exactly remember ever finding one, let alone two in one week.