RBAS Spring Challenge 2015!

All right! It's time for another RBAS Challenge! What we want to do with this challenge is encourage birding right in your backyard and report your sightings to Ebird.

In case you don't know, Ebird.org is a citizen science data entry platform that aggregates bird sightings from all over the world and makes them available to anyone and everyone that's interested in learning about bird distribution, recent sightings in a particular place, or historical trends. All of this data allows researchers at Ebird make a Migration Forecast- a resource that combines our submissions to Ebird with weather forecasts to predict which species will be where, when they'll be there, and if there's going to be bad flying (good birding) conditions.

They can also compile all of this sightings data and make some really awesome migration maps! Here's one for the Indigo Bunting. Very cool!

To better attract birds to your backyard, we've set up a resource for you. Some of the basics of backyard feeders and yard set up are discussed, as well as the benefits for planting native plants. We've linked out to a lot of other resources as there is a lot of information available on this topic!


The Challenge

Our Spring 2015 Challenge is to submit at least 10 Ebird lists from your backyard before 01May2015. This gives you 6 weeks to get 10 lists! Easy! If you don't have a backyard, pick a favorite park or neighborhood spot and see what you can find.

For everyone that completes the Challenge, your name will be entered into a raffle to be held at the 13May RBAS Meeting. Prizes will include guide books, bird feeders, and whatever other items we can conjure up. We're expecting to have around 20 prizes, so lots of people will walk out of there with something!

Once you've gotten your 10 Ebird lists in, REGISTER for the drawing!


Ebird

For a quick how-to-Ebird, I've made an instructional video covering the basics for setting up an account and submitting a list. Ebird.org a free site- no cost you the citizen scientists- it is sponsored by National Audubon and Cornell Lab of Ornithology! So get reporting!

The Big Day!

Every year in late January or early February, the country pauses to take in a spectacle like no other: Months of preparation, training, late nights and early mornings, tough competition, and a singular focus to survive. That’s right, it’s:

SUPERB OWL 2015!

Now the Superb Owl celebrations were originally a way for t.v. comedian Stephen Colbert to avoid the legal ire of the NFL by talking about the “big game” without permission last year (relevant part starts about 2min in). Now in good fun, National Audubon’s CEO David Yarnold got in on it to talk about some of the issues with the Barred Owl/Spotted Owl management in California.

Who manages you? Who manages you all!?

2014 RBAS Year in Review

As we look forward to the new year, let’s take a quick minute to look back at Rio Brazos Audubon’s 2014. We ended the November Challenge (well, we ended with the Christmas Bird Count, but I was sick so I can’t tell you about it!). And it’s well overdue to post the winners to the group! 

We had a very good response in for sketches and photo submissions… and a good response from the voters!

To calculate the winners, each vote was weighted (1^st pace vote got 5 points, 5^th place vote got 1 point) and total scores were tabulated.

Our grand prize winner of a field guide and a bird feeder was:

Gus Cothran and his Chipping Sparrow!

Chipping Sparrow by Gus Cothran

CBC! CBC! CBC!

In the coming weeks, people around the world will venture out into their backyards, city parks, fields, ponds, lakes, and nearby forests to count the number of birds flying around participating in Audubon's Christmas Bird Count. 115+ years ago, people would relax after the Christmas festivities by shooting as many birds as they could. Big, small, colorful, drab, good to eat or just something in your backyard- didn’t matter. Shoot 'em and count 'em!

In 1900, ornithologist Frank Chapman proposed that people should go out and count the birds instead of shoot them! An idea that came too late to stem the decline of species such as the Passenger Pigeon or Carolina Parakeet, but one that started the longest running citizen science project in the U.S.

Savannah Sparrow from TXCS CBC 2012

November Challenge

The simple act of seeing and recognizing a bird in your backyard carries with it a long- and somewhat unappreciated- history of natural observation. What do you notice when you see a Northern Cardinal? How do you recognize it? Is it the ornamental red of the males? Or the claxon orange beak contrasted against the soft brown of the females? Maybe it’s not with your eyes but your ears… the dawn song of these ubiquitous backyard companions is comfortingly familiar to backyards across the eastern US.

Signs of the season

Season changes, weather changes, local avifauna changes.

We’ve been watching the departure of summer birds- the yellows and reds and blues- and welcoming in our winter visitors… with all of their browns and tans and light browns. Of course, with the winter arrivals, we’re changing where we look for the birds. No more warbler neck!, but confounded by little brown jobs in the bushes.

 

You'll miss me when I'm gone!

Look up in the sky!

It’s a bird! And another! And another! And… oh my! Fall migration is upon us, and there’s plenty to see as the birds head to their wintering grounds. With a little luck, we’ll have oodles and oodles of birds streaming through the Brazos Valley.

If you’re like me, when I hear migration, I instinctively think of spring. Bright colored warblers, orioles, and tanagers. High Island and the coast. Fallout! Watching the radar and wind charts! It’s still exciting just to talk about it!

But there’s another migration in the fall and it’s a little different than spring… and that’s good! Fall is full of drab or indistinctly colored warblers that were just hatched this year. While that’s not the best news for making your lists, it is hopeful news for the birds’ populations! Also, fall is not particularly known for it’s fallouts or volumes and volumes of birds. There’s no real synchronicity to the migration like there is in spring, with birds flying overnight from the Yucatan and arriving at the coast about the same time each afternoon.

Swainson's Hawk hanging out at Horizon turf farm

Fall is more of a casual stroll. Not driven by over-pumped hormones pushing them to go breed, the birds tend to go at their leisure. Flocking up, socializing, catching up with old friends (we assume). Our Purple Martin experience this year was a good example of that.

So where is one to find the birds in the fall? Well, there are the usual places like Lick Creek or Brison Parks, although the going might be a little slow. Shorelines and turf farms are usually good for migrating shorebirds, although our normally reliable Country Club Lake has been lacking a shoreline much of the year (where’d all this water come from!?!). Horizon Turf Farm, and Allen Farms usually have some interesting shorebirds running around, but much of that depends on the state of the farming.

Wait a second! This isn't a raptor! We'll call this Loggerhead Shrike an honorary raptor... certainly a bird of prey!

One place you may not have considered is simply look up! You know all of those kettles of vultures we see all over town? Have a second look… are they all vultures? Are any of them vultures?! Fall brings in the raptors, kettling from thermal up-draft to up-draft and soaring effortlessly in between. What’s interesting about our region is that we effectively serve as a funnel to the raptors’ wintering grounds. This is most apparent down at the coast.

Red-tailed hawk cruising over the old landfill south of College Station

Several organization- including Hawkwatch.org and the Hawk Migration Association of North America- operate or collaborate with hawk towers around the US- from Cape May, NJ, to Marathon, FL, Smith Point and Corpus Christi, TX, Brighton, CO, San Francisco, CA, and Veracruz, Mexico to track, monitor, and count diurnal raptors as they head south for the winter. As the hawk migration season peaks, tens of thousands of hawks can be counted in a day. Several hundred thousand to a million hawks are expected annually in the Texas locations, and Veracruz usually sees somewhere between four and six MILLION hawks go by in a season! Sheesh. I’m glad someone else is doing the counting.

A couple of tidbits I learned while looking up some info for this blog. 

The standard model of diurnal raptor migration is the birds hit the skies mid-morning, going from thermal to thermal for most of the day, and then put down in the evening and rest for the night. All while staying over land, riding the convection currents down the continent. Well, as they say: It’s only a model!

Daytime raptor migration as illustrated by the Florida Keys Hawk Watch: http://floridakeyshawkwatch.wordpress.com/about/

Radio tracking Swallow-tailed Kites, Peregrine Falcons, and Osprey can set out over the open waters- both the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic- when they head south. Now our very own John and Helen Baines told us about European Osprey that fly over the Mediterranean Sea to reach their wintering grounds in Africa… but that’s not quite the same! Of course, the European birds have the Sahara to contend with, but we’re not worried about that right now!

Additionally, this whole business of flying only during the daytime may not hold true in all cases. There are published reports of Osprey [abstract only] and Northern Harriers [PDF warning] migrating… or at least actively flying in a direction that wasn’t north... at night! I don’t know how common this is amongst our classic diurnal raptors, but it’s safe to say there are nearly always exceptions to the rules- especially when it comes to biology.

Now, why have I spent all of this time talking about raptor migration?! I mean, I know people are pining for a shorebirds webinar or a small primer on identifying leg color on a 6-inch sandpiper at 500 yards in full sun! [By the way, the shorebirds webinar is really excellent- I highly recommend it!]

Bald Eagles over Gibbons Creek Reservoir at the 2013 CBC

Well, I’ve been talking about raptor migration because we’ll be heading to the Smith Point Hawk Tower run by our friends at the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory for our September filed trip! I think it will be an excellent and informative trip. And if we’re good, Bruce promised to buy us some local delicacy crawfish-flavored ice cream on our way past Anahuac NWR! Yay! More details to come!