Category Archives: Beyond Bounds

Subtle Differences

February 11, 2014Beyond BoundsKate St. John

Faces of green-winged and scarlet macaws (photos from Wikmedia Commons)

If you were paying close attention to last Wednesday’s post about scarlet macaws you noticed that I changed the photo on Friday. That’s because Diane Korolog pointed out that the original photo was misidentified.

When I first published the article I used the photo on the left (green background). It’s a 2013 Featured Photo on Wikimedia Commons that was labeled “scarlet macaw” but Diane said it looks like a green-winged macaw (Ara chloropterus). The scarlet macaw (Ara macao) is on the right.

How can you tell the difference with only a head shot? Diane explained that the scarlet macaw has a clean all-white face, while the green-wing’s face has red feather lines. The feather lines are so unique that you can identify individual green-winged macaws by their pattern. This is as cool as identifying individual tundra swans by the yellow patterns on their bills.

The story doesn’t end there. On Friday I wrote to Information at Wikimedia Commons, explaining the labeling problem. A volunteer put me in touch with the photographer in Germany and we discussed the problem online.

Tuxyso photographed the bird at the Muenster Zoo where both scarlet and green-winged macaws live in the Tropical Hall exhibit. He labeled the photo “scarlet macaw” because this bird has the yellow wing feathers diagnostic of Ara macao. But he isn’t a scarlet macaw. The Muenster Zoo website held the hint to this bird’s true identity.

I can’t read German so I used Google Translate on the link Tuxyso provided. The zoo explains that in the wild scarlet and green-winged macaws don’t interbreed but in the exhibit a scarlet and a green-winged secretly paired up and produced a hybrid offspring. Tuxyso called the zoo and confirmed that the bird in his photograph is the scarlet-X-green-winged hybrid.

Everyone was right. This bird is both.

Subtle differences are important.

(photos from Wikimedia Commons: on left hybrid macaw by Tuxyso via Creative Commons license, on right scarlet macaw photo in the public domain)

Prefers To Raise An Only Child

February 5, 2014Beyond Bounds, Bird BehaviorKate St. John

Scarlet macaw (photo from Wikimedia Commons) — Closeup of scarlet macaw, Gran Canaria (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

5 February 2014

Last fall Parrot Confidential introduced us to the ARA scarlet macaw recovery project in Costa Rica and a bird named Geoffrey who was abandoned by his mother. I assumed at the time that Geoffrey was rescued because his mother was new to motherhood and unskilled in raising her first brood.

But no. Scarlet macaws have a very unusual parenting strategy. The female lays up to four eggs but when the eggs hatch the parents choose just one of the nestlings — usually the first — and shower it with attention. The rest are ignored, unfed, not brooded. They die within three weeks. The parents purposely raise an only child.

I learned about this very unusual behavior in an article in wired.com about the Tambopata Macaw Project in southeastern Peru. Since 1989 the project has collected a wealth of information on scarlet macaw biology and behavior including the birds’ habit of raising only one chick each year. From Nadia Drake’s article:

Observations suggest that this outcome is one of choice, rather than resource limitation. So far, the reasons why are still a mystery. This parenting strategy seems to be unusual even among birds, which often lay extra eggs and then distribute limited resources among chicks with brutal efficiency.
…
The truth is that macaw chick mortality does not appear to be the accidental or inevitable result of scarce resources.
“This is death by neglect,” said ornithologist Donald Brightsmith of Texas A&M University. “Complete and utter neglect.”
— Wired Magazine: Tambopata Macaw Project

Raising only one chick per brood is an unfortunate trait for a bird with a declining population but it explains why the ARA Project has a natural supply of baby scarlet macaws — every nest has an abandoned nestling. By raising the “extra” birds the project boosts the local population.

Scarlet macaws have a reason for choosing to raise an only child. We just don’t know what it is yet.

Bird On Camera

January 26, 2014Beyond Bounds, Bird BehaviorKate St. John

Birds are often on camera, but rarely on the camera.

This photo of a pygmy nuthatch was an experiment by Ed Sweeney (Navicore on Flickr). Thanks to its Creative Commons license on Wikimedia Commons, I found the photo and learned of Ed Sweeney’s extraordinary photographs. See more on his Flickr page here.

(photo by Ed Sweeney, on Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original and Creative Commons license.)

Let’s Get Subtropical

January 19, 2014Beyond Bounds, Water and ShoreKate St. John

OK, it’s cold again, but not (yet) so cold as the worst we’ve seen this month so I think we can afford to get “subtropical” today.

Chuck Tague photographed this reddish egret in the subtropics between the 35th parallel and the Tropic of Cancer, specifically in Florida.

Reddish egrets (Egretta rufescens) are found from Florida and the U.S. Gulf Coast, down both coasts of Central America to the Caribbean edge of South America. But they’re not found everywhere. They only fish in shallow saltwater so they’re restricted to specific locations, always coastal. Click here for their range map.

Some reddish egrets are actually white but most have this distinctive reddish head, gray body and black-tipped pink bill. They’re easy to identify if you watch them hunt. They jump and dart like crazed dancers with their wings open.

Don’t take this beautiful bird for granted. It’s listed as Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List because “despite its large range it occupies a restricted habitat and is patchily distributed.”

If you’re at the coast within its range, take the opportunity to look for a reddish egret.

(photo by Chuck Tague)

Let’s Get Tropical

January 12, 2014Beyond Bounds, Water and ShoreKate St. John

Tired of the weather yo-yo? Let’s get tropical.

Here’s a southern hemisphere bird that ranges from Mexico to Argentina. She closely resembles the belted kingfisher, is virtually the same size, and has the same hunting habits.

But she’s green. Her genus is Chloroceryle whereas the belted kingfisher’s genus is Megaceryle.

Amazon kingfishers (Chloroceryle amazona) are sexually dimorphic and follow the dimorphism of most birds — the male is more colorful than the female. This one is female. The males have rust color on their breasts. Click here to see a male Amazon kingfisher.

Belted kingfishers are backwards — the males are less colorful while the females have rust color on their breasts. Click here to see a male, and here for a female.

This Amazon kingfisher was perched over water during Charlie Hickey’s fall trip to Costa Rica. Click on his photo for a closer view of this tropical bird.

(photo by Charlie Hickey)

At The Top Of The Mountain

January 4, 2014Beyond Bounds, SongbirdsKate St. John

Black rosy-finch (photo by Steve Valasek)

Here’s a bird I hope to see some day … but I’ll have to go out of my way to find it.

The black rosy-finch (Leucosticte atrata) is an alpine bird from the American West that spends all his life at high elevation. In the summer he nests on cliffs above the treeline in the Rockies. In the winter he moves to lower mountaintops.

Steve Valasek photographed this one at a feeder at Sandia Crest, New Mexico … at the top of the mountain.

(photo by Steve Valasek)

Merry Christmas

December 25, 2013Beyond Bounds, Books & Events, Plants & FungiKate St. John

The colors of a Merry Christmas…

Pyracantha after a rare snowfall in Nags Head, North Carolina, February 2006 by Bob Muller.

(photo by Bob Muller (bobxnc), Creative Commons license via Flickr)

Penguins As Far As The Eye Can See

December 20, 2013Beyond Bounds, Nesting & Courtship, Tenth PageKate St. John

This week I read about colonial nesting in Ornithology by Frank B. Gill. “About 13% of bird species, including most seabirds, nest in colonies. Colonial nesting evolves in response to a combination of two environmental conditions: (1) a shortage of nesting sites that are safe from predators and (2) abundant or unpredictable food that is distant from safe nest sites.”

The book mentions king penguin colonies; sometimes they’re huge. This one is on the Salisbury Plain of South Georgia, an island in a volcanic ridge that arcs from the southern tip of South America to the northern tip of Antarctica. (Click here to see where it is on Google Maps.)

There are lots of king penguins in the photo above, but zoom out below and the number is stunning. Half a million king penguins in one place!

Obviously the advantages of living like this outweigh the disadvantages of occasional social strife, epidemics, or the crash of the food supply.

Imagine being in a place where there are penguins as far as the eye can see!

(photos from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the images to see the originals. Today’s Tenth Page is inspired by page 330 of Ornithology by Frank B. Gill.)

Same But Different

December 19, 2013Beyond Bounds, Musings & NewsKate St. John

Steller's jay at Sandia Peak, New Mexico (photo by Steve Valasek)

Recent photos by Steve Valasek in New Mexico reminded me that western birds are often very similar to their eastern cousins. Unlike the ecologically equivalent birds who live on different continents but have similar habitat requirements, these live on the same continent but have different habitat requirements.

Here are two western birds that fit the bill.

This Steller’s jay perched on a feeder in the Sandia Mountains is recognizably similar to our blue jay but he lives in evergreen forests in the mountainous West. The blue jay prefers oak forests because he loves acorns. Both jays like to visit bird feeders.

Below, the mountain chickadee also lives in dry evergreen forests in the Western mountains. He looks like a black-capped chickadee except for his white eyebrows. The black-capped chickadee is far less picky about habitat and can be found in deciduous and evergreen forests, residential neighborhoods, weedy fields and cattail marshes. Because of this the black-capped has a wider range.

Mountain chickadee, Sandia Mountains, New Mexico (photo by Steve Valasek)

And finally, a seed-eating generalist, this dark-eyed junco shows how different he looks in the West. He’s different but the same.

Dark-eyed Junco, Embudito Canyon, New Mexico (photo by Steve Valasek)

Juncos breed in northern or mountain forests but can be found in a wide variety of habitats in winter.

When I first started birding juncos like this one were listed as a separate species, the Oregon junco. Since then evidence has shown that the slate-colored junco of the East, the Oregon junco of the West, and the “white-winged” and “gray-headed” juncos are different races of the same species, now called the dark-eyed junco.

There is still much scientific discussion about the “lumping” of the junco. Given enough time and isolation eastern and western juncos could become separate species and settle the question for us.

(photos by Steve Valasek)

Wearing A Bad Toupee

December 14, 2013Beyond BoundsKate St. John

Here’s a bird you don’t see every day … unless you visit the National Aviary where they live in the Wetlands Room.

The boat-billed heron (Cochlearius cochlearius) is a strange-looking bird from the mangrove swamps of Central and South America. Not only does he have an unusually fat bill but his head feathers resemble dark hair.

Charlie Hickey took this photo in Costa Rica and noticed immediately that the bird looks like he’s wearing a bad toupee. Click here to read whose toupee Charlie’s reminded of.