Working for Birds

Posted on January 3, 2020 by Roger

I took another day off work to bird. But where? I’d seen the majority of the common birds that can be easily found this time of year. A day at Black Forest or along the creek would have yielded a few more to my 2020 list, but those are birds I could pick up anytime. They aren’t worth investing a day off to find.

I decided to make the effort to track down six rare or easy-to-miss birds around the Denver area.

Bird #1 — A Brant of the Pacific/black subspecies has been hanging around with other geese at Arbor Lake in Arvada for about a week. I got there around 9:00 and was told by three other birders that it had just taken off. The remaining Cackling and Canada geese also took off, leaving the lake to Northern Shovelers and Mallards. I walked the path around the lake to pass the time and get some steps in but then decided to head elsewhere.

I came back around noon. Many of the geese had returned. There were large groups on the lake and a mess on the lawn next to the water. I scanned the ones on the water first. The wind had kicked up and it was a blustery afternoon. I next turned my attention to the 500 or so geese on the lawn. I scanned from one side of the flock to the other, them moved to another spot and did it again. And then did it again. I’m not sure what kept me looking — I was pretty convinced I’d seen what there was to see. And then suddenly there was the Brant, right in the middle of the flock. Most of the time, I got looks like this. When you see it, it’s definitely different, but it’s still very easy to miss.

Finally the Cackling Geese moved aside enough.

Speaking of Cackling Geese … They look exactly like Canada Geese except smaller. It would be an exercise in extreme patience to scan an entire mixed flock and try to i.d. every bird. Some, I’m convinced, can’t be differentiated. Add to that the different postures they assume and it’s a challenge. I’ve decided on this criteria for my own satisfaction: If the distance from the tip of the bill to the back of the white chin patch is longer than or about the same as the length of the neck, it’s a Cackling Goose. If it’s shorter than the neck, it’s a Canada Goose. By that criteria, these are definitely Cackling Geese. They were only marginally larger than the nearby Mallards.

Bird #2 — In between my to visits to Arbor Lake, I drove 18 miles east to the South Platte River in Thornton. Northern Pintails have been seen there in recent days, and this is an easy bird to miss in Colorado. The pintails were there, along with a lot of other ducks scattered up and down the half-mile of river I walked.

Bird #3 — I fought Friday afternoon traffic to the park in Littleton where I found my lifer Eastern Screech-Owl last fall. It was a long drive in vain — the hole was empty.

Bird #4 and #5 — A White-winged Scoter and a Pacific Loon have been hanging around the reservoir at Chatfield State Park for a month or so. I’ve gotten very close looks at the scoter, but only frustrating distant looks at the loon. I’m pretty sure I saw both from the Jefferson County side of the reservoir, but both were too far off to be sure of. After taking a short hike to look for bird #6, I drove around to the Douglas County side and found both birds again. They were still way off, but the light was better and I was able to confirm both, although in the case of the loon, I’d still like to see it closer. While I was driving through the park, I saw a Bald Eagle hanging out in the tree where it always hangs out.

Bird #6 — American Dipper should be easy in Colorado, but I missed it last year in spite of looking for one several times. One was seen along the river below the dam yesterday, so I took a short walk to the spot but saw nothing dipperish.

Final tally, I saw four of the six birds I targeted and added a Bald Eagle for five new birds for the year, bringing my total up to 63. My list today was 33 species. To get those five birds took me 10 hours and almost 200 miles of driving. Not fun, exactly, but it was better than it would have been if I’d missed more of the birds.

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Lake Pueblo State Park

Posted on January 2, 2020 by Roger

I took today and tomorrow off work to get my 2020 year list off to a fast start. I spent almost all the daylight hours at Lake Pueblo, first by the south marina where the gulls hang out and then below the dam.

I arrived shortly after dawn on a cold, overcast day. I walked about 20 yards and went back to the car for layers and gloves. I headed out to the tip of the peninsula to get close to the tire breakwater where the gulls hang out. Somehow in the midst of the huge flock of Ring-billed Gulls, I spotted a winter-plummaged Dunlin. It’s that small brown sandpiper in the very center of the photo. I only bother with this photo because it’s a very rare bird around here this time of year.

As I was sorting through the gulls, a winter-plummaged Horned Grebe swam by.

One of the first birds I spotted was a Lesser Black-backed Gull. I saw a second one a bit later on the other side of the marina — unless the first bird flew over there. I’ve included shots of both. Key marks are the dark back, the yellow legs, and the red spot on the bill.

A California Gull landed on the breakwater and looked just different enough from the Ring-bills to catch my attention. It’s a little bit bigger and longer-winged than the Ring-bills and has more black on the wing tips. It also has black and red spots on the lower mandible rather than a black ring around both. In the photo below, it’s the one that looks like it’s wearing eye makeup. I saw my lifer California Gulls at Lake Pueblo back in 2002, about 500 yards from where I saw this one.

When I was done with the gulls on this breakwater, I headed around the marina to the other one. I’d gone about 10 steps when I spotted a covey of Scaled Quail running in front of me. As near as I can figure, this was within about 20 feet of where I saw my lifer Scaled Quails back in 2002.

The quail were very skittish, but I stalked them and waited them out and got some shots. They finally flew across a small channel. I saw them three or four times on the other side, usually as they dashed from one bit of cover to another.

A Great Black-backed Gull. No need to explain the field marks on this one. This is a very rare bird in Colorado — or it would be if this very bird hadn’t wintered at this very spot for the past 20 years, or so I’m told. I know I’ve seen it every year since we’ve lived in the state.

That was as much gull-viewing as I wanted to do for the day, and a lot more than I usually do. I parked below the dam and almost immediately saw an adult Cooper’s Hawk.

I decided to walk a couple miles down one side of the Arkansas River and up the other. I hadn’t gone far before I decided to return to the car to shed some layers. The highlight of the day was a female Merlin (Taiga subspecies) that flew down to the rocks along the river. It stood there for maybe four minutes before flying up to the top of a dead tree across the river. About 10 minutes later, I saw it circling overhead. I made a half-hearted attempt to take a picture of it in flight, but before I could even get my camera out and ready, it was so high up it was just a speck.

A Bushtit. I saw two flocks of these, both of at least 10 birds, and I was in perfect position to photograph them, but they move so fast I hardly had time to point the camera, much less focus and shoot. I did manage to capture this one. Based on the black ear-patch, it’s probably a juvenile male.

I drove out into the flats on Hanover Road to look for raptors, but I saw bupkis except a couple Canyon Towhees in the cholla. I was home by 4:20 with 46 birds on my day list and 58 on my year list. And that doesn’t count the pair of Great Horned Owls that are calling outside my house as I write this because I haven’t managed to see them.

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Columbus

Posted on November 24, 2019 by Roger

We spent three days in Columbus at the beginning of Thanksgiving week. The weather was pleasant — not like the heavy snowstorms back in Colorado that shut down work for two days. It’s taken us a while, but we’ve finally found some go-to restaurants around town. On Sunday night, we went to Skyline for Cincinnati chili.

On Monday, we drove west into Indiana so my wife could shop at Warm Glow Candles.

We stopped in Springfield, Ohio, to wander through a couple antique stores. My wife bought a couple of antique cottage cheese jars. I bought a souvenir bank from the 1964 New York World’s Fair. I went to the fair when I was six with my mom and sister, but whatever souvenirs I bought at the time have long since disappeared.

We ate a light supper of grilled cheese and lobster soup at the Chocolate Cafe back in Columbus.

On Tuesday afternoon, I spent a couple hours wandering around the cemetery, forest preserve, and bike paths along the Olentangy River near our hotel.

It’s not a great place to bird, but this was a good day. I saw my first Ohio Wood Ducks, Cooper’s Hawk, and Merlin! It wasn’t where I would expect to see a Merlin — all the others I’ve seen have been in much more open, more wild locations. But there it sat in a tree between the cemetery and a hotel parking lot.

For supper, we went to Schmidt’s, a German restaurant in the German Village section of Columbus. We both had the sausage sampler, which was great. We also split a delicious cream puff for dessert.

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Otherworld

Posted on November 24, 2019 by Roger

Otherworld is billed as an “immersive art experience.” It’s housed in an old theater in a nearly-abandoned shopping mall southeast of Columbus, Ohio. We drove down right after we landed in town and arrived when the place was not at all crowded.

It cost us $22 each to get in, and this was really our only beef. It wasn’t nearly as large or as interesting as it pretended to be, but it was a mildly-amusing way to spend an hour. It was certainly more interesting than sitting in a hotel room would have been.

The inside space was divided into 30 or so small rooms, each with its own design. Most were dark. All of them felt a little like a good place to pick up a virus. Here are some of the better rooms.

Otherworld was definitely the place where local youths went to take Instagram photos.

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Things I’ve Learned Recently

Posted on November 11, 2019 by Roger

The cubicle did not get its name from its shape, but from the Latin cubiculum meaning bed chamber.

A male Brown Thrasher can have more than 2,500 separate songs in his repertoire.

Creede, Colorado, was named for prospector Nicholas C. Creede who later committed suicide because his wife, from whom he had separated, insisted on living with him.

The yield sign was first used in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

In rural Britain and Ireland, most houses had dirt floors until the 20th century. That’s where “ground floor” came from.

Nobody knows for sure what the “tuffet” Little Miss Muffet sat on really was. The nursery rhyme is the only place in historic English where the word appears.

Queen Anne of Britain (1702-1714) was too fat to go up and down stairs. A trap door had to be cut in her bedroom floor so she could be lowered to and raised from the floor below by pulleys.

During the first four months of World War II, 4,133 people were killed on the roads of Great Britain due to the blackout restrictions enacted to thwart German bombers.

There are more chickens on the earth than there are dogs, cats, pigs, cows, and rats combined.

In Korean, the word “umchin” is used to describe someone who is better than you are at everything. Its literal meaning is “mom’s friend’s son.”

It would actually be faster to allow everybody on an airplane to attempt to board whenever they wanted than to use any of the boarding methods airlines currently use. So why the boarding groups? Because it allows airlines to charge extra for letting people board sooner.

A young Sioux boy who witnessed Custer’s Last Stand lived until 1961, when I was three.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Cary Grant’s character is mistaken for a spy named George Kaplan, who doesn’t actually exist. In 2014, a species of fly that was originally named as a subspecies of another fly that was found not to exist was renamed “prochyliza georgekaplani.”

The word “spanghew” refers to the act of flinging a frog violently into the air from the end of a stick.

The word “teetotaler” comes from the phrase “Total with a capital T,” a slogan of the temperance movement.

Venus rotates in the opposite direction of all the other planets, so the sun rises in the west.

Shel Silverstein, author of Where the Sidewalk Ends, and The Giving Tree, wrote the song “A Boy Named Sue,” which became a huge hit for Johnny Cash. Silverstein was inspired to write it by his friend who had a name generally used by girls — Jean Shepherd — who wrote The Christmas Story.

Christopher Columbus took notes in Italian, gave most of the places he discovered Portuguese names, wrote his official correspondence in Castilian Spanish, kept a public journal of his voyages in Latin and a second, private, one in Greek, used Hebrew astronomical tables, and spoke the lingual franca (a mix of Arabic, Italian, and Spanish) of Mediterranean traders. And he was typical of learned men of his day.

The word “literal” is an adjective of the Latin word littera, meaning “letter.” Centuries ago, when only a handful of educated people knew how to write (or read) and the materials for doing so were hard to come by, something that was “literally true” was of such importance that it was worth writing down.

When you say that something is “the greatest thing since sliced bread,” you’re saying it’s the greatest thing since 1928, the year a Missouri jeweler named Otto Rohwedder invented the bread-slicing machine.

Falling down stairs is second only to car accidents as a cause of accidental death. Unmarried people are more likely to fall than married people. People in good shape are more likely to fall than those in bad shape.

To prevent fires back in the days when houses were warmed and lit by fire, people covered flames at night with a lid called a coverfeu. This word developed into our word curfew.

In an average year, more people die of food poisoning contracted at church picnics than have died from contact with bats in all of recorded history.

The dining room came into existence in homes largely because people got tired of food and drink stains on their expensive, upholstered parlor furniture.

In 1907, Kellogg offered a free box of Corn Flakes to any woman who would wink at her grocer.

The Duke of Marlborough was so cheap that, to save ink, he didn’t dot his “i”s.

Many years after the United States gained its independence, an old soldier was asked why he went to fight the British at Lexington. He said “We had always governed ourselves and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.”

Theodore Roosevelt was the first American to earn a brown belt in judo.

In 1920, Babe Ruth set a new record for home runs in a season with 54. That was 33 more than anyone else had ever hit. In 1920, no other TEAM hit as many homers as Ruth did.

The ashes of at least 12 White Sox fans were scattered over the infield at old Comiskey Park.

The German word for exit is “ausfahrt.”

Hal Smith, who played Otis the town drunk on The Andy Griffith Show did the voice of Owl in the original Winnie the Pooh cartoons.

The bleachers in a stadium were so named because the sun was said to “bleach” the skin of the fans sitting on the uncovered benches.

On May 17, 1979, Randy Lerch and Bob Boone of the Phillies became the only pitcher-catcher combo in Major League history to both hit home runs before taking the field. The Phillies beat the Cubs at Wrigley Field that day, 23-22 in 10 innings.

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