Phoebe Snetsinger, Birding on Borrowed Time (Colorado Springs: American Birding Association, 2003)
Phoebe Snetsinger’s name has long been synonymous for me with fine birding and big listing. Diagnosed with terminal melanoma at 49 and told she had only a short time to live, she rejected treatment and decided instead to see all the birds she could in what time was left. She lived for another 19 years and became the first person to see all the 8,500 bird species known in the world at that date. When the second-hand bookseller Andrew Isles announced he had secured a copy of her autobiography, I immediately snaffled it up, and was further delighted to find the forward had been written by another great lister, Peter Kaestner, who was the guide on our India tour in February, back in the pre-Covid 19 era. Phoebe Snetsinger came to birding late, when she was 34, mother of 4 children, with a “mind starving for some kind of outlet that didn’t revolve around raising a family”. A friend took her birding, handed her a pair of binoculars, and pointed her in the direction of a male Blackburnian Warbler. She was hooked! As she became more experienced, she also became more ambitious, but also more eager to learn more about her new hobby. She always kept immaculate notes, determined that she would not “count” a bird unless she had seen and identified it properly herself—no merely relying on a guide for her! On a trip to Panama in 1981, when she reached her 2000th species, she became aware of a worrying lump under her arm. Diagnosed and given what she saw as a death sentence, she set off for Alaska, determined to add as many birds as possible, then went to the high Himalayas. On that trip, one of her fellow-travellers died, peacefully, in her sleep. “Jo’s end,” writes Snetsinger, “seemed to me the best that one could possibly ask for” and stiffened her determination to see more and yet more. Her autobiography is beautifully written, well-paced, and illustrated with lovely drawings and paintings by artist H. Douglas Pratt. It recounts shipwrecks, earthquakes, recurrences of the melanoma and the breakdown of her marriage. To give you a taste of the excitement of reading her, take this extract: “it began to rain heavily, and the falling drops made it impossible to pick out any subtle bird movement—because everything was moving with raindrops. I continued to watch the track for want of something better to do, and suddenly a rufous-brown bird with a semi-cocked tail scuttled rodent-like across the track. Quick, but adequate: it was a Rufous Scrub-bird.” On her fourth trip to Madagascar, with a want-list of 23 species, five of them representing new genera, her bus crashed and she was killed instantly. Her last sighting had been the Red-shouldered Vanga, a beautiful bird, in a family unique to Madagascar. As her son Thomas writes in the epilogue, “she went out, as she had always hoped, at the very top of her game, in the middle of doing what she loved to do.” Carpe diem, as she herself often said. Rosemary Lloyd
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A Covid19 bird foray
While many of you have been walking wetlands, bowling along beaches and hiking hills observing birds in their habitats, I have been reading about the very opposite: work on dead birds – taxidermy. The book, The birdman’s wife which you may have read as it was first published in 2016 is by birdwatcher, Melissa Ashley. With some literary reservations, I have found it a delightful book: written as if told by Elizabeth Gould, wife of John Gould, it describes her life and love of birds expressed through her painting skills. The facts are well researched and any deviation is described by the author. Some years ago I read another book (title forgotten) about the Goulds in which the recognition of the differences between the beaks of finches brought from the Galapagos by Charles Darwin was attributed to Elizabeth providing further evidence for Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. I have enjoyed the careful descriptions of birds, exotic and known, as seen through an artist’s eye and shall look more carefully at specimens in the future rather than rushing into identification. An extract from the book describes the artist at work after she had been asked by her husband to draw any species undescribed by science (at that point in time): “One afternoon I picked up a specimen that resembled an American hummingbird, with a bright yellow breast and an iridescent purple crown and throat. The tiny feathers of its wing coverts were red as blood. Its bill curved like a pared fingernail, and its feet seemed fragile as twigs. Cradled in my palm, the creature was weightless, its wings fold like a closed fan, its eyes replaced by nubs of cotton.“ She then describes her effort to represent the plumage accurately. “I experimented at my easel, discovering that adding a sprinkling of copper powder mimicked the feathers’ iridescent gleam.” This bird from a South East Asian collection was later named by Nicholas Vigors in honour of Elizabeth as Mrs Gould’s sunbird - a photo is on the link below. https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/mrs-goulds-sunbird-1800x1058.jpg Aethopyga gouldiae The only sunbird in Australia is the olive backed sunbird (Cinnyris jugularis) found in Queensland. As I have described, this book has taken me on an interesting journey about the Goulds, their life, their family and above all, their dedication and hard work in describing the birds of the world. Probably the most interesting sighting that we’ve had in our garden was in April 2015, when we started noticing plate-sized bare patches in the leaf litter. Then we saw a small stout bird foraging on the ground under a bush and thought it might be a Brown Quail, but then it came out and revealed itself as a Painted Button-Quail (Turnix varia). It didn’t seem to mind our presence and so we could watch it feeding with the characteristic Button-Quail method that produces ‘platelets’, a set of bare patches on the ground, about the size of dinner-plates. The bird stands on one leg and scratches the leaf litter with the other, slowly rotating the position of the standing leg until the bird has searched a whole circle. It then moves on to another spot and repeats the process, leaving behind an otherwise mysterious trail of bare circles. Rosemary took the opportunity to take some photos of the bird and its platelets, which are attached. And then, after four days, the Button-Quail vanished just as suddenly as it had appeared. Bird Song
How do birds sing and make calls? In mammals, sounds are produced by vocal folds, but birds don’t have these. The vocal organ of birds is the syrinx. It is a double instrument located deep in a bird's chest at the point where the trachea divides into two bronchi. A human creates sound using only 2% of the air exhaled through the larynx, but a songbird uses almost all the air passing through its syrinx, even though the syrinx may be no larger than a raindrop. Sound is produced by vibrations of some or all of the membrana tympaniformis (the walls of the syrinx) and the pessulus, caused by air flowing through the syrinx. This sets up a self-oscillating system that modulates the airflow creating the sound. In passerines, a part of the syrinx rests in each bronchus and each of these halves is capable of making sound. Muscles on the left and right branch modulate vibrations independently so that some songbirds can produce more than one sound at a time. This allows a bird to sing two different notes at the same time, or even sing a duet with itself. In crows, mynas and parrots, the syrinx allows mimicry of human sounds. The location of the syrinx and the muscles that control it varies between different bird groups. For example, the syrinx may be restricted to the bronchi, such as in some non-passerines (owls, cuckoos and nightjars). In other species known as tracheophonae (ovenbirds, woodcreepers, antbirds, and gnatbirds), the syrinx may be restricted to the trachea. Yet other species of bird, such as vultures, have no syrinx and communicate by throaty hisses. And, the world’s loudest bird song? That honour, once thought to be with the Screaming Piha, belongs to the White Bellbird of the Guianas. The males blast a song, which sounds like a melodic air horn, in the face of a nearby female. Although the male usually sings at around 116 decibels (dB), when one is wooing a female, they can get as loud as 125 dB. The White Bellbird may get its extreme volume in part from its large beak that flares out like a trumpet. As the sound gets louder, its duration gets shorter, possibly because of limitations in the ability of the birds' respiratory systems to control airflow and generate sound. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/this-is-the-loudest-bird-ever-recorded Eating habits of Silver Gull [Chroicocephalus novaehollandiae]
“Gulls are scavengers and do not dive into the water but pluck offal from the surface or from land” [Newman’s Birds of Southern Africa 7th Ed] “Some native predators/scavengers such as Silver Gull……are at artificially high densities, as human wastes provide rich and abundant food allowing populations to become superabundant” [Shorebirds of Australia A Geering et al 2008] A quick review of common gulls in the National Audubon Society “Field Guide to North America” reveals that some gulls frequently gather around garbage dumps, sewage outlets, and reservoirs where they are attracted to a variety of scraps and refuse including, in some cases, animal droppings and berries. Birdlife Australia’s introduction to their monograph on the Silver Gull states “There weren’t always as many Silver Gulls as there are now. Since the 1950s society has become increasingly wasteful, with our rubbish tips now bulging at the seams. With this increased availability of food in the form of refuse, the population of Silver Gulls has exploded, and offshore islands which once supported small breeding colonies are now over-run. With so many gulls dominating these breeding islands, it is becoming increasingly difficult for terns and other seabirds to breed there.” This all seems to paint a fairly miserable picture of the bird that many of us will have happily associated with beach visits most of our lives. None of these descriptions seemed particularly attractive for a bird that I have always thought of as, in appearance at least, clean, beach loving, fishing, sociable and pretty. To try and present a more pleasant view of the Silver Gull, a couple of encounters Margie and I have had with them at Black Point may help to improve their image. On a more serious note and despite the varied diet of these birds the average life span of the Silver Gull is around 23 years, with the oldest recorded 28 y 8m. They begin breeding at the end of their third year for about 11 years - but may breed more than once per year. Back in December 2008 at Black Point, Margie noticed a visiting Silver Gull to The Shack was wearing a band. As the gull observed the lunch table Margie was able to get good photographs of all of the details on the band [photos below] and submit this information to the Australian Government Department of the Environment, Water and Heritage and the Arts Bird and Bat Banding Scheme. They replied that the band had been placed on a Silver Gull on 6/11/1993 at the Breakwater, Outer Harbour SA and that the bird was age code First Year, sex unknown and gave the name of the bander. That was about 15 years between banding and the sighting at Black Point about 56km away While wondering when we were likely to be able enjoy group Sunday Outings again I thought about where in the past we had been sending the information about these Outings…birds seen and their numbers etc. I checked with Marianne, who confirmed that our sightings were sent to eBird Australia.
These are then sent to the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in the Ithaca region of the USA, where sightings from all over the world are kept and collated. I then thought about several visits Malcolm and I had made there in 2019, the first on 2nd of July, and the second on 23rd of December, (when it had been snowing, the central lake frozen, and the only birds seen were at a bird feeder) See photograph #1. In July we enjoyed a “behind the scenes” tour in the large building, given by a volunteer guide, who after a short talk on the history of the complex took us into various laboratories to see many specimens and also hear sound recordings. She also pointed out a huge mural which had been painted on a tall inside wall. It was covered with paintings of a member of each bird family in the world superimposed on the continents. See photograph #3. After this the group went their separate ways. We walked around one of the paths in the adjoining Sapsucker Woods Sanctuary which surrounds this Centre for Birds and Biodiversity. We took the Wilson Trail, which incidentally has bird call recorders at various stations along it, and walked in a clockwise direction around the central pond, which was covered with waterlilies. The sanctuary is named after the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, a furtive mainly silent Woodpecker which gets its name from the habit of boring holes into the inner bark of a tree. They then suck up the oozing sap with their brush-like tongues. They are mainly silent, so it was no surprise that the only ones we saw were a pair of taxidermed ones in a glass case in the foyer of the main building! A Downy Woodpecker was the only one we saw, and it’s the smallest and most commonly seen. See photographs #4 and 5. Returning to the centre we sat in comfortable chairs looking through telescopes, a number of which were set up by the windows overlooking the ponds. If ever we visit the family in Ithaca again we will be back there! Apologies for the length of this piece … it become much more technical than anticipated, but I hope you will all find it interesting.
Structural Colouration Margie Tiller mentioned recently that Joan Paton told club members many years ago that the blue colour of birds is not from actual pigments. I thought I’d investigate a little further. Blue and iridescent colours in birds are never produced by pigments. They are "structural colours”. English scientists Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton first observed (from a scientific viewpoint) this phenomenon in living creatures. In Hooke’s 1665 book, Micrographia, he said of the peacock, “… each Feather in the tail sends out multitudes of Lateral branches, … so each of those threads in the Microscope appears a large long body, consisting of a multitude of bright reflecting parts. … their upper sides seem to me to consist of a multitude of thin plated bodies, which are exceeding thin, and lie very close together, and thereby, like mother of Pearl shells, do not only reflect a very brisk light, but tinge that light in a most curious manner; and by means of various positions, in respect of the light, they reflect back now one colour, and then another, and those most vividly.” A century later, Thomas Young (1773 – 1829) explained the principles behind structural colouration. Young was a British polymath who made notable contributions to the fields of vision and light, amongst other scientific discoveries. Structural coloration is the production of colour by microscopically structured surfaces fine enough to interfere with visible light. Peacock tail feathers are pigmented brown, but their microscopic structure makes them also reflect blue, turquoise, and green light, and they are often iridescent. It made me wonder about the real pigment colours of other birds we see as iridescent blue, green, purple etc. Iridescence occurs when the colour changes with the viewing angle and orientation. Structural colour, however, is no simple matter. In bird feathers, interference is created by a range of photonic mechanisms. The vivid colouration is caused by interference effects that reflect or scatter light, rather than by pigments. Colours are produced when a material is scored with fine parallel lines, formed of one or more parallel thin layers, or otherwise composed of microstructures on the scale of the colour's wavelength. The detailed structure of the feather’s barbules reflects some wavelengths and absorbs others, and the reflected wavelength changes with the angle of reflection. The structural colour is registered by the eye in response to the reflected wavelengths and changes with the angle formed by the light, the reflecting surface, and the eye. The benefits of structural colouration for birds include for camouflage, avoiding predation, signal communication and sex choice. I have a few photos taken in Uganda last year to share with AOC members.
Photos 1 & 2 Shoebill. (Balaeniceps rex.) Was once allied to the Pelican family but is now classified in its own family. Vulnerable, rare and very threatened it is only found in Africa and reduced to just the swamp areas of Uganda and Rwanda and Zambia. Pairs have a territory about 5 square km. in Papyrus swamps, reeds and sedges. Massive wings and can fly. Claps its bill making a hollow "clock" as a call. Photos 3, 4 & 5 The following three photos show how useful the African Buffalo can be as a safe perch for birds. Photo 3 These are a group of Piapiac, a long legged crow with a heavy decurved bill and a red eye. Common and usually seen in small flocks. Photo 4 Although not very clear in this photo this is the Yellow billed ( Intermediate) Egret. (Ardea intermedia). Photo 5 And a wonderful perch for the Pied Kingfisher. Musk Ducks After visiting Aldinga Scrub CP last week we decided to call in to the Hart Road Wetlands on the way home, to check out the resident male Musk Duck. He was still there, & after watching him for a while I started to ponder on why his tail feathers sometimes appear to be a blue colour when spread out in the water. I was reminded of the time we visited W.A. in September 2019, staying at the Karri Valley Resort, SE of the Margaret River region. The Resort is on a lake fed by water from the Beedelup Falls (and incidentally is a great place to stay). There were a number of Musk Duck there, including the female shown in the photograph, which also was showing blue tail feathers. After puzzling about this for a while I eventually remembered one of the WEA lectures given by Joan Paton, (which I attended last century!) when she told us that the blue colour of birds is not from actual pigments. It is created by the way light waves interact with the arrangement of their keratin molecules in the feathers, and which reflect light in subtly different ways to produce different shades of what our eyes perceive as the colour blue. Since all the feathers of Musk Ducks appear to be grey some of the time, and only blue when we see them from certain angles in the water, I assume that refraction of the light rays in the water makes them appear blue to us. I have not been able to find any published work on the particular subject of whether this is relevant to Musk Ducks, so I might be completely wrong, but it’s the best I can think of! (Googling directed me to a relevant article by Scott Sillett, a wildlife biologist at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Centre, entitled Colour of Feathers in Birds.) One of my favourite birding memories resulted from a tragic plane crash. In 2007, we flew to São Paulo, intending to fly on to the Pantanal, return to São Paulo, then fly to Iguazu. The day before we arrived, however, there was a horrific plane crash at the domestic terminal and all domestic flights were grounded for the foreseeable future. While deciding what to do, our guide took us to the Hotel do Ype in Itatiaia National Park. We slept in comfortable cabins in the forest and woke to a dawn chorus of Chachalacas. Breakfast was served in the main building, on a balcony adorned with numerous bird feeders. It was almost impossible to eat, because every time you sat back down another wonderful bird, more brightly coloured than the last, would appear. There were tanagers and motmots, woodpeckers and toucans, euphonias and chlorophonias, and when at last we tore ourselves away to go out birding and visit the local hummingbird feeders, we saw a ferruginous pygmy-owl roosting right next to the dining room.
Row 1: Saffron Toucanet, Blue Dacnis, Green-headed Tanager, Row 2: Yellow-fronted Woodpecker, Black-goggled Tanager, Ferruginous Pygmy-owl. |
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