Escape!

Whew.  In late September, I hacked apart the chain tethering me to my laptop and the joys of proofing data, and headed southward to the Warm Springs Natural Area for a few days to collect some data.  Free at last!  I’m still in the process of getting the survey data entered, so I’ll leave the full species list for a later post, but I thought I’d share some highlights and a few photos.  I didn’t see anybody particularly unexpected, but one of my favorite things in wildlife biology is delving into what is expected, where, and why!

• Western Scrub-Jays.  My goodness, the Scrub-Jays.  We tend to run into a few in mid-April, but we hadn't had any fall records in our dataset until this visit.  Plus Flickers.  They were EVERYWHERE, and apparently had just arrived en masse … not to mention a Lewis’s Woodpecker or two.

Red-naped x Red-breasted Sapsucker

• I was really excited to see sapsuckers: Red-naped and Red-naped x Red-breasted hybrids.  So far, in my September forays to Warm Springs, several of the Red-naped/Red-breasted/hybrid Sapsuckers have been young-of-the-year, and at least half have been hybrids.  Has anyone else noticed this pattern in that part of the state/at that time, or is it just a function of my small sample size?  I’d be really interested to hear, either way!

• Not that these guys are that uncommon, but I enjoyed my 4-wren day, with Bewick’s Wrens, Marsh Wrens, House Wrens, and a Cactus Wren (!) hanging out in the riparian area within a space of about 300 meters.  It's not that Cactus Wrens are unknown from the area, but I have to admit that I was a little startled to have one poke its head out from the palm fronds, rasping its song.

• Summer Tanagers.  Any day I see a Summer Tanager is a good day in my book, and I had 3 days of them pitucking from among the palm fronds and cottonwood leaves.

The Bee Nest Tunnels are these dark spots on the ground surface

• The Phainopeplas are back, “hoyting” from the top of mesquites.

• A particularly fun discovery was a colony of native ground bees: maybe alkali bees?  There is an alfalfa field only a couple hundred meters away.  SO cool.  [As an aside, if you’re interested in books on pollinators, Stephen Buchmann and Gary Paul Nabhan’s The Forgotten Pollinators is one of my favorites.] 

• I found a few unidentified Sage Sparrows (but nothing like the winter numbers) darting into the shrubbery, thwarting my attempts to determine whether they were Bell’s or Sagebrush Sparrows!

• Lots of Sharp-shinned Hawks, too.  I tried to get some photos, but ended up with some fantastic pictures of branches instead.

• Warbler-wise, it’s a little late, so I was limited to Yellow-rumped (all Audubon’s), Orange-crowned, and Common Yellowthroats.  Again, I tried to get some photos of the Yellow-rumps, and ended up with yet more pictures of branches!

Lincoln's Sparrow

• By far the most abundant species I found, though, was the White-crowned Sparrow, who were packed into the former pastures now filled with sunflowers.  There were so many of them, and they were moving around so much, it was difficult to pick out the occasional Lincoln’s and Song Sparrows.  House Finches were also found here in large numbers, but at least they perched on the tops of the sunflowers, making them easy to see; plus they called almost incessantly.  The Lincoln’s and Song Sparrows were mostly on the ground, where they alerted me to their presence by the scratching sounds as they foraged - along with the occasional call note.

• I watched a Loggerhead Shrike manipulate a large green grasshopper with its beak, finally impaling it onto the broken stub of a mesquite branch.

• Last but not least: Monarch butterflies.  I didn’t see nearly as many of them this year as I did in 2012 (from what I understand, last year was a particularly good year for them in Nevada), but I saw quite a few scattered through the area.

Well, that’s it for now, I think.  I’ll try to get the rest of the data finished up soon, so I can put up the full species list.

Happy birding!
Jen