Sometimes it can be difficult

A barred owl (Strix varia) watching me from its perch in a tree (2010_01_12_048666)

Ever tried to sneak up on an owl?  Keep in mind these mystical creatures are masters of silence.  Evolution gifted them with keen hearing, something afforded them by the recognizable shape of their head and face, a shape that funnels sound to their ears.

So imagine trying to sneak up on a pair of them when the forest is thick and the understory clogged with bamboo and brush.  Let’s just say it doesn’t work too well.

But after the pair of barred owls (Strix varia) moved in a few years ago[1], I focused on trying to get close for some photos.  The great horned owl (Bubo virginianus) who lives across the floodplain is even more difficult given it sleeps on one of many islands within the bay’s confluence—areas I have no access to—yet the barred owls are near, in a place visible from my patio, so I should be able to get some images, right?  Not!

They sleep, nest, brood and raise young at the juncture of public land and official park territory: essentially, they either roost in dense woods or on land I can’t legally enter without permission[2].  Very frustrating!

Still, this is one of them.  One of the two, I mean.  I can’t say which.  Mommy or Daddy.  Take your pick.

Trying to get close was an exercise in futility.  The owl heard me coming long before I realized it was there.  You can see it had already set its eyes upon me as I scrambled through brambles and thickets trying to locate them[3].

I suspect the other had long since evacuated given the riotous din I created as I clamored and fought my way through what is essentially an impassable area.  I really thought I was being sneaky.

Lesson to self: Gosh darn it, work on that silence thing!

So while I study up on my ninja stealth techniques so I can wind my way through impenetrable barriers without making a noise, why don’t you go take a look at some other goodies…

Friday Ark #279: What can I say.  Steve has all the energy in the world when it comes to finding the best on the web each week.  Wanna see dogs?  Cats?  Birds?  Everything else under the sun?  Head on over and see who’s enjoying a leisurely expedition on the ark this week.

I and the Bird #117: I can only say Seabrooke’s creativity astounds me.  She put together the most brilliant yet simple presentation for this carnival.  If you love birds, you’ll want to visit, but please don’t forget to comment on her exceptionally creative effort.  I can’t imagine reaching that level of awe…

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Notes:

[1] Barred owls have been at White Rock Lake as long as I can remember (that’s measured in decades).  And though I can always remember their singularly recognizable call, this pair is the first one that I have located and monitored.  They’re not the first and not the last, but they’re the two I can identify and locate.

[2] I can get permission to be on the city’s property.  I’ve just never done so before.  More and more I think I should delve into the opportunities afforded by asking.

[3] Though I hadn’t seen either owl prior to this photo, the moment I looked up and realized it was watching me, I snapped this picture and retreated.  They needed to sleep.  I was being intrusive and disruptive.  Seeing how obvious I’d been told me I’d long since passed the point of acceptable observation.  Silliness aside, trying to photograph them will hinge entirely on me being able to do so without bothering them.

A few of my favorite things #1

I begin each morning long before sunrise, a quick step out the bedroom door to the patio, coffee in hand.  The city sleeps around me, too early for all but a few to be out and about, darkness still a heavy cloak upon the land.  By rain or moonlight, in cold or hot, this begins my day no matter the weather.

The barred owls who sleep nearby often begin their conversations while I stand and listen, deep voices echoing across the lake, big words and small words drawing images in the darkness which I can only view but never understand.  I try to imagine what they discuss each day, why the chat begins well before they arrive in that place where they will find the day’s rest.  As I sip my coffee their voices draw near, each responding to the other, sometimes in long sentences and sometimes with a single word.  Yet always the voices remain the same, the haunting and magical owl sound that none could confuse with any other creature.

Then a squirrel barks repeatedly and vehemently, the warning bark it gives in response to a predator.  The rodent sounds as though it rests near one of the owls.  Might it be responding to the arrival of this nocturnal raptor, this silent killer who stalks the night?  Then a wren joins in, the mobbing, larger-than-life voice from a tiny body.  It too seems near one of the owls.

A smile crosses my face, a comfortable smile, a knowing smile, for this drama plays out nearly every morning just as it has these past few years, just as it has since this owl pair took up residence in the treetops that line my western view.  Soon a mockingbird will join in, perhaps a blue jay, sometimes even a crow wrested from its last few minutes of sleep by the growing cacophony.

But eventually the owls nestle into their favorite woods, their conversation becoming more intimate, the angry noises from other denizens falling silent as the threat passes.  And for a while longer they will speak to each other, these two owls, the chat sometimes lasting only minutes and sometimes ending well after dawn.  Finally, though, it does end as the need for sleep overtakes them, and they become quiet, and their voices stop creeping through the trees and over the water.  Finally, in the cover of woodlands only a minute’s walk away, they drift off into a world of dreams.

Even as the owl voices become a memory, other voices fill the air.  A change of shift has begun.  Raccoons scamper back to comfortable places.  Armadillos trot along toward hidden burrows.  The bobcat slinks into the nearby trees where it rests so close to people yet unbeknownst to them.  Coyotes vanish across the floodplain into the riparian habitat that gives them daytime cover.  All the while, mockingbirds stretch their wings and lift up their voices, wrens and sparrows call into the morning, cardinals pierce the day with sharp choruses and jays offer up greetings to the sun that only now brightens the eastern horizon.

As if on cue, the plaintive call of a mourning dove drifts down from a nearby building, a lonely sound, a lament to my ears yet music to the doves.  They rise to perches this time of day, as if to survey the world from upon high, as if to take one downward glance to ensure all is well.

And then a changing of the guard takes place: the first call from a hawk.  It matters not whether it’s a Cooper’s or a red-tailed or a red-shouldered.  One of them will speak into the light of dawn, one of these citizens of the lake will put their stamp on the day, one of these hunters will shout into the air that the raptors of the night have taken their leave and the raptors of the day have risen in their stead.

This ceremony, this repeatable and predictable wonder called morning…  It stands as one of my favorite things, a marvel which can’t be captured in photos or words, a touch of splendor the universe offers to me as gift.  Though the faces change just as the seasons change, the drama plays out on a stage that seems meant only for my eyes.  So I take my front-row seat each morning, sitting in a silence unequaled by the world of the day, and I let the show unfold just as it has every day before, every year before.  Then I walk away from it a better man than I was when I first climbed out of bed.

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Strange though it may seem, that somewhat rambling tale stands as introduction to a new picture series.  In the last seven years I have taken 76,847 nature photos (everything before that has been lost due to technology problems coupled with my own shortsightedness).  I realize that number might sound obsessive, but I’m passionate about nature in a way that no doubt borders on, or long ago surpassed, being an obsession.  Having given up television many years ago, all the time I once wasted being a couch potato has translated into time outside, time walking, time sitting, time watching and listening, time enjoying the smell of spring flowers and the sound of buzzing insects…  More succinctly, I have spent all that time letting nature hold my hand.

In my quest to share what marvels I see, I constantly find myself unable to provide more than a glimpse of a whole, something too vast to contain.  So just as I began the “put on your faces” series to offer picture-centric posts that require little more thought than viewing an image or two, this new series, “A few of my favorite things,” will likewise be photo-centric and short on words.  Some posts will be thematic whilst others focus on a singular moment.  But each entry will be one of my favorite things, whether that be a species, an event, a scene, an experience, an encounter, or some of a million other ideas.  Perhaps it will be as simple as mushrooms in morning light, as beautiful and double-edged as catching critters when they’re getting to know each other in the biblical sense, or as singular as this photo, one of my favorite things:

A red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) flying directly overhead (2009_12_20_046506)

When a hawk, my medicine animal, acknowledges me with a glance as it swims the crystal river overhead.

[photo of a red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) taken at White Rock Lake]

Button buck

Found him grazing alongside the road in Aransas.  A couple of adult females with him (he was noticeably smaller than they were).  I figure one of them was his mother.

A young male white-tailed deer (a.k.a. whitetail deer; Odocoileus virginianus) grazing along the roadside (2009_12_13_044105)

Probably around six months old.  His antlers had barely broken the skin.

A young male white-tailed deer (a.k.a. whitetail deer; Odocoileus virginianus) grazing along the roadside (2009_12_13_044096)

Cute as the day was long.  And not too worried about me, but neither were his female companions.  Ah, the joy of living in a wildlife refuge…

A young male white-tailed deer (a.k.a. whitetail deer; Odocoileus virginianus) looking at me (2009_12_13_044098)

I crept up on them slowly thinking they’d flee, hence I was taking photos all the way.  Eventually I sat next to them watching, then I drove on by.  They moved a bit away from the road, but otherwise they paid little attention to me and focused on enjoying breakfast.

[white-tailed deer (a.k.a. whitetail deer; Odocoileus virginianus)]

‘The birding community’ hates birds: Pishing and Tape-Luring – Part 1

In Fiji’s Pacific Harbor, tourists hold their noses as dive boats pour hundreds of pounds of discarded fish scraps into the ocean.  This “chumming the water” as it’s called brings in sea life from miles around, including various kinds of sharks.  And sharks are precisely what the tourists have paid to see.  Yet biologists the world over state time and again that this constant activity will no doubt have an impact on normal shark behavior, and that the conditioning will lead the sharks and other wildlife into a downward spiral of abnormal activity.  But one thing the tourists pay for is results, and unloading all that smelly refuse into the tank definitely brings in the sharks.

But was has this to do with birds?  That answer rests in two activities: pishing and tape-luring.  Together or apart, they represent the birding community’s equivalent of chumming the water.

According to Wikipedia, a pish is “an imitated bird call (usually a scold or alarm call) used by birders and ornithologists to attract birds (generally Passerines).  The action of making the sound is known as pishing.  This technique is used by scientists to increase the effectiveness of bird diversity surveys, and by birders to attract species that they might not otherwise see.”

Before I get to tape-luring, let’s stop here for a minute.  Birders use pishing to attract species they might not otherwise see.  In other words, birders use this method to interfere with a bird’s natural behavior simply because the birder wants to check off a name on a life list, not because they want to observe avifauna in its natural beauty and behavior.  That’s important to note.  And while I won’t delve into active and passive birding in this post, I will cover it later, and at that time I’ll remind you of pishing and tape-luring, and their arbitrary use by birders who have no sound scientific reason to employ the methods.

As for tape-luring, this method rests comfortably alongside pishing but relies on technology as opposed to pursed lips.  Tape-luring is the use of prerecorded bird calls as means to bring birds out of hiding, such as a mating call, a threat call or a challenger call.  By it’s very definition, it’s nothing more complicated than pishing with batteries.

I will admit the lack of centralized, coherent research on these practices leads many to believe that no word means a good word (i.e., if science hasn’t definitively blasted the practices, they must indeed be acceptable and even endorsed).  Yet the issue is not a lack of research but instead a seemingly endless array of information tucked away in disparate places.  Where ornithologists and biologists use these measures for scientific study, pishing and tape-luring are clearly spoken of as highly effective methods.    Using the flawed logic of “if something is not expressly forbidden it is allowed,” the birding community has seized upon these acceptable scientific tools and made them an everyday part of their birding practice.  And therein rests the problem.

In 2001 Professor Daniel J. Mennill from the Biology Department of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, discussed a study involving black-capped chickadees which showed how tape playback impacted mating choices by females.  In essence, his findings suggested “that female black-capped chickadees eavesdrop on male-male singing contests and that the information females gain through eavesdropping plays an important role in shaping female reproductive decisions.”  Even more disturbing was that he found “that high-ranking males who lost song contests [against recorded songs] also lost paternity in their nests.”  And since “females prefer males who have a high-ranking position in the previous winter’s flock,” use of these methods in nonbreeding seasons could still influence mating and paternity.

The question of recorded sounds to lure avifauna for birders became a point of discussion on NEOORN, the e-mail discussion group on Neotropical bird biology.  When a question posted to the group asked for guidance on tape-luring and pishing in eco-tourism areas (the compiled discussion can be seen in this PDF), Dr. Jeffrey R. Lucas, a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Purdue University, said, “It is very common for us to instigate territory disputes in Carolina Chickadees (the birds that are the focus of almost all of our studies).  This is because responses that we elicit from one neighbor are usually reacted to by other neighbors.  So even if our playbacks, per se, are having no effect, the increased interaction between birds caused by frequent playbacks could potentially disrupt the social system. […] The point is that there are lots of ways to disrupt a social system through playbacks, and to do this in order to let some people see a rare bird seems a bit much.”

Dr. Bridget Stutchbury of York University, coauthor of Behavioral Ecology of Tropical Birds, offered this response: “I agree that playback should be discouraged, unless it is specifically for formal bird census and/or scientific research.  Recreational playbacks for birding can be harmful if done repeatedly to the same pairs of birds; and it’s unnecessary … ‘real’ birders will use their instincts and patience to track down the bird the natural way.”

Dr. Philip Taylor of Acadia University and Associate Chair of the Atlantic Cooperative Wildlife Ecology Research Network added that, “compounded by tons of people, or focused on particular individuals or pairs repeatedly, I’m sure that [tape playbacks] are disruptive or even detrimental.”

But this all sounds like professional conjecture sprinkled with scientific fact, right?  Besides Professor Mennill’s research, I mean.  Though no one would question the credentials of these experts, and no one would doubt their knowledge in this area, they all appear to be offering opinion—and no matter how much learning and expertise stands behind that opinion, posts in various birding forums discussing these remarks clearly show that “the birding community” mostly enjoys or is agnostic about the use of these methods, and many frown upon “purists” who would deny them their use.

So let’s return to the research: The peer-reviewed and published results (PDF) from the work of Professor Mennill and his team state that “two short playback sessions were sufficient to alter high-ranking, but not low-ranking, females’ perceptions of their partners’ status.”  Two short playback sessions.  Think about that.  The paper goes on to reveal that the impact of these encounters ripples through the community as a whole, a finding that supports “the idea that information may be transferred between individuals in a communication network rather than simply within a dyadic context [between two individuals] and provide a conceptual link between the attractive and repellent properties of male song where mate attraction and territory defense may be simultaneous functions of a common signal”—a finding that reinforces Dr. Lucas’s statement “that there are lots of ways to disrupt a social system through playbacks.”

Were we only discussing a single birder, perhaps the impact would be negligible.  But we aren’t talking about a single birder, nor even a few dozen or a few hundred.  In North America alone we are discussing many, many thousands of people.  For example, there are more than 1,600 people subscribed to the TEXBIRDS mailing list, and that list focuses only on Texas; also, at any one time more than 100 people are visiting and viewing the Dallas Audubon discussion forums, and those focus on Dallas and surrounding areas.  Accepting that not every birder is online and that not every birder knows of these resources, one need not be Stephen Hawking to extrapolate from those two examples precisely how large the birding community is on this continent, let alone around the world, and one need not be a mathematical genius to see how even a fraction of that number using these methods would equate to a very large group.

In closing, it is the last statement of the Mennill study with which I want to end this part of my discussion: “Finally, our results show that short playback sessions can have longlasting and far-reaching effects on individual fitness.”  Wait a minute!  How did we get from interfering with mating and social status to permanent impact on a bird’s health?  The simple answer rests in a single word: physiology.  Part 2 of “Pishing and Tape-Luring” will deal with research covering the health impacts on birds that stem directly from these two practices.

Part 2

[cross-posted to The Clade]