A confusion of flycatchers

It's now almost June, and as the wheels of the migration turn, we get flycatchers. Now, flycatchers are famously hard to identify as to species, and the four (or is it three?) pictured above, all of whom showed up in my neighbor's yard today, are all confounding me in one way or another.  Start with the one on the left: what's your pleasure, willow or alder?  It didn't make a sound, so who knows?  But is it the same bird as flycatcher number four?  It could well be; the pictures were taken hours apart.

On to flycatcher number two.  I call it yellow-bellied, on the grounds that it is, sort of, but then why is its throat so white? Is that okay?  And it's the same problem with flycatcher number three.  I think it's a great crested flycatcher, but again, it's not very yellow down there, is it?

Meanwhile, I'm trying to put together an account of the warblers that went through in May.  There were still a few showing up today, so I'm entitled to a few days' grace period.  It's going to take me forever to deal with the photos anyway.

POSTSCRIPT:  Looking back at these pictures, at some months' remove, I'm now convinced that picture number one is of an eastern wood-pewee, and not an Empidonax flycatcher at all.  Meanwhile, number two does seem to be the yellow-bellied flycatcher, and number three the great crested.  I still can't make up my mind about picture number four.

Mexican wave

Many people have noted that the secondary migration is a bit late this year, like the warm weather itself.  But finally it looks as if the warblers have begun to pass through.  It would be a bit much to say the trees by the Mystic were lousy with them, but I did see a certain number this morning -- a yellow warbler, a palm warbler, and a small flock of yellow-rumped warblers, like the one above.

But in my yard, still nothing.  No sign of the catbirds, no chimney swifts.  I hope they show up before I begin to worry.

Interspecific Dating

It's hard taking pictures of birds, particularly when you're not very good at it. But sometimes things align so perfectly that you're able to come up with a shot of unbeatable illustrative power. In this instance, I was standing on a viewing platform in the Mystic (really, a disguised outfall pipe, adjacent to the Route 38 bridge), when a small flotilla of mallards heaves into view. Only one of them is not quite a mallard; instead, it's what happens when a mallard dips into a dating pool not its own. Specifically, it seems to be a hybrid between a mallard and an American black duck. T

And a week earlier, I saw another hybrid  -- quite clearly a different duck (look at the difference in the bill and the patterning of the head). It's getting to be kind of a thing, apparently.

Visitors from the Frozen North

We were recently treated to a visit from a species that breeds in Nanook-of-the-North country:  namely, the red-throated loon.  This pair, probably a plighted couple, has been right below the Amelia Earhart dam for a couple of days.  We tend to think of migration as a thing that brings us birds in the spring and sends them home in the fall.  But while we're "north" for all those birds in the tropics, we're also "south" for birds of the higher latitudes.  And like typical snowbirds, they might like somewhere a bit more balmy for the winter months.  The red-throated loon apparently ranges an enormous distance in its escape from the winter Arctic -- even as far as the Yucatan. By those lights, we're not all that far south.  And heck, lately we haven't been all that balmy.

Water Hazard

In the winter especially, I usually take a walk by the Mystic most Sundays.  Winter birding means waterfowl, and waterfowl means the Mystic.  So the Mystic offers plenty of birding interest.  But there's a disconcerting side to this.  As we well know, the Mystic is one of the most polluted and degraded rivers in Massachusetts.  And any creature like this swan that gets its breakfast, lunch and dinner from the muck at the bottom is likely to be the first to suffer for it.  This is actually the second dead swan I've seen this month.  I have no idea what's killing them, but it ain't predation.  Any bird taking fish or weeds from the water -- all the birds I spend my time watching, in other words -- are running some kind of risk.

But how can they know? It's obvious to us from the rubbish littering the banks and shallows, the conspicuous outfall pipes with their stern warnings, the industrial vistas on the lower river.  But to birds it's just water:  perfect for swimming in, perfect for hunting in, perfect for drinking.

Spring

Spring, and the birds are all a-twitter.  At least the sparrows and the house finches are.  My privet bush has been stripped nearly bare, and when this food of last resort is gone, that generally means winter is over, and something better is on offer.  I haven't seen any signs yet of migration, though I imagine some birds have already embarked on their march north.  Within a week or two, we should see some signs of it.

Here's something interesting that has nothing particularly to do with spring:  it's a ring-billed gull at the Blessing of the Bay Boathouse that looks like it's wearing a racing bib.

Well, it turns out that it's been banded as part of a DCR project to track the movements of gulls that congregate at (and foul) the Wachusett and Quabbin reservoirs.  The DCR has learned, by banding gulls and attaching GPS transmitters to some of them, that gulls roam over an extraordinarily wide area.  Here's one, for example, that spent a certain amount of time in Central and Eastern Massachusetts, before ranging south to New Jersey, and north to Lake Simcoe in Ontario.

And remember that other banded gull I posted about last year?  That one, I learned, from my friend Google, had been banded as a chick on Appledore Island, part of the Isles of Shoals off the coast of Maine.  The funny thing is that the research is conducted by a professor at Tufts, scarcely a mile away from where I saw that gull.  Clearly the bird had a score to settle.

The State of the List

I have recently spent some time -- actually, quite a lot of time -- reorganizing the species list.  Where before all the species were on one page, now they have been broken out into five separate pages (see the alphabetic tabs above).  As the number of species grew, it seemed to make more sense to break the list up.

I'm now up to 71 species (of which only five, parenthetically, are introduced species).  My next milestone is 100.   At maybe five new species a year, call it another six years.  I'm fairly certain this is achievable, though I may be said to have gotten most of the low-hanging fruit.  Still, there are a couple dozen birds that aren't the least bit rare in Eastern Massachusetts that I ought to be able to spot here in Somerville at some point.  A few more raptors, a handful of new warblers, some aquatic birds, the odd songbird, and voila.

By way of context, consider that there are just about 500 birds that the American Ornithologists' Union list as Massachusetts birds.  Consider that about a third of those are considered rare, very occasional migrants, or indeed extinct.    That leaves about 300-odd species.  Now, of that 300, a decent number -- maybe half, I'll say -- are found only in habitats we don't have in Somerville:  offshore waters, beaches, old-growth forests, marshes, swamps...

Well, actually, we have scarcely any habitat worth mentioning.  That's what gives this whole thing its blood- from-a-stone quality.  But that said, the stone has at least yielded something.  With a bit more squeezing, I bet I can get a few more drops.