by Gene Walz
Now, the possible Lazuli Bunting is another story. Conflicted, you head home, get on the internet, check your manitobabirds emails, and discover that someone else has already seen it and put out a notice. Oh, well. You won’t get credit for discovering it (not that this is tallied in St. Peter’s book of good deeds and will get you a heavenly seat next to St. Francis of Assisi!). But at least you were correct in your identification.
Other members of the Winnipeg birding community flock to the Lazuli location. They see it and grumble. Disputes arise. After several days and some good, clear photos, it’s decided that the bird is in fact a hybrid: a Lazuli Bunting crossed with an Indigo Bunting. No wonder you had so much trouble identifying the bird!
Advice-givers tell you that you must go birding on your own in order to get better. That’s a given! But sometimes when you’re birding alone, you find yourself wishing that somebody, anybody, was right next to you to help you confirm that what you think you’re seeing is actually what’s there.
A Greylag
and Other Wild Goose Chases
If you are at all interested in finding rare birds, you know that luck is often a factor in spotting them. For birds, the sky is literally the limit. They can flit into an area and skip out in seconds. You’re driving along a country road and suddenly a big, grey bird flashes past. You slam on the brakes, grab your binocs, and get a good look just before it disappears over the trees. A Gyrfalcon, the largest of the falcons and the toughest to find. Great!
For strays or vagrants—birds not native to a particular environment—a rare sighting depends even more on luck. Bird-luck.
Mockingbirds are especially undependable. Aptly named, they seem to mock my every attempt to find them, even when I get to the place where they’ve been spotted only minutes before. It took me years—and more than a dozen false alarms—before I added them to my Manitoba list.
A Scissor-tailed Flycatcher spotted by others in Portage la Prairie many years ago almost drove me around the bend. On four different occasions, I drove out to Portage at about the speed of Vin Diesel in The Fast and the Furious movies. Four wild goose chases. More than twenty other birding friends were lucky enough to see it—many of them on their first try, no less. I never saw it. Still haven’t, even though I recently chased after one east of Winnipeg. The birding gods were against me.
Likewise, the Black-throated Sparrow that showed up in a farmyard just off Highway 75 in St. Jean Baptiste a few years back. It was reported by the farm-owners on a Friday night. I couldn’t get there on Saturday when this adventurer from the southwest USA seemed to bask in the constant attention of dozens of excited birders. By the time my friend John and I got there early Sunday morning, it was not to be found. We scoured the trees and bushes in the area and kept a watchful eye on the places it frequented the day before. No luck. Eight or ten more birders showed up. No help from them either, except that we were all separately trying to will the bird to return.
After three hours of futile waiting, I knew I had to get back to Winnipeg. But here’s where birding superstition sets in: we were all reluctant to go, all waiting for someone else to leave first. It was a game of birding chicken. The fear is: as soon as the first impatient birder leaves, the bird will show up. John and I waited past the point of patience. But we wouldn’t give up. Finally, someone else had had enough and decided to leave. We all tensed and looked around with extra special care. The bird was still a no-show. Then another couple left. And then we did. About a dozen others had followed us to the St. Jean Baptiste farm that day. As a friend of mine says, we were all bad-lucky.
As frustrating as those non-encounters were, they don’t match the frustration of finding a dead rare bird. John once found a freshly killed Barn Owl west of Winnipeg; there are very few records of live ones here. An ex-Barn Owl is uncountable. A newly dead Black-legged Kittiwake found, I believe, in the parking lot at Stony Mountain Institution, is a local legend. Ex-kittiwakes are also uncountable, even still-warm ones. The reasoning: maybe someone kidnapped the kittiwake, drove to Stony Mountain, got tired of the bird, strangled it, and left it in the parking lot. Far-fetched, but enough to rule it out as a live sighting. Birders are as honest and honourable as nuns. Far better than some amateur golfers—five shots to the green, three putts = six on the scorecard!
Finding a living rare bird and having it declared un-countable is even more frustrating. A Greylag once led me on a real wild goose chase. Well, maybe not wild. And that was the problem.
Manitoba is not a goose-free zone. It’s on a major north-south migration super highway. Upwards of 200,000 geese fly in and out every spring and fall. To be at Oak Hammock Marsh when wave after wave of them wing in and then wiffle down onto the open water is a sight to behold. Magnificent! Stirring! (To be in St. Vital Park or on a provincial golf course after the geese use them as biffies is less inspiring.)
Most of the geese are Snows and Canadas, with regular sightings of Ross’s and Greater White-fronts, and, much more rarely, Brants. And never, ever Greylag Geese.
So, when a notice was posted of a Greylag Goose at a retention pond in an east Winnipeg industrial park, I was there in a flash.
The Greylag is native to Europe and Asia. Although other Eurasian Geese are slowly making their way to North America, only one wild (and banded) Greylag has ever been officially accepted as a trans-Atlantic migrant. All the other Greylags have been classified as released or escaped domestic geese or hybrids. They’re good-eatin’ and therefore common farmyard geese, as I found out later.
Rudolf Koes, originally from Greylag country and now one of the best birders in Canada, had a close look at this bird. “It is too large for a pure Greylag,” he declared. “The neck is too thick, the bill too high, and it has the droopy fold of skin and feathers between the legs which is seen in domestic birds.” In other words, it was a domestic bird, an escapee, probably a hybrid; ergo, it was ineligible for lists.
Well, maybe for primary, official lists. But I keep a supplementary list, begun when an escaped Chukar, probably raised at a nearby game-bird farm, hung around the University of Manitoba campus fourteen years ago. (I checked my list.) I saw it often, pointing out, mischievously, to whomever was nearby, “This is a phantom bird; it can’t be counted. It doesn’t really exist.”
Besides, I’m actually less interested in the “ticking” than in the sightings of rare birds, no matter what their provenance.
Birding is about wonderment. With the Greylag, I keep wondering: where did it come from? How did it get here? Where did it go? What tempter or temptress lured it from its comfy but doomed barnyard existence? Did it suddenly sing, like Daffy Duck, “I mutht go where the wild goothe goeth?” How did it manage to keep up with the Canada Geese vee-squad it joined up with? Will it find another farm far south of here in the Canadas’ wintering grounds and settle there for the year-round warmth? Or will it bond with the Canadas and fly back north in the spring? I’ll probably never know.
Burrowing Owls
A Trip to FortWhyte Alive
One cold winter when my older grandson, Torsten, was three, he came to visit me here in Winnipeg from his home in Switzerland. Nyon, the town where he lives in Switzerland, is pretty mild in the winter. Winnipeg winters ain’t mild! The Swiss Alps and the Jura get piles of snow but Nyon is on Lake Leman (aka Lake Geneva); snow there usually lasts a day or two before it melts away. Torsten barely understands what a real winter is all about.
I took him to the required Winnipeg sight-seeing spots: the Children’s Museum, the Manitoba Museum, Manitoba Theatre for Young People, Tim Horton’s (they still had the apostrophe then), and, of course, the zoo. It was minus twenty-something, but at the zoo you can warm up in the inside exhibits and race through the frigid air between them, glancing quickly at whatever hardy animals are forced to stay outside. We stayed longest at the outside bird enclosures. Raptors and owls—big birds, the kinds that kids can see and m
arvel at even with frost on their eyelids.
We spent the longest time, maybe thirty-one seconds, at the “Snow” Owl (his term) cage. He was fascinated by their bright yellow eyes and their large, dangerous talons. I pointed out the difference between the males and females—males almost entirely white, females with black streaks. Then we raced back inside to warm up.
As the circulation slowly returned to our feet, I told him more about the “Snow” Owls. They eat arctic rodents called lemmings and when there aren’t enough lemmings to go around, they migrate south to Manitoba. I think I may have told him about the owls in the Harry Potter books and movies. (Confession: I’ve only read one of the books and sat through only one movie.) Six years later, my grandson has now seen all of the Harry Potter movies and is slowly making his way through JK Rowling’s books. So he’s hooked on owls (his favourite one is, I think, Harry’s “Snow” Owl, Hedwig), though he’s probably forgotten I showed him his first live one.
When we left, it occurred to me that I was coddling the kid. So the next day I bundled him into every layer of winter clothing I could find, including scarf, toque, and ski-mask, and we set out for FortWhyte Alive, a former quarry which is now a nature reserve in west Winnipeg.
Our first stop at FortWhyte was the buffalo pasture. I know, I know, there are no “buffaloes” in North America. They are bison. But like many three-year-olds, my grandson had trouble with his r’s and l’s. I just loved to hear him say buffayoes!
This 500-acre buffayo enclosure is a far cry from the crummy zoos of my childhood. Durand Eastman Park in Rochester, New York had a “zoo” but it was really an animal jail. It was in a deep gully about forty by twenty yards with a high fence that kept a couple of elk, a handful of skinny deer, and one miserable, shaggy, old bison. He was the first live one I ever saw—the first one that was not on the back of a US nickel. If you stomped your feet and uttered a few deep woofs, that testy, old bison would charge the rickety fence. We would wait until some unsuspecting zoo visitors (usually young women) approached the fence, then stomp and woof. The bull would charge, and we’d see how high-pitched their screams would get and how fast they could run. Ah, you may think, a sad case of runaway teenage hormones! But most of the crew were older than forty. Testosterone freaks!
It’s said that there were once up to 75 million plains bison in North America. By the middle of the nineteenth century, only about half of them remained. Still, there were enough that when Sitting Bull left Canada to surrender to the US army in 1881, he rode through a single, continuous herd for nine straight days.
Millions of bison, the ninth largest land animal in the world, used to graze the prairies of Manitoba. But size and numbers could not save them from people bent on simple slaughter. In 1895, Ernest Thomson Seton, the great Manitoba naturalist, could count only 800 bison in the province. Shortly thereafter, their numbers dwindled to 500 on the entire continent.
Now, there are more than twice that number in our province (some of them actually wild) and over half a million in North America. But their numbers owe more to bison ranching than to conservation. Of course, I didn’t mention any of this to my grandson. Well, I did mention that we were lucky to see them because long ago people slaughtered millions and millions of them and they became so rare they almost became extinct. When he asked me what extinct meant, I explained and then cut my lecture short. I have to constantly resist the urge to overpower him with facts, to blurt out everything I know or almost know in one grandfatherly gush. I just let him take it all in. Wonder at it and maybe worry.
Bison are truly impressive beasts. When my grandson and I visited, it was a blustery cold day with almost a foot of snow on the ground. Great snorts of breath blasted from their nostrils, and they rooted for grass by shagging away the snow with their great triangular heads. I could see why their heads hang lower than almost any other animal. They don’t have to bend down to eat, having evolved to graze efficiently on prairie grasses. Too bad there’s so little left.
At FortWhyte Alive, I got my grandson to stomp his little feet and woof, as I did as a skinny, teenaged, road-gang member back in Rochester. But these particular buffayoes paid no attention to us.
Then we raced inside to see a stuffed buffayo up close (the ones outside were fifty metres away). We stomped our feet at it too, but it didn’t move a muscle either. Then we strolled back into the Interpretive Centre to look at all the taxidermied birds and beasts on display.
Torsten was most impressed, and a bit scared, by the stuffed polar bear, the cougar, the wolf and the black bear. I had to reassure him that he was quite safe because none of them had eaten the stuffed tom turkey; they didn’t seem interested in a potential meal that would have been much tastier than him. I quickly steered him to the walls of mounted birds. Lots of owls, big and small, from a Screech Owl and a Saw-whet Owl to a Great Grey and a Snowy. I read the plaques to identify them, but that’s all. No lessons in distinguishing one from another. Although they look faded and weather-beaten, dead birds like this are better educators than photos, drawings, and even movies. A kid gets a better idea of size and dimensions. He can understand feathers and fur by touching them gently (when no one’s looking).
From the stuffed owls we made a bee-line, or an owl-line, for the newly opened Burrowing Owl reclamation space. The scurrying prairie dogs quickly captured his attention. Who isn’t amused by these funny little creatures? It took a while and some hints from me for Torsten to discover the owls. One was standing in a hole. A burrow, I pointed out, like a tunnel; he’d never heard the word. That’s where they live, underground. Then the owl seemed to notice us. It tilted its head sideways and gave that little shimmy-shake that Burrowing Owls do to get a three-dimensional view. This proved more amusing than the prairie dogs to Torsten.
We talked more about owls on the way home. I told him that I once could see Burrowing Owls just outside Winnipeg. Now there are hardly any in Manitoba. They’re so rare that their whereabouts are a closely guarded secret. People do that, sometimes unwittingly, to animals like the bison and the Burrowing Owl: take them right to the edge of extinction. Maybe FortWhyte will raise enough Burrowing Owls to re-stock the province. Maybe when he’s my age, he can just drive out to LaSalle as I did and see them in the wild.
I’ve since bought Torsten some binoculars and a bird book, but I’m not trying to make him a birder or an ornithologist. I’d just like it if he comes to appreciate the outdoors and not get stuck gaping at a cell phone or a laptop all day long. Angry Birds may be a captivating video game, but it’s nothing compared to seeing live birds and animals. I hope he resists the urge to become a slave to technology and is more comfortable in nature, alert to its liveliness, power, and beauty.
Apapanes
and Other Hawaiian Birds
Hawaii is not the place to go if you’re intent on adding to your life-bird list. There just aren’t that many unique native birds left on the islands.
Since “civilization” reached Hawaii about 200 years ago, over thirty native birds have gone extinct. It has the worst record for extirpation of any state. Beyond the effects of colonization, recent evidence seems to suggest that more species were killed off by the original islanders than was originally suspected, since bird plumage played a huge role in their costumes and decoration. Additionally, avian tuberculosis devastated a lot of the Hawaiian native birds, and since then, well-intentioned people from various continents who have brought along their caged or neighbourhood birds and then set them free to displace native birds have caused many of the problems. Tourism and rampant development also hasn’t helped much.
When a friend and I were in Maui in January, 2013, I did see about three dozen species of birds. But most of them I had seen or could have seen elsewhere: cardinals, manakins, white-eyes, the usual introduced species, some common shorebirds and water birds from the Americas, and others. There was even a colony of Peach-faced Lovebirds thriving in south Kihei—so n
ew to Maui that they aren’t yet mentioned in any of the bird guides for the island.
I take delight in finding and identifying all kinds of birds, but there’s something disappointing in seeing non-tropical birds on tropical islands. Especially if they are contributing to the demise of the native birds, the endemics—rare birds you can’t see anywhere else. Invasive species are often bullies; they take over the habitats and food sources of endemics.
One of the last places to see Maui endemics is in Hosmer’s Grove, a canyon near the top of the extinct volcano Haleakala on the east side of the island. Haleakala is the mountain that tourists visit at dawn to watch the sun rise over the water. We drove through the clouds to get to Hosmer’s Grove. The air was crisp and fresh with the smell of flower blossoms on the trees.
In two separate visits, I managed to get long, satisfying views of such rare native species as the Apapane (a brilliant red honeycreeper), Amakihi (a yellow-green honeycreeper), Alauahio (similar enough to the Amakihi to make identification a challenge), and I’iwi (like the Apapane but with black wings and a huge, curved bill). They’re all bright, active, wonderful bird finds. For me, part of the pleasure of seeing them is the challenge of learning to pronounce and then savour their musical, Hawaiian names.
But I missed the Kiwikiu (Maui Parrotbill) and Akohekohe (Crested Honeycreeper), two high-priority target-birds. A huge disappointment. They are becoming increasingly rare, rapidly disappearing on the island and struggling to survive.
Nearby I found several rare NeNe (Hawaiian Geese) and in the shallows at the Kealia Pond National Wildlife Refuge I easily spotted Alae Kea (Hawaiian Coots), Koloa Maoli (Hawaiian Ducks), and many Ae’o (Hawaiian Stilts). They may sound exotic, but they look pretty much like their North American counterparts, so they’re not all that special. In fact, the Hawaiian Ducks were re-introduced to Maui after hybridizing with some not-so-very-rare-at-all Mallards.