Raven yanks another raven’s tail
The average adult raven is about 2.5 pounds and it’s hard to tell adults from juveniles. The below video shows a power struggle between ravens at a food source. At the very beginning you can see a raven on the far left grab another raven’s tail feathers with his beak and pull him or her away from the food. Another seems to join in. (By the way, if the video is blurry find the settings in the bottom right hand corner of the player and change it to a higher resolution. Youtube automatically chooses a low setting so it will download faster.)
After reading Ravens in Winter, a book by Bernd Heinrich, I’m inclined to believe that the commotion going on in the video has to do with a power struggle (to gain access to the food) between the juvenile birds and the adults. According to Heinrich, adults are usually silent at carcasses (dead animals in the wild), and juveniles are very noisy. The juveniles “yell” at kills and make a commotion, possibly to attract more juveniles to the kill, in order to compete with the adults and gain access to the food.
Heinrich “proves” through observation and careful note-taking that ravens actively recruit other ravens to food piles. He speculates, after studying raven behavior for many years, that this recruitment is not necessarily altruistic, or done in order to get the favor back some day. Instead, it is probably related more to “gaining or maintaining access to the food than to sharing the wealth.”
Juveniles actively recruit, in order to overwhelm by sheer numbers, the adults at the carcass, so that the adults will give up defending the carcass, which they do when they are just too outnumbered.
So if we can extend this power struggle at carcasses in the field to city food (trash) then it’s possible the squawking raven in the video, the one being pulled from the food by his or her tail feathers, is likely a juvenile, being bossed around by the adults, who are not as vocal.
I strongly encourage any bird lover to read Ravens in Winter. This bird that I see nearly every day of my life is actually quite mysterious and Heinrich helps us understand their possible and likely motivations.
Thanks for reading! Happy New Year!
Black-Capped Chickadee Beak Deformity
I made this little animation to show how this poor chickadee was being bothered by its beak deformity. Every so often it would rub its beak against the edge of the bird feeder like this. It appeared relatively healthy so it must have been able to eat satisfactorily, but apparently this deformity causes it to be obsessive about trying to scrape off the excess beak.
Bird Congregation
I don’t think this is a very common sight on the coastal plains of northern Alaska (or anywhere?), but as my husband drove in to Prudhoe Bay last spring, he spied this unusually large gathering of various birds.
The rough-legged hawk and raven seem to be acting as sentries over the vast flocks, but they are watching for sinister purposes.
Yes, watching carefully.
Sure enough, a hawk has gotten herself a meal.
But really, how can you blame her?
A short-eared owl perches nearby.
Kind of hard to believe that little twig can hold him up. He must be all fluff.
And life goes on….
Butterfly Exits Cocoon
I imagine that most people who like birds don’t mind butterflies, so here’s a slideshow I created from photos taken last summer of a butterfly leaving a cocoon. For over a week I kept the camera and its time lapse device set up outside, through heat and rain, waiting until it broke out of its temporary home… then the actual event lasted only a few minutes! And because of memory card limitations I could only set the camera to take a photo every 30 seconds – I wish it could’ve been a shorter interval – but I’m still pleased with the few shots I got.
I don’t know the specific name of this butterfly but I’ve definitely seen it before.
After the butterfly left the cocoon it crawled into some potato plant leaves and you can see that it dripped a dark fluid that looks like blood (but of course isn’t). Apparently it’s a waste product that doesn’t come from their wings as I had first assumed but from their abdomen, being released after chrysalis, the cocoon stage.
The butterfly never opened its wings for me so I didn’t get that photo. And I wish I knew the name of this butterfly! Please comment if you have any idea. Thanks and I hope everyone is having a terrific summer!
Redpoll: Adapted to Gorging
These redpolls, and many more, are coming to our feeder lately in droves. I’ve started putting seed out one or two times a day instead of letting them gorge themselves at the feeder nonstop. I don’t want to test it out but I would be willing to bet they could empty the entire contents of the feeder in only one day. (It’s on the small side but can still fit at least a quart jar’s worth of sunflower hearts.)
It’s unbelievable how much they can eat. My guess as to how many birds visit the feeder per day is perhaps 30 to 40, though it could be upwards of 100 or more stopping by once a day (or less often).
Actually, they aren’t eating most of the seed. Apparently they store it in their “esophageal diverticulum” and regurgitate it later to eat in peace.
These two”on-alert” fine fellows might actually be females (lack of red on their chests).
Once late May and June arrive, the birds practically disappear, so even if they are acting like little piggies at the trough right now, we still enjoy them!
A chubby Redpoll can’t stop eating
A few years ago a chubby Redpoll visited our feeder.
This antique dish had broken and I couldn’t part with it, so I put seed in it, and the redpoll adopted it. He (or she) sat right in it and ate and ate and ate. Like his full switch never got flipped.
He moved quite slow. My husband and I figured that he was missing some kind of instinct or characteristic that gives birds their fast-twitch, jumpy nature. Probably something that they need to survive.
He’s puffed up too because of the chilly weather, but this bird was quite unusual in that he was fatter, slower, and never flew away intermittently like the other birds. He was totally content to eat continuously, rarely looking up. This was the very last photo I took and out of at least 20, this is the only time I got him looking up.
After watching hundreds or even thousands of birds at the feeder over the years, this little guy’s behavior was profoundly different than all the others.
A Snow Bunting at Pictured Rocks
I saw a snow bunting once before, in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. In its summer garb. But this one I spied on a gravel road in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in Michigan in its winter plumage. My husband and I were in the middle of a 6 week long road trip that started and ended at our home in Fairbanks, Alaska, but that took us through 4 Canadian provinces and at least 14 states. And of all the amazing times we had this snow bunting was actually pretty special because it was one of the few close encounters with birds that I had over the whole 6 weeks.
Michigan’s scenery, little did I know, is astoundingly beautiful! I had no idea there were sand dunes in the Midwest! Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (on left) is a must-see part of North America.
As is Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore on the
Upper Peninsula of Michigan. You can see red-orange sandstone that is 500 million years old in the photo on the right. This cliff has been beautifully sculpted by the waters of Lake Superior. The interesting part is that even though the rock that makes up the landform is hundreds of millions of years old, the cliff itself that you see jutting out into the water is only a few thousands of years old. No landform around this area could be older than 12,000 years old because that’s when glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age. But this land is rising. It has risen far enough up since then, and been sculpted by the forces of erosion, to give us a spectacular view of rock formations that used to be buried.
So as my husband and I are visiting this most scenic of places, this snow bunting is pick pick picking at bits of something along a gravel road, letting me get closer and closer with my camera.
He must have just arrived from more northerly climes, smartly getting busy eating as many seeds and insects that he can before the coming winter. Snow buntings spend the summer in Alaska and northern Canada and before winter fly to the Midwest of America, southern Canada, and the coastlines of Alaska. Males have darker heads in the winter and more black on their wings, like this little guy.
I know all this about snow buntings now because I have my handy birding books around me. But when I was taking the photos I thought maybe it was a sparrow of some kind. To my delight, when I finally got home and looked it up I found out it was a snow bunting which is not a sparrow. I would have never recognized it because the one I saw in Prudhoe Bay was in it’s June breeding plumage which is mostly white. Moral of the story: take at least one birding book with you on your road trip!
Chipmunks at Athabasca Falls (not a bird to be seen)
My husband and I are presently traveling from the north of the United States – Alaska – to the south of it – North Carolina. I have gotten some unbelievable photographs of wildlife, including a close encounter with a grizzly bear that was digging up roots alongside the Alaska Highway (you can see them here).
Jasper and Banff National Parks in Alberta, Canada were spectacular. Surrounded by sunlit mountains, we drove 
through the parks with our mouths agape, peaks above us and streams meandering through valleys below us. And though we saw barely a creature but tourist’s dogs in the parks, I did catch a few up close photos of scurrying chipmunks at Athabasca Falls in Jasper.
Canadians definitely have their national parks figured out, if these two are representations of them as a whole.
Athabasca Falls had wooden stairways interspersed between towering rocks – sometimes you have to duck to or go single-file to get through. Lots of concrete walkways
in different viewpoints of the falls, accessed by sun dappled paths with views of game trails through the moss. A peaceful and necessary stop, and in our case at least, not too crowded.
The only large wild mammal we saw in the parks was Bighorn Sheep. A group of 6 or 7 were nibbling something on the rocks (my husband says they were ingesting minerals from the rocks). The chipmunks were also nibbling, moving with rocket speed over the concrete and moss, not too scared of us big hulking humans except perhaps to be caught underfoot.
So, no birds this time. The only ones I’ve managed to capture with my camera are swans and ravens, back up in the Yukon Territory. But that’s a post for another day. Until then, best wishes to you all…
Don’t forget to click for larger images! 
Why did the Lesser Yellowlegs cross the road?
To lead me away from her nesting site most likely!
It’s not too hard to find Lesser 
Yellowlegs in interior Alaska during the summer months if you get a ways out of town near some water. And you’ll know you found one when you hear that mind-numbing “TU TU TU” alarm call. (You can hear it here.)
The Greater Yellowlegs – a larger version of this bird – also visits Alaska in the spring and summer, but doesn’t come this far north. In the winter, Yellowlegs sandpipers can be found in Mexico and the coastal and southern edge of the U.S.
They eat aquatic insects, snails, & small fish, nest in depressions in the ground in bogs and treeless tundra, and give birth to 4 eggs which when hatched are precocial which means they can fend for themselves as soon as their natal down is dry.
It’s hard to believe, but people used to hunt sandpipers like these! These skinny little birds were game species and apparently market hunters nearly wiped out many types of shorebirds before they were protected in the early 1900s. Thank goodness!!!
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Black-Capped Chickadee Beak Deformity
First seen in the winter of 1991-92, Black-Capped Chickadee beak deformities are now quite common, according to the Alaska Science Center. To date, there have been over 2100 reports of chickadee beak deformities in Alaska, and only 31 outside of Alaska. In the photo above, you can see that the chickadee’s beak is at least twice as long as it should be, and the bottom part is crossed and curved up.
The Northwestern Crow suffers from this malady as well, with an astounding 17% of adult birds in Alaska exhibiting some level of beak deformity (as opposed to 6-10% of adult Black-Capped Chickadees).
Other birds with reported beak deformities are the Black-Billed Magpie, Red-Breasted Nuthatch, and Stellar’s Jay – although none of these reports come anywhere close to the high number of sightings of the Black-Capped Chickadee. Other species of chickadee have been seen with the problem too but they number under 10 total. Whatever the source of the problem, Black-Caps are especially vulnerable to it.
This map (from alaska.usgs.gov) shows locations of Black-Capped Chickadee beak deformity sightings. At first they were centered around Bristol Bay and the Mat-Su Valley but they soon spread to Fairbanks (where I live) and elsewhere. There are plenty of sightings in remote locations so the problem does not exist only in populated areas.
The poor creatures with deformed beaks often have a very hard time eating – it’s actually kind of amazing that they do get by at all. The one on the right kept rubbing the elongated portion of its beak on the wood of our feeder, as if attempting to rub it off. No doubt feeders and even garbage help to keep them alive but mortality is undoubtedly higher among them. Normal preening is greatly disrupted. And though many of them do find a mate and breed, fewer eggs hatch to a pair in which the female is deformed and fewer young survive when the male is deformed.
Possible causes are contaminants, nutritional deficiencies, disease, genetic abnormalities and parasites. Read more about those at http://alaska.usgs.gov/science/biology/landbirds/beak_deformity/causes.html
On the left is an example of a normal beak.
Say’s Phoebe on Rosie Creek Trail
I spotted this sunbathing beauty near Rosie Creek Trail outside of Fairbanks in August 2009.
Maybe it was migrating south. Or maybe it was spending the last couple of days surveying its territory, waiting for a Crane Fly to wander by. Either way, doesn’t it look more majestic than its humble 4 or 5 inches?
The Say’s Phoebe is named after Thomas Say, a naturalist who named hundreds of new species at the beginning of the 1800s. He identified over 1,000 species of beetle alone, and over 400 other insects. He saw and described the Say’s Phoebe during an expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1819.
But isn’t it kind of silly to associate this enigmatic little creature to a man from the 1800s? And what did Native Americans call the Say’s Phoebe? … What is in a name anyway?
… Alas, we must communicate.
You might have noticed that this spruce tree has a lot of cones. Apparently, the year after a conifer goes through a period of stress – such as drought – the tree produces a crop of cones that is much larger than normal. The dark ones are immature.
This is a Black Spruce (there are no naturally occurring pine trees in interior or northern Alaska though spruce trees are often mistaken for them). Black Spruce is looked at with disdain by a lot of Alaskans because it represents unbuildable wetlands fraught with frost lenses and mucky tundra.
But this mucky tundra is the Say’s Phoebe’s living room for the summer. It spends its years flying between an arctic paradise and a tropical paradise. To the Say’s Phoebe, this fair-sized Black Spruce (12-15 feet tall) is the perfect perch for hunting mosquitos, unbuildable wetlands and all.
An Ode to Summer
That’s what this blog is, an ode to summer. Alaskans worship summer and in January or February we start getting a bit disenchanted. So this bird blog is self-administered therapy. A reminder that the darkness and frigid temperatures will subside.
This blog is therapy in another way too…a way to take my mind off of things like politics, greed, pollution, disaster. Stuff like that. For some reason I believe that we should pay attention to the bad stuff in the world as much as the good stuff. So you can imagine, I need a bird blog to take my mind off of it.
The first bird I’m going to blog about is a flying squirrel… yeah, not exactly a bird but, you see, it’s my spirit animal. 
Supposedly seeing a flying squirrel is somewhat rare, but the darn things just won’t leave me alone!
All spring, summer and fall they frequent my bird feeder. For several months in the summer they are as regular as clockwork, arriving about 1am and gorging themselves on sunflower seed hearts. I say “they” because I have no way of telling if it’s the same squirrel or several different ones. Only one time did I see two at once, making a ruckus in their frantic search for the feeder that had been moved to a different location. Since then, my husband and I have nixed the bird feeder and just regularly put a small amount of seed out on the deck railing. No need for gorging since sunflower hearts are not a natural food for chickadee or squirrel.
These photos were taken May 29, 2010 in the wee hours of the morning. It hardly even gets dark at that time of year, although I did I have to lighten the photos somewhat.
The real clincher that convinced me the flying squirrel is my spirit animal is that one jumped on my face inside of my father’s home. Yes, that’s right, on my face, inside a house.
My father lives in Minnesota and during a visit, as I was walking into the bathroom, I noticed the cat was looking at something and twitching its tail. Not something that would alarm me. But as soon as I entered the bathroom a small furry thing landed on my face, blocking my vision. My very first thought was, how did the cat get on my face!? Almost immediately it jumped off, landing on the floor and scurrying away. (The flying squirrels down there are about half the size of the one pictured here.) My cries of alarm brought family members and even though my father said to kill it, my husband captured it and set it loose outside. My hero.
Turns out, flying squirrels get inside my Dad’s house on a regular basis. One was even found dead. It landed on a cactus and got stuck there and died. Who knows how long it was there before they found it. True story. That dusty museum has a lot of stories, but never before had a flying varmint landed on someone’s face. (Yes, it did scratch my face just enough to draw 3 tiny drops of blood, after which being wiped off you couldn’t tell where they had been. And no, I didn’t seriously consider rabies shots.)
Such an intimate encounter is bound to pique the curiosity so I did some research on the flying squirrel. Little had I known it eats truffles, a type of fungus, as its main food, found in the ground and around rotting trees. Lichen, insects, buds, flowers, scavenged meat, berries and tree sap are other dining options when they can be found. They often cache lichen and seeds when supplies are scarce, and steal red squirrel caches when the poor saps are hibernating.
These 2 photos were taken July 24, 2011. You can click on the one on the left and it will enlarge quite a bit.
Flying squirrels do not hibernate and are active all winter, though they do enter torpor, a deep sleep, as long as it’s about 40 degrees below zero F or colder. They often share nests, most commonly 2-5 individuals who suffer the frigid cold huddled together inside tree cavities in summer or witch’s brooms in winter. Witch’s brooms are dense snarls of branches that occur when a fungus attacks spruce trees. Squirrels hollow them out and line them with moss, lichen, feathers or anything they can find that could make their slumber that much more comfy. 
Sometimes I feel like I enter torpor in the winter too. I defintely sleep more when its 40 degrees below zero or colder. I’m nocturnal and prefer small groups or being alone, just like the flying squirrel. I identify with the little guys, and am fascinated by them. So it’s decided, the flying squirrel is my spirit animal.
And now, on to the birds!
