Month: August 2022 (Page 2 of 2)

The Manx Shearwater Conundrum

Manx Shearwater (courtesy of eBird and Jeremiah Trimble)

What does it mean to see something?

On January 22, 2006, Kobe Bryant scored 81 points in a basketball game against the Toronto Raptors. It was a home game for the Lakers, and the attendance was a near-capacity 18,997 people. But if you talked to people in L.A. in the years afterwards, approximately 341,676 of them claimed to have been at the game and watched the historic performance live. A similar but distinct phenomenon plagues the criminal justice system. Case after case after case involves the testimony of eyewitnesses who say they saw the defendant commit the crime charged. But research demonstrates the profound unreliability of eyewitness testimony and identifications. Some 20% of the exonerations of individuals sitting on death row involved mistaken witness identifications. A staggering 69% of individuals convicted for a crime but later exonerated by DNA evidence were incorrectly identified by witnesses as the perpetrator (check out this video about the case of Ronald Cotton). 

One of these situations involved an event that actually happened (Kobe Bryant really did score 81 points in a game in 2006) while the other involved events that didn’t occur (specific accused individuals did not commit a crime).  But in each, people said they saw something that they did not see.

Claiming to have seen things you didn’t see lurks in the birding world. Some of it is like the eyewitnesses in trials – cases of mistaken identification. This can be an innocent or optimistic error (think the Ivory-billed Woodpeckers sightings from 2004) or a deliberate falsehood. Other times, the false reports are not incorrect IDs of a bird seen in the field, but intentional inventions (see Swallowgate or this tale of a false big year).

These instances of claiming to see things that you didn’t see came to my mind after I went on a pelagic (open ocean) birding tour recently in San Diego county waters. It was a long, but productive, trip that I’ll recap soon. We saw Short-tailed Albatross and Cook’s Petrel and endangered Townsend’s Storm-Petrel and Long-tailed Jaeger and Craveri’s Murrelet and Arctic Tern and all kinds of other goodies. At no time during the trip, however, despite much and careful effort scanning flocks of Black-vented Shearwater, did anyone see a Manx Shearwater. As far as I know, no one even saw a bird that they thought might be a Manx Shearwater and snapped a photo to study later. Rather, after every pause at a flock of Black-vented Shearwaters, or awesome leader Paul Lehman would announce “looks like all Black-venteds.”

Where’s the Manx Shearwater?

A day after the trip, however, Paul Lehman sent out an email announcing that someone had looked through their pictures and discovered a Manx Shearwater amidst a flock of Black-vented Shearwaters. Like some kind of avian Waldo, the Manx had apparently been there when we were looking. But nobody spotted it. The interesting question to me becomes: should I (or anyone, for that matter) include the Manx Shearwater in an eBird report for that portion of the trip?

The main reason to report the Manx Shearwater is that it was, in fact, there. Since eBird is a data source tool of bird distribution, someone should indicate that a Manx Shearwater was present on this day at the particular location. But eBird is also a personal tool for maintaining a record of the birds I have seen in the world. And I didn’t *see* this bird. Even though it was there, and I almost certainly scanned the flock of shearwaters it was sitting in, I find it hard to justify including the Manx on my eBird report. I mean, it would be silly for me to visually scan a page of a Where’s Waldo book and declare that I saw Waldo if I never actually *saw* Waldo. That fact that he’s there, somewhere, and that I could find him at some later time if I looked more carefully at the picture, strikes me as quite different from me saying that I saw Waldo.

But perhaps it depends on the nature of an eBird report. When birders do a Big Day, for example, they often go out in groups of 3-4 birders, and any bird seen by one member of the group is a bird that goes on the day’s list. The eBird report is not, therefore, a list of the birds a single person saw, but I list of birds that the group saw. In this sense, all of us on that boat were a group of people looking at birds. And a bird seen by one is a bird seen by all. That’s true as far as it goes, but I’m not sure how far it goes. There’s still the little snag that nobody actually saw, much less identified, this bird during the trip. Or did they? For all I know, I saw the bird, but I didn’t see the key field marks that identified it as a Manx (it’s the white rump). I have certainly reported sightings of birds I could not identify in the field, but later discerned from pictures while sitting on my living room couch.

The shared eBird list that went out from the trip organizers did not include the Manx Shearwater. So far, a half dozen people (out of 68 on board) have added the Manx Shearwater to their eBird reports. Most of them–but not all–have uploaded a photo they took showing the bird. I’m not one of the people who added Manx Shearwater to the eBird report. I don’t think that makes me a more ethical person. It just reflects my conception of eBird reports as tallies of the birds I saw, with “saw” meaning a bird I consciously looked at in the field and either identified or puzzled over.

 

Sandhill Cranes Eat Mice

Sandhill Crane Torrey Utah

A Sandhill Crane in Utah tossing around a mouse

Birding South Central Utah

We just spent a week in southern Utah and, as usual, it was glorious. Our headquarters is the strategically located little town of Torrey, Utah. From there, it’s about 20 minutes to the red rock playland of Capitol Reef National Park (highway construction added some delays this year), 20-40 minutes to two different 10,000 foot mountains, and 20 minutes to some wide-open agricultural fields. That’s a big variety of habitat within striking distance. Despite the arid climate, there are creeks and rivers running here and there all around, great for cooling off and attracting birds. The place is just as amazing at night as it is during the day. Torrey is a designated International Dark Sky Community. Even when the moon is almost full (as it was while we were there), the stars at night are mindblowing. For an L.A. resident, it’s awesome to walk outside at night, look up, and straight-up see the Milky Way. Torrey is certainly off the beaten path, and much of the good stuff is down dirt roads. The beauty and solitude (especially compared to Zion and Bryce Canyon and Arches) more than make up for the extra effort it requires.   

The colors of southern Utah are incredible

I’ve been seeing Sandhill Cranes in the agricultural fields around Torrey since 2013. At first, I thought it was a pretty good find. eBird was in its infancy at the time, and this is not an area with a lot of eBird submissions, so there weren’t many reports at all. Moreover, the map in the Sibley guide we had indicated sightings were rare in southern Utah (the 2nd edition still shows it as rare).  The Nat’l Geographic Field guide indicated they aren’t in southern Utah. The Audubon Field Guide is the same. But they’re all wrong. There are Sandhill Cranes here every summer. At least, they’ve been there every July and August I’ve been there. One year I saw a group of 38 together in a field.

The inaccuracy of the distribution map for Sandhill Crane is not my point, though. The point is: beyond seeing Sandhill Cranes, I never spent much time watching them or learned anything about them. In nine years, I didn’t once pause to wonder what it was that Sandhill Cranes eat. All the Sibley Guide says is “picks food from ground.” If I’d thought about it, I’d have guessed that meant seeds and grains and bugs. That would have been a correct, but incomplete, answer. As we were driving by a field with two Sandhill Cranes, I noticed each one picking up some big, bulky item and tossing it back to the ground, and then pick it up again. I pulled the car over and zoomed in with my camera. Was it cow dung? Nope. This pair of Sandhill Cranes were tossing field mice around. I don’t know why this surprised me so much. Given their size, they must chow down for meals from time to time. And I’ve never blinked when a Great Blue Heron wolfed down a fish or frog, so why wouldn’t a big crane similarly go for big prey? I did some internet research, and Sandhill Cranes are omnivores who will eat snakes, lizards, fish, rodents, and small birds. That’s one of the things about birding – it’s so much more than ticking off a species and moving on. Spend some time watching, or happen by at the right time, and you see cool stuff.

I didn’t see any lifers on the Utah trip this year. It’s the 8th time I’ve been there during July-August, and I’ve pretty much exhausted any likely lifers that are around during that time of year.  But I did see a lot of familiar birds I don’t get a chance to see in Los Angeles. This included Pinyon Jay, Juniper Titmouse, Black-billed Magpie, Virginia’s Warbler, Northern Goshawk, Woodhouse’s Scrub Jay, Grace’s Warbler, and Cordilleran Flycatcher. A couple of surprises this year were an American Dipper on Sulphur Creek in Capitol Reef, a Williamson’s Sapsucker on Moulder Mountain, and a California Gull on a reservoir.

Despite a trio of trips to the high mountains, hoping to stumble into the path of the elusive Dusky Grouse, I struck out again this year. I did manage to visit some beautiful lakes, including the one below that had a lone Spotted Sandpiper. Access was quite easy on Thousand Lake Mountain – the roads are dirt, but well-maintained. Four-wheel drive isn’t necessary to get almost to the top. Boulder Mountain, on the other hand, is rougher going off the paved highway. To my delight, I didn’t see or hear a single ATV this year. They look like fun, but they’re loud, ruin the serene mood, and don’t help with bird-finding.  

At 10,000 feet on Thousand Lake Mountain

I’d love to visit this area during spring or fall migration, just to see what it’s like. Surrounded on all sides by mountains, I don’t imagine it’s much of a flyway. But who knows? Before this year, I would’ve said that Sandhill Cranes don’t eat mice. But they do. Maybe Torrey and Capitol Reef are great spots for migrants.

 

 

 

 

Newer posts »