March Roars Like a Nuthatch

Last night’s early spring snowstorm stirred things up a bit but instead of producing the feeding frenzy we had in February after a heavy snow, things got a lot quieter. Are the birds in bug-eating mode? It seems like they are. We spend yesterday afternoon scanning Lee Kay ponds, hoping to find a reported Black-necked Stilt. No luck. However there was plenty of bug-eating birds, specifically Bank, Cave and Tree Swallows!  A couple of male Yellow-headed Blackbirds and Double-crested Cormorants also signaled the arrival of spring–but not Stilts.

Sugarhouse Park was particularly quiet today, although the Common Goldeneye first sighted more than a week ago remained in the pond. Despite the abundance of trees in the park, passerines are hard to come by, especially in winter. It seems like they’re would be a variety of species similar to those found at the area cemeteries, specifically Salt Lake and Mt. Olivet, where we regularly see and hear Nuthatches, Cross-bills and occasionally, Pine Siskin.  That changed today. I heard and saw a Red-breasted Nuthatch while walking in the southeast corner of the park. A great way to end March.

 

The Sound and the Flury

Visit the coast of main you may find Atlantic Puffin. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology describes them this way:

A natty black-and-white seabird with a huge, multicolored bill, the Atlantic Puffin looks like a clown of the sea. It breeds in colonies on rocky islands in the North Atlantic and winters at sea.

No one would confuse the Puffin with any other bird in the area. We need to travel to Yellowstone, and with luck, we can find similarly colored and marked birds in the swifts waters of the Yellowstone River, which, like the Puffin, is impossible to mistake for another species. 

A much more dependable visitor to our area is the Tundra Swan which makes stops around the Great Salt Lake during its migratory journey north to, you guessed it, the Arctic Tundra. A large, gracefull flyer, you can count them by the thousands. A much rarer bird is its almost identical cousin, the Trumpeter Swan.  By 1935, The Trumpeter Swan was on the brink of extinction with only 35 birds known to exist is the wild. Fortunately, concerted propogation progams has helped them to come back to much more sustainable levels, although finding them is still difficult. A site on the Madison River near West Yellowsonte used to host a two paris of Trumpeters, but predation(coyotes?) and possible theft from homeowner’s wishing to acquire a beautiful specimen to display in their yard eliminated this reliable opportunity for viewing. Southwest Idaho is still a good place to look for Swans, but around the Great Salt Lake, look at the flocks of Tundra that rest at Farmington Bay, Salt Creek WMA and a few others locations in northern Utah.

Tundra Swans in flight with Wellsville mountains in the background(Shelly Spencer, chickadeetrails.com)

Look very closely, because identifying them can be a challenge. The drawing by David Sibley(above) illustrates the distinctions between the two species. So, grab your favorite guide, you binos and/or spotting scope and take the challenge.

An excellent guide to help distinguish between the two species in the field can by found here :

http://www.sibleyguides.com/swans.htm

 

Birdstack

A new website for tracking bird sightings and recording trip reports has emerged: http://birdstack.com/tour. At first blush it seems like a great option to the expensive commercial software products available. With birdstack you can record your lists and trips using data from a worldwide database, chat with fellow birdstackers, etc. But it cumbersone. You are required to navigate through multiple pages of selection data when making a single entry. Compare with eBird where you can easily record multiple species on a single page representing all of the birds at a specific location. I will investigate Birdstack for some of its reporting and linking usefullness, but for now, I’ll stick with eBird.