We hope everyone had a nice 4th of July weekend. To help you get back into the usual routine, we’re delighted to present Braden’s second report from his job looking for Northern Goshawks in the California Sierras. So far, the goshawks are few, but the other animals abound! To see his first post, click here.Will there be more goshawks? What other surprises will greet his intrepid crew? Be sure to check in on upcoming posts to find out!
The Brushy Hollow PAC lay about forty-five minutes from Beardsley Lake, a man-made reservoir in the Stanislaus National Forest where we’d be spending the next two nights camping. After waking up at the crack of dawn and unsuccessfully trying to snag some good photos of the Black-throated Gray Warblers around camp, our crew began driving the cliffside road up to Brushy Hollow. As we neared the PAC, my peripheral vision caught a large brown animal absolutely booking it away from the car. Stanislaus National Forest was (unfortunately) filled to the brim with cattle–we either saw them or heard the bells hanging from their necks every time we went out. No cow had ever fled from the car this quickly, though, and as I snapped my head back to look I spotted paws, not hooves, trampling the brush before the mammal disappeared into the forest.
“Bear!” I shouted, but it was too late. The bear wanted nothing to do with us.
Our crew prepares to tackle another PAC in search of Northern Goshawks. But would mammals intervene?
Again, the rest of the crew missed it, so a slightly disappointed car arrived at the parking lot for Brushy Hollow. The parking lot consisted of a small patch of grass off to the side of the dirt road, and we were greeted by an army of mosquitoes as we stepped outside of our brand new, cherry-red Nissan rental truck that the rental car company had decided to give us for the summer. We set off into the forest, which was only somewhat brushy and somewhat a hollow, despite the name of the PAC. Many of the usual birds greeted us, including calling Mountain Quail, Olive-sided Flycatcher and pairs of White-headed Woodpeckers flying between the pines. As far as ease of travel, the PAC turned out to be one of our best. Mountain Misery—a native, ground-hugging plant also called “bear clover” (foreshadowing warning)—covered much of the ground, meaning we barely had to lift our feet as we followed our transects. Sam and I met up and began walking up a hill towards Miles where we would enjoy lunch. As soon as we spotted Miles, he stood up and pointed frantically behind us.
“Bear!”
“Bear, bear, bear!!” We echoed as we whirled around to spot another bear sprinting away from us down a nearby road. Ivara followed suit, and we all yelled at the animal for a little while as was protocol before sitting down for lunch.
Adrenaline filling our veins, we sat down in the Mountain Misery, slapping mosquitoes and talking about what we’d just seen. Two bears in one day! And then, our eyes darted again to the same road, where two MORE brown bears ambled by, as if on their way to work!
We finished our lunch quickly, heading towards the other side of the PAC. I proceeded to get very lost, then eventually found, and we took one last break on a log before finishing up our transects for the day. As we scarfed down our last snacks, a crack echoed behind us. The sound of a branch breaking. We turned around, and the response was immediate.
Five bears in one day was a record for all of us. We were too excited to remember to take any photos, but here’s a mama bear staring suspiciously at my dad in our backyard in Missoula.
“Bear! Bear!”
This time the brown bear just watched us for several minutes, wondering why four humans had suddenly started yelling at it during its afternoon walk. Eventually, though, this bear did turn tail, but not after my adrenaline hit new levels! Five bears was enough, and Ivara called it for the day.
Bear Note: All bears in California today are black bears. Black bears vary widely in color from black and cinnamon to the “brown black bears” that Braden observed. The bear on the California state flag, however, is a subspecies of the much larger grizzly bear. Apparently, about 10,000 grizzlies once roamed California. Large carnivores such as the grizzly, however, were not welcome by cattle ranchers and the influx of settlers following the gold rush, and the California grizzly was shot, trapped, and poisoned to extinction by the mid-1920s. Some efforts have been made to reintroduce grizzlies to the state, but so far, all proposals have been rejected. To read a nice article about the situation, click here.
Welcome to Blog 4 of Braden’s series about his and Nick Ramsey’s remarkable birding excursion through Florida. Nowhere in the U.S. do things get more biologically bizarre than in South Florida, and especially in the Keys. Enjoy and, as always, please feel free to share this post.
A Great Horned Owl, the second owl species of our trip so far, greeted us as a silhouette on a power pole as we raced south from the Everglades at dawn. After waking to the sound of more Chuck-wills-widows, we’d packed up the car, and now were on our way towards the southernmost point in Florida. We crossed a small bridge overlooking the slowly-brightening shallow waters of south Florida, and suddenly, we were there: the Florida Keys.
If you need convincing about how invasive species are impacting the planet, go no further than Florida!
Our first stop, like many of our stops today, had one major target: Mangrove Cuckoo. This species, one of North America’s most elusive, had consistent records only from the very southernmost part of the state, barring a few reliable spots farther up the Gulf side. The habitat looked right—the part of Key Largo we’d just entered was absolutely coated in Red and Black Mangroves, and as we pulled into a dirt parking lot, we were greeted with the songs of White-eyed Vireos, a species I had not expected to breed in the mangroves. This area, especially later in the season, could be stellar for vireos, with Red-eyed, White-eyed, Blue-headed, Yellow-throated, Black-whiskered, Thick-billed, Yellow-green and even Mangrove all possible. Unfortunately, we were still a bit early for many of these birds, and we saw and heard only White-eyed throughout the day.
The first stop was not particularly productive, and we realized that we were in the wrong habitat for the cuckoo. Despite having driven through mangroves to get here, the road wound its way through almost-subtropical deciduous forest rather than the water-submerged trees we needed to find a cuckoo. Dagny Johnson Key Largo Hammock Botanical State Park(say that three times), just down the road, proved considerably better, and as we got out of the car Nick got on a warbler almost immediately.
“Black-throated Blue!”
I was thrilled to add this Black-throated Blue warbler to my Life List—one of the last wood warblers I had yet to see.
“Really?” I said, jogging up to where he was standing. Sure enough, a darker, blue and black warbler hopped into view a few feet above us in a tree, and began responding as we played Blue-headed Vireo calls. It was one of my last Eastern wood-warbler needs, and one of the best of them at that. Soon, several parulas and vireos came to the playback as well, and we found ourselves in a miniature mixed winter flock, something we had been hoping to encounter. Continuing down the path, another lifer appeared.
Two dark pigeons flew over, landing in a snag barely lit by the morning sun, and I raised my binoculars, confirming what I’d suspected. While I could make out few other features aside from the dark gray color, the one feature I saw nailed the identification.
“White-crowned Pigeons!”
White-crowned Pigeons, another Lifer for me, was but one of six members of the pigeon/dove family to greet us in South Florida.
This species, a Caribbean mangrove specialist like the cuckoo, also had a very restricted U.S. range, but where it did occur—specifically here—they were supposedly quite abundant, something we confirmed as we drove farther south. They weren’t the only member of Columbidae present, though. We tallied an astounding six species including Eurasian Collared, Mourning, Common Ground and White-winged Doves plus Rock and White-crowned Pigeons. Who knew that the Keys would be so good for this seemingly random family!
Every key differed, if only slightly, from the last. Resorts and restaurants covered the larger Keys, like Key Largo, and I was surprised to see how much land existed on them. I’d assumed many of these islands would be completely mangrove, but I had assumed wrong, as everywhere we looked we saw dirt, whether put there by humans or not. The smaller keys were the really neat ones though—sometimes only a couple of hundreds of meters wide, the Overseas Highway divided what little land each had. We stopped on many of these small keys to play for Mangrove Cuckoos, with no success, but we did make other cool discoveries. Shorebirds coated the beaches and lagoons, and Magnificent Frigatebirds circled above as commonly as Red-tailed Hawks in Montana. The two most abundant passerines were Prairie Warblers and White-eyed Vireos, both of which appeared to have distinct breeding populations found in the mangroves. The water itself was a stunning blue-green, and I could see why hotels and resorts were so popular here.
After adding Prairie Warbler to my Life List early in the trip, I was astonished to find that they and White-eyed Vireos practically dripped from every bush in the Keys.
While we drove, I kept an eye on the sky. While we’d gotten our trip Swallow-tailed Kite a few days before (and also happened to get one in the Keys), we were still missing another Florida specialty: Short-tailed Hawk. This raptor had a very small population in the United States, and could be told from other Buteos by its often-dark wings, barred tail and small size. On our drive down, however, we didn’t spot any, growing a bit concerned that we might miss them for the trip.
After driving over water for a while, we soon arrived at Big Pine Key, one of the largest islands, not to mention being one of the farthest south. This island was unique, hosting a rare habitat known as Caribbean Pine Rockland, and this new habitat brought a new endemic subspecies: Key Deer. This deer, a miniature version of a White-tailed Deer, only lived on this cluster of islands, and did not occur on Key West, farther south, or on any of the keys farther north. Several other strange species lived here, including Indian Peacock, which had been introduced and established itself on this island. Indian Peacock, despite being found all over the United States as escapees, was only actually countable in this one place in the entire country!
We spent the day so far in mangroves, but at the Blue Hole nature walk we felt transported back to the Pineywoods section of the state. This habitat, like the Pineywoods, was actually fire-dependent, although I had a hard time imagining how, given the tiny geographic area it occupied in the middle of the ocean. We soon arrived at a small wooden platform overlooking a large, mostly clear pond: the Blue Hole. A slightly obnoxious woman welcomed us, pointing out an alligator lying right below the platform, its entire, scaled body visible in the water below us. Further out in the pond, a large silver fish floated aimlessly.
“Tarpon,” said the woman, “Usually a fish only found in saltwater. These guys got deposited by the last hurricane. You see that?” She pointed at a mark on the platform at about the height of my knees. “That’s how high the water was, all over this damn island.”
Nick and I continued, finding ourselves on a large dirt road. “If we walk down this, we should see some deer,” said Nick, who’d been here before. Sure enough, after a few dozen meters, we came across a few feeding in the yard of a vacation home. While they weren’t mind-bogglingly small, they were smaller than any of the White-taileds I’d seen in Montana or Maine, or even northern Florida for that matter. We kept Dixie on a leash as she stared intently at the Key Deer, which were fairly unimpressed by our presence. Before leaving, we also managed to hear an Indian Peacock from somewhere in the pines—another lifer for me.
Wait for it . . . finally, a photo of Nick and Dixie! Oh yeah, and a Florida Key Deer on Big Pine Key.
After finding an early Gray Kingbird (see my post “When Montana Birders Collide“), we continued down to Key West, pulling into the parking lot for the Key West Botanical Gardens. It was only forty minutes before closing time and we cursed ourselves, having hoped to get more time at what was surely one of the best spots to bird in the keys. We split up, heading off into the forest of foreign plants to try to tally as many species as possible. After twenty minutes with almost nothing besides a cooperative Black-and-white Warbler, Nick called me. “I’ve got a mixed flock! Get over here!”
It was odd to see a Gray Kingbird in its natural habitat after seeing a vagrant GRKI in Maine just a couple of months ago.
I was on the other side of the gardens, and took back off the way I’d come, eventually finding him on the other side of a manmade lake. He played his mixed flock playback, and the birds poured in: Prairie, Yellow-throated and Palm Warblers, accompanied by a squadron of catbirds. Two splotchy Summer Tanagers joined the fray, and Nick pointed out a Ruby-throated Hummingbird as it zipped by. I was disappointed in my inability to find anything like this on my own, but was happy that we’d finally found one of the mixed flocks the Keys were known for.
Our last major stop of the day was Fort Zachary Taylor Historic State Park, a manicured tourist destination that had been hosting a Black-faced Grassquit for several months now. Birders were unsure as to whether this grassquit was wild or not, given that they were a popular cage bird, but a wild population did exist on the Bahamas, not all that far from here. Regardless, it was one of the less exciting rarity chases we’d ever done. We pulled up to the spot it had been reported in, following coordinates others had posted, and located the bird deep in a bush, its ashy head poking out every once in a while, and that’s where it stayed. After getting another birder on it, we continued walking around the park, scanning trees for more warbler flocks and brush piles for rarities. A Merlin flew over, spooking the established Red Junglefowl as they strutted around the lawns, but we found nothing spectacular, and were soon back on the road north. The Keys had been some of what we’d hoped them to be. I’d gotten several lifers, and we’d found a rare—
No, this is not the Short-tailed Hawk we saw, but the Magnificent Frigatebirds that frequently flew over us should convince anyone that the Chicxulub meteor did not wipe out all the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous!
“Wait!” I yelled as we headed north from Key West. “Hawk!”
Nick and I peered through the windshield. Above us, at the very top of a flock of vultures, soared a small, dark-winged buteo with a striped tail and pointed wings.
“Is it Short-tailed?” I asked, trying to think what else it could be.
“There aren’t Red-taileds here,” said Nick, “And dark morph Broad-winged are incredibly rare in the east, if not unreported. That’s a Short-tailed!” “Woohoo!” I yelled, rolling down the window to get better looks as our car zoomed a hundred meters underneath my last, and best lifer of the day. Okay, so maybe the Keys hadn’t been that bad! We’d missed Mangrove Cuckoo, of course, but Nick and I had a plan for that. A place by the name of Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge . . .
(by Braden) By the time our posse of eleven reached Logan Pass at 6 in the morning, the parking lot was already full, though that did not hamper the views. Nick Ramsey and I rushed over to the bathrooms, admiring a view we had not experienced for years (despite having been to the lower-altitude parts of Glacier Park every year since 2017) and nabbing Cassin’s Finch and White-crowned Sparrow, then hopped back into Joshua Wade Covill’s car and headed for the Piegan Pass trailhead.
Nick and I had arrived at Josh’s house in Columbia Falls late the night before after a helping of early-summer shorebirds south of Kalispell and were greeted by not only Josh, one of Montana’s birding mammoths, but also by an assortment of the country’s top birders: Tom Forwood Jr., a southern Montana-based birder well-known for the Big Day records he had set across Montana (some of which had been with Josh) and working at Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park; Marky Mutchler, a recent graduate of Louisiana State University who had been the ABA young birder of the year a few years back and whose six-out-of-five star photos decorated every part of eBird’s website; four field techs currently studying nesting birds like Lazuli Buntings and Spotted Towhees on MPG Ranch, and two more birders, who along with Marky, currently spent their time researching grassland birds like Long-billed Curlews and Sprague’s Pipits out on the American Prairie Reserve. Several of the people I had already met through Facebook, while I was excited to meet others for the first time. I knew I was in the presence of greatness the minute I stepped out of the mini-van and onto Josh’s lawn, where I pitched my tent.
We were all here for one reason: to see Glacier National Park and its birds under the guidance of Josh, who knew the park like a Black Swift knows the underside of a waterfall, and who had, in fact, just started a Glacier-based guiding company! While several of us had been here before, others (including many of the field techs) had never seen this part of the country before, and we were prepared to assist in blowing their minds.
We woke up on Saturday morning at 5, getting into the park before the ticket period started, and were up and over Logan Pass by 6. A MacGillivray’s Warbler sang downslope of us as we bug-sprayed up in the Piegan Pass trail parking lot, and then set off into the forest of Engelmann Spruce and Subalpine Fir. Almost immediately Josh halted the group to point out several White-winged Crossbills singing from treetops, their complex trills a new sound for me. This habitat made much more sense than the cemetery in which I’d gotten my lifers earlier in the year.
My dad and I usually see Pine Grosbeaks at lower elevations during winter, so it was very special to see them at their breeding altitudes.
In a clearing several miles up the trail Josh called in a Varied Thrush for the photographers of the group (several people including Marky, had brought giant lenses) and a pair of Pine Grosbeaks, not wanting to be left out, had decided to forage in the grass and shrubs at eye-level about ten feet from us.
As we hiked, I learned about the individual research projects that each of the field techs were looking at on the APR, which included Long-billed Curlew migration patterns and parasitism on grassland birds by Brown-headed Cowbirds. We talked about top birding spots everywhere from New Mexico to Missouri and exchanged stories about how everyone had gotten into birds. It was particularly fun visiting with Tom and Josh, as they seemingly had an answer to everything I wondered about along the trail. Tom didn’t just know the birds—he identified every flower and butterfly we came across, and he and Josh pointed out the glaciers and peaks around us as we rose in altitude, many of which they had individually hiked to. They also had a wealth of knowledge of birding Latin America, specifically Costa Rica, something I was incredibly interested in.
After about three miles we rose above the stunted forest marking the end of the subalpine zone and were hiking along scree fields and across lingering snow patches. A Golden Eagle soaring high above welcomed us to the alpine zone as pikas mewed at us from their rocky burrows, and the bird community changed abruptly. Rather than crossbills and grosbeaks, Gray-crowned Rosy-finches filled the finch role up here, and all of us were shocked to encounter a Brewer’s Sparrow belting out a song from a patch of young trees! A rare subspecies of Brewer’s Sparrow, known as the Timberline Sparrow, lived above the tree line in Glacier Park and in mountain ranges farther north, a rather strange change from the normal sagebrush habitat the species used elsewhere in its range. No one in the group had ever seen one before, including Tom and Josh, which meant that everyone had gotten at least one new bird out of the hike!
This surprise Timberline Sparrow (a subspecies of Brewer’s Sparrow) was a Lifer for our entire group!
Speaking of new birds, I was here for my Montana life bird #299: White-tailed Ptarmigan. These cryptic, high-altitude game birds only lived in the northwest part of the state, and only in Glacier were they easily-accessible. As we reached Piegan Pass, Josh pointed out a large snowfield. We would be walking around the base of the field after a quick lunch, as it was perfect ptarmigan habitat: it turns out that most alpine habitat was unsuitable for ptarmigan. These picky birds require access to water, shade (i.e. low cliffs) to hide from the sun, and vegetation (i.e. moss) for food. If a site does not have one of these three things, it’s unlikely to contain ptarmigan.
After a lunch full of various mammals from Least Chipmunks to Hoary Marmots trying to steal our food, we set off in a large search line to try to find ptarmigan as an American Pipit displayed in the air high above us, an activity shared with the Sprague’s Pipits my dad and I had found earlier this year. After about fifteen minutes, Skyler Bol, one of the MPG Ranch field techs, yelled, “Got one!”. We all maneuvered across the rocks over to where he stood, and sure enough, there sat a surprisingly small game bird, half-white and half-brown, curiously staring up at us.
It had taken me more than seven years for me to finally see a White-tailed Ptarmigan, but I couldn’t have asked for a better experience—or company—in finding my 299th Montana bird species!
Everyone whipped out their cameras and settled around the fairly unconcerned bird, and soon Skyler spotted another one sitting on a small waterfall nearby! We basked in the ptarmigan glory for at least an hour, then wished the small birds good luck and cold temperatures, and headed back down the trail.
Once we were firmly in the subalpine forest again, we began stopping periodically and playing for Boreal Chickadee. It was great habitat for them, and several members of the group had never seen them before. You might call it “pushing our luck”, but hey, it worked! About two miles from the parking lot after hearing a Mountain Chickadee and several Canada Jays impersonating Yellow-throated Toucans, Josh decided to play for them and a pair of Boreal Chickadees showed up! I had not expected to see them again this year after nabbing my lifer in May and it was great to watch them from a distance as other people took photos of their very first of these boreal birds.
Though our goal was to see White-tailed Ptarmigan, the day facilitated several epic QUACHs as well!
After spying a trio of Golden Eagles again at the parking lot, we headed back to Josh’s house, stopping briefly for a Chestnut-backed Chickadee (there would be several QUACHs completed today) at Avalanche Campground. I had to head home but many of the others stayed another day, and I would soon hear stories of Black Swift, Spruce Grouse and American Three-toed Woodpecker.
As we left the Piegan Pass trailhead, Josh mentioned that he thought it had been his best day of birding in the park, and I would have to agree. And not just because of the great and cooperative birds we saw—because of the people. I had learned so much from everyone as we hiked, and had really gotten to experience what the community I would soon be immersed in would be like. Everyone was so knowledgeable, yet humble and kind, and I was honored to be a part of the first annual “Camp Montana”, even if it was only for a day.
However, seeing the ptarmigan was also a bit sad—who knew how long these alpine birds would be here? With temperatures already breaking record highs within the park, the birds living at the tops of mountains barely had anywhere to go, and snow was disappearing fast. I am very fortunate that I got to experience the birds while they are still here, and hope that somehow, they can adapt to whatever climate change throws at them.
Ptarmigan are a poster bird for how climate change is negatively impacting our planet. As permanent snow fields disappear, habitat for these birds is rapidly shrinking—a call to action to drastically and rapidly reduce the CO2 emissions we as humans produce.
Another problem was posed by seeing the ptarmigan: What will my 300th Montana bird be? Now that I’d nabbed #299, I had no choice but to get to 300, but my options were few and far between, and my days in the state are running out…stay tuned to see what it will be! (I don’t have it yet).
“eBird really needs to add a checklist for mammals!” I tell Braden for the 58th time. What has prompted my sudden outburst? A marmot scurrying off the road in front of us. The truth is that the past seven years of birding have led us to an amazing number of mammal sightings in Montana and beyond—mammals we wouldn’t otherwise have seen if not for birding. Sure, we’ve observed the usual pronghorn, elk, deer, and bison by the hundreds, but it’s those smaller, cooler mammals that I most remember.
Actually, there are two moosii (plural for moose) here—the other behind that bush on the right.
Let’s start with moose. Okay, they’re not smaller, but they are way cool—so cool that we remember every single moose location we’ve encountered, from the burn area around Lincoln to the meandering creek near Philipsburg. Coyotes rank similarly high in the mammal standings, whether they be trotting around one of our favorite birding hotspots, the Gravel Quarry, or galloping hell-bent-for-leather across the grasslands of Bowdoin National Wildlife Reserve like the one we saw last week.
Is there a roadrunner somewhere around here???
Some mammals, though, deserve special honors. For years, I’d been griping about never seeing a live porcupine—a fact that astounded me given how many dead ones I’d spotted over the decades. Shortly after covid hit, however, Braden and I were driving into the Lee Metcalf NWR when I noticed a suspicious shape balled up on a bare branch right above the road. “No, it isn’t. It couldn’t be . . . “ I gasped. It was. A live porcupine. Finally!
At last we meet, Mr. Porcupine!
A few weeks later, I was hiking up a trail about a mile from our house looking for a Three-toed Woodpecker that Braden had found. Suddenly, a long white shape climbed up onto a rock not twenty feet from me. I stared and it stared back—though not with its mouth open like mine. It was a short-tailed weasel, by far the best look I’d ever seen! And as a bonus (and disadvantage for the weasel), it wore its mismatched winter coat against the snowless ground, demonstrating up-close-and-personal the threats animals face from global warming.
Mr. Weasel, find some snow. Quick!
Our mammal list also includes numerous red foxes, bighorn sheep, beavers, hares, otters, mountain goats, bats, muskrats, whales, dolphins, monkeys, raccoons, black and grizzly bears, seals, prairie dogs—even a bobcat in Aransas NWR and our first-ever javelinas down in Texas. And that’s not even mentioning the beluga whales, polar bears, and walrus Braden has seen on nature trips with his grandparents. I admit that we still have never glimpsed a wolf, lynx, wolverine, or thylacine—but we hope to.
Which goes back to my original point: Can’t eBird add a basic mammal checklist, at least for the ABA area? In no time, they’d be collecting millions of invaluable data points for scientists and conservationists. Plus, it would be a lot of fun. I know. I know. Some of you are saying, “Use iNaturalist!” I hear you—but I’m never going to. One app is plenty for my curmudgeonly brain. So what say you Cornell? Are you game—and not just Big Game? I and millions of other birders are waiting!
