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Last week, to celebrate the final days of summer, Braden and I did something we’ve always wanted to do: bird banding. This, however, wasn’t just any bird-banding session. We were lucky enough to accompany the team of biologist Debbie Leick, whom we first met during last year’s Christmas Bird Count.
When Braden and I got to hang with them, Debbie Leick and her bird banding and recording partners had a productive morning, capturing thirty birds of fourteen different species.
Debbie works for MPG Ranch, a wonderful operation that supports a host of restoration and academic science. Debbie’s project? To see if she and her crew can count migrating birds by listening to their flight calls with a large array of microphones spread throughout the Bitterroot Valley. Before she and her team can start counting birds, however, they have to be able to distinguish their calls.
Birds in Bags! Birds extracted from mist nets are kept warm in bags while awaiting banding, measuring, and for a lucky few, recording.
Braden, Debbie, and I joined the University of Montana Bird Ecology banding crew at a trapping station up Miller Creek. The team had set up mist nets to capture birds, and when we arrived, the action was in full swing. A Swainson’s Thrush, Yellow-rumped Warbler, MacGillivray’s Warbler, and a surprise (to us) Northern Waterthrush kicked off the bird parade. Some of these were recaptures, as evidenced by the bands around their legs. New or recaptured, each bird was carefully removed from its net, weighed and measured, and released. Some birds, however, got special treatment.
This MacGillivray’s Warbler submits to a thorough health inspection by expert warbler wrangler Sasha Robinson before being banded, measured, and released back into the wild.
When we caught a Townsend’s Warbler, Debbie’s colleague Boo Curry (and yes, no typo there) led me and the bird to a PRS or Portable Recording Studio. The warbler was gently placed in its own soundproofed recording booth and then Boo piped in some warbler calls (a bird’s version of elevator music) to see if she could get the Townsend’s to respond.
A Townsend’s Warbler prepares to audition for Debbie’s flight call library. It passed with, ahem, flying colors.
It did! In fact, it was the team’s first successful flight
call recording of the season. Which just goes to show how painstaking field
biology can be. The work of Debbie’s team, though, has great promise to improve
not only our counting of migrating
birds, but our understanding of them. Stay tuned for more when Braden and I
follow up on their progress at a later date!
Debbie’s colleague Kaitlyn shows Braden how to release a thoroughly-processed, somewhat bedraggled Ruby-crowned Kinglet.
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On Wednesday, July 10, both my dad and my Montana year lists stood at 203, mere inches from our previous all-time records. Two days before, we’d had an awesome all-day birding session, nabbing five year birds (Bobolink, Dusky Grouse, White-throated Swift, California Quail for my dad and Black-chinned Hummingbird for me). Now, a couple of days later, I had gone to swim practice and was surfing the recent Montana eBird reports when suddenly, I spotted something. A Virginia’s Warbler had been seen in Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park! Upon further investigation, I discovered that not one but two Black-throated Gray Warblers had been seen in the same spot. Up a nearby canyon an Indigo Bunting was hanging out! I talked to my dad, and we couldn’t take it anymore. The rarities coupled with other year bird possibilities pushed us to the brink.
Bolstered by this Dusky Grouse and four other year birds we’d seen on Monday, July 8, we decided to make an all-out push to break our Montana Big Year records.
The next evening—Thursday—we hit the road for a Super 8 in Butte and the next morning were up at dawn, heading for the caverns. I had a pretty good idea of where the rare birds were (or so I thought), so we started off on a mildly steep trail from the campsite, encouraged by neon Bullock’s Orioles swooping around us. In our haste, however, we had forgotten our bug spray, and about two miles in, the mosquitoes attacked, forcing us back to the campsite.
Slightly disheartened, we
moved on to our next stop: Milligan Canyon Road. A male Indigo Bunting had
taken up residence here among the usual Lazuli Buntings, and we expected him to
stick out like an indigo wildebeest in a pack of green lions. As we continued
up the road, though, seeing all lions and no wildebeest, we began to grow disappointed.
At the actual entrance to the canyon, though, my dad pulled off the road and
whipped out his binos.
“I’ve got him!”
While common in the middle and eastern U.S., this Indigo Bunting was probably the rarest Montana bird we’d ever seen.
We leapt out of the mini-van
like it was about to explode and ran across the road, and sure enough, there he
was. The wildebeest was singing his tiny heart out, as if nothing was weird
about the fact that he was in Montana rather than North Carolina. My dad and I
celebrated our first successful rarity chase in Montana with a high-five.
After a quick search up the canyon for Yellow-breasted Chats and Green-tailed Towhees (we found a Golden Eagle instead), we made our way towards Three Forks. We pulled onto the dusty Bench Road and spotted harriers and Swainson’s Hawks, bringing back memories of our first-ever eastern Montana trip two years before when we’d found curlews and Burrowing Owls with Nick Ramsey on this road. Soon, we saw our main quarry: a tiny owl picturesquely perched on a fence post ahead of us. We pulled up alongside it, and flushed another!
We love it when birds pose only a few feet from us. This Burrowing Owl was really trying to score a permanent modeling contract, or at least a spot on “Project Owlway.”
The owls gave us great pics, and after a half hour we turned tail and headed back to Lewis and Clark Caverns. Why? It turned out I had picked the wrong trail for the rarities! We gave it another shot, this time driving to the top of the state park. Sprawled in front of us were beautiful juniper and pine-covered hills, and we started off on another short trail after being interrogated by the park officials (“We aren’t going to sneak into the caverns, we’re looking for birds!”). A few hundred yards up the path, a new sound rattled across the landscape, different from the regular sounds of the Spotted Towhees. I peered down the slope, and saw a bird with the strangest color combination—green, gray and orange. Green-tailed Towhee! We pished it up the slope and got awesome looks. This wasn’t just a year bird; we’d never seen it before!
We tried one more trail before giving up all hope on the two warblers, then steered towards Helena. After a brief rest at yet another Super 8—this one far more depressing than the first—we visited a Helena cemetery, where my dad had gotten Pinyon Jays earlier in the year. I was skeptical, but sure enough, eight blue-and-gray corvids crossed the road in front of us, hopping onto a few tombstones and then loudly flying off. Another lifer for me!
Chipping Sparrow? No! Green-tailed Towhee, a long sought-after Lifer for Team Collard!
We had dinner at MacKenzie River Pizza, then hung out there reading and watching the men’s Wimbledon semifinal since our next and final stop wouldn’t produce what we were looking for until later. Flammulated Owls, one of the most secretive in North America, had been regularly reported in a nearby location known as Grizzly Gulch (ironically, there were no grizzlies there), and we arrived at the coordinates at about 9:00 p.m. Almost immediately we heard a low, single hoot in the trees. No way! Who knew owls could be this easy? We tried to make our way towards the sound, but gave up and opted to let the owls come to us. Making our way farther down the road, we picked up winnowing snipes and Willow Flycatchers, and tried in vain to find a Common Poorwill flycatching in the road. We never did see the owl, but were fine with that! My dad had surpassed his all-time Montana record, and now we have 210 and 211 species respectively in Montana this year. Can I break my old record of 213? Stay tuned to find out!
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Braden is off this week so I’m filling in. Just kidding. Birders are never off. Don’t you know that by now? I did want to use this week, however, to talk about an especially cool group of ducks that we observed during our recent Big Weekend. You got it: teals.
Always a favorite of hunters, Blue-winged Teal have a more subtle beauty than other species.
We left Missoula about noon on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend and I have to admit, the only ducks on our minds were the fabled Harlequin Ducks, which we hoped to glimpse in Glacier National Park—and add to our Year Lists. We did get two spectacular experiences with Harlequins—a breeding pair at Josephine Lake in the Many Glacier area and a lone male on MacDonald Creek the next day. I have to say, though, that the teals matched the Harlequins for beauty, and overpowered them with raw abundance.
Cinnamon Teals are not only one of the most beautiful ducks, they are one of the most rare. According to Ducks Unlimited, estimates of breeding population are between 100,000 and 300,000.
We saw all four species of common teals on our trip: Green-winged,
Blue-winged, Cinnamon, and Northern Shoveler—which I didn’t realize was a teal until Braden informed me of
the fact. To make matters even more confusing, the last three species are in
the genus Spatula while the
Green-winged Teal is in the genus Anas
with a bunch of other dabbling ducks. Go figure. But full disclosure: I am not
a taxonomist, so let’s not get too hung up on that now.
Several things impressed us about these four species—especially the three birds in Spatula—a name that undoubtedly has something to do with the Northern Shovelers impressively wide honker. The first thing, of course, is that these species of ducks are exceptionally beautiful. Stunning, in fact. Just look at the photos of the males. I mean, “Whoa Dude, where’d you get those threads?”
I first fell in love with Northern Shovelers during our 2016 Big Year and grow more impressed with them at every encounter.
Another thing about these ducks is that they all seem to adopt similar lifestyles. We kept finding them together in many of the same places: Browns Lake, Benton National Wildlife Refuge, and even the prairie potholes along the highway. Not surprising since they are all dabbling ducks and prefer to nest in or near shallow bodies of water.
The real kicker for us, though, happened at our very first stop, Browns Lake. Braden was looking at a group of ducks on a small pond and he said, “Doesn’t something look a little odd about that duck?” I studied it and agreed. “I think it’s a Cinnamon—Shoveler Hybrid,” he offered. “What? Really?” I’d heard of hybrids but figured they were exceptionally rare. Then again, this duck didn’t look like anything else we’d seen. I suggested that it looked more like a Blue-winged—Shoveler hybrid because of the white crescent behind the bill. “Other teals also can show that in their juvenile phases,” Braden pointed out. Smart-alec kid.
Shoveler—Blue-winged hybrid? Shoveler—Cinnamon? Send us your thoughts with a comment!
One thing was for certain. This bird had not followed the rule books for sticking to one particular species. Interestingly, another teal hybrid was IDed in a different Montana location by another birder the same week. The lesson? If you keep going out there to look, the birds will keep surprising you.
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When my dad and I stepped out of our car at Swiftcurrent Lake in Glacier National Park we were welcomed with a barrage of raindrops. Water fell from every imaginable place, and small puddles had formed in the miniature valleys of the parking lot. Thankfully, both of us had our raincoats, but for some reason during the packing stage of the trip we had looked at our rain pants and said, “Nah. We won’t need them.”
As it turns out, we did.
We did not have any other places we planned to bird today, however, so we decided to brave the monsoon and see if any birds were dumb enough to be out in the rain like we were. Swiftcurrent Lake was known for having great birds, including Dusky and Spruce Grouse, Boreal Chickadee, Tennessee Warbler, Varied Thrush and Olive-sided Flycatcher.
A wet day in Glacier National Park is better than a dry day almost anywhere else!
After being greeted by a wet Gray (or Canada) Jay in the parking lot, the first quarter-mile along the lake shore did not yield any living creatures. We listened for the grouse that the park rangers had said were here, but either the rain masked the sounds, or, more likely, the grouse were taking shelter from the storm. At one point we did have an encounter with two thrushes, but they uncooperatively disappeared into the brush, leaving us to wonder at their identities.
We came to an intersection and turned right to hike over the small glacial moraine to Lake Josephine. There, we walked out onto the dock and scanned the water, looking for any avian action. By the shore off to the left, I thought I saw a splash, so I focused my binoculars on it. After a minute, a slate-gray, blue and cinnamon-colored waterfowl with distinctive white markings popped up—a male Harlequin Duck!
Even with the limits of my dad’s iPhone camera, you can see how magnificent Harlequin Ducks are. Fortunately, we got another view of a Harlequin Duck the next day on MacDonald Creek—with our cameras this time.
We stalked closer to the duck and its mate, marvelling at our luck while at the same cursing ourselves for not bringing our cameras. The two ducks continued to dive, oblivious to the rain and completely fearless of us. Soon, they floated closer, and passed three meters from where we stood, gracing us with their incredible but subtle beauty.
We spent thirty minutes watching the ducks, wet but happy, then decided to book it back to the car. We started the long drive back to East Glacier, but stopped beside Swiftcurrent Lake when we saw people staring up at the mountain beside the road. We raised our binoculars, and sure enough, spotted a herd of at least twenty Bighorn Sheep staring back at us from their rocky vantage points.
“Wait a minute,” said my dad, “There are three more much higher up. Wait, no! Those are Mountain Goats!”
Mountain Goats high on the mountain slopes of the Many Glacier area, Glacier National Park.
We watched them for a second, then continued driving. We had just seen two of the Glacier Park Big Four—the rare, large mammals most commonly seen in the park. The other two were Grizzly Bear and Moose, but I doubted we’d see those.
I was wrong. Just a little ways past the goats and sheep, we spotted a pair of stopped pickup trucks, their drivers gazing at the meadow right off the road. Two wet but content-looking Grizzly adolescents dug for roots in the brambles, unafraid of us! Well, you know what they say: When it rains, wildlife pours!
Between the Harlequin Ducks and Grizzly Bears, we had a most memorable day in one of our favorite places.
Sparrows. A simple word that can elicit groans from the most
experienced birder. Even after six years of dedicated birding, I feel like I am
just beginning to grasp most sparrow identification, let alone sparrow behavior
and song. With Braden’s help, I can now figure out most of Western Montana’s
species, but put me in any new environment and I’m like a birding babe with a
binkie.
It’s always great to see Chipping Sparrows back in Montana—even if they add to the sparrow confusion this time of year!
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Helena public library, followed by a lively Last Chance Audubon meeting nearby. The next morning, I decided to sneak in some birding before heading back to Missoula. I first chose a local site affectionately called the “K-mart Wetlands.” This was my first time at the ponds during spring migration, and my pulse raced as I heard the haunting call of a Sora from the cattails. That was followed by my FOY (First of Year) Common Yellowthroat and a flock of more than twenty Yellow-rumped Warblers.
I was fortunate to run into a Helena birder name Jeffrey Olsson who said, “I heard a Clay-colored Sparrow down at the end there.” Though Braden had done his best to educate me about this bird, I drew a mental blank. “What does it sound like?” I asked Jeff. He repeated a buzzy sound for me. “Great. Thanks,” I said and headed off down a fenceline in pursuit. Amazingly, I heard the distinctive call, but didn’t catch sight of the bird.
No question, Lark Sparrows are some of the most stunning sparrows of all. This was only my third sighting in Montana.
I did run into a large number of Chipping Sparrows along with a single White-crowned. After completing a loop of the end pond, I looked out into a gravel patch and spotted a lone bird foraging for seeds. “Clay-colored?” I asked myself, quickly raising my camera. It wasn’t. Instead, it was something just as exciting—a lone Lark Sparrow. After seeing one with Braden and Nick Ramsey only a couple of weeks earlier, the Lark got my pulse racing, especially after I managed some good photos. Alas, I still didn’t glimpse a Clay-colored—or so I thought.
While taking photos of the Chipping Sparrows, I noticed some
with duller brown head stripes instead of the usual bright red. I assumed these
duller sparrows were females, but they also seemed suspicious. Later, back at
home, Braden confirmed something I’d been pondering. The “female” Chipping
Sparrows were actually Clay-coloreds! Once again, it was the struggle over
identifications that inched my knowledge forward. While it’s a certainty I’ll
misidentify many other sparrows in the future, each time I run into these
interesting little birds, my brain connections grow. Which, of course, is what
makes birding an endless adventure.
Sparrow On!
No, not a female Chipping Sparrow after all. One of several Clay-coloreds I watched at the K-mart ponds—without realizing it!
