My Birdy Big Year

When looking back on things, whether it's a month, a season, or a year, it is in our nature, I think, to look for the high points. I had many high points this past year, too many to name, actually, but some stand out more than others and are worthy of being recounted in a year-end round-up fashion.

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I knew going into 2011 that it was going to be a big year for me as far as birding was concerned, and I was right. The entire year has been a turning point in my birding career, and I feel like I have started to come into my own. Do I have lots more to learn? Sure, but that's a big part of the fun. Lots of details finally started to click for me this year, and I'm happy to say that I'm beginning to see a bigger picture. I don't see "just a bird" anymore, but also how the bird is connected to the habitat it uses, and how we are affecting those habitats (for better and for worse). I'm also paying more attention to bird behavior, and find myself continually asking "what does that mean? why are you doing that?" My own birding "philosophy" continues to evolve, which I will share at some point (I already have to a certain extent, when I wrote about the Emotional Life List), and I watch with curious interest some of the discussions other birders have about things like "what differentiates a birder from a bird watcher?"

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A male Magnolia Warbler, captured and released at the New River Birding and Nature Festival, May 2011

The New River Birding and Nature Festival that I attended in May in West Virginia went a long way to expanding my bird knowledge. A full week of birding immersion was better than I ever could have imagined. I look forward to making a similar trip in May of 2012, this time up in Michigan. It will be a different set of birds, different habitat, different flora, but some of the same friends will be there, and I have no doubt the experience will be spectacular.

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A Red-eyed Vireo fledgling, probably newly out of the nest the day this photo was taken.

Breeding pair of Orchard Orioles, a first-year male on the left and a female on the right.

Participating in the Ohio Breeding Bird Atlas this summer was also a fantastic experience that contributed to my growing avian knowledge base. This was an activity that I took part in largely on my own (as opposed to a festival or group birding outing), and it was empowering to be able to recognize and identify some new birds without assistance, as well as to find evidence of breeding either in the form of a nest, adults carrying food, or in some rare cases, fledglings that were not too many days out of the nest. I still remember the joy in my heart at finding several teeny Red-eyed Vireo fledges along the side of our road, and the great excitement at tracking down a begging Blue-winged Warbler on our neighbors' property and a whole party of begging Ovenbird babies just feet from my own front door! (A challenge for upcoming breeding seasons is to find an actual Ovenbird nest on our property, which is a tall order, as their nests are notoriously well-camouflage and difficult to find!)

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A Great Egret flies over Meadowbrook Marsh near Lakeside, OH

The last big birding "event" for the year was the Midwest Birding Symposium (mark your calendars for September 19-22, 2013, when the symposium will be back at Lakeside, OH!), where I found myself with so much to do and see that although we went up to Lakeside a few days before the symposium even started, I still didn't get to visit all of the birding hotspots on my list. This time around we took part in the sunset cruise (we missed it when we went up in 2009), which was my first pelagic-style experience (although I'm not sure if riding a boat in the windy chop of Lake Erie really counts as pelagic cruise). I was surprised and pleased to see many birds at Magee Marsh at close range. Magee is known as a mecca for spring migrating birds (they rest there before crossing Lake Erie to get to Canada), but it is also obviously a good resting spot for them during fall migration as well.

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The male of our nesting Eastern Phoebe pair after being banded.

Speaking of migration, another thing that I got a little more in tune with this year was the arrival patterns that define spring migration. Before breeding season even begins, it pays to listen to when the year-round-resident birds start to sing, sometimes as early as February. Likewise, I listen especially close every day starting in early April as I await the return of our nesting Eastern Phoebes. The Woodcocks also start moving into southeast Ohio in mid- to late April. Come the beginning of May, the floodgates open, the trees are flowering and new singers are added to the dawn chorus every day. Just thinking about it right now on a damp December evening makes me giddy!

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Surprised?  Scared?  Happy?  Who knows what's going through this little Saw-whet Owl's mind here, but it was love at first sight for me!

 An especially poignant moment came on my birthday in early November, when I got to not only observe the banding of a Saw-whet Owl, but I even got to hold, "pet," and release the bird. You can read the full details of the experience HERE.

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Yours truly giving a birding program at the Athens Public Library in January 2011.

 As I look forward to 2012, I anticipate a similar array of experiences, each with something new to teach me. I also hope to engage more with my local community, teaching them about birds and showing them why I think birds are awesome, and just maybe setting a foundation in place for a local birding group, which this town is sorely lacking. I dearly love my birding friends from other parts of Ohio and beyond, but I also want to make more birding friends right in my own back yard.

Here's wishing you all a very birdy 2012!

Figuring it out

I love field guides. I started off by borrowing my husband's Peterson's Guide that was given to him by his dad. Then a friend bought me my first flower field guide. I was off to the races after that. I have lots of field guides, and yet I don't have nearly enough. I have at least one field guide for each of the following subjects: butterflies, trees, mammals, wildflowers, birds, owls, reptiles and amphibians, insects, singing insects, tracks and scat, spiders, frogs and toads. I'm sure there's a few I forgot.

In instances where I have multiple field guides on one topic (birds, or wildflowers, for instance), each one serves its own purpose. Some of them are laid out so differently from each other, or contain such different information, that they complement each other nicely.

As much as I love my field guides, I will admit that they can be intimidating, especially when they cover a subject matter with which I am relatively unfamiliar (like anything that's outside of the realm of birds and wildflowers). This has been the case for me this year when trying to identify various spiders and insects. It reminds me of how I was when I first started birding: I would flip through virtually every page to find a bland brown bird that I had gotten a glimpse of for 2.5 seconds, only to find that every brown bird in the field guide looked virtually the same to my "new" birding eyes.

I figure it's frustrating for everyone at some time or another to use field guides, so I thought I would give you a quick run-through of how I narrowed the beetles in my previous post down to blister beetles (and more specifically, oil beetles).

First, I started off with a top-notch field guide to insects. If you spend any amount of time trying to figure out the identity of any kind of insect, BUY THIS BOOK:

One thing that I love about this book is what they call the "Pictorial Table of Contents." It not only lists the major groups of insects covered in the book, but it also gives a small photographic sampling of representatives of said group. Look closely at the shape and size of what is pictured, and you should quickly be on your way to the right portion of the book.

I had a good hunch going in that I was looking at some kind of beetle, and after looking at these quick visual representations of all the groups presented, I flipped with confidence to the beetle section, only to be somewhat daunted by 45 pages of photographs of many, MANY different types of beetles.

Looking at photos and paying attention to the description of the different families narrowed things down even further. For example, I knew that it WASN'T a type of lady beetle, nor was it an aquatic beetle, nor a stag or rhinoceros beetle. (Remember, knowing what something isn't can get you a long way toward what it actually is.) There was a good-sized section devoted to ground beetles, which I thought was a possibility, but none of the body shapes or sizes matched up to what I was seeing. As I got into the last quarter of the beetle section, I came upon the blister beetles. I finally had a visual match. There was mention of foliage feeding. Check. Then the specifics were spelled out for oil beetles, of which there are 21 species across North America: flightless ground-dwelling adults with short wing covers and bloated abdomens. A perfect match to what I was looking at. Oh, and there was mention of that funny kink in the antennae of the males. Bingo! Now, I ventured to guess the specific species as Meloe impressus, based on this guide and also photos shown on bugguide.net, but the jury is still out on the definitive ID of this blister beetle.

My trusty Kaufman guide also lead me to ID this fantastic metallic-looking beetle as a Dogbane beetle, which was found on - you guessed it - a dogbane plant.

So folks, I'd like your feedback. Was this post helpful and/or informative? Would you like to see more posts like this? I do write this blog for me, but I also like to know if what I'm putting out there is striking a chord with anyone else. Please let me know in the comments! Thanks.