1) Don’t confuse this bird with the Black-winged Stilt (a common bird found across Eurasia) or the Black Stilt (a critically endangered species endemic to New Zealand). This is the Black-necked Stilt, the only member of the genus in the New World.

2) The Black-necked Stilt is arguably the most “elegant” of the stilts, with long pink legs and a white eyespot. They are easily recognizable from other hard to identify brown shorebirds.

3) These birds can be found year-round from South America up through the southern parts of the United States. Some birds migrate up as far north as the Prairie Potholes in Canada.

4) There is at least one endangered subspecies, the Hawaiian Stilt. At one time there were only 200 individuals left on the islands due to extensive hunting. Luckily, the population is now over 1000.

5) This bird sometimes eats by using its bill in “Scythe-like Sweeps” to snatch up prey (aquatic invertebrates). It can also “Peck”, ‘Plunge” and “Snatch.” These are all real scientific terms for its feeding behaviors – I’m just not quite sure what the difference is between the last last three…

Have a wonderful week!

1. The Western Capercaillie is the largest grouse in the world. The males weigh up to 6.5kg (14 pounds or 1 stone). Females are only half the size of males.

2. These birds live in the far northern reaches of Europe and Asia, from Scotland to the Russian Far East. There are also smaller populations restricted to mountain ranges across Europe.

3. These birds vary their diet throughout the year depending on what is available. In the summer they eat fresh leaves, during the autumn they eat berries, and during the winter they eat delicious pine needles (yum).

4. This species exhibits lekking behavior, a breeding system found in many of this bird’s closest evolutionary relatives. Males jaunt around displaying their very attractive feathers and making very attractive noises. The most competitive males will attract many females to their territories.

5. Being a nice plump grouse is hard if you are trying to not go extinct. In Scotland, this bird was hunted to (local) extinction in the late 1700s. Amazingly, people back then felt bad about it and reintroduced the species to the British Isles in the early 1800s using birds brought over from the mainland. The population initially rebounded, but more recently has been in decline. Conservation efforts are now in place to try to stop a repeat of the last local extinction.

Have an excellent week!

1. The American Golden-Plover is a remarkable long-distance migrant. In the winter, the species occupies coastlines and rivers in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. In the summer, the species migrates all the way up to the Arctic.

2. The distance between these two areas is roughly 8,500 miles (or ~14,000 km), a remarkable distance for a 10-inch long bird. Put in another way, this bird migrates 54 million times its body length TWICE each year. 54 million body-lengths for us humans would be about two times around the world at the equator.

3. And those numbers are likely an underestimate. This bird doesn’t take the shortest route. Rather, it follows an elliptical migration path throughout the year, passing up over the Pacific Ocean, then up through Central America, and through the American Midwest during spring migration. During the fall, individuals fly over the Atlantic before heading down to the bottom of South America.

4. Why do these plovers subject themselves to such wild migrations each year? Breeding at high latitudes can have its perks, potentially including less predators, longer days, and a temporary hyper-abundance of resources.

5. Whatever the cause, this species has evolved to migrate this far because this strategy works, which is pretty remarkable. And this strategy seems to be working out alright – the American Golden Plover is currently listed as a species of “least concern.”

P.S., you probably have this species or a related plover near you. This bird’s closest relatives are the Black-bellied Plover, Pacific Golden-Plover, and the European Golden-Plover. All make pretty spectacular migrations.

Before we start – if you are interested in being an early-access beta tester for the Android version of Poke-A-Bird, please sign up using this form here. We just need your email for now, and will send instructions for how to download and review the app in the next week.

This week’s bird is the: Mountain Quail

1. John Muir called this bird “the very handsomest and most interesting” – a great celebrity endorsement.

2. Despite this early plug, very little research has been done on this species. Part of that may have to do with the species range (up high in remote mountains) or because of how shy the species tends to be.

3. This bird can be found from Washington State to Baja California, but its range is fragmented. Because the bird does well in high-altitude environments, many populations are isolated in ecologically unique areas.

4. These birds like high altitude environments, but they can’t live in areas with dense snow. So each year these birds have to move seasonally along an elevational gradient – referred to as altitudinal migration, unlike the north-south migration we normally think of.

5. Most scientists think that to make these journeys the birds walk, rather than fly. So what are those wings for anyway??

Have a wonderful week!

1. The Brown-headed Cowbird’s most famous characteristic is that it is a brood parasite – meaning it lays its eggs in the nests of other “host” birds.

2. This is a tremendous evolutionary life hack. Raising young is costly and dangerous, so laying your eggs in another nest and then peacing out is a pretty awesome strategy. But this bird’s savagery goes further than just laying an egg and then leaving. They have their ways of taking out the competition (i.e. other nestlings)…

3. For one, cowbirds will often cannonball their eggs on top of the already-laid eggs of their hosts. They perch up high, lay their big, fat eggs, and as those parasite eggs approach terminal velocity they make impact and smash the (usually smaller) eggs of their host.

4. But wait, there’s more! The adult cowbirds will often then go in and just toss one or two host eggs from the nest for good measure. This seems much simpler and I’m not sure why they really need to do the cannonball thing…

   

5. And potentially my favorite bird fact of all time: if the host bird recognizes and rejects the cowbird egg from the nest (i.e. tosses it out), the cowbird will often come back and destroy all the host’s eggs. This is referred to in the scientific literature as “mafia behavior” – no joke!

6. But before you judge the cowbird too much, just remember that it is a bird-eat-bird world out there and evolutionary strategies exist because they allow species to persist, whether or not it aligns with our human vies on morality. And this isn’t nearly as bad as screwworms, zombie-ant fungus, or even the “butcherbird” IMO. To learn more about brood parasitism and the Brown-head Cowbird click here and/or here.

Have a nice week, and remember, never reject a cowbird egg!

1. The American Dipper is the only truly aquatic songbird in North America. This bird hunts in creeks and streams for its watery prey.

2. The dipper has a variety of tactics to capture its aquatic prey, and can even dive to the bottom of creeks to grab stuff on the bottom! Check this video out.

3. There aren't many dippers in the world. Only 130,000 are estimated to exist across North America. They have very particular habitat preferences (just along waterways, usually in the mountains) so there isn’t much space for them!

4. This bird nests on cliff sides out of the reach of floods, which usually works…

5. Except when rivers are dammed! American Dippers and dams do not get along. The Elwha River Dam in Washington (RIP 2014) flooded nest sites and shrunk populations upstream. Removal of these dams can open those nests sites back up.

Have a great week!

1. This bird was originally called the “Mountain Mockingbird” – a name that isn’t too far off. The Sage Thrasher is in the Mimidae family, which includes both thrashers and mockingbirds (plus two catbirds).

2. The Sage Thrasher loves a desert. It migrates up from the Southwest U.S. to the Northwest during the summer months, but sticks to the interior of the continent where sagebrush is dominant.

3. Like other thrashers and many desert birds, this species spends a lot of time running around on the ground. While it’s down there, this bird searches for insects – its primary food source.

4. This bird doesn’t nest far from the ground either. In most cases, this bird places its nests about one foot off the ground, usually under dense vegetation (i.e. sagebrush). Having more vegetation above both shades the nest (it gets hot in the desert, and you don’t want your eggs to be cooked) and blocks the view from would-be predators.

5. The biggest threat to this species is habitat loss. Conversion of sagebrush habitats to agricultural conversion, urbanization, etc. can lead to big declines in this species. For this reason, this bird is red-listed by British Columbia and identified as a “Species of Greatest Conservation Need” by Washington State.

Have a great week!

1. The Nanday Parakeet is native to a small area spanning across Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. In its native range, these birds are often seen in large flocks looking for palm nuts and other food.

2. This parakeet is fairly large with a black head and red “ankles.” It makes a sound probably most similar for readers to a squawking jay.

3. Want to buy this bird? It’ll run you about 600 bucks. Think little barky dogs are annoying? Try having this as a pet.

4. The biggest threat to these birds happens to be the illegal pet trade, so you really shouldn’t buy this bird. The pet trade is a big problem for some of the world’s most beautiful tropical birds.

5. This parakeet can be found in the U.S., both in the Tampa area and clear across the country in West L.A., with populations forming out of the many escapees of the pet trade. So there is no need to head to the lowlands of central South America to see this bird, although that sounds fun to me…

Have a great week!

1. The American Kestrel is the smallest falcon in North America, weighing in at about one-quarter of a pound, with a wingspan of less than two feet.

2. Small predator = small prey. This bird mostly eats insects and small mammals like mice and voles.

3. This bird usually sits on a perch, waiting for prey to appear before swooping down. When on a perch, kestrels will bob their head up and down, probably to get a better sense of how far away prey is1. Bird’s eyes can’t rotate as much in their sockets compared to humans, so to get a different look at something birds move their whole head.

4. When not on a perch, this kestrel will sometimes “hover-hunt” – flying in place either by riding the wind or by flapping rapidly. While it does so, its head remains remarkably stable. Check out a video here.

5. American Kestrels are cavity nesters and will nest in nest boxes. Feeling overwhelmed by the number of insects and small mammals like mice and voles in your life? Try installing one of these!

The number of BOTW subscribers added another digit this week, so I wanted to take a beat to say thank you. It’s been a real joy of mine to write this thing over the last 7 (gasp) years, and although I get a lot out of the research and writing, it’s motivating to know that more than two people read it, so thanks. To the bird:

This week's bird is the: Black Oystercatcher

1) The Oystercatcher lives on rocky shorelines along the Pacific Coast where it hunts, you guessed it, oysters! (and other mollusks)

2) Most evidence suggests that these birds are monogamous, and stay with their mates for life.

3) The Black Oystercatcher has a close relative that lives on the East Coast (and around the Gulf of Mexico) - the American Oystercatcher. In Southern and Baja California, these two species create fuel-efficient hybrids.

4) Peregrine Falcons, coyotes, and domestic cats are hunters of the Oystercatchers. It's a bird (and mammal) eat bird world out there…

5) Oystercatchers make their nests out of rocks and the calcium remnants of their mollusk enemies. That can't be comfortable!

Have a great week!

This week’s bird is the: Black-throated Blue Warbler

1. During the summer months, the Black-throated Blue ranges from the high elevation Appalachian mountains in the Great Smoky Mountains up to the edge of the boreal zone in Southeastern Canada. It prefers mostly dense forests with lots of shade, making it trickier to see than hear.

2. Despite living in an environment that makes it so hard to see, this bird has enjoyed much research attention from the ornithological community. According to one study, this species ranks #28 out of 293 species in terms of research attention (measured as the number of scientific publications featuring this species).

3. What makes this bird so popular? Well, one explanation is how blue it is. Being ascetically pleasing means scientists may want to study you over say, the Brown-breasted Brown Sparrow (not a real bird).

4. Another reason for this outsized attention is that the range of this bird overlaps with the range of many ornithologists (i.e. the Northeast U.S.). It’s much easier to study a bird within driving distance compared to flying halfway around the world!

5. All of this attention has helped to develop a really good understanding of this bird’s biology, including many aspects of its habitat preferences, migration, and responses to climate change. A better understanding of all of these factors can lead to better targeted efforts to protect these birds and other species as well.

Have a great week!

1. Is this bird attractive? I’m not sure… It’s very colorful, but it also might be a little over the top. You be the judge.

2. Now, I know what your thinking: “how can I get my hands on this tasty-looking bird?” But not so fast, according to Birds of the World (the wikipedia of bird knowledge), this bird “has a reputation of being unpalatable.” Plus, hunting this bird would be a federal crime.

3. This bird lives across the majority of South America, but its range only extends into a small sliver of the American South. At the northernmost part of its range, this bird is migratory.

4. This bird likes freshwater marshes, and doesn’t seem to mind humans. It also likes rice paddies and other human-built environments.

5. This bird has some creepy feet. Don’t believe me?

Have a great week!

Each day, you get a list of five bird species. Your goal is to guess where those five species co-occur. Very fun, very free. www.find-a-flock.com

On to this week’s bird, the: Pine Warbler

1. The Pine Warbler breeds in Eastern North America, with many individuals migrating up from the Southeastern U.S. to the Northeast for the summer (this is a hint for today’s puzzle…).

2. Regardless of where you find these birds geographically, you are likely to see them in tall pine trees. They are most abundant in older pine forests with a dense canopy.

3. Unlike most warblers, seeds can make up a large part of this species’ diet. This probably helps them to live in the American Southeast during the winter months, a time when many other warbler species fly much farther south.

4. The Pine Warbler is also a very chonky boy (for a warbler), weighing in at a massive 9-15 grams. That’s nearly twice as chonky as the teeny-tiny American Redstart (6-9 grams). Having a little more meat on your bones is good on cold nights.

5. This bird can be easy to miss (at least for me) because it sounds very similar to the Chipping Sparrow and Dark-eyed Junco. So if you hear a high-pitched trill, look up! (Unless it’s a Chipping Sparrow or a Dark-eyed Junco, which are usually on or near the ground)

Have a wonderful week!

1. The Olive-sided Flycatcher is one of the most impressive migrant species. Some individuals leave the Andes in March, arrive in Alaska in June, and turn around and head back starting in July - a trip totaling 7,000 miles.

2. What do these birds eat to fuel their arduous migrations? Bugs! Fly. Catchers. 7,000 miles powered entirely by flies…

3. Insects power these birds during the breeding season too. These flycatchers often are found in recently burned forests, where the large number of insects makes it easier to find food to feed their young.

4. Flycatchers have a large family (taxonomically speaking) with over 422 species – making it the largest avian family. Some notably cool-named siblings of this species: Marble-faced Bristle Tyrant, Rufous Twistwing and the Bearded Tachuri.

5. The range of the Olive-Sided Flycatcher has changed over the last two hundred year, expanding in parts of California, and contracting in parts of the Northeast. 

6. BONUS: The song of these birds has been described as sounding like: “Quick! Three beers!” Try and go hear one in your closest, most recently burned forest.

Have a great week!

1. The Golden Pheasant goes by a few names, including Rainbow Pheasant and Chinese Pheasant. Its scientific name (Chrysolophus pictus) loosely translates to “painted golden crest” (pretty accurate).

2. This bird is native to the mountains of China, where it is supposedly difficult to see. I really can’t imagine how that’s possible given its painted golden crest, but that’s the word on the street.

3. Due to its glorious visage, this bird has been imported all around the world, where it often has made daring escapes much to the joy of the general public.

4. In some cases, escapees have led to free-living populations, like in Hawaii and England. Although the English population grew into the thousands in the early 1980s, those numbers have declined ever since. The reason remains a mystery.

5. Luckily, back in their native range, the Golden Pheasant may be expanding their range due to climate change, despite hunting and pressure from the pet trade. Hooray!

Have a wonderful week!

1. A member of the mimic family (Mimidae), the Brown Thrasher can imitate the songs of other birds.

2. Despite this cool ability, they mostly stick to their own sounds. Their own sounds are highly varied though, with one study putting the number of unique ones at over 1000!

3. The Brown Thrasher is an eastern bird, with some birds moving up from southern states to the Midwest and Northeast during the summer.

4. Brown Thrashers are a very common host for the Brown-headed Cowbird, a brood parasite. They will most often raise these birds, but sometimes recognize the shifty eggs and boot them out of their nests.

5. Brown Thrashers like semi-open areas, rather than fully closed forests. Despite being historically common in the Northeast, their numbers seem to be declining there due to reforestation.

Have a great week!

1. This species’ scientific name is pretty great: Nycticorax nycticorax. The word “nycticorax” is loosely translated to “night crow” or “night raven.”

2. The Black-crowned Night Heron is found around the world, on every continent except Antarctica.

3. In contrast to this species insanely large range, its five cousin species in the genus Nycticorax are/were much more range restricted, four of which were restricted to single islands off of Africa.

4. Unfortunately, having such a small range is a big risk. During the colonial era, these four single-island cousins went extinct soon after they were discovered by early European explorers, almost certainly due to anthropogenic causes (introduced species, habitat degradation, etc.).

5. For the Black-crowned Night Heron, having a large range is a good insurance policy. Although having a private island is nice, when bad things happen (like humans), it doesn’t take much to snuff out a few million years of evolution.

6. In case you are worried, the Black-crowned Night Heron is doing great in most places (populations are stable), especially in North America after people stopped using DDT.

Have a great week!

* Poke-A-Bird *

a new iPhone app from the team that brings you Bird of the Week. The app is a retro-style game for logging your real-world bird sightings by “poking” virtual birds. You can even stop an evil developer from destroying a wildlife sanctuary if you poke (see) enough birds. Check it out here!

Now, without further ado…

This week’s bird is the: Acorn Woodpecker

1. This bird is true to its name – acorns make up >50% of its diet! When it is not eating insects, you can find this bird eating fruit and insects.

2. These birds store acorns for cold months in “granary trees.” These trees often contain thousands of individually drilled holes, each of which is filled with a single acorn. These holes are drilled over long periods of time by generations of woodpeckers!

3. These granaries are very valuable, and so they need to be defended! To do this, Acorn Woodpeckers form social groups that work together to defend granaries from other woodpeckers, as well as other acorn-eating animals.

4. For example, these birds will mob poor little ground squirrels that get too close! Don’t even think about stealing those acorns!!

5. You may have seen this bird in the news, when 700 pounds of acorns were found in the wall of a house, stashed there by - you guessed it - Acorn Woodpeckers.

Have a great week!

1. The Golden-cheeked Warbler has an extremely limited range. During the breeding season, it is only found in a narrow band of juniper woodlands in Texas. During the non-breeding season, it lives in high-elevation pine forests from Southern Mexico to Nicaragua.

2. This species is strongly associated with the Ashe juniper, a tree with a similarly limited range mostly within Texas. The Golden-cheeked Warbler uses all different parts of this tree to make its nest (e.g. bark, leaves twigs) secured with cobwebs. This whole process of construction takes about 4-6 days.

3. Because of this species limited range and the destruction of much of its habitat due to conversion of land to farmland, ranches and urban sprawl, this species is on the IUCN and U.S. endangered species list.

4. At the moment, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering delisting the species (changing its classification from endangered to threatened), despite the fact that its habitat is still in steep decline (down 29% from 2000 to 2010). A switch from endangered to threatened would remove many automatic and sweeping protections for the species.

5. Golden-cheeked Warblers are a charismatic species that have drawn a lot of public interest and support in the past, and it is likely that the species will remain on the endangered list as a result. Greater protection of this species means a broader protection of an extremely unique ecosystem in which it lives. Meaning, even if you don’t like birds (and I think you probably do), protecting this bird means protecting the similarly rare and unique species that it cohabitates with.

6. BONUS! In case you were wondering, there will eventually be a public comment period during the delisting process. So stay tuned…

Have a great week!

1. All petrels belong to the order Procellariiformes, collectively referred to as “tubenoses.” You can guess where this name comes from – they have little tubes on their bills!

2. These tube structures give these birds a ridiculously good sense of smell. They can smell the odor from oils and other substances excreted from marine life. They can even smell plankton! This ability allows them to find local concentrations of food in a very expansive ocean environment.

3. Tubenoses also drink seawater. They have to, because they spend virtually all of their life at sea (except when breeding). To process seawater, these birds basically act as mini desalination plants, using specialized structures near their eyes that allow them to concentrate and excrete salt, retaining that nice desalinated water.

4. Petrels usually migrate quite far from their breeding grounds on remote islands to deeper oceans during the rest of the year. The Fork-tailed Storm-Petrel is an exception, mostly sticking nearby its breeding sites. Some populations in California are even considered resident.

5. These birds are very abundant around the Gulf of Alaska. Recent population estimates put the total number around 3-5 million.

   

Have a great week!