Last post was the New Year’s first bird — a frosty Costa’s hummingbird — but this one is the Year’s First New Bird, and it’s a hummer, too.

We just returned from Baja California, and in the mission village of San Javier on the dramatic east side of the Sierra de la Giganta in Baja California Sur, Xantus’s hummingbirds (Basilinna or Hylocharis xantusii) were much in evidence. They’re pretty little birds, medium-sized for a hummer (about the size of Anna’s) and colorful, sporting a bright red bill, buffy chest and belly, azure and emerald green upper-parts, black throat, blue-black forehead, a white line behind the eye, and a cinnamon tail.

Behind the Misión San Javier de Viggé-Biaundó, in the three-hundred year old olive grove planted by its founding Jesuit missionaries, Xantus’s hummers zipped back and forth, feeding on chuparosa flowers sprawled over the bulky stone walls (photo right), perched in the thin tips of the olive branches (below), and scolded each other. This is a hummer that lives no where else on earth but central and southern Baja California, and we had tried unsuccessfully to see it once before on an earlier Baja trip, so it was delightful to get so many good views.

(All hummer photos thanks to E.Shock and his magic big little zoom lens, in difficult light conditions with tiny moving targets! Click to enlarge.)

The man whose shares his name with the bird had an interesting history: Xántus János, John Xantus de Vesey (left), was a Hungarian exile who came to the US in the middle of the 19th century, and worked with Hammond and Baird (also names familiar to birders and biologists). He had a short-lived consulship in Mexico — according to Wikipedia he was dismissed for ineptitude — but was there long enough to collect a specimen of this endemic hummer.

In his lifetime, Xantus’s name was also attached to a blenny, a croaker, a gecko, a pelagic crab, a murrelet, a wrasse, a night-lizard, and several plants. In addition, according to an anecdote recounted to me by a Baja historian, during his consulship Xantus left quite a few of his own chromosomes in the local gene pool, along with his Hungarian family name Xántus, which reportedly can still be found as a surname in Baja.

>> A durable little male Costa’s hummingbird, perched two feet off the ground on an aloe-tip, in the gray light of a below-freezing desert dawn, the first morning of the year also the coldest of the season so far. (All photos A.Shock — click to enlarge!)

Moustachios a-flarin’ >>

Above: slurping at the feeder:

It’s surprising how often the shutter captures an extended hummer-tongue:

As I’ve mentioned in other posts, Costa’s hummingbirds are year round birds in our yard, although in the winter months their numbers can be sparse. Currently, I know of one male in the yard, this one, who holds court at the feeder hung in the palo verde shown here, and one female, who hangs out at a feeder at the back of the lot. Gnats must be scarce right now, but the Chuparosa (Justicia californica) — so favored by the little flower-feeders that the bird gives one of its Spanish names to the plant — are in fine bloom, their red tubular flowers full of sweet nectar.

In celebration of my friend Kate seeing Black-bellied whistling ducks in New Orleans, here is a Black-bellied whistling duck Spot the Bird.

The photo was taken in a coastal wetland in the state of Veracruz, Mexico, in Ocotber of 2008. I was scanning the greenery with binx when I spotted the ducks — I suspect I would never have seen them with the naked eye — and took the picture, hoping it would come out just like this: a photo with birds that are virtually invisible, except for their extraordinary bill color. (If you don’t know what a BBWD’s bill color is, click on the link above to Kate’s photo to make the search easier.) I’ll post a photo key later, but in the meantime, don’t forget to click to enlarge. By the way, the head count is three ducks, as far as I can tell.

Along the Verde River in the Yavapai Indian Nation, a Bald eagle sits low in the field of view, framed by a dramatic snag, golden cottonwood foliage, and saguaro and brush-covered hills behind.  Out of sight, the river flows to the right, between the eagle and the saguaros in the background.

Vignetting, distortion, noise, and other fatal photo flaws result in moody painterly effects created by distance, heat, and the multiple lenses of digiscoping. (Photo A.Shock; no “artistic” Photoshop filters used)

The eagle’s own view of me taking the photo would likely have been sharper than this image.

A looming Killdeer (Charadrius vociferus) casts a long shadow in the late afternoon sun, standing on a bermed farm road east of Phoenix (photo A.Shock).  Despite its scientific name, it was being silent, and not vociferus at all.  And despite its common name, ungulates don’t have to worry, but you invertebrates? — quake in your lowly, mud-coated exoskeletons.

…it’s hard to hide in bright, falling foliage if you’re a flying tiger…

Here’s one of a pair of Great Horned Owls we happened upon yesterday in a cottonwood grove along the Verde River east of the Phoenix metro area.  We were scouting for Tuesday’s official Christmas Bird Count of the Rio Verde area, and accidentally flushed the pair from their day-roost just before midday.

The owls flew a short distance then resettled, each in a spot they felt was secure.  One hid well, disappearing from view, but the other became a shadowy shape in golden foliage.

Great horned owl (Photo A.Shock) >>

It evidently felt sufficiently concealed, since it didn’t fly again, despite our nearness and a raven and a cooper’s hawk hassling it.  Look carefully — even through the screening leaves, you can pick out the owliness of its outline: a solid, chunky form with wispy cranial tufts. “Stink eye” — no one likes their nap interrupted — can be deduced, but not actually discerned in the photo.

I’ve classed this as a Spot the Bird, of sorts, just because.

…a Happy Thanksgiving!

As fabulous a bird as our North American Wild Turkey undoubtedly is, there is a turkey more wonderful still: the Ocellated Turkey (Meleagris ocellata) of tropical Central America.>>

On this Turkey Day feast your eyes on the glory that is the iridescent El Guajolote Supremo — eaten nearly to extinction because it apparantly tastes as good as it looks.  Now it’s protected, and currently can be  found primarily on the Yucatán Peninsula, and a limited number of other spots and preserves including Quintana Roo, Campeche, and Guatemala.  (These photos were taken by A and E Shock at Chan Chich Lodge in Belize in 2007.  Be sure to click to enlarge!)

As long ago as the Old Kingdom (the middle of the third millenium BCE), the Egyptians used the eye of the Falcon — the eye of Horus, the falcon-headed deity — as an apotropaic, or protective symbol, wearing the still-popular faience amulets as personal ornament, or tucking them into the wrappings of mummies.

The Left Eye of Horus, also known as the Wedjat Eye, was known to be particularly potent, and its resurrective power was demonstrated by bringing Osirus back to life. According to the British Museum:

The name wedjat means ‘the sound one’, referring to the lunar left eye of Horus that was plucked out by his rival Seth during their conflict over the throne. The restoration of the eye is variously attributed to Thoth, Hathor or Isis. The injury to the eye and its subsequent healing were believed to be reflected in the waxing and waning of the moon.

Horus’s falcon counterpart is said to be the Lanner (Falco biarmicus), a falcon of southern Europe, Africa, and the middle east. We don’t have Lanners living wild in this hemisphere, but most falcons display the typical black “speed stripe” below the eye, like cheetahs, which is the distinctive characteristic of the Wedjat Eye symbol.  To illustrate, here’s a detail of a clay portrait of a native falcon I recently completed: the left eye of a male American kestrel, the smallest falcon in North America, and terrorizer of finches, grasshoppers, and small rodents.

Really, I don’t know if a Kestrel’s eye is so much a bringer of life, as it is a see-er of lunch, but, that’s life-giving to a kestrel, if not to the lunch.

… I missed at first, when outside friday morning shooting passionflowers.

It really irked me to not have my own photo of a Gulf Fritillary to post yesterday, so once the sun was higher, I went out to fetch one, if possible (a photo, that is, not a flutterby). I ended up encountering not only the butterfly, but three other notable things. Here they are, in the order they appeared (be sure to click to enlarge, except the kestrel, which is too blurry to bother, and actually will just get smaller anyway; all photos A.Shock):

A. The Gulf Fritillary, which started it all. The insect is sort of hidden in the negative space between stems and leaves (almost a “Spot the Bird“).  This was the best photo I was able to nab — the name flitirraries would suit them even better, because they never seem to rest. They are Passiflora specialists, and are clearly thrilled that we have four vines in the yard. (Well, six vines actually — this morning I found two small seedlings, thriving about 4 feet away from where their parent plant refused to take.) >>

B. The Echinopsis in bloom (or “Easter Lily cactus”). This one is a cultivar, I don’t know which, since these shade-growing cactus have been living in this yard longer than we have. In my experience, it’s unusual to find its crepuscular flowers still open at noon. <<

C. The Fearsome Predator. >> The neighborhood male American Kestrel, about the size of a Mourning dove, checking out the Dee-licious Finch Bar (the birdfeeders) for lunch. I looked up when I heard a house sparrow give a rough alarm call; the little falcon was just 20 feet away from me, perched on a low wire with a good view of the menu. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a shot of him until he’d swooped up to the top of the corner phone pole because my trigger finger was distracted by D:

D. The Ants that were biting me painfully on the feet. Due to hastily brushing them off and sweeping them out from under my sandal straps in a undignified quick-time version of the Myrmex Dance I did not immortalize their image, although they were just doing their job, Protecting The Nest, which I’d accidentally trodden upon trying to photograph the Echinopsis. Perhaps the Gilded Flicker family who lives here (and who, I think surprisingly late, just fledged a young’un) will be making a visit to the Dee-licious Ant Bar.

Do you suppose the Ant Bar has a Formica countertop?

Bonus etymology: Formica, etc.

According to the archives of “Word of the Day” — …Greek murmex [is] “an ant,” which also gives us myrmecology “the study of ants” and myrmecophagous “ant-eating.” In Latin the related word for ant was “formica,” from which we have the former Word of the Day “formication,” the sensation of ants crawling under the skin. The proprietary name “Formica” applies to a plastic laminate ultimately derived from formic acid (which comes from ants), but it is also a pun—it was originally developed as an electrical insulator that could be substituted “for mica.”

For the detail-oriented, let me add that Latin formīca is the ancestor of the French and Spanish words for ant, fourmi and hormiga, respectively. The Latin and Greek words formīca and myrmex (μύρμηξ) at first glance may not seem similar to each other, but as neatly summarized by Wikipedia, both are generally accepted to be derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *morwi- along with a pile of words for ant in other languages: Latin formīca, Iranian /moirbant, Avar maoiri, Sanskrit वम्र (vamra), Greek μύρμηξ (murmēks)/μυρμήγκι (mirmigi), Old Norse maurr, Crimean Gothic miera, Armenian մրջիւն (mrǰiwn), Polish mrówka, Albanian morr, Persian /murče, Old Church Slavonic mravie, Russian муравей (muravej), Tocharian /warme, Kurdish Mérú, Breton merien.