Here is the Hen today, sitting tight on her tiny cup nest built on two pine cones in our backyard Aleppo Pine.  She fills the whole opening like a cork, horizontally oriented.  Usually we see hummers either air-born or perched, in vertical orientation: it’s the horizontal arrangement, with her tail sticking out behind her and her back practically parallel to the ground, that makes her so Henlike.

She sits absolutely still for long stretches of time, with only the blink of her tiny eyelid to give away her presence.

I’ve been peeking up at the Hen infrequently, so as not to stress her with “eyeball pressure”.  She seems to be on-Nid most of the day.  I’ve tried a couple of times to catch her away from the nest, looking down on the Nid-bough from an upper bedroom window, to try to see eggs, but she’s always been there, strongly suggesting there are.  (The views from above are through a screen, so efforts at pictures from there have been unsatisfactory.)

Assuming she’s incubating now, and has been for a day or two — I’ll use 16 March as an estimated laying date — she will sit on her eggs with no help from the male for about 14 -19 days.  The young will fledge around the 23rd to the 26th day.  That would mean if the nest succeeds (and my calcuations are in the ballpark) the eggs should hatch around April 1, and the young will be in the nest for about another week after that.  That puts the Hen right at the peak of Anna’s breeding phenology according to the Arizona Breeding Bird Atlas, which shows nesting records for the species in the state peak around the start of the month, with a second shorter peak near the beginning of May.

While she’s incubating, an Anna’s female will leave the eggs periodically to feed, primarily on tiny insects like gnats, but fueled with nectar from flowers or sugar water feeders.  We’re keeping our feeders well-stocked and particularly clean (thanks, E!), with the first hot weather of the year.  The garden is more than doing its part, with hummer favorites like penstemon, aloes, desert lavender and above all, chuparosa all in peak bloom.

(Digiscoped photo A. Shock)

E and I managed to break away from work and gardening and the yard long enough to go out into the desert world, on a trail on the edge of Hell’s Canyon Wildernerss west of Phoenix.  It’s a real wilderness, but the trail we took merely skirts the proper wild stuff. It’s right next to the heavily used Lake Pleasant recreation area, so the hike is a combination of feeling like you’re Really Out There mixed with the occasional irritation of ORV engine-blarts or gunshots in the distance — plinking is a traditional pastime in this desert.  But we didn’t see anyone else on the trail all day, and once into the hike a bit, did achieve a sense of being away from others.

We went in search of wildflowers as well as a new hike experience, and although we anticipated the height of the ephemerals and hedgehog cactus bloom, there were plenty of flowers, birds, certain Feral Quadrupeds of Interest, and other things to look at.  And I was finding desert Chimaera combo-clumps everywhere — natural ones the desert plants themselves had arranged.  Here are some chimaeric photos (all photos A or E Shock):

Branching cholla cactus, pink fairy duster, hedgehog cactus

Barrel cactus and Jojoba

This last one is harder to see since it’s a subtle tangle of non-succulent foliage, so be sure to click on it to enlarge:

Wolfberry (bright green foliage); Jojoba (gray-green oval leaves); Fiddleneck (tiny yellow flowers unfurling like a fern frond)

Much building activity: as of today the Anna’s hummingbird hen in our Aleppo pine is still finessing her nid.  This morning, she could be seen bustling and fussing at the site (yes, I anthropomorphize, get over it please, I’m not an ornithologist!), making frequent trips away and to, coming back with light-colored fibers, some of which could be seen stuck to her beak in the morning sun.

Beautiful looks through the scope, but focus continues to be a challenge with the camera, as my digiscoping is low-tech (camera lens hand-held to scope eye-piece).  Above is a new shot from this morning.  It’s an action shot, with the downwards-pointed bill apparently in the act of applying fluffy material to the outside of the nest and smoothing it.  The nest is getting taller, and very slightly narrower.

To the left is a photo from this afternoon, where the Hen is screened through the needles at the top of the cones.  Again, click on the photo to enlarge it a little.  You can see her scattering of throat-spangles, which look black because the sun is on her other side.

She seems to be sitting tighter now than in the middle of the day.  Anna’s will sometimes lay before the nest is complete, or rather, continue improving the nest even as they are incubating.

(This photo is with a 250mm lens, not digiscoped, and focus seems a little easier, although obstructions like pine needles are still a bit of a problem for photography, clever nest concealment though they are).

More as it happens, or if I get better pics.

(All photos A. Shock)

The Anna’s hummingbird hen is on the nest! This morning I saw her bringing small beakfuls of fluffy white material like spider web or some kind of aerial seeds and adding them. She would then settle in the cup of the nest, and wiggle a little, as if to get the shape perfect, and run her bill across the outer surface of the nest in what looked like a smoothing gesture.  Being a clever little hen, she’s chosen her site well — it’s hard to see from either above or below, but here is a picture, not well digiscoped but recognizable.

The tiny nest is built on the top of a pair of pinecones about ten feet off the ground.  Though the angle of the photo is from below, you can see the well-compacted mix of material packed onto the cones, with the hen’s little head and beak (pointing to the right) above it.

We have the scope set up a reasonable distance away from the spot on a walkway below the pine, and we can check on her throughout the day. We don’t know if she’s incubating yet, although as I mentioned, construction was still underway earlier today.  Stay tuned!

Photo by A. Shock.

Today I saw the First-of-Season Black-chinned hummingbird for our yard at the back door feeder.  It was a male, as the first birds always are.  He whirred in and made his characteristic little “chup-chup” feeding noise, pumping his longish tail and being generally tidy and well-defined in his gorget feathers, without moustaches.  Black-chinneds typically have longish, slightly-down-curved bills, a fairly flat crown, a sharp color difference between their breast and their chin (the lower edge of which flashes purple in the right light, but looks black otherwise), a graceful silhouette including a narrowish neck (compared to the no-necked Costa’s) and a distinctive s-shaped posture while drinking nectar.

“Black-chins” are breeding hummers here in the Phoenix area, but don’t stay year-round.  They’re with us from about now until late September or the beginning of October, when they return to their wintering grounds along the western coast of Mexico, north-central Mexican highlands or the Gulf Coast of the US.

In other yard hummer news, yesterday E found a female Anna’s building a nest on top of a pinecone cluster in the big Aleppo pine in the backyard.  It’s in the same general area we’ve seen Anna’s nest before in previous years, so it’s either the same bird re-nesting in a favorite area, or just a good place in the tree for Anna’s to build.   This branch has a mixed record of nesting success in the past: one Anna’s nest successfully hatched two fledgelings, but the most recent attempt was destroyed by a predator, perhaps a rat. We’ll try to get pictures and post progress.

The photo above is a male Black-chinned hummer from Wikimedia Commons.  The detail on this photo is excellent; be sure to click on it to enlarge!

On the way home from San Diego Audubon Bird Festival, E and I stopped at a location near the Salton Sea where Gryphons are known to snore and slumber.

Gryphons, in this case, are geothermal features: modest but surprising cones built up by mud pots burbling out of the flat salty floor of the agricultural land around the Salton Sea.  This gyphon patch is officially known as the Davis-Schrimpf Seep Field, and is in the midst of a geothermally active area sprinkled with power plants that harvest energy from spots where warm gases rise up through cracks from deep underground, heating the salty water and liquefied clays they percolate through.  The gryphons lie sleepily in a field at the corner of two agricultural roads, some with briny pools of their own, tinted by hardy algae in red and green and orange, and others dry humps rising from the salty, cracked dirt.

For our trip we were lucky: though the ground had been wet recently, it was dry now, and we could approach the drowsy gryphons without sinking too deep. Some growled and burbled from deep inside without disgorging their liquid contents, while others sputtered and bubbled brownish gray mud, sometimes thin like a melted malt, sometimes almost thick as pudding.  Even in the brisk wind that blew, a slightly sulphurous and organic smell could be detected.  E wished to sample the waters, and I was the lackey, scooping up clays and biofilms into Falcon tubes, prepped for biological sampling.  My hi-tech tools were a narrow stainless steel spatula and a lighter with a  WWF wrestler on it, so it was work I could be trained to do.  (Although having made that claim, I should add that the wind made using the cheap lighter difficult, and I actually worked up a blister firing it over and over to flash off the sterilizing ethanol between samples.)

Meanwhile, E handled the serious equipment for testing pH and conductivity of the pools (several times reading “over range”, since the water is a few times saltier than seawater), and a couple of hours passed while we collected data and samples, trying not to let papers and zip-bags blow into the pools in between.  Clumps of visitors, locals and their friends, mostly, but others from farther places like Canada, came and went, asking questions about what caused the mudpots, what we were measuring, and if it was safe to walk around.  Some folks climbed right to the top of active gryphons, unconcerned about their own safety or the condition of the formations.  So far, this area is unprotected, and visitors have been fairly good about being careful.  For now, the only marks people had left were footprints, and a few unwise vehicle tracks.  As long as that’s the case, the gryphons will probably remain unfenced, regally accepting conscientious company into their realm.

In the last post on scoters, I forgot to add that there is a surprising Arizona angle to these sea ducks. Some years, one or two are found wintering or in transition on desert lakes around and about the state.  They are categorized as “casual” here.  This winter (Dec. ’08), there was a handful of female or immature-type Black scoters (white cheek patches) seen along the Colorado River near Parker Dam, and a White-winged scoter at Kearney Lake east of Phoenix (Jan. ’09; white cheek patches and white on the wings).

Arizona lakes and rivers contain populations of what are locally called “mussels”, both native and non-native bottom-dwelling bivalves.  Presumably these are what these wayward scoters are living on.

The bird above is a well-documented female Black scoter (Melanitta nigra), photographed at Butcher Jones Recreation Area on Saguaro Lake NE of Phoenix in October 2007.  Find more info and photos at the Arizona Field Ornithologists page.  If you’d like to check out the view or hike or kayak from Butcher Jones beach, here is a link with a map and other info.  Saguaro Lake is an excellent place for birding and hiking Fall through Spring.

Etymology

The etymology of the word “scoter” is obscure, with no satisfactory concensus. The scoter genus, Melanitta, is a Greek compound from Gr. melas, black, and “nitta” which Choate says “appears to be a misspelling for Gr. netta, duck”.  Most scoters are mostly or entirely black, so the choice is apt.  The Black scoter species, nigra, is the feminine form of Latin niger, black, which makes it a black black-duck.  The Surf scoter species, perspicillata, is from Latin and means “conspicuous” (like the Spectacled owl, Pulsatrix perspicillata).  They should just get it over with and say “clownlike”, right?

Photo: A. Shock/Three Star Owl

I’ve been working hard on pieces for the San Diego Audubon Birding Festival, which is coming right up.  While glazing a wall tile with the portrait of a male Surf scoter and looking at photo resources of scoters, I realized I was being treated to another pervious nostril!

It doesn’t show so much in this photo, but scoters, like cathartid vultures, have pervious, or “see-through” nostrils.  In Audubon’s professionally terse words:

Nostrils sub-medial, elliptical, large, pervious, near the ridge.

–John James Audubon, Birds of America, Family XXXIX. ANATINAE. DUCKS. GENUS V. FULIGULA. SEA-DUCK.

If you don’t know scoters, they’re sturdy North American sea ducks who breed in Alaska and northern Canada and winter along both coasts of the U.S.  They dive for a living.  The picture above, by photographer Alan D. Wilson, is a male Surf scoter (Melanitta perspicillata) at Bolsa Chica reserve, in California.  It shows the handsome bird with what is too frequently described as a “clownish bill”, gliding in the blue backwater of Bolsa Chica Wetlands.  If you’re wondering why the “clownish bill” is so big, scoters eat hard food, some of which — like blue mussels — needs to be pried off of rocks underwater.  In summer, they favor marine invertebrates, in winter, mostly molluscs.

As for the pervious nostril in scoters, I haven’t turned up a definitive discussion yet, but most sea birds need to rid their systems of salt, often by sneezing or dribbling it out through the nostrils, and have evolved various nostrillar adaptions (again, a technical term) to do so: pervious nostrils would not easily become clogged with expelled salt crystals.

To the left is Audubon’s plate of Surf scoters — at the time called Surf Ducks — from Birds of America

Three Star Owl will be at the San Diego Birding Festival in Mission Bay San Diego, 5-8 March 2009.

When I left the Mississippi River Valley to come back to the West, I thought, Hmmmmm, no chickadees in the low desert.  What’s that going to be like?

We were very accustomed to Carolina chickadees as ever-present “fee-bay-fee-bee”-ers in our St. Louis yard.  They accompanied us on hikes; we heard them in the parks, they were everywhere, all year round — active little birds that deserve the gooey description “perky”, sociable to the point of seeming to boldly hang with people if there was seed to be had (safflower, yum!), or nesting fluff (white dog hair, good!). And in Berkeley and Santa Cruz, we’d encountered Chestnut-backed Chickadees frequently.  So when we got to Phoenix it seemed strange to not have “dees” about the place.

But we didn’t need to worry — here we have Verdin (Auriparus flaviceps).   The default little gray bird of the Sonoran desert is taxonomically unrelated to chickadees, but they are superficially like them in that they are small, predominantly gray, active birds who are common permanent residents in their habitat, vocal, and fairly unabashed by humans.  In fact, though they aren’t related, the Verdin’s genus, Auriparus, means “golden parid”, or chickadee-like bird (Chickadees and Titmice are members of the family Paridae.)

“Small” may not be emphatic enough: tiny, or even dinky (the technical term) is more like it.  Verdin are in fact among the smallest of North American song birds: bigger than hummingbirds, but that’s about it.  They flit and glean busily among the thorny green-branched desert trees emitting chip notes and a three-note call that’s frequent and loud considering the size of its source.  Their sounds, along with the mechanical Drr-brrr-drr-brr-drr of cactus wrens and the Curve-billed thrasher’s quick “whit-wheat”, means home to me.

The photo at the top of the post, taken in our yard, is of a male doing nestling-feeding duties — you can see he’s got a little something in his beak.  He was so busy he allowed me to approach fairly closely, and you can see one of the most excellent things about Verdin: the color of their head.  They aren’t called  “flaviceps” (Latin for “yellow-head”) for nothing.  But it’s not just yellow, it’s a very particular sort of golden yellow — slightly green and slightly gray, too, mustard, perhaps, and by some amazing biological coincidence, it’s exactly the color of Creosote blossoms, as if the birds used them to powder their heads.  The bird above is in a creosote bush (Larrea tridentata), and though most of the blooms have become white seed puffs, you can still see a few yellow flowers over the Verdin’s back.  They exactly match his head.  You can also see another colorful field mark, his sharp little chestnut epaulette.  Both the head color and the epaulette are vivid in the close-up image here (photo by T.Beth Kinsey, from the always excellent Firefly Forest).  Notice the narrow, sharp beak of a gleaner, rather than the sturdy beak of a seed-cracker.

As bright as these plumage features seem in photos, they are not always easily seen in the field, unless you’re equipped with binoculars.  So, many folks don’t notice this industrious little desert-gleaner working above their heads in their xeric yards.  What is very easily seen are the nests of Verdins — messy round stick-wads built in thorny trees and shrubs, often placed out towards the end of branches, to catch cooling breezes.  Verdin are prolific nest-builders, and often have a couple underway at the same time.  They build both breeding nests and roosting nests, and you might say they’ve got a complex nest-culture.  The male starts a sample nest which the female helps him finish, probably strengthening the pair bond.  Here’s a photo of an active breeding nest in our yard with noisy hatchlings in it.  The adult birds are hard to pick out, but the same little gray papa in the top photo is hanging in the “front door” along with the female — you have to imagine away the foreground branch of the Little leaf Palo Verde that’s blooming.  The nest is the wad of brown sticks against the blue sky, and the nest opening is at the bottom of the wad, which is where you can see the gray backs of the parents (click to enlarge the photo; it’s easier to see the birds). The low placement of the nest openings make them rain-sheltered and somewhat protected from larger winged predators.

The materials Verdin use for the exterior of their nests are the same ones Cactus wrens prefer for their own, so Verdin nests under construction in spring are often the focal point of theiving-and-chasing interaction between the two species.  In general, Cactus wrens seem to enrage Verdin, and the smaller birds will gang up on any wren they find in their area — nesting material isn’t the only thing Cactus wrens will snatch out of Verdin nests.

Verdins enjoy a variety of food sources besides gleaning bugs and larvae from foliage.  They take a sip of nectar now and again, and often hop around inside the stems of Chuparosa, robbing the sweet nectar from the base of the red flowers (they’re delicious — pop a whole Chuparosa flower into your mouth sometime; they taste like sweet cucumbers).  And we frequently see them hanging upside down from the hummingbird feeders, sipping the drips on the bottom after the sloppy Gila woodpeckers are through.  This acrobatic hanging upside down of Verdins is a family trait — they are the only North American representative of the family Remizidae, or Penduline tits.  Whatever that may sound like, it actually means little birds that hang upside down.

So, although the desert has no chickadees, we’ve got other little gray birds. ( And I haven’t even mentioned gnatcatchers, Bushtits, and Lucy’s warblers…)  But Arizona is not “dee-free”.  When we need a hit of chickadee or titmouse, we have choices — there is actually one more species of Paridae here than in the Midwest: Mountain chickadees in the high pine forests above the Mogollon Rim, Juniper titmice on the Colorado Plateau, the fantastic Bridled titmouse (yes, its ornate facial markings put the Plain titmouse to shame!) in the evergreen oak woodlands of the foothills and mountains of central and southern Arizona, and even a small population of Mexican chickadees in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona.  All we need to do is go uphill and it’s ‘Dee-a-Rama!