Catching Up With Our California Endemic: The Yellow-billed Magpie

I see them pretty much every day, so it's easy sometimes to forget that this is an exceedingly rare bird. There are less than 200,000 of them in the world, which is not all that many for a species that is faced with habitat loss, and an exotic disease. The Yellow-billed Magpie (Pica nuttalli) is also one of California's few endemic bird species.

If you are a non-Californian, you might look at this species and think it is just a magpie (the Black-billed Magpie), but it is a distinct species, and the ranges of the birds rarely overlap. The Sierra Nevada is the barrier that has provided the isolation allowing the species to diverge.

I live and work in prime magpie habitat. They range over the Coast Ranges and Central Valley of California, living off of bugs, grains, and pretty much any kind of food they can find. They are gregarious, often flying about in flocks, and engaging in boisterous arguments. A day at work would be lonely without their calls going on in the background.

The arrival of the West Nile Virus was nearly their undoing in the early 2000s. They were particularly susceptible to the viral infection because of their gregarious nature, and more than half of them were lost. The few birds with natural resistance have survived and have allowed the population to slowly rise again.

These pictures are some I've collected this year from the MJC West Campus and the along the Tuolumne Parkway Trail where I most often see the birds. I'm glad they survived their version of the bubonic plague. The state would be a less interesting place without them.

The Red-Tailed Hawk Babies are Born! The Newest Raptors at MJC...

The Red-tailed Hawk babies have hatched! I've been watching the activity around the nest since late February when I first noticed the parent hawks building the nest. I feared the eggs might have been lost at one point during a particularly violent windstorm a few weeks ago. I was comforted when the parents were cursing at me in hawk language when I walked by a few days later. Today I thought I saw something move that wasn't "hawk" colored. It was downy white instead. Out came the camera, and there is at least one chick. There may be more...I'll be watching and reporting as I see anything. The hawk baby  (or babies) will be in the nest for around six weeks before they start flying and getting trained in hunting skills.

ADDENDUM: There are TWO chicks (so far)

The Stages of Birding: Yellow-rumped Warblers on the West Campus

I've been at this birding thing for about five years now, which marks me as a rank amateur, but by now I've started to recognize that there are "levels" of birding that for me run something like the following:

1) Total Ignorance: One is vaguely aware that birds are out there, but they're all pigeons, sparrows, crows, and mockingbirds. Birders are strange alien-like people with strange obsessions related to "life-lists" and "first-of-season". Colorful birds are interesting, but known to only live in other places.

2) First Stage Amateur: Somewhere along the way, one sees a very unusual bird, and has no good way of finding out what it was. They then take that tentative first step in birding by asking someone they know to be an expert what the species is, and are surprised to find that bird is actually common in the area, if one knows to watch for it. Experienced birders are still considered strange, but a little less so, in an eccentrically wise sort of way.

3) Second Stage Amateur: Having learned that there are many more birds in the region besides pigeons and sparrows and crows, one takes that ominous and tentative step of buying a bird book (by the time you've asked the expert about seven or eight times you realize you could try doing it yourself). Even though the book may be introductory in nature, one is shocked to find that bird species in the region number in the hundreds. This is a perilous moment, as some are overwhelmed by this complexity, give up, and fall away. Realizing the full breadth of the knowledge base of experienced birders, they are now considered demigods.

4) Tertiary Stage Amateur: One buys a camera with a good zoom lens. And binoculars. And a real bird book, like Sibleys or Audubon's. One starts altering the itinerary of vacations to include potential bird discoveries. But one isn't like those other birders with their life-lists and all. One just happens to like taking pictures of birds. Thousands of pictures of birds.

5) Quaternary Stage Amateur: One finds that he/she is keeping track of observed bird species, sometimes on a random sheet of paper, or perhaps even on a downloaded list of birds from the county or state. One day this person looks at the list and thinks "that's a lot of birds I've identified"...and they count them. They have passed into the realm of "life-list". This stage is completed when they start recording their finds on eBird or similar sites on the internet. Friends and family start asking them about the identity of some unusual bird they've observed. And the amateur knows many or most of the species...

6) First Stage Expert: I have no idea. I haven't reached that stage. And they're demigods anyway, something that we mere mortals cannot aspire to.

All in fun of course, but I started thinking about this amateur/beginning birder thing because of the Yellow-rumped Warblers (Setophaga coronata) I saw today in the sheep compound on the West Campus of Modesto Junior College. I was remembering how rare they seemed to be when I was just beginning to pay close attention to bird species, and how shocked I was to find that they were living by the dozens in the Mulberry tree in my own backyard. I ultimately realized they were a very common bird in the region at the right time of year, and I started to pay a bit less attention to them as I searched for rarer species. They were so flighty and active that I had trouble getting good photographs of them anyway.

But this afternoon I was standing next to a fence watching an Oak Titmouse build a nest, and I was so motionless that the birds came out of hiding, and a couple of the warblers perched on branches only a few feet away. They were just begging to be photographed, so I did. The opening picture of this post is by far the closest I've ever been to these birds. They are mostly going to be gone in a few weeks, moving up into the mountains to breed, and I'm realizing how much I'll miss them.

What's Everyone Yelling About? Cedar Waxwings at the MJC West Campus

Cedar Waxwings (Bombycilla cedrorum) always strike me as quiet unassuming birds. I've had flocks of dozens in my flowering pear tree that were so quiet that I almost missed them entirely (it doesn't help that their call is so high-pitched that I can't hear them).

I was wandering around the northwest corner of the west campus of Modesto Junior College yesterday, near the "mini-wilderness" of the sheep pasture. There's a watering tank that birds often utilize, and yesterday was no exception. There were several dozen Cedar Waxwings flitting about in the trees, and eight or nine at a time were getting water. I snapped a few pictures from a distance and didn't notice until later that they looked as if they were yelling at each other.

What was that all about?

Something New at MJC: A Nesting Pair of Red-tailed Hawks

Things have been afoot at MJC's West Campus over the last few weeks. A lot of birds have been agitated by the presence of some Red-tailed Hawks (Buteo jamaicensis). I've seen Red-tails there fairly often, but most of the time they've been soaring high above the campus and over the surrounding territory. Lately though, a pair has been loitering around the sheep pasture and pond on the northwest corner of the campus. The Yellow-billed Magpies and several other species have been rather unhappy about these unwelcome neighbors, and I've seen them trying to harass the Red-tails a couple of times.

I suspected that they might be nesting, but I was having a tricky time confirming it. There are two large nests in a Deodar and a Eucalyptus tree on the south side of the pond, but during the last two weeks I couldn't see any birds occupying either of the nests. Until this week. I spotted one of the hawks carrying nesting material, and it eventually alit in the Eucalyptus and seemed to be watching me.

I walked away towards the other end of the pond and eventually the bird hopped over to the empty nest and started to work on the lining. They are obviously getting ready for babies. That's a first for the campus, at least during the last three years that I've been paying attention to such matters. I'll keep an eye on things and see if I can get some pictures of the young ones....

An Argument for Looking Closer at Little Birds: Western Bluebirds on the West Campus

Before I  became a geologist, all rocks were gray, and there were a few crystals, but all of them were quartz. Then, a small bit of education intervened and my eyes were opened to a vast and complicated world inhabited by a dizzying array of rocks and thousands of kinds of beautiful and colorful minerals. It was a revelation that changed my life and led me into the career I've enjoyed now for more than thirty years.

Jumping ahead a few decades, birds have become my new minerals. A decade ago, I pretty much figured the birds I saw in the neighborhood and at work fell into a few categories: sparrows, pigeons, and crows. And they were little gray things, just like the rocks once were. So imagine my surprise when I found I lived in one of the more critical bird habitats in the country. Nearly a thousand bird species have been identified in the lower 48 states, and almost a third of them have been sighted at one time or another in Stanislaus County where I live. There are plenty of reasons for the biological richness: mild winters, providing shelter for many migrant species; and a wide variety of habitats, including foothills, prairies, rivers and flood plains, and mountain slopes. Despite being a rank amateur at bird watching, I soon had identified more than a hundred species.

One of my favorites of my new world are the Western Bluebirds (Sialia Mexicana), as evidenced by the fact that this is the 14th time I've posted pictures of them. They're irresistibly colorful. I saw these during my recent wanderings on the West Campus of MJC, which turns out to be a pretty good habitat for bird watching, with more than 60 species seen so far. They'll probably be headed for the hills very soon as spring arrives. They are actually more of a woodland bird in their breeding choices, and move into the Sierra Nevada or the Coast Ranges.

I'm not an expert, and my blog has become just the 300th most-read bird blog, but I've enjoyed writing about my discoveries, and I've appreciated hearing from those who have been along for the journey!

Winsome Little Warblers of the Yellow-rumped Kind in the MJC Mini-wilderness

I see that it has been an entire month since I've posted pictures of Yellow-rumped Warblers (also called Audubon's Warblers, latin name Setophaga coronata). It's hard not to. They are attractive little birds, and they are all over our campus in west Modesto. They are one of the most common species that I see in the central plaza area of the school.

We are getting on towards spring, so they may soon be leaving for their summer breeding grounds, which could be far to the north, or possibly in higher elevations of the Sierra Nevada (I've seen them on the road to Glacier Point at elevations of almost 8,000 feet).

In the meantime, it's fun to try and get decent pictures of these extremely active foragers. I got lucky in the last few trips around the campus and caught a couple of sharp shots I was happy with.

Butterbutts: Yellow-rumped Warblers at MJC and the Tuolumne River show Evolution in Action

In the days of my ignorance (actually not a thing of the past), all small birds were sparrows of some kind. Imagine my surprise when I started paying attention and discovered the dozens of colorful and interesting birds that weren't sparrows (most of them). Among the most beautiful are the little Yellow-rumped Warblers (Setophaga coronata), apparently also known as...butterbutts.

These are pretty little birds right now, but in a few weeks they will take on even brighter plumage as the breeding season commences. I may not see them as often as they tend to move up into the forests at that time. Right now they are flitting about in the trees in great numbers on my campus (all the following pictures), and along the Tuolumne River below where I live in Waterford (the two pictures above).

There is an interesting story concerning these little birds. Until 1973, they weren't "Yellow-rumped Warblers". They were an eastern species called a Myrtle Warbler, and a western species called the Audubon's Warbler. There are color differences, and differences in their calls. But...in 1973 they were combined into a single species because of a narrow region where the range of the two species overlapped. In that narrow region the two species were observed interbreeding and producing young, a long-term definition of a biological species. So now they are officially considered to be subspecies along with two others, the Black-fronted Warbler in Mexico, and the Goldman's Warbler in an isolated part of Guatemala. They're all Butterbutts, for the time being.

But change is afoot. Genetic research is far more advanced than it was in the 1970s, and DNA evidence indeed suggests that the four butterbutts should be considered species rather than subspecies. Part of the argument involves that fact that while they hybridize in that small zone of range overlap, the area of interbreeding has not expanded over time, as if the hybrids were not really viable.

These birds are a great example of how natural selection and evolution works to change and develop new species. As with the Scrub Jays that I discussed the other day, isolation is the driving force leading to changes. During the ice ages, the original populations of the warblers were separated by glaciers, and they remained isolated in the aftermath. The populations were subjected to different environmental conditions and different food sources, and over time little differences developed. Some of the variations allowed particular individuals to survive and pass on their genes to subsequent generations, and over time, the differences accumulated to the extent that they could no longer successfully interbreed. In other words, they were new species.

Because of the new research results, the North American Classification Committee of the American Ornithologists' Union may very well declare the four subspecies to be species once more. It's arbitrary in one sense, but the fact that there are blurry lines between possible species actually supports the idea of evolutionary change. There are simply not always sharply defined boundaries as divergence takes place.

In any case, these beautiful birds may be right in your own backyard. In ours they stayed away from the feeder and hung out in the Mulberry trees around the corner of the house, so I never thought to search for them. Nowadays, knowing where to look, I see them all the time. Have I mentioned that they aren't sparrows?

Audubon's (Yellow-rumped) Warbler on the West Campus

I'm finally seeing some warblers this week on campus while I'm working. I don't know if it was me, but the birds seemed to be hiding away. But the last two excursions around campus have produced some sightings. The Audubon's Warbler (Setophaga coronata) is the type of warbler I see most often. It used to be called the Yellow-rumped Warbler, which was good for random Google search hits, but is otherwise mildly insulting.

Most of those that I've seen have been perched high above in the "mini-wilderness". There's another that likes to land just outside of my lab on the third floor wall. It stays until I grab a camera, then takes off. Tonight I was trying to get some closer shots without success. Just as I gave up, one landed in the tree next to me, no more than 15-20 feet away. It stuck around for a couple of shots.

Western Bluebirds Continue as One of the Most Colorful MJC Birds

They're one of my favorite sights on the west campus of Modesto Junior College where I work, the Western Bluebird (Sialia mexicana). The campus has an unusually large greenspace with lots of mature trees, dating from the property's origin as a hospital for wounded World War II soldiers. I extended my evening walk to the far eastern reaches of the property where there are as of yet no buildings, just a large grove of trees including oaks, palms, eucalyptus, lemon (!), cottonwood, ash, and Monterey Pines. I've seen hawks and kestrels out that way, being no surprise when seeing the large concentration of ground squirrels in the grassy area below. I saw this male (the more brightly colored one) and female in a pepper tree near Bluegum Avenue.

I think this is my twelfth post on Western Bluebirds, which is about right compared to my pleasure at encountering them. They spend a fair part of the year elsewhere, most likely up the slopes of the nearby Sierra Nevada, so I'm catching all the pictures I can right now!

A West Coast Special: Anna's Hummingbird on the West Campus

One day, I'll get the perfect picture of the Anna's Hummingbird (Calypte anna). I know it's possible because Mrs. Geotripper got one on her first try (see it here). I got pretty close to one during my lunchtime stroll on the west campus at Modesto Junior College, but the day was gloomy and the bird was framed by the skies. It took a bit of obvious photo manipulation to bring out the color, although I'm happy with the details visible.

Anna's Hummingbirds are one of the rare success stories of the birding world. They were originally confined to Southern California and Baja, but with urbanization of the west coast and the attendant landscaping of delicious nectar-producing flowers, the birds have been able to expand their range far to the north into coastal Washington and British Columbia (inland would no doubt be too cold for them). Hummingbirds in general are only found in the New World. European colonizers thought for a time that they were some kind of strange hybrid of an insect and a bird ("flybirds").

Update: Almost everyone who usually reads these posts has already done so. However I ended up walking again at dinner, and wouldn't you know the hummingbird was still patrolling the bush! So I added another highly manipulated shot below...clearly the iridescence is not so visible from some angles!

Speaking of California Endemics, Here Are Some Yellow-billed Magpies, Found Nowhere Else in the World

The Sierra Nevada is a barrier to more than just humans. Magpies "invaded" the western United States from Asia perhaps 3-4 million years ago, but the populations became isolated as the Sierra rose to higher and higher elevations, separating the Great Valley and Coast Ranges from the rest of the west. Eventually there were two races of magpie, the widespread Black-billed Magpie found across the western states from Canada to Mexico, and the Yellow-billed Magpie (Pica nuttalli), endemic only to California. There is very little mixing of their ranges.

They are entertaining to watch, and are easily seen in my area. I saw these two apparently having a quiet argument on top of a street light ("I'm not speaking to you!") on the west campus of Modesto Junior College (actually, they were just sitting and watching things; I'm not supposed to anthropomorphize animals). Most of the time they are kind of raucous.

They used to be more numerous, at times forming large flocks, but they were decimated, almost catastrophically, by the West Nile Virus. Beginning about 2005, between 50-75% of the population was killed off, until the few resistant ones could begin to reproduce in larger numbers. The birds are making a fairly decent comeback. It would have been a terrible shame to lose them.

Western Bluebirds in a Changed "Mini-wilderness" on Campus

The storms of 2017 are changing many things. It's been a week since I wandered over to our campus "mini-wilderness", a drainage pond that has a grazing area for sheep from our agricultural unit as well as a collection of old and maturing trees (some are 70 years old). It's been a good spot for seeing a variety of birds. Today I was shocked to see that not one, but two huge Eucalyptus trees had fallen during the weekend. It appears that the first one to fall took out the second.

As I continued walking around the pond, a Western Bluebird (Sialia Mexicana) alit on the fence post only a few yards away from me. These beautiful birds tend to be a little more cautious in my presence, but maybe the coming spring is releasing some of their inhibitions. It stayed in place while I got some of the sharpest pictures I've ever managed to capture of these colorful creatures.

Canada Geese at the West Campus Pond

With the cessation of the seemingly endless rains of the last month (okay, for us Californians it felt that way), the drainage pond on our west campus is filled to the brim, and the local ducks and geese have taken note. I've seen a dozen or Mallards lurking in the brush, and this evening there were four Canada Geese (Branta canadensis). There was nothing overly remarkable about seeing geese in the pond, but I really liked the way they grouped themselves to pose for tonight's photograph.

Western Bluebirds on the Campus Quad

It's been gloomy of late, what with six days of rain, and five days of fog and overcast skies. The conditions weren't ideal for photographing birds, but while I wandered the campus on Tuesday, I did run across a number of Western Bluebirds (Sialia mexicana) in the main quad. Nothing else was likely as a photography target, so I snapped a couple of shots in the gray conditions. They are beautiful birds even if the prevailing skies are not!

Western Bluebirds on a Foggy Cold Morning

We'll get back to the ducks from the Sacramento NWR shortly, but I was getting out of my car this morning when I realized that there were warblers and bluebirds flitting about in the deodar tree under which I had parked. I've been missing these little songbirds this year, so I grabbed the camera. A few of the Western Bluebirds (Sialia mexicana) were nice enough to land on the signs nearby and pose (or stare balefully).

It was a cold morning, and we're starting to see our hated foggy days. Such gray days can get old quickly, so it was nice to see a flash of color in the gloom!