Loree Johnson took this picture in Klamath Basin–her brief note: “This bird was very far away, but flying over Unit 2 at Lower Klamath NWR this morning. There was also a normal colored male in the vicinity.” Harrier leucistic, probably female.
Online searching hints that Unit #2 is inside California, east of Miller Lake and at niorthwest corner of the main section of South Klamath NWR. None of the maps online are totally clear, and, of course, none of the government offices answer the phone.
This is Audubon’s birthday–240 years ago he was born on Haiti. Later his parents took him to France, then sent him to the US so he wouldn’t end up in Napoleon’s deadly wars.
A third blue bird species came into our garden today. Our first Western Bluebird in fours years, after hundreds of eBird checklists. The two previous blueys are the daily visiting jays. This male wasn’t around long and I had carelessly stepped outside without my camera. He was at a feeder with some siskins. I have never seen a bluebird anywhere within a half-mile of our home. That includes the seven-acre park three blocks from here.
The one abundant local bird I have never seen here: Brewer’s Blackbird. I think they must be allergic to big trees which abound here–sitka spruce, cedar, deodar, gum tree, poplars, walnut, white oak, Doug-fir. I can find them in a shopping mall parking lot, but among all these trees and leaves.
My friend, Peter Thiemann, sent a couple images from his home up in Sequim. Members of the local Olympic team (representing the Olympic Peninsula). For this team there is no competition beyond the natural desire to survive. No drugs involved, no stopwatches, nor performance judging.
THen, mid-morning, Peter adds this image, a female Calliope at his feeder:
Calliope are the smallest bird species that breeds in North America.
On our June photo trip at Malheur, Bill Vollmer got the amazing shot of a flying (40 MPH or faster) Common Nigfhthawk a nano-second before it swallowed an insect. Click here to see that classic shot.
Here are some of Vollmer’s recent images, enjoy! (He wiull be going on our second Malheur photo trip this coming June.)
Karl Schn eck reports on the Barn Owl nest in his barn outside of Ashland: “Mom seems to care less about me intruding but the kids hissed at me. Probably in a couple weeks it will be time for USFWS to band them at my Barn Owl Banding Party.” Click here for image.
This late April rain seems to have brought to earth a migrating flock that included Orange-crowned Warblers. For the first time in many days, there were at least three in our garden as the drizzle continued. And a Golden-crowned Sparrow, not seen here yesterday. The warblers came within a few feet of our front door, feeding on small bites found on our roses and other flowers. I nwas trying toi track their nervous movements with my camera, through the door windows. They will move on as our neighborhood is not suited to their nesting preferences.
Click on asn y image for full-screen image.
Thanks to the rain, the earthworms were back at the surface. A single starling marched between the rose bushes and gathered a beakful of earthworms.
Today was an unexpected first…a low elevation wetlands with more Lincoln’s Sparrows evident than Song. And some flying Cinnamon Teal showing off that sky-blue wing patch. Red-wings were the most obvious and loudest bird presence this afternoon:
The other singing icterid was the meadowlark, but too far off for photo. The Savannah Sparrows were adding to the chorus:
Tim Johnson photo’d this bird at his home south of Salem. Plenty of forest and the Willamette River not far off:
Tim has other normal plumage Black-headed Grosbeaks at his place and thinks this is a leucistic cousin. Big and pale beak indicates he is probably right, sans DNA test. The other pale-beaked grosbeak (Evening) is too large to look like BHG, Tim is an expewrt birder.
ELSEWHERE: our garden feeder, Osprey nest at Madrona’s east terminus:
Mill Creek Wetlands, Marion, Oregon, US Apr 24, 2024 3:45 PM Protocol: Incidental 18 species
Canada Goose 1 Cinnamon Teal 5 Mallard 4 Green-winged Teal 8 Mourning Dove 1 Wilson’s Snipe 2 Red-tailed Hawk 2 American Crow 1 Black-capped Chickadee 1 Tree Swallow 16 European Starling 10 American Robin 1 American Goldfinch 1 Golden-crowned Sparrow 2 Savannah Sparrow 10 Lincoln’s Sparrow 2 Western Meadowlark 2 singing Red-winged Blackbird 30
Today’s date in numbers: 42424. In Britain it would 24424.
Today the Earth was bountioful here in Salem. Birdsong. Blue sky. Bright sun. First hawthorn flowers. A Commoin Yellowthroat skulking. Swallows aloft. Turkey Vulture kettle. Red-osier dogwood budded out before blooming. Bluebells edging many gardens. Goldfinches brightly gold. Wood Ducks in Oxbow Slough.
Above: look closely at the Tree Swallow pic, a pair, each in its chosen hole–checking the real estate…nest site and garden shed for storage? Killdeer on tiny island, not running around a lawn or parking lot!
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON ON EARTH DAY: During her confirmation hearings in 2021, Interior Department Secretary, Deb Haaland, promised “to responsibly manage our natural resources to protect them for future generations—so that we can continue to work, live, hunt, fish, and pray among them.” Noting her Indigenous heritage, Haaland tweeted, “A voice like mine has never been a Cabinet secretary or at the head of the Department of Interior…. I’ll be fierce for all of us, our planet, and all of our protected land.”
Her approach was a shift from the practice the Interior Department had established at the beginning of the twentieth century when it began to prioritize mineral, oil, and gas development, as well as livestock grazing, on U.S. public lands. But the devastating effects of climate change have brought those old priorities into question.
Republicans, especially those from states like Wyoming, which collects more than a billion dollars a year in royalties and taxes from the oil, gas, and coal produced on federal lands in the state, opposed Haaland’s focus on responsible management of natural resources for the future and warned that the Biden administration is “taking a sledgehammer to Western states’ economies.”
On Thursday, April 18, the Interior Department finalized a new rule for a balanced management of America’s public lands. Put together after a public hearing period that saw more than 200,000 comments from states, individuals, Tribal and local governments, industry groups, and advocacy organizations, the new rule prioritizes the health of the lands and waters the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management oversees. Those consist of about 245 million acres, primarily in 12 western states.
The new rule calls for protection of the land, restoration of the places that have been harmed in the past, and a promise to make informed decisions about future use based on “science, data, and Indigenous knowledge.” It “recognizes conservation as an essential component of public lands management, on equal footing with other multiple uses of these lands.” The Bureau of Land Management will now auction off leases not only for drilling, but also for conservation and restoration.
Western state leaders oppose the Biden administration’s efforts to change the Interior Department’s past practices, calling them “colonial forces of national environmental groups who are pushing an agenda” onto states like Wyoming.
The timing of the Interior Department’s new rule can’t help but call attention to Earth Day, celebrated tomorrow, on April 22. Earth Day is no novel proposition. Americans celebrated it for the first time in 1970. Nor was it a partisan idea in that year: Republican president Richard M. Nixon established it as Americans recognized a crisis that transcended partisanship and came together to fix it.
The spark for the first Earth Day was the 1962 publication of marine biologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which showed the devastating effects of people on nature by documenting the effect of modern pesticides on the natural world. Her exposé of how the popular pesticide DDT was poisoning the food chain in American waters illuminated the dangerous overuse of chemicals and their effect on living organisms, and it caught readers’ attention. Carson’s book sold more than half a million copies in 24 countries.
Democratic president John F. Kennedy asked the President’s Science Advisory Committee to look into Carson’s argument, and the committee vindicated her. Before she died of breast cancer in 1964, Carson noted: “Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”
As scientists organized the Environmental Defense Fund, Americans began to pay closer attention to human effects on the environment, especially after three crucial events. First, on December 24, 1968, astronaut William Anders took a color photograph of the Earth rising over the horizon of the moon from outer space during the Apollo 8 mission, powerfully illustrating the beauty and isolation of the globe on which we all live.
Then, over 10 days in January and February 1969, a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, poured between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of California beaches and killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals. Public outrage ran so high that President Nixon went to Santa Barbara in March to see the cleanup efforts, telling the American public that “the Santa Barbara incident has frankly touched the conscience of the American people.”
And then, in June 1969, the chemical contaminants that had been dumped into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire. A dumping ground for local heavy industry, the river had actually burned more than ten times in the previous century, but with increased focus on environmental damage, this time the burning river garnered national attention.
In February 1970, President Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.”
“The tasks that need doing require money, resolve and ingenuity,” Nixon said, “and they are too big to be done by government alone. They call for fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.”
Meanwhile, Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, visited the Santa Barbara oil spill and hoped to turn the same sort of enthusiasm people were bringing to protests against the Vietnam War toward efforts to protect the environment. He announced a teach-in on college campuses, which soon grew into a wider movement across the country. Their “Earth Day,” held on April 22, 1970, brought more than 20 million Americans—10% of the total population of the country at the time—to call for the nation to address the damage caused by 150 years of unregulated industrial development. The movement included members of all political parties, rich Americans and their poorer neighbors, people who lived in the city and those in the country, labor leaders and their employers. It is still one of the largest protests in American history.
In July 1970, at the advice of a council convened to figure out how to consolidate government programs to combat pollution, Nixon proposed to Congress a new agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, which Congress created that December.
In honor of Earth Day 2024, Democratic president Joe Biden has called for carrying on the legacy of our predecessors “by building a greener, more sustainable planet and, with it, a healthier, more prosperous nation.” …
Minto-Brown Island Park, Marion, Oregon, US Apr 22, 2024, Earth Day 26 species
Canada Goose 1 Wood Duck 5 Mallard X Green-winged Teal 14 Bufflehead 8 California Quail 4 Mourning Dove 1 Killdeer 2 Turkey Vulture 7 in a single kettle Cooper’s Hawk 1 Downy Woodpecker 1 Northern Flicker 3 calling loudly American Kestrel 2 California Scrub-Jay 3 American Crow 1 Tree Swallow 20 European Starling 9 American Robin 3 House Finch 3 American Goldfinch 2 White-crowned Sparrow 3 Golden-crowned Sparrow 1 Song Sparrow 4 Red-winged Blackbird 3 Common Yellowthroat 1 Yellow-rumped Warbler 1 myrtle
Fairview firsts: blooms of camas lilies, Mallard ducklings with mom (9).
Above: Cacklers flapdoodle on the main pond at Fairview. Preening. Dunking (as in ducking). Flapping. Clean the feathers? Exercise those wing msucles that must propel them to Alaska soon? Below: Fairview’s ring-necked pair:
Cacklers aloft:
Young waterfowl of 2024:
Nine Mallard ducklings, 13 goslings in two families.
Not on OBOL? Here’s Roy Lowe’s newest report on coastal Motus findings: Bullard’s Bridge (Bandon) A dunlin flew from Llano Seco near Glenn, CA to Bullard’s Bridge in Bandon in 6 hrs 43 min. It then flew from Bullard’s Bridge to Cape Meares 2 hrs 48 min. From Cape Meares it passed the Cannon Beach tower but time was not reported.
HMSC (Newport) A dunlin departed Llano Seco near Glenn, CA and was detected at the HMSC Newport 7 hrs 39 min later. It then flew from Newport to Tokeland, WA in 2 hrs 43min. It flew from Tokeland to Breckenridge Bluff (Grays Harbor) in 2 hrs 34 min (obviously it stopped at Willapa Bay or Grays Harbor). It flew from Grays Harbor to Victoria, BC in 1 hr 39 min then from Victoria to Boundary Bay BC in 2 hrs 32 min.
Cape Meares A dunlin departed Llano Seco near Glenn CA and flew to Cape Meares 9 hrs 28 min. The time from Cape Meares to Cannon Beach was not reported but then it flew past Cannon Beach and arrived in Wrangell, AK in 14 hrs 55 min. The average speed for that last leg to the Stikine River delta was 55 mph but that speed is calculated in a straight line between two points which obviously birds don’t do so the speed was likely much greater. That bird was really cooking but we had a frontal system passage yesterday that extended from southern Oregon to Alaska with strong south winds and it appears this bird took advantage of the tail wind.
Fairview Wetlands (in Salem) avian firsts: Northern Rough-winged Swallows this year, Canada Goslings this year, Barn Swallow flock in town, snipe at that location this spring. Fairview floral firsts: two lupine species, osoberry, elderberry. Mammal first: I saw a brush rabbit at Fairview.* I see them regularly at Minto-Brown. First time here. The swallows were feeding and two families of goslings had at least a dozen altogether.
Not far away an Osprey pair were perched above their nest platform at the eastern terminus of Madrona Avenue. It’s the third active nest I’ve been able to confirm in south Salem this spring. One’s at Souith Salem High School and one north of Minto-Brown Parking Lot #1. Madrona pair–click on right image to see pair up close:
*The species taxonomic name for brush rabbit is bachmani. Rev. Bachman was an avid naturalist and friend of Audubon’s. Mammals were his main focus, but Bachman did show Audubon the now-extinct warbler named for Bachman. Bachman’s daughters married Audubon’s two sons, and those women contributed many of the plant drawings that form the background of Audubon’s globally famous bird drawings.
Here are some of our neighbors, catching up on their spring garden work:
Minto-Brown Island Park, Marion, Oregon, US Apr 20, 2024 14 species
Canada Goose 1 Wood Duck 2 Mallard X Bufflehead 4 California Quail 6 Mourning Dove 1 Great Blue Heron 1 Osprey 1 California Scrub-Jay 1 American Crow X Tree Swallow X European Starling X American Robin X Golden-crowned Sparrow 15
Fairview Wetlands, Marion, Oregon, US Apr 20, 2024 18 species
Cackling Goose 2 Canada Goose 50 Northern Shoveler 8 Gadwall 2 Mallard X Green-winged Teal 20 Hooded Merganser 2 Wilson’s Snipe 1 American Coot X Killdeer 3 American Crow 1 Northern Rough-winged Swallow X Barn Swallow X European Starling X American Robin X Dark-eyed Junco 1 Song Sparrow 1 Red-winged Blackbird X
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