Diario de olivialiu

Time: 12:58pm - 2:50pm
Date: 04/28/2020
Weather: 54 degrees and sunny
Habitat: rivershore wetlands, floodplain forest, and marsh area.

Today, I went to Laplatte River Marsh Area. I'm lucky to know a lot of good birding and hiking areas around Vermont. I spent last summer working as a stewardship intern for The Nature Conservancy. I was given the opportunity to visit all of TNC's natural preserves and easements. Laplatte is an oasis in an otherwise fragmented landscape. The rivershore and marsh is an important habitat for migratory waterfowl, and the marsh complex is located at the end of the Laplatte, a 16-mile-long river. The floodplains drain about 35,000 acres of Champlain lowlands. This ecosystem is essential to helping filter and clean the water that empties into Lake Champlain while also providing safe and relatively undisturbed habitat. When I was with TNC, I did a lot of trail maintenance at this preserve because it's so prone to flooding, and the wooden boardwalks often rot or get completely submerged by water. I love this area for it's unique habitat as well as because it's a beautiful place to explore wildlife. Today I saw tons of chipmunks, squirrels, turtles, and snakes, along with the many birds of course! I hope to come here often this summer to bird watch!

Time: 2:20pm – 5:45pm
Date: 04/19/2020
Weather: 50 degrees partly cloudy, rainy and overcast the last hour
Habitat: mixed coniferous and deciduous stands, abandoned farmland, with most of the trail running along streams with very rocky and root-ridden terrain. Gradual, but substantial inclines (lots of ridgelines)

For this field journal, my friend and I hiked Stevenson Brook Trail in Waterbury, VT. We hiked about 6 miles and ended up getting lost for a little while. The last hour of our hike it was raining pretty hard and I didn’t see any birds except two American Robins flying in and out of view among the trees. However, at the start of our hike, we came across an open marsh and at first, I thought I saw two woodpeckers, but as we got closer I noticed the stocky, large-headed bird with a shaggy crest and a dagger-like bill. There were two of them, and neither had any brown on them, so I’m assuming they were both male Belted Kingfishers because they are gray with a white collar and a blue-gray breast band. To create their nests, they excavate burrows in earthen banks, usually avoiding ones with vegetation. They generally choose a bank near water, but some use ditches, road cuts, landfills, and other pits to nest in. From what I saw, it looked as though both males were establishing their territory. They spend most of the year alone until they pair up for breeding season, and males will establish territories that usually conform to the shape of the stream or shoreline. These two birds were chattering loudly at each other, and dive bombing and chasing one another across the water. Belted Kingfishers are monogamous within each breeding season but form new pairs every year. The male feeds the female while courting her, and both vigorously defend their territory by chasing away intruders while giving loud rattle calls. Both males were also spreading their wings, and raising the patch of white feathers net to each eye, which is a characteristic display when they are feeling threatened. A fact I never knew about them is that people used to shoot and trap kingfishers, especially near fish hatcheries and along trout streams, to prevent them from killing fish. But, hunting them is now outlawed, and compared to other fish-eating birds, they seem to be relatively unaffected by environmental contaminants. This could be because their prey size is so small that the toxins don’t bioaccumulate as much in their tissue.

Habitat requirements differ a lot from species to species, this can be due to food availability, nesting placement, behavior, and so much more. The Stevenson Brook Trail has several abandoned farms that have been preserved because they are all in a state park. About halfway through our hike, we saw two American Robins that looked like they were nesting in the field hidden by tall grass. Robins are common birds across the continent, and you can find them on laws, field, city parks, woodlands, mountains, burned forests, tundra, etc. I’ve noticed that during the winter, the Robins tend to clump around food resources (berry-producing trees or shrubs) but recently, as the weather has begun to change, I’ve seen them much more randomly spread out. This is probably due to the fact that they are finding mates and building nests right now but also as the weather warms, insects, worms and snails are easier to find and this can result in a more dispersed placement. Female robins choose the nest sites, which are typically on one or several horizontal branches hidden in or just below a dense layer of leaves. They also nest in gutters, eaves, on outdoor light fixtures, and other structures. So, generally they don’t nest on the ground or in thickets except in western prairies. It’s possible we just saw them foraging for food, but it really seemed like they were nesting on the ground. If this was the case, they may be defending prime territory, where there is a lot of food resources and not a lot of intraspecific competition.

Before we reached the trailhead, there was about a mile of road and open area with a few trees along both sides. Before we got into the forest, I heard the distinct simple, pure 2 or 3 note whistled fee-bee of a Black-capped Chickadee. It’s possible that it was defending its territory, which I believe is prime habitat because chickadees are often found in deciduous and mixed forests, open woods, parks, and disturbed areas. This was adjacent to a mixed forest, with an opening created by the road, and slightly disturbed by human use. This chickadee may not be the fittest because it was all alone and they tend to be social birds that live in flocks, often associating with woodpeckers, nuthatches, warblers, vireos, and other small woodland species. However, I only saw this little guy for a few minutes, and there’s a chance that there were others nearby. One thing I find very interesting about these birds, besides their obvious curiosity and spunk, is that the flocks they life in use many calls with specific meanings, and they may contain some of the characteristics of human language!

Lastly, I saw a Barred Owl! I’ve never seen one, only heard a few and caught a glimpse of one flying at night while I was driving. This guy was totally hanging out, perched on a low branch of a conifer by the river, closing his eyes and swiveling his head slightly every few minutes. Barred Owls usually nest in a natural cavity, 20-40 feet high in a large tree. They may also use stick platform nests built by other animals like hawks, crows, and squirrels, as well as human-made nest boxes. They will look for a nest site as early as a year before using it and it’s not clear whether the male or female chooses the site. They may add lichen, fresh green conifer sprigs, or feathers to a stick platform nest, and will remove or flatten the top of an old squirrel nest. Cavities can be pretty deep, one recorded as nearly 8 feet deep. They are pretty territorial year-round, and chase away intruders while hooting loudly. They are even more aggressive during nesting season, particularly the females and will sometimes strike intruders with their feet!

Time: 1:00pm - 3:25pm
Date: Apri 10th, 2020
Location: Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge
Weather: Sunny and 65 degrees
Habitat: forest, marsh, and tidal wetland

I also saw a beautiful fox!

Time: 12:05pm - 4:45pm
Date: 03/30/2020
Location: Hughes Hollow, Maryland
Weather: 65 degrees, Cloudy & Overcast
Habitat: Mixed Woodland/Wetland

I went home to Maryland to visit my family last week and I spent a full day at Hughes Hollow, a 25-minute drive from my house in Potomac. Hughes Hollow is part of the McKee-Beshers Wildlife Management Area, which is a 2,000-acre state-owned hunting area featuring a mixture of woodlands, fields, wooded bottomlands, and managed wetland impoundments. McKee-Beshers is known among Maryland birders as an extraordinarily productive birding location and provides habitat for a great diversity of wildlife species and birds. Biologists deliberately flood forest areas during the fall and winter to create “green-tree reservoirs” that attract Wood Ducks and other waterfowl that migrate through or spend the winter there. I saw an incredible amount of birds there, along with snakes, turtles, frogs, and lots of tadpoles!

I saw my first Red-shouldered Hawk of the season! They are resident to medium-distance migrants. Birds of the Northeast and northern Midwest migrate to more southerly states for the winter. Birds in central and southern states don’t tend to migrate, although some Red-shouldered Hawks do spend winters in Mexico. The Red-shouldered Hawk’s that I saw are year-round residents in Maryland. These hawks eat quite a wide variety of mostly small mammals, lizards, snakes and amphibians. They perch below the forest canopy silently and then descend swiftly, gliding and snatching prey off of the forest floor. They occasionally eat birds, sometimes from bird feeders. Migration can be a perilous journey, and birds that don’t undertake a significant migration avoid the hazards that come with moving from one place to another like predation, hunting, habitat loss, storms, and more. Birds that don’t migrate don’t need to expend massive amounts of energy to travel, and they can use that time instead to forage, watch for predators, defend their territory, preen, raise chicks and other beneficial tasks for survival. Along with birds of prey, many species of owl do not migrate. The Barred owl spends most of it's life in one area and rarely farther unless food is scarce. They're super cool and watching one hunt is a privilege. They eat lots of small animals like chipmunks, mice and voles. And they can perch on branches along the riverside, swooping down feet first to catch fish. We heard one hooting as we were heading back to the car and stopped to listen. When I was little, my dad used to take me out bird-watching in that very same spot and we would get so excited when we finally spotted the owl because they can be really elusive! Unfortunately, he was across the wetland, so we didn't see him but we were lucky to hear him.

To adapt to living in a place year-round, many birds change their food preferences (kind of like how many people only eat seasonal foods!) Birds that don’t migrate may eat buds, insects, berries and seeds in spring and summer, and switch to fruit and nuts in fall and winter when other food sources have been exhausted. Bird feeders can play a large role in a bird’s winter diet as well. They may also cache food in late summer and autumn, hiding supplies of seeds and nuts in protected areas to be retrieved later. Additionally, year-round residents like the Red-winged Blackbird, Northern Cardinal, and Blue Jay will molt in summer and early fall in order to gain an extra protective layer of insulating down feathers to help preserve body heat and protect them from extreme cold.

I also saw several Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers on my wetland adventure! They are short to long-distance migrants, and depart from their breeding range in September and early October for wintering grounds in the southern U.S., Mexico, West Indies, and Central America. They arrive back north around May. Females tend to migrate farther south than males, with a ratio of more than three females to one male. So, in Maryland they are in their non-breeding stage right now and will be moving north next month! These little guys are facultative migrants, meaning migration is usually optional, occurring in response to environmental conditions. Migration is often triggered by a lot of redundant cues such as; geographic/visual cues, solar cues, stellar cues, geomagnetic cues, and olfaction cues. Birds have the ability to sense changes in the photoperiod and react in different ways to those changes, whether they are leaving for their over-wintering grounds or returning to their breeding grounds. Birds also migrate to move from areas of low or decreasing resources to areas of high or increasing resources, and that could be one reason the Eastern Bluebird leaves for Mexico or the Ring-necked Duck head south from Canada to Maryland. Maryland is unique in that it's situated in the middle of two temperature extremes, and can provide a decent habitat for many year-round residents.

Mini Activity:
Northern Cardinal - Year-round Maryland Resident
Red-winged Blackbird - Year-round Maryland Resident
Eastern Bluebird - 1850 miles (MD to Mexico)
Blue Jay - Year-round Maryland Resident
Red-shouldered Hawk - Year-round Maryland Resident
Dark-eyed Junco - Year-round Maryland Resident
Great Blue Heron - Year-round Maryland Resident
Song sparrow - Year-round Maryland Resident
Ring-necked duck - 2000 miles (Central Canada to MD)
Barred owl - Year-round Maryland Resident
Snowy Egret - 950 miles (Gulf Coast to MD)
American Bittern - Year-round Maryland Resident (Right on edge of breeding and wintering grounds)
American Crow - Year-round Maryland Resident
Common Raven - Year-round Maryland Resident
Yellow-bellied Sapsucker - 2000 miles (Canada to MD)
Black-capped Chickadee - Year-round Maryland Resident

Total: 6,800 miles

Time: 2:20pm - 4:00pm
Date: 03/22/2020
Weather: 35 degrees, partly sunny
Habitat: farmstead with open pasture, a pond, and mixed deciduous and conifer stands in the backyard

I visited my friend’s farm in Craftsbury this weekend. He lives in a pretty remote part of Vermont, and his house is at least a few miles from any other structure in any direction. He wanted to work on his car and replace the hood and pull out the carpets, and I decided it would be a perfect opportunity for me to explore his property and look for birds! At first, it was hard to find anything besides American Crows and one pesky Hairy Woodpecker that’s been eating away at the side of their barn for the past several weeks. I could hear many other species of birds while I was near his house, I just couldn’t see them. But, once I walked about a mile or two into the forest, I started to hear and see so much!

Birds are constantly interacting using posture, plumage, and vocal message. I immediately noticed that there was this one relatively large American Crow perched pretty low on a branch and raising its feathers and screeching at any bird that flew above it, regardless of the species. When a bird came too close to his branch, tree or the compost pile, he issued a series of warning calls, fluffed his feathers, and immediately went into aerial attack. Then I noticed that he was in the perfect position to pick vegetable and fruit seeds out of the large compost pile next to the barn. I started wondering if he set up shop in that same spot every day to get the best food scraps? He did seem much meatier than other American Crows, and maybe this extra source of food helped him through the winter and the extra weight gave him an advantage over other males when breeding season comes along.

Contrasting to this American Crow’s agonistic behavior towards other birds, I walked down to one of the ponds on my friend’s property and there were 3 mated pairs of Common Mergansers that were clearly enjoying one of the first sunny days in a while. The females have really funny tufts of brown feathers on their heads that make them look like they’ve just woken up with some major bedhead, and it always makes me chuckle. Each pair was allopreening, and when one of the males got too close to one of the females that was not his mate, you could see a reaction from the male where his posture completely changed and he would swim over and push his mate away while making small warning quacks at the intruding male. Most male birds I’ve seen (those that travel with their mate) are quite aggressive towards other males coming into their space, which we can probably connect to human behavior as well. Common Merganser males use countershading (white belly with black and other melanin’s on the back and the head) to avoid predation but they also have pretty bold colorations with iridescent greenish-blue on their face and some repeating patterns along their wings. These patterns help males when advertising for females and can also send warning signals to other males.

The patterns on Mergansers are very different than the ones on Eastern Phoebe’s and House Sparrows, which appear mostly to be used for camouflage, helping them blend in with the trees and greenery in the background of their habitat and protect themselves from predators like hawks and falcons. I watched a group of House Sparrows resting and chirping in a bush on the edge of the forest habitat. Right now, many birds are migrating back to Vermont from warmer places down South. As this event is occurring, the length of each day is growing and soon we will see many species arriving at breeding grounds and beginning nesting behavior and ovulation. The length of daylight is an essential environmental cue that triggers sex hormones and increases the size of gonads. Males proclaim their territories with songs and sometimes fights, pair bonds are established or reaffirmed, and mating takes place. One particular house sparrow was sleeping with its head scrunched down into its feathers. This was towards the end of my walk when it was getting to be around 4:00 pm, and the sun wasn’t as strong and the birds seemed less active.

I attempted to solicit "pish" calls while I was around the group of House Sparrows and experimented doing it quietly and then loudly at different volumes and timbres. They were not having it, and almost completely ignored me, with some retreating even farther into the brambles. Alas, I will have to work on my spishing skills and try them out on some other foraging species. All together I had a great experience and saw a lot of activity!

The American Robin, House Sparrow, Black-Capped Chickadee, Northern Cardinal and American Crow all use aspects of evolution and ecology to survive in the wintertime. During my field observation, I noticed around 15 American Robins all in one tree. They were all eating berries and seemed to be getting along just fine. I returned to the same spot about 20 minutes later and there were no birds to be found. I believe they were gathered around this one tree because their resource distribution is pretty clumped in the winter. Burlington only has so many fruiting trees and this tree was the only one on the street with berries/birds on it. Normally, American Robins can spread out relatively evenly, foraging for worms and insects, but those creatures are much harder to find when it starts getting cold. Additionally, they were practicing cooperative feeding, a social strategy that can increase foraging efficiency, protection from and awareness of predators, as well as create some agonistic encounters between individuals.

Black-capped chickadees are a commonly seen backyard bird, particularly during the cold months. I saw around 5 individuals on my walk. They carefully hide certain food items, have dense winter coats, specially selected winter roost cavities, and the ability to go into nightly hypothermia, helping conserve large amounts of energy and increasing the chances of survival. They eat enough seeds and frozen insects to gain an additional 10% or more of their body weight each day and use this excess body fat to shiver all night to keep warm. Birches provide good roosting conditions for them and help insulate them at night when temperatures really plummet.

Torpor, hypothermia, and countercurrent exchange are all tools that birds can use to stay warm in the winter and retain body heat. Many of the species that I noticed on my walk had fluffed up their feathers in order to trap air underneath those feathers and warm that air. Many birds also stand on one leg at a time while the other is tucked up warmly in its feathers. Some birds bury their beaks into their feathers to prevent evaporative cooling that occurs when a bird breaths out of its nares. Birds that can’t handle the cold of the winter may migrate south and then return once the weather starts to change.

On my walk, I saw at least 30 house sparrows and 17 American Crows (they really like the dumpster in my driveway). The house sparrows were not all together but I would see them every 50 feet or so with a handful of them hanging out in shrubbery and bushes. The American Crows were either up in tree branches or they were on the ground or pavement searching for discarded food. Both of these species are scavengers that have hitched their wagons to humans very successfully. We provide year-round foraging and our structures provide them with shelter as well. I’ve seen hundreds up crows roosting together in the canopy of deciduous trees and I’ve seen house sparrows be extremely aggressive towards birds of other species, pecking and using their calls and mob mentality to ward off intruders in their territory. House sparrows are highly social birds that return repeatedly to the same hierarchically-organized flock to forage and roost during the winter. A sparrow pair can produce multiple broods in one year depending in part on environmental factors and they've already started to look for nesting sites by early November.

I saw 4 Northern Cardinals on my walk, three of which were males, and none were flocking together. Each individual was pretty far apart from the other, perched on different phone lines. In the winter, they spend their time foraging while hopping on the ground or in low bushes, readily coming to bird feeders and particularly enjoying sunflower seeds. During the winter, when insects are scarcer, they’ll eat berries and vegetable matter. All of the birds I saw on my walk were either feeding, flying, or having some sort of interaction with each other. Birds burn a lot of energy staying warm, so constant feeding helps them regulate their bodily functions.

Standing dead trees, or snags, provide birds and mammals with shelter to raise young, stay warm and other functions. Woodpeckers and creepers are the most likely to utilize snags but around 30 bird species are capable of making their own nest cavities in trees. The insulation of a tree trunk home allows wildlife to survive high summer and low winter temperature extremes. Tree cavities and loose bark are used by many animals to store their food supplies, while insects living inside the dead wood eat thousands of forest pests. When they eventually fall, fish, amphibians, and other wildlife can use this structure for protection and habitat.

Today I visited East Woods UVM Natural Area with my dad. He's here at UVM this week to teach NR 002 students about E.O. Wilson's Half-Earth Project in the hopes of spreading his conservation message/methods across the country. Suffice it to say he was very excited to get out and go birding with me! We spent majority of our morning watching the movement of downy woodpeckers. As I watched, I noticed that downy's like to hitch upward, laterally on, or along tree surfaces using the stiff retrices of their squared tail feathers to support their bodies and provide a spring to aid in momentum. I observed one individual flexing its tail ventrally while it looked for a sturdier grip on the tree/branches it was scurrying on. There were several individuals (some of different species) all in close proximity, and whenever there was a quarrel or the birds were surprised, at least one individual would take off and land on one of the trees a little farther away. Their flight pattern is intermittent, showing the characteristic undulating flight pattern typical of many woodpecker species, alternating quick wingbeats with folding the wings against the body. Compared to a larger woodpecker species, downy's tend to perform more wingbeats between bounds and have bounds of longer duration. The individual I was observing seemed fairly acrobatic, balancing on tiny branches as it foraged. I saw a female and what I believe to be a young juvenile male because he wasn't quite as big as an adult but he had a red tuft of feathers on his head.

Bird flight is the primary mode of locomotion used by most bird species in which birds use their muscles, skeletal structures, and organ systems to assist in propelling them off of the ground. Flight assists birds with feeding, breeding, avoiding predators, and migration. Each facet of this type of motion, including hovering, taking off, and landing, involves many complex movements. As different bird species adapted over millions of years through evolution for specific environments (habitat niches), prey, predators, an other needs, they have developed specializations in their wings, acquiring varied forms of flight. For example, Herring Gulls have high aspect ratio wings, meaning the length of the wing is much greater than the width. This helps them glide which is an important adaptation for a bird that spends most of its life out over open water. Downy woodpeckers have elliptical wings, which allow a high degree of control and maneuverability in confined spaces, minimizing drag and allowing for rapid ascent and descent. This helps downy's avoid predators and efficiently forage in dense forest. If you are not sure what type of bird you are seeing, flight can be a really helpful identifier. Once you see the birds flight pattern and wing shape, you can guess what type of habitat they live in (aka where you would be most likely to find them). This helps narrow down the possible species you would be seeing and brings you much closer to identifying.

I saw a lot of birds this morning and I think this may be because it was earlier in the morning, when many birds especially songbirds tend to be more active. It was also one of the first sunny days in a while and when we walked into the forest, you could feel that there was a lot of energy and commotion. It was still pretty cold (25 degrees) but the sun was reaching through the canopy and felt very warm and nice. The farther we got from the road, the more birds we found. This is partially because it’s hard to hear the birds over the sound of traffic, but also many birds may try to get deeper into the forest to avoid the noise pollution. Another reason I saw these little guys is because they like woodlands, particularly deciduous woods and long streams. This makes East Woods the perfect habitat for them! I really enjoyed this first birding experience however next time I definitely need to bring binoculars, not only to get better identification but also so that I can take better pictures of the birds. I'm excited to go out on more excursions and find different species!