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Torrent Ducks

Everyone knows ducks are amazing. As Quack, the protagonist of Peep and The Big Wide World sings; there's nothing better than ducks, oh there's nothing better than ducks,

I wonder what Quack would think of my favorite duck, the Torrent Duck.

In the Southern Hemisphere, which lacks such evolutionary extravagance as Harlequin Ducks and Stellar's Eiders, the Torrent Duck is the acme of anatid beauty.

But this beauty is not just feather-deep. I've watched them swim underwater up the kind of waterfall that would defeat a King Salmon. I've watched them climb vertical boulders

Icons of the Andes, this widely, but sparsely distributed duck is a gift to the bird guide.

Finding birds for other people can be nerve-wracking. Patagonian forests can be notoriously silent places. But Torrent Ducks are a slam dunk gift to the birding guide.

Have a pair staked-out on breeding territory and you're garaunteed to find them. None of this walking slowly through a silent and empty rainforest

What are the chances we'll find them? I'd be asked, as we hiked a vertical kilometer towards the ice cap. 

"Ah, well, you never know, hopefully we get an okay view". 

The adults demonstrate to an incredulous juvenile what it means to swim up a waterfall

Maybe these riffles are a more appropriate learning spot. 

5MR

In various iterations the patch birding or radius type challenge has been around for awhile, I think originating with the ‘slightly’ overly complex Patchwork Challenge, in the UK. 

I never really played it because it required you to be in the UK (which I hardly ever was), and there were so many score variations; do you live inland or coastal, separate parts of the country divided up, rarities scored different points somewhat arbitrarily depending on self-found vs twitched, and where they turned up.

So kudos to Jen Sanford for taking the initiative and getting the birding community behind a simpler one: The 5MR. A simple 5 mile radius from your home.

I’ve done this before - just for my own interest, rather than competitively (but I used kilometres so...... ;)

This original 5 mile circle got me 249 species over around 6 years - covering some of the finest toxic post-industrial wastelands of New Jersey and the southern part of Central Park through to lower Manhattan. And the Hudson River of course, which provided some megas - Cave Swallow being the best - somehow I got both the first and second county record of that. Go figure.

Here my 6 yr old daughter is helping with some gulling outside our apartment. Slight trespassing required ;)

Skip forward a year and I am now back in the UK and it’s going to be a whole different ball game. I’m not going to get 25 species of neotropical warbler streaming past the window. But it is good for me for several reasons; I can see at least 5 miles from my house windows, I have a load of different habitats on my ranch, I'm in the middle of a National Park, and I can’t drive at the moment anyway because I bust my neck and can't drive.

The north of the UK is rather like my old home in Patagonia. At over 54° either north or south, your field guide doesn’t get to passerines until the last third of the book ;) 

To put into perspective: here's 54 south and 54 north....

That said, I’m about 45% of the county for January, two owls up, and essentially just missing waterbodies, reservoirs etc... 

Here’s a few pics. You’ll notice a common theme. Snow. It’s like the Midwest here this year.... ;)

In Darwin's Footsteps

In Darwin's Footsteps

2009 is the year of Charles Darwin. Not only is it the anniversary of his birth but also that of the publication of On the Origin of Species, 50 years later.

In collaboration with Manchester Museum and University, Ben is exhibiting a wonderful collection of images from one of our 2009 trips to Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia, retracing the steps Darwin took. Dominic has taken many clients on hunts for Darwin’s past, and the ethnological history of the Beagle Channel region is a particular interest of his, so it’s great to bring it all together in the amazing Victorian buildings of Manchester University.

What Darwin and Fitz Roy saw as they entered the Beagle Channel and took respite from the storms of the Marie Strait and the circumpolar winds of the Southern Ocean.

Chilean Flamingos surprised Darwin just as they surprise people today.


The realm of The Beagle. A black browed albatross in the fjord that ultimately bore Darwin's name, Seno Darwin.

A Chilean skua patrols the waters before the sharp outline of Mount Olivia. In many of the paintings by The Beagle's artist, Conrad Martens, variations on Mount Olivia's outline appear as symbolic testament to the wildness of Tierra del Fuego...

Midsummer snows. One of the most exciting things about visiting Tierra del Fuego is that you simply don't know from one day to the next whether you'll be sauntering in the sunshine and getting a tan, or braving the snow and katabatic winds.

After its extended run in Manchester, the exhibition of around 25 imags is now available for hire.
Drop Ben (or me) an email if you would like some information.

More of the shots can be viewed on the galleries at www.Benhallphotography.com

The many flamingoes of the Atacama Desert

After a long wait, David Attenborough's magisterial Planet Earth 2 finally premiered Stateside.*

I watched the Mountains episode last night, where the short section on flamingo courtship brought back memories of the many trips I made into the Atacama Desert for these birds.

However, what Attenborough neglects to mention, but what is one of the most amazing aspects of this natural history spectacle; all 3 southern cone flamingo species can be seen congregating together in these Andean saltpans.

I can't think of another such dramatic example of sympatry among such ostensibly specialized and ecologically similar species.

Indeed, as late as 1957, the James' Flamingo was thought to be extinct:

A James' flamingo works the edge of the saltpan

That the James' flamingo went unseen was perhaps testament to the difficulty of accessing the altiplano more than its rarity, though it has the most restricted range of any of the 3 species. Salt lakes 15,000 feet above sea level on the border between Bolivia and Chile were not well-travelled regions in the Fifties!

However, compared to its congener the Andean flamingo, the James' is now thought to approach 100,000 birds and has been listed as Near-threatened. The Andean, with a global population under 40,000, is deemed Vulnerable by the IUCN.

Two Andean flamingoes in the shadow of Volcan Licancabur

This is the driest desert in the world, so this water is a critical resource.  

These two sympatric species presumably benefit from some ecological separation, but from my observations they pretty much share the same feeding strategy and habitat requirements. The breeding behaviours differ slightly, with the James concentrating into a very few large colonies, the biggest just over the Bolivian border - not that far as the flamingo flies (there are no crows in the neotropics ;)

A rare side by side comparison of the two Phenicoparrus spp, with James' on the right 

Otherwise known as the Puna Flamingo, and named for its British discoverer, the James' flamingo has finer lamellae than its congeners, enabling it to feed on smaller diatoms and algae. You can almost intuit this in the side by side bill comparison. 

A line-up of Chilean flamingoes

The third species in this otherworldly lake, the Chilean Flamingo, is trans-Andean - with a range that spans 5 countries. But its heartland is here, and it still concentrates in these mixed species flocks with its competitors. After returning back south after my trips to the Atacama I would typically catch up with these guys again in the windswept, glaciated steppe of southern Patagonia - a habitat transition that really shows off their ecological flexibility:

A pretty dramatic contrast! This shot was taken by my brother - the photographer Ben Hall - the first time I took him to Torres del Paine. I think it's been one of this better-selling images, most recently appearing in Attenborough's Planet Earth 2 book accompanying the TV show, as well as cleaning up a few awards. 

Flyout is pretty spectacular in the Atacama too (even if the photographer isn't as good...)

Lest this feels like flamingo overload, other migrants make use of the water resources that are so scarce in this high desert.

Nearctic species are represented by large numbers of Baird's sandpipers, and neotropical species by puna plovers and Andean avocets.

One of these things is not like the others.... Can you find it?

 Striking Andean avocets tumble from the sky - I recorded record counts of this sp. in 2007, but they were one of the more unpredictable inhabitants. 

Up close & personal with a BASA. (I still need this bird in North America!)

One of my favourite waders, the puna plover - this one is a juvenile




Another puna plover, an adult, work the same edges as the flamingoes, albeit with an entirely different strategy

Not wanting to be totally outdone by the avifauna, there are also some pretty cool mammals and reptiles adapted to this extreme xerophytic environment. Here's a very cooperative Liolaemus species.

I really need to improve my herping skills to pin some of these down to species!

Liolaemus sp. (fabiani or andinus?)

A side note on Planet Earth 2; whilst we didn't have to endure Sigourney Weaver usurping the grand master's narration duties, there was some serious misuse of sound design and 'imported' bird calls. It was most noticeable in the Fairy Tern segment, unless you believe the Seychelles were experiencing an unprecedented influx of Nearctic vagrants. Other elements of the sound design were also pretty overblown - I doubt a millipede makes an audible crunching sound when chewing. Of course, this is all in service of transporting the viewer into the life of the subject, but it was pursued with more subtlety in Planet Earth 1. 

Soundscapes

I'm been sorting through old sound recordings I made, with the intent of uploading them to their corresponding eBird records, and it's a pretty fascinating process - especially with some of the soundscapes.

In this particular one I was trying to capture the insistent three note call of Green Shrike-vireo above the din of a troop of howler monkeys at dawn.  It's a common canopy bird here in Panama but one that you see once for every 99 times you hear it. It's 3 note call is often aptly transliterated as 'can't-see-me'!

But listening to it again now, it's the background species that really catch my ear:



After the first few listens I could also pick out;

• the gentle rise and fall whistle of Rufous Mourner
• the familiar (to me) Black-faced Ant-thrush
• a Golden-fronted greenlet somewhere close to the mic
• and a Fasciated Antshrike

But not until listening very carefully around 20 times could I filter out the howler monkeys and separate the other calls enough to hear;

• Yellow-throated Toucan (or whatever it's being called post-split)
• Northern Slaty-Antshrike 
• Southern Bentbill
• Bright-rumped Attila

And finally... not until an email exchange with a friend back in Panama, did I manage to pull out a single faint call note of Forest Elaenia.

Even though I'd consider myself someone who doesn't have a particularly good ear (or memory) for calls, it's amazing what the ear and brain can do if you allow them the time and space to learn.

Also revealing, is how the visualisation of sound helps. Run this same sequence through Audacity and the Forest Elaenia becomes more evident, as does the almost inaudible song of the Southern Bentbill.  When watching the spectrogram scroll by, the elaenia's call note seems fairly obvious, but in the barrage of sound it's almost impossible to hear. Kudos to Kent Livezey for hearing this!

It would take a special ear to hear (and count) this live.

In the middle of the sequence, the 4.0KHZ U-shaped rising call of a Forest Elaenia, visible just before the louder golden-fronted greenlet and over the lower pitched song of Green Shrike-vireo.

Now in the depths of an NY winter there isn't much to record of course, but I'm looking forward to setting up a binaural system to pick up some of these more expansive soundscapes, rather than just recording individual calls and songs, in the Spring.

The Wasteland

I've always been a fan of marginal habitats. Some of the most memorable birds are the ones you find in unexpected places.

A Black Redstart in a parking lot in central London on New Year's Day. My lifer Indian Scimitar Babbler in a dusty corner of Keralan hydroelectric plant. My state Connecticut warbler (two together!) in a graveyard in downtown Manhattan, when I was looking for a something entirely different, even caused a bit of a twitch. 

And, the reason for writing this, a steady stream of yellow-breasted chats this Fall - right on the unassuming patch of wasteland outside my apartment.

Over the past few months of autumn migration, this patch of wasteland became The Patch.

Of course, I had to abide by the First Rule of Patch Birding; you can't miss a day.

So, since September 1st, no matter the weather or the radar, I birded it. Even on those days with southerly flow when you just know nothing will be on passage.

The Patch, on the elbow of the Hudson river, roughly opposite Chelsea (That huge green migrant-trap-of-a-rectangle to the north is Central Park) 

zoomed in...

  ....and a bit more

At first glance, The Patch isn't too promising. Climbing over the first fence gets you access to a gravel parking lot, with a rotting sofa and a couple of waste skips, and a big NO TRESPASSING sign. Being a non-American I underestimated the potential severity of that sign. Normally, the best bird you're going to get there is a Mouning Dove, some Starings, and a whole lot of Ring-billed Gulls.

But vault the second fence and things get better. You're greeted by the only bit of wilderness on an increasingly gentrified and manicured waterfront. A continuous scrub of goldenrod and false-willow blankets the shore line. The traffic noise drops perceptibly. Large concrete impoundments have been splintered asunder by vigorous succession trees; birch, willow and sacal. A sunken metal barge rises from the shore, and rotting pylons providing perches for the double-crested cormorants that linger into winter.

If this was 300m to the east it would be in Manhattan and there would be an overly manicured lawn, some park seats, or possibly a co-working condo space. 

Looks like a bunch of concrete, but the phoebes love hawking 

insects as they warm up in its radiant heat

 A black-crowned night heron waits for the tide to flood, 

and a poplar grows improbably from the pier.  

Throughout October and into the mild November, Clouded Sulphurs and Monarchs stop to refuel.

This young night heron spent about 3 weeks here. He eyed me up every visit,  from his favorite tree. He seems to be saying 'get off my patch' - well it's my Patch too ....

This resident kestrel got used to my presence and made a habit of snatching myrtle warblers as they foraged low on the wrack line.

I found some good birds. But not until I'd repeatedly confirmed the veracity of The Second Law of Patch Birding; leave your camera at home if you want something good to turn up.

After the expected stream of blackpolls, the first good parulid was a Nashville Warbler, turning up almost a year to the day, and in the same patch of goldenrod, since my last one in the county. A few days later another one arrived. Nashville's not a bird that's ever dripping from the trees in Hudson County, and is an indicator of the 'minimum viable habit' sizes of migrant traps in hugely urbanised areas. It's The Patch at work, rather than any habitat selectivity.

Then the first chat appeared. For me this is usually one of those birds that you really just have to luck into. It's not as bad as going out delierately looking for Yellow Browed Warblers in a northern European Easterly but it's skulky and uncommon. Manhattan had been bursting at the seams with chats all season, mainly down to the observer effect of having thousands of birders covering every inch of green space. So it was especially gratifying to find one on The Patch.

Then, two weeks later, another turned up. This one either stayed for a few weeks and kept well hidden (quite possible for a chat), or another sighting mid-November represented a third bird. Either way, a banner year for finding my own chats!

My best morning vizmig experience of Fall came on The Patch too. Sitting on the concrete terminus of the pier, I watched yellow-rumps in their hundreds pour off the Hudson river. I stopped trying to count them once densities reached around 200 'rumps-an-hour, and focused on separating other warblers that were mixed in, mostly Palm Warblers - with an 80/20 ratio of Yellow to Western subspecies.

My only disappointment was Fall gulling. The Patch had briefly hosted glaucous and kumliens gulls in the Spring, and a LBBG the prior Fall. I was hoping for my tenth Hudson river larid, but sometimes the Gull Gods are fickle.

This chickadee was missing all of his retrices, so stuck around a while

Getting some help with the gulling. 

In all eked 73 species out of this neglected patch of wasteland (even adding 3 county birds -AMPI, GCTH and YBCH) and unless they put guard dogs on the gates next spring,  I'm pretty sure I can hit a century.

But more importantly, by watching the same 1.5 acre spot for the entire season, I learned a lot...

In no particular order:

1. Gulls, despite their feeding plasticity, are not cannibals... Of the two dead larids that appeared over the season, both went untouched by their congeners.

2. If you watch sparrows closely enough, you can see clinal variation correlating with migration timing. Pretty damn cool.

3.  When you start to think you won't get a winter wren all year,  it will arrive on Dec 25th.

4. Wintering ruddy ducks are returning later each year, regardless of what Trump says.

5. When you find an orange-crowned warbler it will get eaten by a feral cat right in front of your eyes.

One thing about patch birding is sometimes there's nothing to look at, so you look at ring-bills, 

and they look pretty awesome. 

Having finally lucked into my county Grey-cheeked, all the rest were hermits....

Golden rod and willow deep enough to swallow a 7 year old, is easily enough to hide a chat for 3 weeks....

I have no idea where these chairs came from. They just appeared one night. But they provide a nice spot to sit and scope the river. 

Sky Dancing

Like its northern counterpart, this southern member of the circus genus - the Cinereous Harrier - fills the classic harrier niche over the grasslands and steppes of the Southern Cone, with a disjunct population in the northern Andes.

For the couple of years I worked out of El Calafate I spent many days (either alone or finding birds for clients) at the small Laguna Nimez nature reserve sandwiched between the town and the vast glacial Lago Argentino.

Here, I got to know one pair of harriers very well, watching their courtship and the eventual rearing of a young harrier.

During the courtship period the birds were very territorial, with both male and female occasionally dive-bombing the heads of any humans that crossed their territory. A bird bearing down on you is fun when it's an arctic tern, but kind of scary when it's a large harrier.  One of my clients even lost a hat.

Getting ready to strafe someone's head - talons out, eyes fixed. 

A big part of harrier courtship is the swapping of gifts - usually a prey item, like a small passerine.

Here you can just see the 'gift' - a small passerine, which I never figured out to species - in the talons of the harrier as she comes over to investigate my presence:

The gift exchange involves some spectacular aerobatics, as one bird twists upside down to make the catch. In weeks of watching, I never saw a drop. Interestingly over the days I watched them, they seemed to retain the same 'gift' as it was passed between the pair, and always carried it in the same talon! Presumably at some point it was 'refreshed' to avoid the risk of parasites.

Here two females court in the air above the marshland. I never figured out why same sex courtship was so prevalent in this location. Worldwide, harriers are pretty notorious for their polygyny (and occasional accounts of polyandry have been recorded in northern hemisphere harriers), as are many marshland species of other avian families, but I never found much documentation of same-sex courtship within harriers, polygynous or otherwise.

Moreover, Simmons, in his Harrier monograph, suggests that polygyny is rare in southern hemisphere taxa:

The female sits in  a senecio bush - about as tall a vantage point as it's possible 

to gain in this xerophytic steppeland.

Most harriers share the owl-like facial disk and the cinereous is no exception. Hunting grassland and marsh its parabolic function is a lesser but similar adaptation for aural hunting that owls have phenotypically expressed even further.

The female brings in nesting material 

Hunting involves a technique that is well known in both northern and hen harriers, the tapping of the grass with the wingtips, to flush prey. Here the female exhibits the classic drop-like-a-rock technique.

The sadly defunct quarterly 'coffee table' magazine, Bird Art & Photography, ran some of my harrier shots, (alongside some much better Condor shots of my brother's)...

The position of cinereous harrier in the monophyletic harrier clade also reveals a lot about our own northern harrier.

One reason the NACC should accept the split (UPDATE, IT FINALLY DID ;) between hen harrier and northern harrier is that based on mtDNA evidence (although not enough base pairs were tested according to some of the NACC committee), cinereous is sister to northern harrier, and closer to it than the purportedly 'conspecific' hen harrier of the WP.

Even the BOU recognised this split earlier in 2016 - which I was very happy about as my upland farm in the UK's Peak National Park is one of the only sites in the UK where the heavily persecuted hen harrier can still be seen!

A male harrier shows his displeasure at the chimango caracara flying through his territory

The harriers carry on courting as the sun sets over Patagonia.