By Pat Leonard

Imagine standing in a marsh at night with the rain pouring down and wind blowing through the tall grass, masking all other sounds. Imagine standing there for 20 minutes and not hearing a single bird. That’s the way Team Redhead’s World Series of Birding began on May 11 at midnight. Despite the soggy start, these five intrepid Cornell students followed their plan in an efficient, clockwork-like manner and tallied 166 species to capture the Cape May County division championship. At the same time they raised money earmarked for undergraduate research and conservation projects (see video examples).

After that first silent 20 minutes, a Canada Goose broke the ice and the birding got a lot better in the Tuckahoe Wildlife Management Area in the north end of the county. The Redheads then checked off Virginia, Clapper, and King rails, plus Great Horned Owl, Chuck-will’s-widow, and Whip-poor-will.

“Benjamin Van Doren is amazing with night-flight calls,” says team co-captain Ben Barkley “That’s how we got Least Bittern flying overhead and Rose-breasted Grosbeak–our only chance to get those species all day.”

A seawatch at dawn at Cape May Point brought better weather as well as Royal Tern, Red-breasted Merganser, and Black Skimmer. While Andy Johnson, Jack Hruska, and Van Doren scoped the ocean with Teresa Pegan doing the same with binoculars, Barkley watched for migrants and pulled in Bank Swallow and Green Heron.

At Higbee Beach and Hidden Valley, the team scored 20 species of warbler along with a Blue-headed Vireo. Wintering birds that typically would have moved on to their breeding grounds by now helped swell the species total, including Ruddy Duck, Red-breasted Nuthatch, and Pine Siskin.

The breeding birds up north all showed up on cue as midday stops produced key species including Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Yellow-throated Vireo, Summer Tanager, Eastern Meadowlark, and Horned Lark. A quick sweep of expected shorebirds along the Atlantic brought the team to Cape Island where they finished the daylight hours with Lesser Black-backed Gull, Gull-billed Tern, Eurasian Collared-Dove, and a very unexpected Brown Pelican.

Every Big Day team has a nemesis bird, and for Team Redhead this year, that was the Northern Flicker.

Between 8:00 and 11:00 p.m. the Redheads also did well. Johnson and Barkley did a Barred Owl duet that sounded sufficiently enticing to have the real thing respond. During an impromptu stop for screech-owl, Barkley says, “Andy did a perfect whinny and trill and the bird responded. He just nailed it, it was awesome!” That was the last bird tallied for the day, number 166.

At the finish line, the Redheads checked over their list, checked it again, and handed it in. They had to wait for one more county-wide team to turn in its list before finding out they’d won—too tired to whoop and holler but well satisfied with the end result!

“You put so much work in beforehand, studying the songs, holding team meetings, and then you work like crazy during scouting, and you work so hard during the day and to find out you won is just incredible,” Barkley says. “We made sure we ran between every stop—running to the car, running back to the car, we were all out and we worked incredibly well together.”

Thanks to all who donated in support of Team Redhead—and produced such an inspiring performance!

(Image: Team Redhead in black—Ben Barkley, Benjamin Van Doren, Andy Johnson, Teresa Pegan, and Jack Hruska—accepting their award from Dale Rosselet [left] and Pete Dunne [right].)

Click image for a larger version. (Right-click to open in a new window if you’d like to have the photo visible while you read the answers below.)

The new Crossley ID Guide: Raptors came out in April. Crossley’s innovative technique of cramming lots of photos onto a page seems to work especially well with such large birds and open spaces. They force the reader to assimilate details of shape and size while limiting the amount to which we can obsess over fine feather details (just like we have to do in the field).

This new book turns 15 “mystery” plates into a hands-on ID workshop interspersed throughout the pages dedicated to individual species.  It’s a book that invites you to keep turning pages, luring your subconscious into calling out names almost as soon as your eye passes over them.

The photo above is the third of our three examples of plates from the book (the other two are mystery hawks on the prairie, and a Sharp-shinned Hawk workout). This one takes a look from an unusual perspective, looking down at these normally high-flying birds. Can you tell how many species are here? Which is which? Take your best guesses, and then scroll down for answers, tips, and commentary provided by our own raptor expert, Brian Sullivan, an eBird project leader and a coauthor of the Crossley guide.

Scroll down when you’re ready to read Brian’s answers:

V

V

V

V

V

V

V

This is one of my favorite plates in the book, not only because it provides a really interesting perspective on these birds, but the scenery is spectacular. Raptors are often seen flying overhead, especially hawkwatching sites in the flatlands. But on ridgetops you can often see raptors from above with great regularity. Topside views offer an interesting and exciting perspective, and they can be an ID challenge if you’re not familiar with this kind of viewing. Shape and flight style traits still hold useful, but plumage traits may still be necessary for some identifications. See how you did with the species in this photo:

1. First-year Swainson’s Hawk. Dark brown on top with blackish flight feathers and tail, pale uppertail coverts, and obvious buffy fringes to upperwing coverts. Note long, tapered wings.
2. First-year Swainson’s Hawk. Dark brown on top with blackish flight feathers, pale uppertail coverts, pale eye-line, and faint buffy fringes to upperwing coverts. Note pointed wing tips and the variation in the amount of pale fringing above. This bird has virtually none, but quiz bird #1 has a lot. This is typical variation in juvenile Swainson’s Hawks.
3. First-spring Golden Eagle. Dark brown on top with a golden wash on the head, and a white-based tail. Note that first-years in spring have a broad fade to the upperwing coverts that resembles the narrow, pale mottled upperwing bar of older birds. Also note shorter inner primary still growing in. Note the long, broad wings held in a dihedral.
4. Adult Bald Eagle. Unmistakable, uniformly dark with a white head and tail, and large yellow bill!
5. Adult Golden Eagle. Overall brown above with paler mottling along the upperwings, a golden head, and grayish bands on the tail. Note that in bright sunlight, grayish areas can look white. Golden Eagles are long-winged and long-tailed, with small heads compared with Bald Eagles. In strong sunlight, the Golden’s hackles on the nape can appear white, so beware confusion with adult Bald Eagle (believe it or not!).
6. First-year Red-shouldered Hawk. Brownish on top overall with translucent primary “commas.” Note squared off wings and somewhat long tail with indistinct banding. Red-shouldered Hawks show thin wings hunched forward in a glide.
7. First-year Northern Goshawk. Pale underneath with heavy dark streaking throughout. Note somewhat short wings that are very broad but taper at the hands; also note the broad chest and long tail.
8. Osprey. Blackish on top with a white head and black eyeline. Note white underbody and long, narrow wings. This is an adult based on the pure white chest and lack of dark streaking on crown.
9. First-year Sharp-shinned Hawk. Distant accipiters are hard, but this one has the classic field marks for Sharp-shinned Hawk. Dark brown on top with faintly banded tail. Note long, narrow tail, short, broad wings, and small head.
10. Immature Bald Eagle. Dark brown overall with blackish flight feathers. Note significant whitish mottling in tail and uneven secondaries; this denotes a subadult. Also, note the browner back with darker upperwing coverts. First-year birds are even toned throughout the back and upperwings.
11. Adult Red-shouldered Hawk. Plumage is a beautiful rusty underneath with a brown head, and blackish on top with clean, narrow white bands throughout the flight and tail feathers, and whitish comma-shaped primary windows.
12. Adult Red-shouldered Hawk. Rusty underneath with a brown head, and blackish on top with clean, narrow white bands throughout the flight and tail feathers, and whitish comma-shaped primary windows. Note reddish “shoulders” of adult. A strikingly patterend hawk, especially when seen from above.
13. First-year Broad-winged Hawk. Brown on top with slightly paler primaries, faint pale mottling on upperwings, and indistinctly banded tail with darker band at tip. Note compact structure with stocky, pointed wings and large head. Tail appears somewhat long on first-years.
14. Adult Red-tailed Hawk. Dark brown on top with a bright rufous tail, and a golden wash to the head. Rufous uppertail coverts rather than whitish are much more common on the western race than the eastern.
15. First-year Red-tailed Hawk. Brown on top with pale upper tail coverts and pale mottling on the upperwings. Note the long but broad, bulging wings that taper slightly at the tips. First-year Red-tailed Hawks show pale squarish wing panels on the outer wing that contrast with the darker brown secondaries. It takes a year to acquire the red tail of adults.
16. First-year Cooper’s Hawk. Dark brown on top with faintly banded tail similar to a goshawk, but lacks the pale mottling along the upperwings, and pale eyeline. Note long tail with obvious white tip, short, broad wings, and noticeable head projection. Wings and tail are slightly longer in relation to other accipiters.
17. Osprey. Note blackish topside with white crown, and very long, narrow wings. Aged as adult based on lack of pale fringes on upperwing coverts.
18. First-year Northern Goshawk. Brown on top with tawny-streaked nape, pale mottling on upperwing coverts, whitish eyeline, and long banded tail. Note broad wings compared to other accipiters.
19. First-year Broad-winged Hawk. Brown overall on top with slightly paler primaries, and indistinctly banded tail with darker band on tip. Note stocky tapered wings and big-headed look.

(Plate image courtesy Princeton University Press; Brian Sullivan photo by Jessie Barry.)

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/04/scta_tj.jpg

  Scenes from the High Island migrant fallout: Scarlet Tanager by Tom Johnson.

  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/04/howa_tj.jpg

  Hooded Warbler by Tom Johnson.

  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/04/rbgb_tj.jpg

  Rose-breasted Grosbeak by Tom Johnson.

  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/04/btnw_tj.jpg

  Black-throated Green Warbler by Tom Johnson.

  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/04/oror_tj.jpg

  Orchard Oriole by Tom Johnson.

  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/04/bars_tj.jpg

  Barn Swallow by Tom Johnson.

  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/04/suta_tj.jpg

  Summer Tanager by Tom Johnson.

  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/04/chsw_tj.jpg

  Chimney Swift by Tom Johnson.

  

As midnight struck on Thursday, April 25, 2013, the six members of Team Sapsucker made North American history with 294 species recorded in a single day—a new record. Buoyed by good weather, excellent scouting help, and one of the largest migration fallouts in recent memory, they raced from the desert washes of south-central Texas to the live oaks of the coast to amass a total larger than almost anyone had imagined possible.

In 2011, Team Sapsucker—Chris Wood, Jessie Barry, Andrew Farnsworth, Marshall Iliff, Tim Lenz, and Brian Sullivan—had set a new record with 264 species. That was three more than the previous high mark. In 2012 they returned to Texas and managed to repeat their result. It seemed as if Texas’s potential might be reaching a plateau, which is why it was on no one’s radar (except for the Sapsuckers themselves) that this year’s total would be a full 30 species higher.

“We’ve always known, or at least had some faith, that 300 is possible,” Iliff said. “But it requires not only perfect planning and perfect execution, which is hard enough, but it also requires perfect weather. Somehow this year all those things happened.”

Early on, the Sapsuckers knew this year could be special. A weather forecast was calling for an unusually strong cold front to make it through Texas and out into the Gulf of Mexico. At the same time, conditions in the Yucatan Peninsula were ideal for migrants to begin their long flight north. “When migrants meet these fronts it’s a serious challenge for them,” said Andrew Farnsworth, a bird migration expert and project leader for BirdCast. “They hit rain and strong winds, they look for the closest coastal habitat they can find, and they fall out.” After two straight years of strong south winds and  poor migrant turnout, it looked like Thursday could bring calm conditions and migrants galore.

On Wednesday, a report from High Island by team scout Tom Johnson whetted their appetite. Later, he described the scene:

On Wednesday morning as I headed west on the Bolivar Peninsula, I started to notice large waves of Barn Swallows and Chimney Swifts arriving from offshore. I started to see Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, Scarlet Tanagers, and Yellow-billed Cuckoos flying low over the beach and landing in marginal shrub habitat, so I hightailed it back to High Island, the only substantial strip of coastal forest for dozens of miles around. The woods had turned into a rush of color. Summer and Scarlet Tanagers were attempting to make landfall after a tough water crossing into north winds. Tennessee Warblers, 330 of them, streamed across 5th Avenue and toward Smith Oaks, a Houston Audubon preserve. Orioles, grosbeaks, and buntings were everywhere. Hundreds of warblers were zipping around the treetops, while others poked around on grassy areas and bare trails, trying to refuel after their marathon flight.

The migrants were good news, but they also meant the team had to pack all their scouting into fewer days. Normally they have a full week to ferret out every last rarity and make endless recalculations to their carefully timed itinerary. In the end, they were still making route adjustments up until the night before. At 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday they decided to allot 30 minutes to a great duck and shorebird spot near San Antonio called Mitchell Lake, but this meant staying up until 10:00 figuring out where to win back the time elsewhere in the route. Then to bed, maybe—they were getting up at 10:30.

A lot of strategy goes into a Big Day. To best coordinate the route, they divide the day into thirds and a two-person team takes responsibility for leading each third. Marshall Iliff and Tim Lenz handled the morning in San Antonio and the Hill Country; Andrew Farnsworth and Brian Sullivan planned out the central portion all the way to the piney woods east of Houston; and Jessie Barry and Chris Wood orchestrated the final push from 4:30 onward into the migration hotspots and shorebird flats of High Island and Bolivar Peninsula.

The team got into position before midnight and began their day with a rare Ross’s Goose that had been hanging out at a suburban park near San Antonio. From there the team hopscotched to Uvalde, pausing for opportune species—a robin and a Blue Jay whose nests were lit by streetlights; pauraques, poorwills, Chuck-will’s-widows; two nighthawks and five owls. By the time dawn broke they were on a quiet road in the desert listening for Scaled Quail, then racing to Chalk Bluffs for a dawn chorus worth 79 species.

Though it wasn’t 8 a.m. yet, the day began to pick up its pace. Racing up a hillside after a Black-tailed Gnatcatcher, Andrew Farnsworth watched Brian Sullivan tumble over some barbed wire; on the way back down Farnsworth snagged the exact same strand. The team had to use their full supply of safety pins to repair his pants leg. Iliff briefly raised blood pressures by driving into the Uvalde dump after a Chihuahuan Raven—the same choice that last year led to a flat tire and an hour’s delay. This year: no flat tire, but no raven.

The team’s last-minute decision to add Mitchell Lake paid off with hundreds of ducks and shorebirds, along with a half-dozen soaring raptors. Another detour  that Farnsworth and Sullivan had fretted over also paid off in some wet fields near the Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge. In the end, it was fast and productive: brake pedal, exit ramp, wet field, Le Conte’s Sparrow, Upland Sandpiper, on ramp, accelerator.

Now the team had to make it through Houston in midafternoon traffic. On the far side of the city, some of the last fingers of eastern piney woods creep down into Texas, and with it come Pileated Woodpeckers, Prothonotary Warblers, Brown-headed Nuthatches, and Red-headed Woodpeckers. A Swainson’s Warbler, a difficult bird to find at the best of times, sang on cue. A Bald Eagle soared above a reservoir. “And the whole time Brian and I were thinking ‘Oh geez, we’re not going to find any of these woodpeckers we scouted… we’re not going to have enough time,’” Farnsworth said. “We weren’t thinking about numbers, we were thinking about finding birds.”

“One of the hardest things about a Big Day is you have to stay on your pace,” Sullivan added. “When you miss a bird, you can’t linger on it. You just have to say ‘Oh well, we missed it. We’ve got to go,’ even if it’s just 30 seconds or a minute.  Chris and Jessie’s portion of the route starts at 4:30, and if you’ve added minutes onto your day and you’re starting there at 5:15, you’re going to miss 30 birds later.”

When they hit High Island the migration fallout that had begun on Wednesday was still going on. All six of the Sapsuckers are serious, no-nonsense birders who know how to focus. But they’re also people who have loved looking at birds for as long as they can remember. They were having trouble concentrating.

“One of our biggest problems was being distracted by too many adult male Scarlet Tanagers and Rose-breasted Grosbeaks,” Iliff said. “We missed at least three or four species that way, probably more.”

“It was like being in a confetti of all different colors,” Farnsworth said. “It was beyond our abilities to comprehend and stay focused. These red and black Scarlet Tanagers were everywhere in your field of view, such an incredibly intense color, and we’d see 100 of them in a small area, everywhere you look, hopping on the ground.”

As good as the birding was, Barry kept pushing them forward. At one point, Philadelphia Vireos were so close at hand that Iliff photographed one using his iPhone. But despite the nagging sense that among those flitting masses there must be a new species or two—maybe a Bay-breasted or a Golden-winged Warbler—they needed to get to Bolivar with enough daylight to pick up the dozens of species that awaited them there: thousands of avocets, plovers, stilts, dowitchers, knots, yellowlegs, sandpipers, skimmers, gulls, and terns.

When the sun went down Iliff, in the passenger seat, started entering birds into his laptop. A big number at the top of his spreadsheet flashed the total, but he refused to look at it until he was done. All he could hear were Barry and Lenz, sitting behind him and gasping at the numbers; and Farnsworth and Sullivan in the back of the van, asking what was going on. They were at 292. They spent the rest of their time slapping mosquitoes at Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, getting King Rail around 10 p.m. and then Virginia Rail at 11:41. As the clock struck midnight, they were still listening for a Black Rail’s kee-kee-kerr. It didn’t come.

A total of 294 immediately raises the question of whether 300 really is possible. For Wood, it’s hard to say. “It’s in the back of our minds as we do this,” he said. “We’re at this point in time where technology will continue to advance, and our knowledge about birds and their exact requirements will continue to increase. But the other question is will there still be areas for birds? The area where we went to see Seaside Sparrow and Nelson’s Sparrow—along that road out into this great estuary—it’s all slated to have homes built on it. And there’s questions like how long will these birds be able to continue moving in these types of numbers? It speaks to so much that the Lab does, and the power of partnerships with local organizations.”

He was talking about help the team had received from dozens of people: expert scouters, crack local birders, birding organizations, kind permission from landowners, and team sponsorship by Carl Zeiss Sports Optics. Scouters included Andy Guthrie, Matt Hafner, Cornell Lab conservation scientist Ken Rosenberg, and Cornell grad Tom Johnson. The team also thanks Michele Crawford, Grant Webber at the Uvalde Fish Hatchery, Neal’s Lodge, Susan Albert and the staff at the Mitchell Lake Audubon Center, National Audubon Society, Brad Wier at the San Antonio Botanical Gardens, Noreen Baker, Jimmy Laurent at Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, Harvey Laas, John Berner, Elizabeth Eddins, George and Clarence at Beaumont Waste Treatment, and Patti Ryan, whose delicious cookies powered the team through the day.

(Images taken by Tom Johnson at High Island, Texas, over the last few days. You can still donate in support of Team Sapsucker’s record and to aid our conservation work. You can view the full species list in the team’s eBird checklist.)

Tonight at midnight, the Cornell Lab’s competitive birding team will kick off a 24-hour Big Day in San Antonio, Texas. During every single minute of April 25, 2013, the six members of Team Sapsucker (left) will train their eyes and ears toward finding birds. They’re hoping for 265 species or more to break the North American record. Thanks to supporters’ pledges, it’s also our biggest conservation fundraiser of the year.

This year the team decided to push up their schedule owing to a favorable weather forecast. It gives them less time to scout for rarities along their route, but they hope that good migration conditions along the coast will make up for that.

“The way this [cold front] is timing out on Thursday, it provides a very unique window for us,” said Brian Sullivan. “Every time you do a Big Day you’ve got to put together all the breeding birds you can, and you can’t leave any of them on the table because you never know what’s going to happen with the migrants.” But after two years that have offered up slim migrant showings, the winds look poised to deliver on Thursday.

“Fitz would probably say ‘cautiously optimistic,’” said team captain Chris Wood, referring to Cornell Lab director and former team captain John Fitzpatrick. “But yeah, it could be very, very good.”

The day will start around San Antonio, said team member Jessie Barry. Bird number one might be an American Robin with a nest the team can check off without disturbing it, or possibly a Canvasback that often roosts at a nearby and well-lit lake. They’ll listen for owls, herons, nightjars, and the soft calls of passing migrants as they make their way toward the Hill Country for the dawn chorus. Last year, the team had 129 species by 9 a.m.

As the morning activity winds down they’ll make a long push 300 miles east to the Texas coast. They’ll swing through some wooded patches to pick up classic eastern species that are hard to come by in the Hill Country—birds like Downy Woodpecker, Acadian Flycatcher, and Pine Warbler. They’ll try to remember all the correct turns to get to the best sparrow fields as well as find the perfect flooded rice field for shorebirds.

“It’s always tricky with the rice fields, Wood said, “You’ve got to get the water levels just right” to produce clutch species like Buff-breasted Sandpiper, Long-billed Curlew, and Hudsonian Godwit. “Healthy godwits that have had good success on their wintering grounds don’t even want to stop along the Texas coast,” he said, referring to research by former Cornell Lab Ph.D. student Nathan Senner that showed that in good weather, the godwits keep right on going as far as Nebraska or Minnesota in one jump. “They might put down in Texas in adverse winds, but maybe only stay for a few hours,” Wood said. “So those are species that you always worry about it.”

Their meticulously timed route itinerary has them pulling in at 5:45 p.m. to High Island, one of the most famous spring migrant spots in North America. With any luck, rain and north winds will have forced migrating songbirds to seek shelter here on Wednesday instead of carrying on northward, and Team Sapsucker hopes they’ll stick around to refuel for Thursday.

This is a crucial part of the route for this year’s Big Day attempt—the team had a fairly poor showing for migrants last year but still managed to reach 264 species. On a good day, High Island can produce nearly 30 species of warblers alone. If eastern winds blow across the Gulf of Mexico there might even be a Caribbean influence to the migrants on offer—birds like Black-throated Blue Warbler and Cape May Warbler, said team member Andrew Farnsworth.

The team will spend the last of their daylight on Bolivar Peninsula, “one of the arguably very best concentrations of shorebirds in North America,” Wood said, where 10,000–15,000 shorebirds await them. “It’s a really good place for Snowy Plover, Wilson’s Plover, Piping Plover, hopefully Red Knot,” he said. “If we get out there right around sunset, we can hope for Peregrine Falcon and White-tailed Kite too.”

Then they’ll be back in darkness, using their ears to try to squeeze out a last few species. Here again, the predicted weather, if it holds, will help them. “The last couple years, the wind has not been tremendously kind to us,” said Brian Sullivan, referring to steady 25-mph breezes that made it hard to hear and probably kept birds inactive during the team’s last two attempts. “Last year in particular, the whole last night we ended up getting about four species, and we had a dozen that we should’ve found,” Wood said.

As I spoke with them, the team was converging on San Antonio from their various scouting territories. They planned to meet up around 5 p.m. and make final preparations: wash the car, meticulously clean the windows inside and out, decide on seating arrangements, and practice getting in and out smoothly. They’ll make a grocery run. From midnight to midnight there will be no meal stops; everything the team eats will come out of a single cooler. “Basically everybody gets to pick one item they want,” Barry told me. “Other than that it’s peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.” With any luck they’ll get to bed around 9 p.m. tonight—and back up a little before midnight.

We’ll have running updates on Facebook during the event, and a full recap posted here afterwards. Good luck, Team Sapsucker!

(Thanks to sponsorship from Carl Zeiss Sports Optics, 100 percent of your pledge goes directly to support conservation. Team Sapsucker image by Tim Gallagher. Left to right: Marshall Iliff, Tim Lenz, Jessie Barry, captain Chris Wood, Brian Sullivan, and Andrew Farnsworth.)

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/04/magw_wood.jpg
  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/04/scta_wood.jpg
  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/04/cerw_wood.jpg
  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/04/rbgb_wood.jpg
  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/04/kewa_wood.jpg
  

As Team Sapsucker prepares for their Big Day in Texas, our new BirdCast project is helping pin down the best day of the week for their attempt on the North American record—and its weekly reports can help birders all over North America, too.

On a good day, springtime can deliver spectacular birding. But picking that day can be tricky. Migrants by the millions are flooding into North America, but are they coasting on tailwinds, battling through thunderstorms, or being buffeted by crosswinds? For decades, biologists have noticed that great sightings often go along with certain weather patterns—particularly the near-mythical “fallout,” when northerly winds stop migrants in their tracks as they arrive on the Gulf Coast after an all-night flight from Mexico.

Recently, our BirdCast project began formally compiling weather reports, radar maps, recent sightings, and other data into specific, weekly predictions about what birds are moving, and where they’re likely to be seen. The project aims to develop detailed predictions for conservationists and environmental planners—today, their regional reports are already proving useful to birders like our Team Sapsucker as they plan their Big Day. Thanks to your pledges, each extra species they find helps raise more funds for conservation.

We caught up with BirdCast project leader Andrew Farnsworth, who is also a member of Team Sapsucker, to see how the forecast looks for Texas this week. His short answer: Thursday could be really good.

The elements are already in motion, Farnsworth said. A cold front pushing across central Texas is likely to bring north winds and rain to east Texas and into the Gulf of Mexico by tomorrow morning. “It’s an almost ideal situation to create a fallout,” he said.  ”Later tonight, birds are going to take off from the Yucatan, parts of the Mexican coast, and the Caribbean, because conditions are really good down there. Once they take off, they don’t usually turn around.”

As they near the end of their flight they’ll run into the cold front, with its rain and opposing winds, and they’ll start looking for the nearest shoreline to make landfall. (See a more complete breakdown on BirdCast’s weekly forecast page.)

Thursday should dawn cloudy but calm. The exhausted migrants should spend the day where they landed, resting and replenishing their energy stores. Meanwhile, Team Sapsucker will spend the morning scouring the Texas Hill Country, 300 miles away, and aim to arrive at High Island, on the coast, at around 5:45 p.m. They’ll have about two and a half hours of daylight left to look for 20+ warbler species as well as other migrants.

At least that’s the way it looks right now. “Whether it’s going to be as epic as it appears on paper is hard to say,” Farnsworth said. “But I think the chances for a fallout are better than 50:50 and increasingly better with each passing forecast that I’ve seen.”

There’s still time to help spur Team Sapsucker along by making a pledge for each species they see. Thanks to sponsor Carl Zeiss Sports Optics, 100 percent of every pledge goes directly to aid conservation.

More like this:

• Read about last year’s Big Day run
• See their 264-species day condensed into a 4-minute slideshow

(Images by Chris Wood, Team Sapsucker captain.)

Bill Rhein (right), with his friends George and Walter Kohler in the Sierra Madre in 1953, during the first of three expeditions in search of the Imperial Woodpecker.

Living Bird editor Tim Gallagher’s newest book, Imperial Dreams, hit bookstores on Tuesday with its tales of exploring Mexico’s Sierra Madre in pursuit of the largest woodpecker that ever lived. The book has received some great reviews, and Tim will appear on the Diane Rehm show on Thursday, April 25, 2013, to discuss it. Here’s a little bonus material from Tim about William Rhein, a dentist and amateur ornithologist/filmmaker who provided some of Tim’s most important clues:

I’ve always loved the story of William Rhein—the indefatigable Imperial Woodpecker searcher who launched three self-funded expeditions into the vast Sierra Madre of Mexico in the 1950s to try to document these remarkable birds as they hovered even then at the edge of extinction. I sometimes wonder why he did it. Rhein had an excellent income from his dental practice in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; a nice home; and no children, so he and his wife could afford to indulge themselves in every way. But instead he chose to drive south with a few buddies and spend up to two months at a time, roughing it in the outback of Mexico, living on beans, booze, and tortillas.

Of course, it was a great adventure. These guys were World War II veterans, and perhaps they missed the thrills, danger, and sense of camaraderie they’d experienced in combat. And bird study was a lifelong obsession with Rhein. Although he did not have a degree in ornithology, he was an ornithologist to the core—and also a gifted bird photographer and cinematographer. Rhein’s lucrative dental practice provided all the funds and time he needed to do anything he wanted, and the Imperial Woodpecker was the ideal species for an obsessive quest—a bird that had barely been studied and never photographed alive. Perhaps it was the challenge of accomplishing something that had never been done that spurred him on.

In the course of working on my new book, Imperial Dreams, I was fortunate enough to interview two surviving members of Rhein’s expeditions—Frederick K. Hilton (who went with him in 1953) and Dick Heintzelman (who went in 1956)—and they filled me in on the details of the expeditions and shared their photographs with me.

The first thing Rhein did to prepare for his expedition was to visit famed Cornell professor Arthur A. Allen (founder of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology), who had searched for Imperial Woodpeckers in 1946. Allen—along with his wife Elsa and 20-year-old son David—had spent six weeks in Mexico, driving the atrocious mountain roads in a station wagon and a sedan, both laden to the gunwales with camera and sound-recording equipment. They actually located one of the birds, a lone female, but were unable to photograph it or make a sound recording. Allen was generous to Rhein, providing him with maps, advice on where to go, and the names of people to contact in Mexico. He even loaned Rhein a huge parabolic microphone and a wire recorder (an early sound-recording device that recorded sound onto thin steel wire) in case he got a chance to document the bird’s voice, which had also never been done.

Rhein and three of his friends loaded up his Chevy panel truck with all of their gear and headed south in the late spring of 1953, driving all the way from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to the city of Durango, Mexico, some 2,500 miles away. Although they struck out in the first two areas they explored, the men eventually found several Imperial Woodpeckers (including a pair with two young) near Los Laureles, a tiny village in the high country of Durango.

Walter Kohler looks at a fallen tree where seconds earlier three Imperial Woodpeckers had been foraging.

Some of the local people were suspicious of the strange equipment they carried, such as the odd-looking metal parabola, which was bigger around than a sledding disk, and the wire recorder. This was in the early days of the nuclear age, and some of them suspected the Americans were searching for uranium.

The sound-recording equipment proved to be impractical for the job at hand. They brought along six truck batteries to power the setup, which did not allow them the mobility they needed to follow an Imperial Woodpecker closely and record its call—which is too bad; no recording of the bird’s voice exists, and no one has ever had a better chance to record it than Rhein and his friends. They were also unable to take still photographs or film footage on this or their follow-up expedition in 1954.

On his third and final expedition to Mexico in 1956, Rhein finally successfully documented an Imperial Woodpecker, capturing a variety of behaviors on 85 seconds of 16-mm Kodachrome motion-picture film. But unfortunately, the film didn’t meet Rhein’s strict professional standards, and he kept it to himself for decades. He had filmed the segment from the back of a mule as the woodpecker hung around, flying from tree to tree in a circle, and occasionally foraging.

Clips from William Rhein’s 1956 footage of a female Imperial Woodpecker.

The world might very well never have learned about Rhein’s Imperial Woodpecker film if not for the efforts of my colleague Martjan Lammertink, who tracked down Rhein and interviewed him less than two years before his death. Martjan had read a letter in the Cornell archives that Rhein had written to woodpecker researcher James Tanner in the early 1960s, in which he had briefly mentioned the Imperial Woodpecker footage he shot in Mexico. Martjan was living in the Netherlands at the time, but the next time he came to America, he tracked down Rhein at his home in Pennsylvania.

Rhein and his wife greeted Martjan warmly and invited him inside. Later, they sat down in the living room and Rhein set up his old 16-mm projector and screen and began running the film. Martjan had the foresight to turn on a tape recorder as he sat with them as the projector rolled. Pat Leonard at the Cornell Lab has put together some of Rhein’s best footage and used the conversation between Rhein and his wife and Martjan as a voiceover. You can view it here:

I love hearing the comments of Rhein and his wife. Neither of them had viewed the film in decades. As for Martjan, he was stunned. Although it only ran a total of 85 seconds, the film was far better than he could ever have imagined. The bird was easily identifiable and engaged in a variety of behaviors—flying, foraging, hitching up a tree. It holds a goldmine of information about a species that has barely been studied. To this day, it is the only photographic documentation ever made of an Imperial Woodpecker, and its importance cannot be overstated.

(Images courtesy Tim Gallagher. To learn more about the Imperial Woodpecker, visit Tim’s blog.)

(Click image for a larger version)

The new Crossley guide hits bookstores this week, bringing Crossley’s unique approach to the task of helping you identify more raptors—whether they’re familiar, unfamiliar, faraway, backlit, immature, adult, light-morph, dark-morph, soaring, hovering, or sitting.

With raptors for a subject, this guide concerns itself with far fewer species than 2011′s Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds, and the authors have used the extra room well. Crossley has always wanted readers to engage with his books—to puzzle over each plate’s many shapes and patterns as much as they read the ID tips at the bottom of the page.

This new book adds even more of an ID workbook feel than the last guide. Interspersed with the book’s 67 two-page identification spreads are 15 “mystery” plates that challenge readers to put the book’s advice immediately to use in working out identifications.

As an example, check out the one above: you’re out birding on the central prairies, and a host of buteos are circling in the sky. Which is which? Take a close look and see if you can identify each numbered bird (for the smaller specks, try clicking for a larger image). Then scroll down for the answers, provided by Crossley’s coauthor Brian Sullivan, who is an eBird project leader and raptor expert.

Scroll down when you’re ready to read Brian’s answers:

V

V

V

V

V

V

V

Answers to the Quiz: by Brian Sullivan

(Tip: right-click on the image above and select “Open link in new window.” Then you’ll have the image next to you as you read the answers instead of scrolling up and down.)

How many species? There are four species in this composite photograph: Ferruginous Hawk, Red-tailed Hawk, Swainson’s Hawk, and Rough-legged Hawk. These are all buteos—large, long-winged birds with rather short tails. These characteristics help them soar efficiently over open country; several species also regularly hover or kite. They have shorter tails than accipiters and broader, rounder wings than either falcons or kites. Bear in mind that most buteos can occur in several color patterns: “light-morph” (generally more common) and “dark-morph” (less common), as well as occasional intermediates.

So which is which? Next, to identify these buteos, focus on subtleties of shape and broad plumage patterns. (Flight style is also key to identification, but that is difficult to discern from still images.) Here are the points to look for in each example:

1. Adult light Ferruginous Hawk. Snow-white underneath with rufous leg feathers, underwing mottling, and upperwing coverts. Light Ferruginous Hawks have long, rather pointed wings and are overall very pale.
2. Adult light Red-tailed Hawk. Pale underneath with dark patagial bars and belly streaks. Virtually all light Red-tailed Hawks have these dark patagial bars (the leading edge of the underwing). Note rufous tint to underside, dark trailing edge to wings, and reddish tint to tail; these denote an adult.
3. First-summer light Red-tailed Hawk. Not all Red-tailed Hawks have red tails! First-years have brown, banded tails. They molt into the red tail during the first summer, as shown in this bird. Brown overall on top. Broad wings with new, darker inner primaries, outer primaries showing first-year paleness, which can look like a window in the wing. Brownish, faintly banded tail with new, reddish adult feathers.
4. First-year light Red-tailed Hawk. Pale underneath with dark patagial bars and bellyband. Lacks the buffy or rufous tint to the underbody, dark trailing edge to the wings, and reddish tail of adult. Shows translucent primaries.
5. First-year dark western Red-tailed Hawk. Broad, somewhat long wings in a full soar. Note that the uniformly brownish body and underwing coverts is an uncommon plumage. Lack of defined trailing edge to wings and reddish tail denote a first-year bird.
6. First-year light western Red-tailed Hawk. Pale underneath with dark patagial bars and belly streaks. Note: translucent primaries and plain buffy coloration denote a first-year bird.
7. Adult intermediate Swainson’s Hawk. This bird shows long, pointed wings in a shallow glide. Swainson’s Hawks usually show pale underwing coverts contrasting with dark grayish flight feathers. This one also shows a dark chest bib and paler belly. Many intermediate adults are mottled on the belly.
8. Adult light Red-tailed Hawk. Pale underneath with dark patagial bars, belly streaks, and reddish tail. Somewhat long but broad wings.
9. Adult dark Ferruginous Hawk. Dark underneath with whitish, plain flight feathers, and minimal dark on wingtips. Wings are long and tapered, but unlike dark Swainson’s, Ferruginous have very pale flight feathers. Dark trailing edge to the wings, rufous overall body plumage with whitish throat, and lack of dark on the tail tip denote adult.
10. Adult female light Rough-legged Hawk. Pale underneath with blackish belly and wrists. Dark trailing edge to the wings and defined dark tail tip denote an adult. The single dark tail band, complete bellyband, and wrist patches denote a female.
11. Adult “Krider’s” Red-tailed Hawk. Pale and nearly unmarked underneath with minimal dark on patagials, reddish and whitish tail, and dark trailing edge to wings. Broad wings slightly tapered in shallow glide is classic Red-tail shape. Krider’s is a pale subspecies of the Red-tailed Hawk that breeds mainly on the northern Great Plains and winters on the southern Great Plains.
12. Third-year light Swainson’s Hawk. Pale underside with dark bib and flight feathers with darker trailing edge to wings and tail. Bib is near complete, and paler outer primaries help denote age. Unlike many buteos, Swainson’s takes three years to acquire full adult plumage. This summer bird is in the process of molting into its adult plumage.
13. First-year light Rough-legged Hawk. Pale underneath with solid blackish belly and wrists, and buffy, unmottled underwing coverts. Dark trailing edge to the wings is ill defined, but appears to have a dark tail tip. Translucent primary panels somewhat visible. First-years and adult females can be difficult to tell apart.
14. Adult light Ferruginous Hawk. Snow-white underneath with rufous leg feathers, underwing mottling, and minimal dark on wingtips. Wings are long and lack bulge along secondaries, body is robust. Compare shape with other light buteos on this page.
15. Adult female light Rough-legged Hawk. Most light Rough-legged Hawks are easily identified by the dark belly and wrist patches that contrast with the overall pale underparts. This is especially true of adult females and immatures. The dark trailing edge to the wings and defined dark tail tip denote an adult. The single dark tail band, rufous underwings, complete bellyband, and wrist patches denote a female.

(Image courtesy Princeton University Press.)

Big Days are intense: Last year, our Team Sapsucker spent all 24 hours of April 27 scouring central and eastern Texas for birds. They had three dozen species on their list before dawn broke, and hit triple digits shortly before 8 a.m. They kept going, adding an average of one species every 11 minutes throughout the day.

To help the rest of us picture what that sort of daylong deluge of birds feels like, we’ve condensed their Big Day into a 4-minute slideshow. Watch and enjoy as the birds flash by!

Curious about which species is which in the slideshow? Refer to the table below—or download a printable PDF. (Note: the slideshow does not show all 264 species, and these photos were not taken on the Big Day itself.)

Species recorded during Big Day but not pictured in slideshow

(Photos courtesy Chris Wood and Tim Lenz.)

(Click image to enlarge)

We were pretty impressed with Richard Crossley’s first bird ID guide when it came out in 2011. So we can’t wait for the next installment: a guide dedicated specifically to raptors, due out in April 2013. Could our excitement have anything to do with his coauthors? Yes it could: they include raptor wizard Jerry Ligouri (author of a guide or two of his own), and the Cornell Lab’s own Brian Sullivan, an eBird project leader.

The Crossley ID Guide: Raptors continues Crossley’s turned-on-its-head approach to bird guides. Instead of putting one or two large, detailed images front and center against a white background, Crossley inundates the reader with photos of the bird in all postures, plumages, and—most importantly—sizes. The birds skitter across a single landscape photo, forcing the reader to pay attention to the most important aspect of identification: size & shape.

This approach is especially well suited to raptors, which you typically see from a long distance away in challenging light. The first thing we learn about raptors is how to tell the shape of a buteo from an accipiter from a falcon. Refining that ability to judge shape is what makes raptor watching an enduring pursuit. Take this sample plate for example—how many jump out immediately as Sharp-shinned Hawks, and how many surprise you?

I asked Brian Sullivan for some tips on this small accipiter, and here’s what he told me:

Distinguishing the accipiters is one of the most challenging aspects of bird identification. Let your eyes roam across these images, and pay particular attention to shape. How do the various shapes translate as the birds get farther away? Sharp-shinned usually shows a relatively small head, a narrow-based, often squarish-tipped tail, and short, stocky, rounded wings. The wings are pressed forward at the wrists, often making Sharp-shinned appear smaller-headed than the other two accipiters, Cooper’s Hawk and Northern Goshawk. Ageing accipiters is often easier than identifying them: first-years are brownish above and streaked brownish below; adults are blue-gray above and barred reddish or (for the goshawk) grayish below.

Keep an eye out here and on our Facebook page for more raptor quizzes from Brian, coming your way in April. And read more about the new Crossley guide as the book tours the major bird watching blogs this week (tip: click through and read to the bottom of the post for a chance to win a great prize package).

(Image courtesy Princeton University Press.)

By Jason Martin and Robyn Bailey

In many parts of North America, handsome male Northern Cardinals are already singing to attract mates. A bird so visible in the winter landscape begs the question, “How does a flame-red bird that nests close to the ground manage to be so common?”

Many people puzzle over how this conspicuous species can be so successful, despite its low rate of nesting success. Typically, fewer than 40 percent of nests fledge at least one young. And if predation is a problem for cardinals, why don’t the males try to blend in a little more? Our NestWatch team has some answers, fed by details of cardinal nesting behavior gleaned from the 268 nesting attempts reported to the program so far. Here’s project leader Jason Martin:

The answer may lie in their long breeding season. Cardinals do not migrate and can begin building nests as early as late February. They can continue nesting into late August or September, giving them plenty of opportunity to raise one or two broods of young per year.

Another factor could be that cardinals are habitat generalists. They can nest in open woodlands, dry shrubby areas, disturbed tangles, suburbs, backyards, and even deserts. And they seem to put their nests pretty much anywhere: a recent study in Texas found that cardinal nest sites weren’t particularly different from sites the researchers chose at random. This suggests that cardinals may not be limited by suitable nesting locations.

Cardinals build their nests in live trees, shrubs, or vine tangles, anywhere up to about 15 feet high. Higher nests, and nests placed in denser tangles, seem to offer some relief from predators. The bright male carries nesting material to the female, who does most of the building. She uses her big beak to crush twigs until they’re pliable, then bends them around her body to make a nest cup that fits her, wedged into a small fork of branches for support. The nest is a sophisticated structure that takes 3–9 days to build. By the end, it’s about four inches across and three tall, lined with a snug layer of grapevine bark and fine grasses and pine needles.

But how does the male get away with being so colorful? The flamboyant males sing from high perches and do not trade their breeding plumes for a drab winter coat—they seem like obvious targets for hawks. It turns out that male cardinals are probably bright and loud for the same reason: to advertise what good mates they’d make.

According to the Birds of North America Online, brighter males have higher reproductive success, hold better territories, and offer more parental care. The intensity of a cardinal’s redness is related to what he’s been eating. So when females see a bright male, it’s a signal that he’s healthy and holds a good territory. (Interestingly, recent research by Amanda Rodewald, the Cornell Lab’s new director of Conservation Science, shows that this relationship may be getting less reliable for cardinals in urban areas, because of the novel food sources available in town.)

By responding to redness as a sign of a promising mate, females have encouraged the evolution of bright coloring in males. This process is called sexual selection, and it’s an everyday example of a process that can lead to extraordinary creatures like the birds-of-paradise. At the same time, the female’s muted colors provide her (and her nest) with a protective camouflage that the male lacks. Furthermore, cardinals tend to have high survival rates, possibly because they don’t endure the stress of migration. The oldest recorded cardinals lived to be at least 15 and a half years old (one recorded in Pennsylvania and another in Virginia).

If you are lucky enough to find a cardinal nest this year, won’t you help us learn more about this fascinating species? Last year, NestWatch participants monitored a record 81 Northern Cardinal nests. Can we get more in 2013? Head over to NestWatch for tips, stats, and focal species information, plus details about how to monitor nests safely as part of this great, free project.

(Image by Daniel Behm via Birdshare. This post was written by NestWatch project leader Jason Martin and program assistant Robyn Bailey.)