Review – "Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle" by Thor Hanson

Looking for a last minute Christmas gift for the birder in your life?   “Feathers” will not only fit the bill nicely but is also an excellent read for the casual naturalist or mildly “bird-curious”.  Conservation biologist Thor Hanson guides readers through the history of feathers in culture, recreational birding and ornithology.  This journey necessarily involves many detours and diversions but Hanson kept me engrossed in two ways.

Firstly, he begins and ends the book with personal anecdotes and then keeps all of the material framed within his own exploration of the topic.  Most memorably, discussing the numbers and types of feathers on a bird (2,000-4,000 on a typical songbird, 25,000 on a swan if you were wondering!) begins with Hanson’s attempt to pluck a roadkill Pacific Wren.  It’s messier than you might imagine for such a little bird and provides a natural segue into the finer details of feather types and evolution.

A Pacific Wren seen in Ucluelet BC this past summer.  Tougher and messier to pluck than you might imagine!  (By the way, what's coming out of that beak sounds much nicer than this picture looks!)

Secondly, I was impressed by the way that Hanson conveys the more technical details of feather evolution in engaging and entertaining context.  Much of the book outlines the story of how birds got their feathers, in other words it portrays the continuing uncertainty around the origin of dinosaur feathers.  Hanson interviews most of the key players and explains the concepts by telling the story of the researchers’ work.

Dinosaur feathers embedded in amber

Of course there’s an important Alberta connection here as University of Alberta researchers announced the discovery of the first fully preserved (three-dimensional) dinosaur feathers back in September.  Here's a good summary of this science news if you aren't familiar with it:

While this development occurred well after the publishing date of “Feathers”, it only makes the book more relevant and timely.  Feathers are an obvious but surprisingly complex aspect of birds and this book was a great read that taught me much about them.

I'm taking this great idea from several other bird book sites because 1) most birders have a copy of "Big Sibley" and 2) it's irritating opening up the mail to find an unexpectedly tiny book (or an unexpectedly huge one!)

"Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle" by Thor Hanson is published by Basic Books as a 352 page hardcover.  A paperback edition is coming in June.  The book is available on Amazon or Chapters for about $20.

Let it Snow!

As one of those irritating people who cheers the year's first big dump of snow, I've enjoyed the last 24 hours in Calgary.  The seven inch blanket of the white stuff that arrived last night added an appropriately wintery touch to picking up our Christmas tree and stringing up new lights in the big spruce in our front yard.  The snow also provided the opportunity for my first winter birding of the year.  All of the usual suspects were to be found at Inglewood Bird Sanctuary including some very friendly Black-capped Chickadees and the usual massive rafts of Canada Geese on the river.  I also found a small flock of White-winged Crossbills, a Calgary first for me.

White-winged Crossbill, Loxia leucoptera, pondering which cone to tackle next

Oh yeah!  That's the spot!

Even with that beak, cones can be cracked only with copious contortions!

After this stop I headed to LaFarge Meadows in Fish Creek Park - having read an article about Gyrfalcon's in the current issue of BirdWatching magazine I was possessed by the wildly optimistic notion that I might find this raptor hunting among the ducks.  Unsurprisingly there were no Gyrfalcons or Goshawks but I did find a lone Bald Eagle surveying the hundreds of Common Goldeneye's and Mallards.  More unusually I also came across a late (and very chilly looking) Killdeer to round out a pleasant winter's day of birding.

One very cold looking, albeit well camouflaged, Killdeer, Charadrius vociferus 

Calgarybirder is Now on Flickr!

In case you missed yesterday's post, I now have some photos uploaded to Flickr so you can follow my quixotic quest to photograph every species of Alberta bird, complete with geotagging of each sighting.

I also wanted to reiterate my recommendation that you check out this site for great Canadian and Alberta bird photography.

Birding When You Can't Bird: Part 2 - Photography

There sure are a lot of bird photos out there on the web.  My Google Reader feed brings me about 70 birding blogs from around the web and, on this random Wednesday in November, that meant well over 100 photos of birds.  Some are spectacular, some are informative and, (like many of my shots) some are "identification only" images of negligible artistic merit.  As has been recently pointed out by some bloggers, photography is only one aspect of birding and not every bird photographer would necessarily consider themselves a birder.  Sometimes these different values can clash in the field - often as mere irritation but occasionally as inappropriate or unethical behaviour.  If you are a birder first and foremost - and I mean that in the sense of someone whose primary purpose is to locate, identify and observe birds in the wild with the goal of learning about their behaviour and distribution - then what role does photography play in your experience?  I offer three ideas, and some places to pursue them online.

1) Practice Makes Perfect

Quick! How many shorebird species?

As I have repeatedly mentioned in the last few months, I don't have as much time as I would like to get out birding.  Even if you are fortunate enough to have time, how prepared are you for trips beyond your regular birding turf?  With a continuous stream of photographs pouring through an RSS reader (a what?) you can be exposed to literally hundreds of identification challenges every day.  I'm certain from my own experience that exposure to images taken at different times of year, in different locations and contexts can significantly improve rapid identification skills.  To engage with this learning process I try to make sure that every photo I see online of a North American bird is identified and that I understand the reasons for that identification.  This improvement even goes beyond field marks and touches on the elusive birding by impression ("jizz"), which can be conveyed by many photos of a species viewed over time.


Want more "Practice Makes Perfect"?

• GrrlScientist has a daily bird photo quiz at Punctuated Equilibrium
• Birds Calgary and Prairie Birder both run occasional photo quizzes and regularly have pictures of local birds
• David Lily is just one of many excellent Alberta photographers with an excellent online repository of images

2) Let The Memory Live Again

This is a very bad photo.  It is also a life bird.

I saw a Long-tailed Duck in Calgary.  I had never seen one before anywhere.  I hadn't been birding in weeks.  Everytime I look at that photo it brings a little smile to my face.

Keeping a collection of bird photos can be a great way to reminisce about birding experiences and reflect on trips.  Improving those photos can itself be a motivator to get out birding.

Want tips on helping your birding memories live again?

• I've started using Flickr which provides a great way to share and organize photos, as well as a mapping tool where you can pinpoint the location of your birding adventures.
• Birds are often very small and often very far off.  Taking photos through your spotting scope is a way to get record/ID shots and sometimes some great images too.  The topic of digiscoping is too large to tackle in this post and could have it's own blog.  In fact here's a good one!

3) Pure Inspiration

And so we come full circle - back to the spectacular.  Just today there were was inspiration to go out and look for Rough-legged Hawks.  And there was inspiration to save up and visit Peru again - these photos were taken by a Canadian birder who is featured on canadianbirdphotographer.ca, alongside David Lily's work.  

We may lack the experience, equipment, time, patience, motivation or money to take these kind of images ourselves but they capture some of the experience of watching these birds in person.  Whether we are birders, birders who photograph, photographers who bird, or some other hybrid thereof, images from the fuzzy to fantastic and from the mundane to the magical can connect us in unique ways to wildlife.

Amazing Starlings! No, really...

This is so worth two minutes of your time...
Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

Thanks to Magnificent Frigatebird for finding this one.

Rumours of my death....

or at least this blog's death, are greatly exaggerated.

Tundra Swan, Cygnus columbianus, nr. Langdon, Alberta

October was a hectic month - a nasty cold made the rounds of the family, we helped my parents move house, and one of the kids had his appendix out.  Combined with lots going on at school there wasn't a whole lot of time for birding and I watched Rare Bird Alerts go through my mailbox with little action on my part.  The last few days have improved somewhat and I managed to catch a few nice migrant birds, mostly on and around Glenmore Reservoir (click above for map) over the course of three visits.  The rarity images are a little Bigfoot/UFO-like but it's nice to have a record of a significant sighting.

An immature Red-necked Grebe, Podiceps grisegena.  The bay where this youngster was feeding was ice-covered when I went by this afternoon, so I'm sure it is long gone.

A very cooperative Townsend's Solitaire, Myadestes townsendi, gave the best views I've ever had of this species before diving back down from the windy treetops.

The Western Grebe, Aechmophorus occidentalis, is a new Calgary city bird for me

A pair of migrant Surf Scoters, Melanitta perspicillata, have been hanging around the reservoir for a while now.  I finally had a chance to add them to my Alberta list.

Worst picture, best bird?  My lifer Long-tailed Duck, Clangula hyemalis 

Birding When You Can't Bird

Two weeks of silence on this blog correlates to two weeks of little to no birding for me.  A big flock of Common Grackle's moving through the neighbourhood were a treat (and a new NMT bird) while walking the dog.  A Blue Jay was a colourful and relatively rare sight in urban Calgary.  And a Bald Eagle made a majestic low pass over our raft when I was out with my students on the river on Friday - it was nice to see Grade 8's getting excited about birds.  Anyway, those are slim pickings for migration season but the new school year and some busy goings-on at home have kept the scope in the cupboard and the field guide on the shelf.

All this inactivity has got me thinking about ways we enjoy birds when, for whatever set of reasons, we can't actually go out and "bird".  The first, and for many people only, point of engagement with wild birds are feeders.  My own experience with these in Alberta has been somewhat frustrating.  With memories of vast flocks of American Goldfinch swarming over the niger seed at my Mom and Dad's house in Ontario, when we moved into this house I gamely hung feeders in the front and back yards filled with bags of supermarket bird seed.  This did not go well.  The front yard was largely the domain of House Sparrows, with the occasional brave Black-capped Chickadee and Rock Pigeons picking over the mess underneath.  The backyard was just House Sparrows.

With some help from the experts at The Wild Bird Store, on Macleod Trail , I now have a plan.  With three feeders, all in the backyard, there is one place for the inescapable House Sparrows to fill up on millet (on the plus side, I'm feeding the Merlins too!)  The two feeders closer to the house hold high quality nuthatch and chickadee mix and a finch friendly mix.  As you can see, the results have been positive.

A young House Finch, Carpodacus mexicanus

Adult House Finch (on the right) seems prepared to brave the aggressive sparrows...

...but the sparrows don't like that

By far the best views I've had of a Pine Siskin, Spinus pinus, and looking forward to more over the winter

It will be interesting to see what sort of birds I can attract once winter begins.  In any case I will keep the blog updated with any worthwhile photos.

On the topic of photos, I'll have another post in the next few days highlighting another way to bird when you can't bird and showcase a few talented fellow Albertan photographers.