"Out Of Place" White-winged Crossbill, Common Redpolls

Common redpolls and White-winged crossbill March 14, 2011 Phippsburg, Maine

White-winged Crossbill, male March 14, 2011 Phippsburg, Maine

     A flock of about a hundred and thirty Common redpolls is still here. Among them has been this lone, male, White-winged crossbill. As boreal forest birds, it's highly unusual for either species to be here this late into spring. Maine has seen unprecedented numbers of Common redpolls this winter. Though they look somewhat out of place, the birds seem comfortable in this environment far from their northern homes. They don't spook easily and are aggressive at the feeders. I've carefully studied the flock of redpolls hoping to see a Hoary redpoll, but no such luck. I did notice that some of the Common redpolls were wearing high heels and the White-winged crossbill was wearing false eye lashes. Hoping to fit in, boreal birds are known to don this type of attire when they travel south to the cities.

     My husband and I just came back from a trip. We travelled south to see family and to see the Philadelphia Flower Show. Though we only went to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, for us it was a big trip. Jersey and PA are after all, south of here and closer to spring. We don't often get off the Phippsburg peninsula, and when I do it usually involves a police escort and zip ties. My children have both moved away from Maine and I sometimes wonder if my reputation is one of the reasons they fled. But, they haven't completely escaped me; occasionally, I visit them. And when I do, I try to clean up my act. Both of my kids are now adults. They have complete lives with respectable jobs, friends and images of their own far removed from when they lived with me. I don't want to embarrass them. I remember with crystalline clarity the days when I held my breath fearing that it was they who would embarrass me. I don't recall anything either of them actually did that mortified me, but I do recall the anxiety of fearing that they might.

     My daughter's life is now in New Jersey, land of concrete, asphalt and the most shopping malls per square mile of all fifty states. She is a stylish, citified and gorgeous, young woman. She wears huge, hoop earrings and boots with four inch heels as day-to-day wear. On her worst day, she looks like a super model.

    I, on the other hand, live where practical shoes dictate all outfits. I look comparatively like a troll that's lost its bridge. I sleep in plaid flannel and wear snow shoes to bed! The day we left, it was zero degrees Fahrenheit and we still had two feet of snow pack, making these nightwear choices prudent. Most days, I'm also bundled in layers of mismatched fleece.

     My daughter and I had not seen each other in eight months. Suddenly, I envisioned myself through her eyes. I looked like a bear! Now, the mortification tables had turned and I felt woefully inadequate. I would have to do something radical to myself in order to not be an embarrassing hick, a gnarly Nanook of The North, an Ellie May Clampet without great legs. First off, I bought high heeled boots. For several days, while in my bathrobe, I wore them around the house for practice. Nothing pegs a country girl quite so fast as when she falls off her own shoes. After I had that licked, I got a hair cut. That involved two and a half hours in a salon chair. With a reciprocating saw, the beautician whacked a foot off my coif. It took half a pound off my body weight and ten years from my face. But, I wasn't done.

   Of late, on television, I've been watching Real Housewives Of Atlanta. The trashy, reality TV series fascinates me because the women are preposterous. Yet, they do exist in real life, albeit in a bizarre social context. They represent a world and people so far removed from me that I find it easier to conjure Martians. And, in that respect, I find them educational. It's always good to get in touch with what's out there that you can't possibly imagine. I also learned something practical beyond the bare sociology, too.

     I discovered that they all wear false eye lashes and they wear them all the time! The fake eye lashes are what account for some of their vapid, doe-eyed blinking. I noticed this when one of the ladies was crying in a fit of despair and her eye lash came off in her hand like a soggy caterpillar. Some of the "housewives" are not classically pretty women, but they do have gobs of money to throw at their problems. They definitely know how to make the most out of their less than perfect god given selves. So, I decided I'd try it. I'm sure that they spend bundles on expensive false eye lashes made from the furs of endangered mammals. But, I bought a five dollar set from a chain drug store in the same aisle as the cigarettes, condoms and on sale cans of Spanish peanuts.

    Like the high heeled boots, it took some practice in the privacy of my own home to master the application. Naturally, or not - as the case may be, I put them on crooked a couple of times. I got the adhesive in my eyes more than once, which ruled out reading anything for a couple of hours, but I persevered - anything for the cause of fashion. When I left for New Jersey, I no longer looked like a country bumpkin; I looked like a squinting bear with a thorn in its foot and a limp.

     I'm just not a glamorous person and my fashion artifice left me feeling like a silly fraud. In the mirror, I saw a stranger in my own skin. Beneath the Bambi lashes, killer heels and  fancy do, I was still just me. I know my daughter loves me regardless of what I look like or even if I were to embarrass her. She loves me as I love her, unconditionally, no matter what. She sees me for who I really am and I feel beautiful in her eyes; I feel okay. It's a pivotal moment for parents when we realize that our children accept us for who we are, and sometimes for who we are not. From the moment my children were born they have punctuated my life with moments of beautiful clarity.

Displaced Baltimore Oriole at the 2011 Philadelphia Flower Show

"No matter how foolish you feel, someone always looks worse. "

"Which Of These Things Is Not Like The Others? Which Of These Things Isn't The Same?" Waxwings, Crossbills & Siskins

Bohemian waxwings gorging on crab apples

Cedar and Bohemian waxwings. Can you pick out which are which?

The Cedar waxwings in this photo are numbered so you can find them amongst the Bohemian waxwings. Cedars are slightly smaller. If you look under their tails, they are white. Bohemians have reddish coverts and less white around the face than Cedars.

In this collage, there are 105 birds.  Nine of them are Cedar waxwings. Double click on the collage to make it bigger, then see if you can pick out the nine birds that are different. The photo is repeated with numbers by the Cedar waxwings.

The photo on the right is of a Cedar waxwing. The image clearly shows the 'wax' tips of the primary feathers.

White-winged crossbills bickering with a Pine siskin over feeder rights, or maybe they are going to get it on!

     When I was a kid, I loved Highlights Magazine. The 'picture in a picture' puzzles fascinated me. I felt like they were made especially for me to figure out. How fast could I find a key hidden amongst a tree full of toucans or a shoe in the shapes of a leopard's spots? First published in 1946, the magazine is still going strong today. I read my first Highlights Magazine in Boston in 1964.
      I was a sickly child, so spent a lot of time in waiting rooms of doctors' offices. The year that I was nine, I was hospitalized several times with protracted fevers that medicine could neither remedy nor explain. For months, my temperature sky-rocketed then plummeted over and over again inexplicably. By the time I learned "Fever Of Unknown Origin," I had lost enough time from school that my academic progress was cause for concern.
     Monstrous ear aches kept me awake, moaning and rocking myself back and forth, alone in a quiet house where everyone else was sleeping. After a while, I quit crying because it just made my head hurt more. I stared into space waiting for the sun to come up, for sleep, for whatever until it was gone. Between bouts, I was weak and tired. My exhausted parents were frightened, the doctors worried. When the earaches stopped, the fevers continued.
     The first time I was hospitalized was in the middle of the night. I was in an isolation ward with babies in steel cribs with cages over the tops so they couldn't get out. Some of the babies could stand up. They'd hold onto the bars and jounce up and down, screaming until they were too exhausted to keep it up. They'd collapse in a heap of soggy diapers and sleep for a while, only to start up again the second they woke. No one came.
   The doctors wanted my blood when the fevers were in full swing. In the middle of the night, they'd wake me up to draw my blood. Dr. Lacey wore a white coat and had warm hands. "Count backwards from one hundred, Robin. Can you do that for me? Just start counting," he'd say. I watched the blood from the needle in my arm meander along a little tube into a vial, then another vile, and then a third. "ninety-eight, ninety-seven, ninety-six...." I whispered under my breath. This would go on for a week, then I'd go home. Before I was strong enough to go back to school, the fevers would start again, and back to the hospital I would go. I was always the same, though each time, the screaming babies were different.
     Eventually, I was sent to Peter Brent Brigham Hospital in Boston for two weeks. My family couldn't stay with me, so I was there alone. Tests were done, things that hurt and things a little girl shouldn't have to know about. I knew not to complain, not to cry, to be brave. I walked the halls of the old hospital staring up at the tallest ceilings I had ever seen. An occupational therapist was called to stave off my boredom. She taught me to hammer sheet copper. I hammered three daffodils nodding in the sun.
    For no good reason, the fevers stopped and stopped for good. In the mean time, I had read loads of Highlights Magazines. I particularly liked the puzzles where the reader had to pick out the one thing in the picture that was different from all the rest. I  became lightening fast at it, a skill that would serve me well as a birder in later years. I learned about big cats in Africa, penguins at the Arctic circle, Right whales in the sea,  and more. Those were the formative days of my eventual obsession with the natural world.
     All sentient creatures have the ability to discriminate. Our survival depends on being able to tell what plants are food or poison, if something is too hot to handle or a crevice too wide to jump. We get it right enough that we don't walk off cliffs or eat deadly mushrooms too often. Animals also use these skills for finding mates. In the case of waxwings, the red, 'wax' tips on the primary feathers are believed to signal the age of a bird. Younger birds that haven't had as much experience mating, nest building, laying eggs and rearing young have fewer wax tips than older, more street smart birds. Waxwings side hop when courting, suggesting that it's all the better to see the wax tips with. This seems simple enough, but mate picking is knotty business.
    We humans have more gaps in our understanding about what makes birds choose one another than we have solid science. To our eyes, the waxwings in the group photos above look so much alike, that unless we are looking for a difference, they all look the same. Though I have searched extensively, I have not found one single reference to reports of hybridization of Bohemian and Cedar waxwings. Logically, we would say that the birds can pick out subtle differences. But this is where it gets tricky: in spite of their powers of discrimination, there are birds that crossbreed readily. Mallards and American black ducks, Common and Barrow's goldeneyes,  and mergansers are some that do. It's not common, but it's not rare, either. In the 1980's there was a chick documented that was progeny of a Pine siskin and a Red crossbill, two birds of different species which look distinctly different by anyone's standards. The DNA of the chick was traced by ornithologists verifying its parentage [1]. Who'd a thunk it? This is one more reason to practice the adage of birders to "look at every bird." You might be the first to see the picture in the picture, the one that's not like the others. Keep reading your Highlights Magazines cover to cover.
    
 1. Tudge, C.  "Keeping Track: The Absolute Need To Classify," The Bird (2008), New York: Crown Publishers (2008), p77

Pop Quiz! White-Winged Crossbills, Accipiter Hawks & Northern Hawk Owl

A crookedness of White-winged crossbills, males and females, Phippsburg, Maine

Sharp-shinned and Cooper's hawks, both accipiters, clock-wise from bottom left: Cooper's, Sharp-shinned (perched), Cooper's (perched), Cooper's (flight), bottom right - Sharp-shinned (take-off)

"You got a problem with this?"

Northern-hawk owl, perched, flight and eating White-winged crossbills in  Bristol, Maine

White-winged crossbill feathers, probably female, aftermath of Sharp-shinned hawk attack. Note that at the mid right of the image above the blood mark is a crossbill bill.

     I love pop quizzes, but most of the people I know hate them. I think that's because people don't like being put on the spot. They like lots of advance time to study and prepare answers so they don't look stupid. Me? I'm quite willing to look stupid without any advance notice required. The images above are of Sharp-shinned and Cooper's hawks, a Northern Hawk owl and White-winged crossbills, pre and post mortem. Do you know what they all have in common? And don't say "Ya, the one on the bottom is dead." That would be just stupid. The hawks and the hawk owl are three species of predatory birds that eat other birds. They all eat White-winged crossbills when they can find them. The Northern hawk owl isn't a hawk at all, though it does behave like a hawk. And, the owl and the White-winged crossbills have more in common than the hawks or the owl. Don't you wish you had studied for this exam?

     White-winged crossbills and the Northern Hawk owl are boreal irruptives in the southern part of Maine.  Neither bird is migratory, but they both occasionally fly south of their usual range when competition for food is too high. In 2007, a White-winged crossbill was found dead in a parking lot in Florida. No one knows for sure how it got there, but it's safe to say it didn't fly. One theory is that it had been hit by a recreational vehicle then rode to Florida stuck in the vehicle's grill. It just fell off in the parking lot on arrival.

     Food supply of the White-winged crossbills and Northern Hawk owls can drop if there is a 'crop' failure or reduction in prey population. Crossbills eat seeds. Their bills are highly adapted for prying seeds from the cones of conifers of the northern forests. The bill holds the cone or seed hull open while the tongue plucks the meat out. I once knew a heavy smoker who could flip a lit cigarette butt around with his tongue so that the lit end was inside his mouth. He would close his lips and blow the smoke out of his nose. Because I knew the guy personally, I thought it was a cool trick. Remember the legendary woman who could tie a Maraschino cherry stem into a knot with her tongue. There's always some guy who says he knew her in high school. White-winged Crossbills with lower mandibles crossing to the right are three times more common than those with lower mandibles crossing to the left, like people that are left handed.

     The birds in these photos were enjoying black oil sunflower seeds in my feeders ans spillage on the ground. Individual White-winged Crossbills can eat up to 3,000 conifer seeds each day. Crossbills breed opportunistically throughout the year whenever food is sufficient for the female to form eggs and raise young. The species has been recorded breeding in all 12 months. A group of crossbills are collectively known as a "wrap" or a "crookedness" of crossbills.

     Northern Hawk owls, also called simply "Hawk owls," are unique among owls. They have long tails and pointed wings and their flight is like accipiter hawks. In addition, they tend to bob their tails when perched and are adept at hovering like kestrels. Their long tail distinguishes them from all other owls. This owl is about the size of a crow.

    Hawk owls eat rodents, mostly voles and in the winter, other birds. They will occasionally take a frog or even fish! Diurnal hunters, Hawk owls like the hawks they are named for, sit on perches and swoop to the ground for prey. They hunt mostly by sight and can see prey up to half a mile distant. Like a true owl, they also can hear rodents under as much as a foot of snow.
     The Hawk owl in the images above was dining on a female White-winged crossbill.  Both of these species were irruptives in Maine in the winter of 2009. This year, there are plenty of White-winged crossbills here, but so far, no one has reported a Hawk owl this winter. Maybe if they knew the crossbill delicacies were here they'd come around. In 2009, it was reported that several times, people who saw the owl took fat, Petco rats for the Hawk owl's pleasure. The owl swooped from its tree perch and snatched up the bewildered, rotund rats before you could say "White-winged crossbill!" Though the owl clearly found the domestic rats tasty, it was regarded as an outrage in the birding community to feed the starving bird that was far, far from home. Perhaps the crossbill that wound up in Florida perished in pursuit of an Early Bird Special after it wasn't allowed into a restaurant.

     Sharp-shinned and Cooper's hawks are accipiter hawks built for speed, because like the Hawk owl, they hunt other birds in flight. Nailing a rodent to the ground requires speed and power, but not flight maneuverability. Both species of accipiter hawks are winter regulars in Maine. When there is thick snow cover, they stalk feeder birds, as easy pickings as a senior citizen's buffet or a Petco rat. Pass the tartar sauce and the Pepcid, please.

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