Golden-winged Warbler in Winnipeg

The Golden-winged Warbler is a Threatened species and I am privileged to be part of the monitoring and recovery efforts in Canada. Although, I have surveyed and studied this species on its breeding grounds here in Manitoba, and seen them in their wintering grounds, I rarely see this species in migration. Yesterday morning, however, I first heard and then saw this beautiful male in my very own neighbourhood. He even stuck around long enough for a photo. He was foraging in the buds and young curled up leaves as shown here (this species specialises in feeding on caterpillars and other invertebrates in curled up dead leaves). It was a rare treat on a beautiful Sunday morning of May migration magic.

The recovery strategy for Golden-winged Warbler in Canada is viewable at: http://www.registrelep-sararegistry.gc.ca/document/default_e.cfm?documentID=2669

Manitoba's Painted Redstart

Manitoba's first and Canada's third Painted Redstart (Myioborus pictus), also known as "Painted Whitestart", showed up in Pinawa 11 days ago. This species breeds from Arizona and New Mexico down through the mountains of western Mexico into Nicaragua. Although the southern populations are resident, the populations in the southern U.S.A migrate south. Sometimes, the phenomenon of "reverse migration" takes a bird in the wrong direction, presumably due to a miscue of the innate (genetic) aspect of migration. In this case, instead of heading south towards Mexico this Painted Redstart has flown north to Manitoba and found itself in Pinawa. Its behaviour over the past 11 days suggests it has set up a winter territory in a small residential area. Currently it has enough to eat and appears very healthy (flying well and foraging actively) but its prospects of escaping winter's inevitable grip are slim. For now though, the balmy November weather southern Manitoba is enjoying is keeping our rare visitor in fine form and a steady stream of birders have come to watch this rarity. Seeing this bird today along with northern species like Hoary Redpoll, felt a little surreal. The four photos below show the bird perched, feeding by gleaning invertebrate prey from bark, and calling. Most interesting for me was to observe how it foraged like a nuthatch (third photo) in an effort to glean food from bark crevices (and also dead insects presumably from gutters and the like).

 

The Importance of Important Bird Areas

On Sunday 24th July I photographed this Pectoral Sandpiper in a mixed species flock at Delta Marsh Important Bird Area (four photos below).  It turns out this bird, an adult male, was fitted with a satellite transmitter by the Max Planck Institutes (https://mpg.de/institutes) on 28th May 2016 in Barrow, Alaska. On his fall migration, this male Pectoral Sandpiper went from Barrow to the southwestern area of Hudson Bay, where there are no less than nine Important Bird Areas, and from there flew to Delta Marsh IBA (MB001).  He arrived at Delta Marsh on the 23rd July or possibly the 22nd (the satellite tags have a 48-hour on and off schedule so it could have arrived one day before transmitting a signal from Delta) and stayed until the 26th July. He took flight in the early morning of 26th July and went to the Whitewater Lake Important Bird Area (MB015).

As we discover more and more about the incredible journeys of shorebirds, what I find most amazing about this particular story is the way this bird has used a series of Important Bird Areas during his southbound migration. The Important Bird Area program is designed to identify and work towards securing a network of key sites along migratory flyways (as well as other important habitats). This network recognises the importance of hemispheric connections and international collaboration for the conservation of migratory species. This movement of this Pectoral Sandpiper demonstrates nicely how this network of sites works for an individual. From the Hudson Bay IBAs to Delta Marsh and onto Whitewater Lake, this individual is connecting the dots in a very real way!(see http://ibacanada.org/ to find details and a map of these IBAs)


As this bird moves south to South America, perhaps even as far south as Argentina, it is quite likely that other IBAs along the way will provide important stopover and refueling places. Without all of those, we would be unable to enjoy their magnificence up here in the north. You can read about some recent findings on this amazing species here: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature20813.epdf?referrer_access_token=wp9yadTPPo1--TbIkmdHr9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0MNwzKCl3iiqhEiO_VlpLQT9Hc-9evJWnZQLEY4etso-WcGQjyn9LLpI1vyYM3LZil9e4G4cM_2NeyXEuz7xF6YfsWLOiHQ0Z0_s0jk40wBouWquZEV-0CCYhxhaP41ptfYavqfgQkItSBwSi5rC0D6xMYhO3bNj2N-V18tGGvWOw%3D%3D&tracking_referrer=www.popsci.com

Mixed-winged Warblers?

OK, so you probably recognise the Golden-winged Warbler on the right and the Blue-winged Warbler on the left of the photo collage below. You may even recognise the bird in the middle as a hybrid:

 
A new article in Living Bird magazine discusses a paper in press on the small difference in the genomes of Golden-winged Warbler and Blue-winged Warbler. There are some interesting findings in dominant versus recessive plumage patterns but also the suggestion that perhaps these two should be considered a single species. I am waiting for the article to be published before I come to any conclusion on whether the claims made in the article are warranted but it certainly fodder for thought. Unfortunately this article does not mention the paper's co-authors, which is upsetting, but here is a scan to give you a sense of it:

International Migratory Bird Day + “The Messenger”

International Migratory Bird Day is celebrated here every year on the second Saturday in May and this year there are some great activities to help you celebrate on May 14th!

Join us at Oak Hammock Marsh on May 14^th for any of the following:

* 8 - 10 a.m.:       Birding Marshwalk with Christian Artuso and Tim Poole - Birds recorded on the walk will be entered in eBird

* 10 - 11 a.m:      IBA Program and Data Entry – Learn how to record birds in eBird with Tim Poole and Christian Artuso

* 11 a.m. - noon: Manitoba’s Returning Songbirds presentation by Christian Artuso

* 1 - 2 p.m.:         Birding by Ear Workshop with Paula Grieef - Learn some basics for identifying bird songs in this beginner workshop.  $5 plus admission

* 2:30 - 3:30 p.m.:  Buying Binoculars presentation - What to look for when buying binoculars with Paula Grieef and Ricky Ryan from Zeiss. Binoculars will be available for testing. Enter to win a pair of Zeiss binoculars.

During the week of International Migratory Bird Day, the superb documentary “The Messenger”, which chronicles the struggles of songbirds in the face of habitat destruction, climate change and industrialization, will be featured at Winnipeg’s Bandwidth Theatre on May 13 – 19, playing at 7 p.m. daily with 5 p.m. matinées on Saturday and Sunday. On the “auspicious” Friday May 13 I will be there to introduce the screening.

I will also be leading a birding workshop at St Leon on April 30^th for any of you in that neck of the woods who might be interested. On the evening of May 12^th I will be doing a condensed Birding By Ear Workshop at FortWhyte Alive.

Good birding all; May is just around the corner and such a wondrous time in Manitoba!

Here are two photos of a male Baltimore Oriole I photographed recently in Costa Rica — one of many birds getting ready for the northward trek to brighten our lives up here in the temperate zones!

 

ON THE VERY BRINK...

I photographed this Spoon-billed Sandpiper (Calidris pygmaea) in South Korea in 2005 (the bird on the right is a Dunlin) but this critically endangered species in now on the very brink of extinction. Their massive decline, and the decline of many other species that use the East Asian-Australasian Flyway is strongly linked to the ecological devastation of major stop-over sites (much more so than to changes on the breeding grounds or wintering grounds) as this post http://www.birdskoreablog.org/?p=16846  and this article http://news.sciencemag.org/environment/2015/10/hostile-shores discuss. This is a compelling example of the need for full life cycle monitoring and conservation planning.

Surveying Whitewater Lake IBA

On August 2, 2015, Jo Swartz and I surveyed the Whitewater Lake Important Bird Area (IBA), tallying shorebirds and other species both inside and near the IBA.  We found 102 species including 22 species of shorebirds plus a few more en route. Some highlights and high counts for the IBA are given below. I also decided to use this chance to talk a little bit about the area and its birds.

Whitewater Lake is a closed basin and has alternated from periods of being bone dry (a few decades ago) to being flooded well past its former shoreline as is the current situation. When I arrived in Manitoba in the early 2000s, the lake was slowly filling back up again and was very shallow at that time. I remember when the whole basin had a shallow layer of water, that the shorebird flocks numbered in the tens of thousands. I recall watching with friends as a Prairie Falcon put up a massive and dense cloud of shorebirds. Then by the mid 2000s, as the lake was getting deeper and the emergent vegetation growing tall in many areas, the lake seemed transformed from a shorebirding destination to a site for rare long-legged waders. In 2006, Ron Bazin and I confirmed breeding of White-faced Ibis in Manitoba for the first time and many rare herons began appearing more and more regularly. In addition to the White-faced Ibis, Great Egrets and Cattle Egrets established colonies and Snowy Egrets were eventually confirmed breeding by Ken De Smet in 2011. All this high water and the great fetch of the prairie winds eventually breached the dyke structures that were built to create cells in the southeastern corner of the lake, such that by 2014 they were “united” with the lake and the cattail beds largely drowned out. The road to the main viewing mound is collapsing and is not currently safe to drive. The shorebirds are no longer as concentrated as they used to be and water logged fields one or two miles from the lake are mow the best places to look for them. Although these areas are not currently within the IBA, some of the wetland-upland complexes around the lake represent important ephemeral habitats that host great diversity and concentrations, as well as high productivity.

To give you a bit of a sense of the lake and its turbulent history , here are a few photos I took on this trip. The first shows what used to be a house on road 19N. The whole road has been washed away, although its slightly raised and compacted bed has allowed the cattails to take hold in what is otherwise a flooded extension of the lake approximately 2 km from the former shoreline.The second photo gives a wider angle of the same area.

This photo shows a former road allowance / “farm road” that has been eroded away and continues to be ground down by the wind and wave action.

The areas well away from the lake proper are now the best shorebird habitat as shown in the photo below (the shallow basin of the main lake used to be THE place in the early 2000s):

 

Not so very long ago, many of the long-legged waders that are now considered to be Whitewater Lake specialties were mega-rarities in Manitoba. This changed in the mid 2000s. One of the areas special birds (considering they are extremely rare anywhere else in Manitoba) is Snowy Egret and on August 2, we were treated to great views of this individual. I thought at first that this bird might be a juvenile as I saw the long yellow stripe up the back of the leg but the nuptial plumes of the rear crown and lower back made me realize this must be an adult.

Although they have been difficult to find this year, Whitewater Lake is THE place in Manitoba to find Cattle Egret as well. I didn’t manage to get any photos of the Cattle Egrets we saw on this surveying effort but I have added this photo taken last year.

It should be mentioned that these smaller egrets are still rather uncommon and by far the most common egret breeding at Whitewater lake is Great Egret (we only counted 35 on the day but many more were likely hidden in currently inaccessible areas). This photo was taken the following week:

Before proceeding to some of the highlights of the survey, it is worth a little flashback of some of the many rarities that have graced Whitewater Lake, particularly in the heron family. They included frequent sightings of Little Blue Heron as shown here from a few years ago (in fact we wonder if they may have bred here):

And other rarities have included Tricolored Heron and Yellow-crowned Night-Heron as shown here:

Of course there are also lots of the "regular" herons. This American Bittern tried the you-can't -see-me pose as we were surveying this Sunday. In recent years, Least Bittern, a species that seems to be expanding both northward and westward in Manitoba, has also been on territory in the lake's now extensive reed beds. Black-crowned Night-Heron also breeds here and we counted 59 on the day including some juveniles.

Another of the star attractions of Whitewater lake is White-faced Ibis. We counted 145 of these beautiful birds (quite the change from 10 years ago when this species was an RBA alert!). This photo shows a small flock and a little bit of the plumage variation at this time of year, especially how the facial pattern begins to change in late July as they transition from breeding to non-breeding plumage. White-faced Ibis is now the common ibis at Whitewater lake; however, Glossy Ibis has also recently become almost annual (especially in June) so one has to be very careful in the later summer and fall with the ID of Plegadis ibises (all of the birds in this photo are White-faced Ibis). In addition, there is a relatively recent record of White Ibis.   

 

As you would expect with a wetland complex of this magnitude, rails also abound here. It was late in the year to get a good count on rails (they are less vocal now),  but we saw and heard both Sora and Virgina Rail while counting. This photo of a Virginia Rail was taken at the lake earlier this year. Yellow Rail also occurs further from the lake in sedge meadow habitat. By far the most ubiquitous member of the rail family is American Coot and we counted 4,592 of them on the day.

August is a difficult time to be counting waterfowl when many are far from the observer and in eclipse plumage but we did our best. An example would be a day-total of 2,575 Mallards. American White Pelicans are easier to count and our tally was 1,211 on the day, although this is not a breeding site for this species. We counted 199 Western Grebes including many with young as shown in the two photos below, although the real highlight was seeing a Clark's Grebe with young (a little too far for good photos). In the five years of fieldwork  for the Manitoba Breeding Bird Atlas, nobody managed to get confirmed breeding evidence of Clark's Grebe so this was a little bitter-sweet!

 

Even though Whitewater lake is not as good for shorebirds as it was 10 years ago, this is still an important breeding site for "prairie wetland species" such as American Avocet, Marbled Godwit, Upland Sandpiper, Willet and Wilson's Phalarope. Naturally, this is also a major staging area for thousands of arctic breeding shorebirds. In late July and early August, the American Avocets gather in large flocks, presumably a mix of local breeders and migrants, and can offer an impressive spectacle when they form tight flocks feeding in a "vortex". On this day our count of  3,123 American Avocets included a few such feeding flocks. The first photo below shows one of these avocet swarms but because the views were distant I have added three photos taken at Whitewater Lake last year to illustrate this behaviour.

The most numerous shorebird on this count was Stilt Sandpiper (3,291 in total), so I have included a few photos of some of their flocks below. In each case, these photos only show a tiny portion of a larger flock. If you look closely you may pick out a few other shorebirds such as Wilson's Phalarope and Semipalmated Plover in the mix. The third most abundant shorebird species (after Stilt Sandpiper and American Avocet) was Short-billed Dowitcher  with a count of 2,223 but there were more Limnodromus sp. and some Long-billed Dowitchers as well. If you look closely at the fourth photo in this blog post, you may notice a dark band in the darker blue water in the background, which is a flock of dowitchers. We also had a good count of Wilson's Phalarope with 843 including many juveniles. Two small flocks of 14 Hudsonian Godwits were a special treat as they are not so easy to find here at this time of year.

One of the biggest highlights in our total of 22 shorebird species was Buff-breasted Sandpiper. This special bird is declining in number, causing concern. They breed in the high arctic and migrate all the way to the grasslands of southern South America. They are not easy to find in southern Manitoba any more and Whitewater Lake in early August represents the best chance of finding them. They like "short grass" habitat types such as wet fields, stubble fields, sod farms, and large flats and are sometimes found alongside American Golden-Plover (another high arctic breeder heading to the South American grasslands) and other shorebirds that frequent these habitats. This means that they are not often close to the water's edge where the other shorebirds are and you have to make an effort to find them. On this day, we spotted two on open mud far back from the main shorebird flocks. See if you can spot one of them in the first photo below. If that doesn't work, try the second photo which shows three individuals or the third photo for a closer look. The last two photos were taken in northern Manitoba and not at Whitewater Lake but I have used them to give you a sense of this beautiful bird and how they blend into their habitat.

There are also often raptors here and at this time of the year both Peregrine and Prairie Falcons like to put up the shorebird flocks. On this day we only recorded one Peregrine; however, the following week Tim Poole and I watched this Prairie Falcon soaring above us:

Of course, there is a lot more to Whitewater Lake than the birds shown here. There are also many passerines to look for and I leave you with one simple photo of a Yellow-headed Blackbird to summarise the rest of the amazing biodiversity at this Important Bird Area.

I hope you enjoy this brief introduction to this Manitoba hotspot. Please contact me with questions! There is also another recent article of interest on the lake at: http://manitobacooperator.ca/country-crossroads/whitewater-lake-region-under-threat/

Seal River IBA

Greeting from the Seal River Estuary Important Bird Area (IBA) (Manitoba, Canada - along Hudson's Bay coast) where I have been conducting shorebird counts at the request of Oceans North for the last few days. I will compile a full post soon; however, here is a short teaser...

One of the notewrothy sightings has been that for the last 2 days Brant (pale-bellied form) have been moving in small flocks along the coast.

Shorebird tallies have been reasonably high. This beautiful Buff-breasted Sandpiper was one of 22 that stopped off in the Seal River Estuary Important Bird Area on their way from the high arctic to southern South America. This species and many others will need a network of high quality sites, such as IBAs, to fuel their migration. Here are three photos of this magnificent shorebird (all are juveniles as seen by the scaly mantle).

Unless you spend time on their breeding grounds, one dones''t often get to see the super streaky plumage of juvenile Dunlin- here is one of my favourite photos of these shorebirds.

Despite their flocking behaviour, shorebirds sometimes display aggression while foraging. These Pectoral sandpipers are squabbling over the rich pickings on the Hudson Bay coastal flat. This photo also reveals the "triple barred" appearance of the underwing that can be a useful feature in identifying Pectoral Sandpipers in flight at a distance.

And here are two photos of a bathing juvenile White-rumped Sandpiper.

Stay tuned for more to come...