2017: An okay year for birds, part 1

It would be hard to beat 2016 as a year for new life birds, without making extensive new travel plans, and that we did not do in 2017.

We returned to Boynton Beach, Florida in late January, and discovered that it wasn't nearly as birdy as late February 2016 had been. It was disappointing, but we still had a wonderful time and managed to scrape up a few more life birds apiece. Knowing more about the region this time, we were determined to visit all three of the local wetlands within easy driving distance. (Not that we were dong the driving. Our wonderful friend Adam Castro did the driving.)

Loxahatchee wetlands is a tiny slice of the Everglades, a National Wildlife Refuge with a lovely nature center, lots of alligators, and a chunk of nearly-extinct cypress forest, all alongside encroaching farms. Just driving there, I was extremely lucky to spot a Crested Caracara flying across the road in front of us. Alas, no picture. Alas, Ed did not also see it. But the bird was utterly unmistakable in flight, with its short wings with a big white flash, its black-and-white head. Mind you, I'd never seen one. But I had memorized the image from the bird books, and I had zero doubt what I saw and shouted out as soon as I saw it.

There were Loggerhead Shrikes on the wires. No photos from either of us, but there's no mistaking their silhouettes. Definitely birds we want to see more closely in the future. [Spoiler Alert: WE DID, but 2 years later.]

Another bird we came to see was not a disappointment. Our first ever Pileated Woodpecker! We heard him before we saw him, as we traveled on the cypress forest boardwalk. You better believe we RAN towards the sound -- it was like someone hitting a big tree with a smaller tree. And there he was, in his pileated glory! Of course he flew off after we got only a few shots...

I hadn't been feeling well, so I stayed behind while Ed and Adam went chasing after gators. There is a nice deck with shaded benches behind the nature center, facing into the cypress forest. I sat and found a few warblers and gnatcatchers, which made me happy.

Then this happened. One of Florida's ubiquitous Turkey Vultures landed on the railing only a few yards away from me.

Then a few more showed up. And performed an aerial ballet in the wide clearing in the cypress forest that was right in front of me. I had seen one up close before, but not so many. Not like this. 

They are BEAUTIFUL. They are made of bronze and sunshine. 

They spent a good fifteen minutes lazily circling and drifting about in the clearing. A couple of them drifted away, a couple others landed to enjoy the sun. If I hadn't been feeling unwell, I'd have missed the show. Turkey vultures. Damn.

After Spouse and friend failed to find alligators, we departed and visited Wakodahatchee. Like Green Cay, this is another "artificial" wetland created for purposes of water treatment, surrounded by developments and shopping centers. The birds don't seem to mind.

The special thing about Wakodahatchee is how close you can get to LARGE BIRDS and their extremely um, adorable babies. Great Blue Herons and Wood Storks really are extremely large, and it's extremely startling to realize their nests are sometimes just a few feet away from the boardwalk.

There was a system to the mixed flocks in the low, broad trees. Great Blue Herons had the top of each tree -- one or even three pairs. Then Storks and Great Egrets below. Then Snowy Egrets, Cattle Egrets, Anhingas and Gulls crowding into whatever branches happen to be left over. Cormorants seemed to have their own trees to themselves. Wood Storks mostly had their own trees too. Iguanas hung out on the lowest branches nearest the water, not doing much.

We'd never seen colony nests like these before.

I'd also never seen a Great Blue Heron try to swallow a duck before.

And I hope never to see that again, anytime soon.
(For the record, he gave up, a turtle made off with the carcass, and then he tried again...at which point we got on with our lives and departed.)

Cormorants were everywhere, flying and swimming and diving and hanging out. One of them was another lifer, a Neotropic Cormorant. Yay!

It pays to pay attention to even common looking birds. You never know.

Alas, there was only one Roseate Spoonbill. Dat spoon, dat spoon, dat spoonbill.

We visited Green Cay again the next day, to witness what we already thought of as The Usual Assortment of wetland waders and swimmers. Lots of Anhingas, Common Gallinules, Blue-winged Teals, Great Egrets, Little Blue Herons, Tricolor Herons, Pied-billed Grebes, Gray-necked Moorhens, Green Herons, various swallows, Red-winged Blackbirds, Boat-tailed Grackles, Limpkins, White Ibises, Glossy Ibises, etc.(Pretty much the same birds as Wakodahatchee, but in different blends.)

Any visit to Green Cay is a good one, though.

2016: A GREAT Year for Life Birds, Part 2

Not a bird. My apologies.

In mid-February 2016 we went to Florida, with intentions of birding at Loxahatchie and Green Cay reserves near the Everglades. We visited a friend whose home is on the shore of a small lake and surrounded by a moat, and he likes to post photos of white ibis gazing into his living room windows while the indoor cats lose their minds. Well, it was all true.

Good times started with lunch at My Big Fat Greek Restaurant on Griffin Road, between Ft. Lauderdale and Boynton Beach. They have a friendly male Boat-tailed Grackle that likes to steal sugar packets from the outdoor patio tables, and enjoys snacks of fried calamari. Anhingas swim and fish in the canal alongside. I have seen both species before in previous trips to Florida, but never bothered to enter them on a life list before. Likewise the earnest Muscovy Ducks also enjoying the water, and the Cattle Egrets on every roadside greensward. Boom!

The word anhinga comes from the Brazilian Tupi language and means devil bird or snake bird.
Wikipedia says so.

Come morning, the White Ibises in the canal by the hotel, and in the parking lot, kind of put things in perspective. Big birds are just part of the suburban landscape in that part of Florida. If you look up you'll see Turkey Vultures, gulls, terns, egrets and herons drifting by. If you're lucky, you'll see a Double-crested Cormorant trying to perch on a power line like an enormous pigeon wearing swim fins. (I wish I had a picture of that.)

We only made it to Green Cay that weekend, with a couple of friends along to make the experience even more fun. One friend spends most of the winter in a nearby community and visits the place several times a week. She knew all the good places to keep one's eyes peeled, and helped spot two alligators. Another birding friend who lives in the region also kept pointing out good things. We really hit the jackpot there for new life birds. Best birdy afternoon ever!

First thing we saw gallinules, wood storks, egrets, herons and ibises. Like all at once, right near the nature center and boardwalk. Considering how much trouble we go through in New York to get good views of herons and egrets, it seemed almost unfair!

Wood storks are clearly dinosaur throwbacks.

Purple Gallinules aren't common, like the Common Gallinule, but were among the first birds we saw there. Gray-headed Swamphens, an introduced species, were only seen further along the trek.

One is purple. One is common. One is neither.

Tricolored Herons were abundant. They seem to find the boardwalk railings a congenial place from which to watch humans pass by.

I walked right around this one. No reaction.

Little Blue Herons and Green Herons stalked about everywhere. I could only recall all the trouble I'd had seeing my first Green Heron in Central Park a few years earlier. Gah.

I had the completely mistaken impression that a Limpkin had to be an exotic and elusive creature.

It's not.

As a special treat, a normally elusive American Bittern was hanging out right alongside the boardwalk, basically right under our feet. It didn't seem to care how many camera lenses were pointed at it.

Not pretending to be reeds.

I also never expected to be thisclose to a Pied-billed Grebe. I can throw away all my long-distance shots from the Central Park Reservoir birds.

Mottled Ducks and Blue-winged Teals were the dominant waterfowl. Both were often found right around the boardwalk. Both are very nice to see up close.

Sleepy Mottled Ducks. Sleeeeeepy.

Plump, stately Teals.

White Ibis and Glossy Ibis are quite handsome birds. (I actually didn't realize Glossy Ibis also live in New York City, at Jamaica Bay, as part of their invasion force in the US.)

Sentinel.

Roseate Spoonbills are among my favorite dino-birds. I've seen them quite close up in zoos, the better to appreciate their bony faces, but seeing them in the wild is quite another experience.

A farther-away experience, mostly.

Didn't get any good photos, but before the day was over I'd also added Caspian Tern, Royal Tern, Northern Harrier, Red-shouldered Hawk to my life list. 

There were also plenty of Coots, Lesser Scaups, Great Egrets, Snowy Egrets, Great Blue Herons, Brown-headed Cowbirds, White-winged Doves. Prairie Warblers and Palm Warblers and other species familiar from elsewhere. Also Painted Buntings in abundance at the bird feeders right at the entrance...just two months after we hunted one down in Brooklyn!

Also this Sora, more cooperative than expected. 

Green Cay is just a terrific place to BE, never mind spot birds. The boardwalks are comfortable (I could wish for a few more shaded gazebos but oh well). The nature center is well-organized and informative, and I love the tote bag I bought. The writer friend we were visiting was happy to learn of the place, as it's ten minutes from his house and gives him a great place to take exercise walks.

Green Cay is also a great place to see lots of bird butts.

We returned in January 2017. That's another post.

2015, a Good Year for Life Birds

Well, I didn't have nearly the exciting birding year that some people did, but it was quite satisfying nonetheless. I didn't spend as much time twitching in Central Park in 2015 as in the past few years. Partly that was due to a torn hamstring/torn ligament combo that spanned Thanksgiving 2014/January 2015, and caused me to spend the first half of 2015 limping about with a cane and extreme caution. While walking was part of therapy -- along with many, many leg lifts and stretches -- the uneven ground in the park was uncomfortable at first. So it wasn't until late in spring migration that I really got out and about again.

Once the leg was mostly fully healed, hiking up and down the hills of the North Woods and the Ramble became positively therapeutic besides enjoyable. And handling the binoculars and camera was much easier without the cane needing attention. I didn't see a lot of spring migration but did have a few really good days, shared with Ed and with other friends. No life birds, though, at first. And there wasn't much to see in the summer except for the usual suspects, so I didn't make much effort to follow Ed on his weekend bird hikes again until the fall migration began.

There were opportunities away from the city. Our annual summer trip to the Catskills got Ed several life birds over the past few years, and this year I got one too: I finally saw a whole field full of Bobolinks! There were many pairs breeding in an uncut hayfield just one driveway past our friends' farmhouse -- twittering their odd song, flying up to the surrounding power lines perhaps to distract predators, perhaps just to keep an eye on the territory.

My photo, not Ed's

I was feeling kind of lazy to visit Central Park until migration began, when some really cool birds began moving through. In mid October, an injured Sora was spotted in the North Woods. Ed saw it several times, and I finally saw it too not long before it disappeared. This is one of Ed's photos of it, as I had stupidly forgotten to recharge my spare camera battery and therefore was unable to shoot the darn thing myself. Not that it was visible for very long when I was there.

Ed's photo, not mine

We also had a few really good October days seeing warblers, kinglets and woodpeckers -- there were a dozen Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers in the elm trees between the Pineatum and the Reservoir one afternoon -- but nothing else really new. Then in early November reports began of a Great Horned Owl in the Ramble, I'd missed the previous bird in 2012, I wasn't going to miss this one! So I was there the second weekend he/she was hanging out. I was well rewarded with a gorgeous autumn day, and the sight of a GHO's extremely fluffy butt, seen from below.

My photo, on a really windy day the owl did not enjoy

There was also an extremely lost and scruffy Western Flycatcher (which doesn't exist, as the taxonomy splitters claim that species is actually 2 different species THAT LOOK THE SAME) hanging around near the Boathouse, and we were happy to bring friends to see it same day as the Owl. Alas, the flycatcher soon disappeared from the park. We fear it met a sad end.

Then in December a Painted Bunting appeared in Prospect Park, and there's no good excuse for that bird to be in Brooklyn. It became quite the celebrity. We HAD to see it, despite my birder friend in Ft. Lauderdale noting he had a dozen of those a day at his backyard feeders. As I grew up living a block away from Prospect Park, I was especially pleased to return to the site of my earliest birding adventures. The Bunting was gorgeous. It glowed, as if it were painted with fluid from blue, red and neon green glowsticks. It also wasn't hard to find, as there were nearly 100 other birders tracking it.
I didn't get excellent photos of it, but Ed decided to return the next day and got lucky.

He's right there in the middle. 

As we walked from the skating rink to the Zoo, along the eastern shore of the Lake, we spotted a few ducks. One of them turned out to be a female American Widgeon -- and that was my sixth life bird for the year! If I'd only gone with Ed back to the park, I'd have gotten a seventh -- a Black-headed Gull has also been hanging out in the Lake, but I've been entirely too lazy to nab that sighting. Wouldn't be the first time. Or the last.

A Good Year for Life Birds

Yeah, I'm a little behind on my posting again. I intended to do a whole series of posts about birding, starting with late winter/early spring migrants, but somehow that fell by the wayside.

My post that was BEGUN some months ago:

Birding fever gripped the land this spring. (Central Park for certain.) Winter rolled away, leaving us blue skies, lush lawns, trees decked out in dainty petals and showers of pollen, and the usual flocks of feathered migrants seeking food, territory and mates, not necessarily in that order. A few winter birds still lingered, even while the first newcomers make their noisy appearances. We haven't seen any Fox Sparrows in weeks, but the White-throated Sparrows are still here in large numbers. Eastern Phoebes already seem to be gone.

This Ring-necked Duck appeared to prefer a quiet life with the Mallards of the Lake. 

A pair of Baltimore Orioles made it through winter in the Ramble. 

One of those fat & sassy Fox Sparrows that were so abundant here this winter.

An Eastern Phoebe pursuing its prey right to the ground. Flycatching is hard work. 

Ponerorchis graminifolia

The charm of certain terrestrial orchids is partly in their ephemeral nature...they behave at the beck and call of the temperate seasons, and gladden our senses for only a short period of time before they once again wither and vanish beneath the soil surface...

Of course were someone to magically develop a Habenaria medusa that never goes dormant but continues to bloom on and off throughout the year, I'd be one of the first in line. As it is, I am content with my two that have vigorously re-emerged from winter's sleep and daily stretch their unfurling leaves upward, the promise of their fantastical white flowers still tucked somewhere inside.

Ponerorchis gramnifolia grabbed my imagination from the first, when I read about them in an American Orchid Society Bulletin article. Teensy adorable tuberous orchids with a Japanese cult following? Awesome! Then I saw them alive: Orchid Art had a few, and I nearly got one, but honestly, I hadn't realized just how teensy adorable they were. Flowers and all, the whole plant was about three inches tall. I love miniature orchids, and I had a fair number of creepers and gnat-attractors that made the Ponerorchis seem a veritable giant, but adding in the dormancy thing...which Rita kindly explained in detail...made Utyouran  seem just too risky.

I never saw one again for many many years. Neither did most of my friends. "Gosh, Rita had them once, why doesn't anyone else ever have them?" Well, lots of orchid species come and go seemingly at whims of fashion, or just availability, or just refusal to go forth an multiply. Everyone thought everyone else was raising a few?...but they weren't, because the darn things were stubborn, or finicky, or wouldn't set seed, or...anyway.

Finally: "Did you see the Ponerorchis tubers?" my friend asked at SEPOS, standing in front of a table-ful of mind-bendingly expensive Neofinetia plants. "I just got some!" Now, my friend grows some amazing terrestrials in his collection. So we each ended up with six teensy tubers in a plastic baggie. No idea what color variety, not that it matters.

After forgetting about my baggie for about two weeks...yeah, that's kind of inexcusable, considering they were right in front of my face on a shelf in the light garden...I saw that four of the little suckers were sprouting. I planted them in a nice deep pot with my favorite terrestrial mix: 3 parts Peat-lite, 2 parts ultra-fine fir bark + perlite + charcoal (in other words, stuff from the bottom of the Paph Mix bag). This stuff drains pretty well, so I do hope to lessen the chances of rot. I only let the tallest sprout poke above the surface, though I'm sure the rest will quickly emerge once the mix settles a bit. Keeping them in the cool window until that happens. Fingers crossed.

Dockrillia rigida

Formerly Dendrobium rigidum, this little cutie comes from Australia, one of many compact, mat-forming mini Dockrillia-formerly-Dendrobiums that flourish there. Tough leathery 1-inch tongue-shaped leaves host fragile-looking spikes of yellow and red flowers (mine have a peachy blush too). All in all, totes adorable.

Even better, those tiny 1/4-inch flowers are fragrant! Well, it's not a fabulous scent. It's kind of like a hyacinth mixed with something slightly burnt. Pleasant, but strange. I think I once owned lipstick with that scent. I didn't keep it very long. I'll keep the plant anyway.

Since I've seen mixed advice on how much light this plant likes -- some folks recommend providing quite bright light for best results, while others say they'll bloom and thrive even in  relatively low light -- I'm starting it off under the new T8 tubes that are making so many of my other orchids rather happy.

I found this at the 2012 SEPOS Show at Longwood Gardens. H&R always brings fabulous things for super-cheap, and this teeny pot was just $10. The spike was just barely in bud then, and the flowers just opened a couple of days ago.

Epidendrum fimbriatum

Despite having many years ago sworn off of orchids with flowers too tiny to see without magnification -- my eyesight isn't what it once was, and I have extremely limited space and decided I wanted a bit of splash from my collection -- now and then I fall for a cutie-pie and find myself cooing over it as if it were a raggedy kitten needing a home. I feel that way about a lot of offerings from Ecuagenera.

This Epidendrum fimbriatum followed me home from the 2012 Deep Cut Orchid Show. The whole plant is about ten inches tall, with about a dozen reed-stem growths. The leaves are surprisingly firm for such a delicate-looking thing. The flowers arrive in ones, twos and rarely threes per spike, which so far are each elongating to about two inches.

The literature says it grows cool, but I was assured it would tolerate intermediate-to-warm if slowly acclimatized. Well, it's so far doing extremely well at temperatures in the 70s. I received it newly mounted on a piece of PVC pipe wrapped in coconut fiber, with a sphagnum moss pad; I stuck it in a plastic pot with more sphagnum (but without the mount), figuring to someday transfer it to a chunkier mix. It sure likes plenty of water. And, since I moved it to the shelf where I now have T8 lights, the foliage took on a distinct reddish tinge; since this is a sign of stress and not just glowing health, I moved it a little further from the tubes. On the other hand, the number of budding buds on all the spikes also vastly increased...but the flowers are even smaller. Juggling act, why always a juggling act...

Woot!

Woot! After a long dull stretch of inactivity, the orchids are starting up some winter cheer. 4 plants in bud! Woot!

Beallara Lembaba has a nice spike along with a new growth. Mystery Oncidium Hybrid that I got from Silva in March has budded beautifully, allaying my fears that the older slightly twisted growths were typical and would bollocks future blooming. The older speciment of Bulbophyllum curtisii "Pololei" has been flowering wonderfully ever since I boosted its light levels and been more careful about watering.

Phalaenopsis Tsay's Evergreen "Fangtastic" made my mouth water first time I saw it five years ago. I bought one in February, and I've been eagerly awaiting new flowers ever since. The flowers on the old spike lasted two months, with new ones forming every few weeks. Right now it's got 2 healthy spikes and two buds showing on the bigger one. I only wish the plant didn't look so craptastic, the leaves a bit mottled. I know I let it go too dry too often the past couple months. I'm being better now. I even fed it.

And, after disappointing me last year, Catasetum atratum is back on track, with a nice fat spike and five buds only a month late compared to past flowerings. I think I might have to "repot" it next year, trimming old roots and removing the very oldest pseudobulbs before replacing it in its happy home, the CD box. I refuse to mess with success. The older Catasetum on the window got a bit too dry this fall, and I don't think I'm seeing flowers again this year. I need to repot that sucker.

I need to repot like a dozen things. Mostly phals in those crappy flimsy clear plastic containers full of dank rotting sphagnum moss. Ugh. They're all making loads of new roots. Yay!

Brains and Tails

Internet awesomeness knows no boundaries.

And here's a picture of lemurs in the Bronx Zoo. I love the Bronx Zoo. I actually didn't realize how easy it is to get there by train. My childhood memories were colored with very very long hikes in hot weather, which now appears to be an exaggeration. The Madagascar exhibit is very worthwhile, as it contains lemurs. Yay, lemurs!

Also, I like to encourage a positive attitude whenever possible. Boom da yada!

Cuil not cool yet

Has anyone tried Cuil yet?

So far most of the picture links are missing, and for several searches I ran this morning it didn't pick up even a small percentage of the hits I get from Google.

Thinking of my Yarn Archive blog, I typed in "missoni yarn knit" and got 4,850 hits in Google (including, thank you, my yarn blog). I got 3 in Cuil.

For a laugh I typed in "cuil blogs" in both engines.

Google returned a load of blog pages referring to the new search engine.

Cuil returned a load of pages...about a town in Ireland.

Ha ha.

Transmogrify Pesky Stomach Fat Into Gold!

How perfectly lovely that the first "sponsored ads" that popped up as I perused Arthur Waite's Collectanea Chemica under Forgotten Books/Google Books were for oil management systems, potassium permangate by the pound and only secondarily for tarot and mastery of the astral plane. Woo. And pyrotechnic supplies. Woo. And, of course, how to lose stomach fat. I think stomach fat ads are guaranteed to pop up regardless of the subject. Woo. Although as the early pages of the Hermetic Tracts concern themselves with the Alkahest and the superiority of human urine above all others for alchemical purposes (good as then there's no need to go bothering any other beasts for some), well, I suppose fat reduction and colon cleansing ads are just possibly appropriate...woo woo.

And of course, a peek into The Corpus Hermeticum yields ads for spiritual guidance, and Hermes boutiques. Woo.

Masdevallia Doomsday

The temperature right now is 58F, just after midnight. It rained today for a little while in Manhattan, though a friend in the East Bronx experienced a light hailstorm. Great weather. Glad there's no levees around here.

The coolth has come too late. The 2 big healthy masdevallias I bought in the spring are just about nearly completely dead. 4 days of near-100F heat crisped nearly every mature leaf, despite my efforts to keep the lights stand cool with plenty of air movement. Slightly different mode of demise than I experienced years ago with my once-great Brooklyn pleurothallid collection; the summer of doom that put an end to those poor plants was just as hot but because the plants were kept too wet the leaves did that amazing still-green-but-touch-it-PLUNK trick.

If I had the heart I'd buy yet another of these generic yellow or orange plants and try putting it by the bedroom air conditioner during a hot spell. In the interest of horticultural science.

But this Zygoneria shall be my last, even if it does pull through. It has hardly any leaves left, and the new growth has rotted, despite being right by the mega-fan and open window.

Nearly every other orchid has come through OK. The mature phals with empty spikes did fine leafwise, but every spent spike that was still green turned brown during the heatwave. Onc. Twinkle, which showed very sudden leaf-tip spotting in the heat, shows no further distress and the new growths continue to mature. The Coelogyne didn't so much as develop a spot. Amazing.

And Neofinetia falcata flowered magnificently, all buds opened despite the heat. I wish I weren't afraid to repot it, as all the roots are a-wandering. And Mystery GNYOS Raffle Mini-catt, that I nearly forgot about in the back row of the middle shelf, has several buds visible in a nice fat sheath on its still-maturing growth. I've no idea what it is but the old price sticker still on one leaf says $45 so it must be pretty good. Right?

Yay Nuthatches!

Strolling about the New York Botanical Garden on Saturday, I was very excited to discover the place is quite a haven for a number of birds even in the winter. Added two to my life list: tufted titmouse and red-breasted nuthatch. (I used to see white-breasted nuthatches in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, near the 9th St. playgrounds. Very calm birds.)

I actually thought this was a winter wren at first, owing to the stumpy tail and not being able to see the blue-gray color in silhouette. My friend noticed the color, and then I realized the bird was head-down while moving rapidly around the trunk. Well duh!