It was a fine day for an October farmers’ market in Estabrook Park, but the beautiful weather we’ve been enjoying lately has started to fray a bit. I’m sure few folks mind backing off on the heat some, but I was a little bummed to see the still air go.
Anyway, the wood duck drake at the pond has doubled his entourage from two to four hens. It’s amazing what a sharp-looking suit can do.
The pied-billed grebe is still there, but maybe this yawn suggests that it’s starting to get a little bored with pond life.
The big surprise for me, however, was the number of warblers in the park today. In addition to the yellowthroat, palm, and yellow-rumped warblers we’ve been seeing lately, here’s our first orange-crowned of the season with a beak full of caterpillar. Yum!
Here’s a black-throated green wishing he had the same.
I heard this one before I saw it, and immediately thought that it was a red-eyed vireo chasing after the ones who had been here but are now long gone. The song wasn’t quite the same, however, and that’s because this is our first blue-headed vireo of the season, instead.
While the warblers, vireos, and most of the sparrows are just passing through, this little cutie, our first dark-eyed junco of the season, has just arrived at its home for the winter. “Welcome! We hope you enjoy your stay.”
The warm weather even brought out some dragonflies, and here’s a common green darner parked for a moment in the sun at the pollinator garden.
Don’t blame me if I sound like a broken record because it’s not my fault that the weather just keeps getting a little nicer every day. In fact, it is supposed to get so warm this afternoon that this yellow-rumped warbler, our first of the season, may wonder if it didn’t set out too soon.
This young great blue heron and I surprised each other with our sudden proximity at the river. Luckily its reaction was to freeze and mine was to take its picture.
At the north end, I finally got our first kinglet picture of the fall, and that white eye-ring makes this little darling a ruby-crowned, even if we can’t see its ruby crown.
The red-winged blackbirds are all long gone, but there are still a few grackles hanging around, and this one really put on a light show for us.
As I started to make my way back downstream, I could hear a few crows making a ruckus, and I thought maybe they were mobbing a raptor. So, I picked up the pace and arrived in time to find at least a dozen crows harassing a pair of Cooper’s hawks. One of the hawks flew around a bit, and one just sat and cried. The youngster below was the crier, poor thing, and I’d bet the flier was a parent trying to help its kid out.
I didn’t hear or see any red-breasted nuthatches today, for a change, but this white-breasted was really putting on a show for somebody. I doubt very much that I was the intended audience, but I tried to show my appreciation anyway. The WordPress rendering of all the pictures today looks a bit low-res, but this one might be the worst because the original came out especially nice, so you know what to do.
The goldfinches already have their winter coats on, despite the weather, and the sunflower seeds are ripe, which should go a long way towards replenishing the calories it took to grow all those new feathers.
Eat’m while they’re fresh!
The monarchs continue to love the Mexican sunflowers, and I had at least three subjects to choose from today.
Finally, this thing, which my sources tell me is a bear’s head tooth fungus (Hericium americanum) and Vermont’s state mushroom, was about the size and shape of a rugby ball. It’s a contender for the most amazing mushroom I have ever seen.
Lastly, the crew was hard at work on finishing up the reshaping of the falls this morning, and if you zoom in, you can see that they have backed the articulated dump truck onto the exposed river bottom so that the excavator can fill it up with limestone rubble.
The forecast for tomorrow is more of the same with a smidgen more wind, so it’s gonna be a great morning to see who else just flew in.
The fine weather trend continued this morning in Estabrook Park, with calmer winds, warmer air, and about the same mostly-blue sky. It was warm enough that I even heard a cicada make one more valiant effort to attract a mate.
I’m mostly over my jet lag, so I was able to get into the park fully-caffeinated and about twenty minutes earlier than yesterday, and I arrived at the pond in time to catch this belted kingfisher watch the sun start to shine through the trees to the east.
The wood ducks and pied-billed grebe are still there, but the bigger surprise today was when this Cooper’s hawk swooped in and perched right at eye level. I did my best to keep my face covered by my camera, and it took a while, but I get the impression that the hawk finally noticed me standing on shore.
You may recall that I didn’t see any warblers yesterday, but I didn’t take that to mean that they had all flown south already. Well, today I present to you exhibit 1: a darling little female common yellowthroat lurking in the low brush beside the river at the north end.
Along with the sparrows I showed you yesterday, another member of the next migrant wave is this brown creeper, who was kind enough to line up with a little bit of blue sky shining through the foliage behind it.
Back at the south end, as I checked the weeds for butterflies, I was pleasantly surprised to find another warbling straggler, which I call “exhibit 2”: this sharp-looking palm warbler hungrily picking seeds or bugs, I couldn’t tell which, from some gone-by thistle.
Meanwhile, this eastern phoebe was definitely hunting for bugs right behind me.
The highlight of the morning, however, at least for me, was finding this beauty hiding in the low brush nearly right between the warbler and the phoebe. For those of you who don’t recognize it, and why would you because I’ve never managed to show you one before, this is the elusive yellow-billed cuckoo (Coccyzus americanus), and the yellow eye-ring suggests that it’s a youngster.
Even as I write this, I can’t believe my luck to have not only gotten to see one, finally, but that I also managed to capture a presentable image I can show you. Yee haw! I wouldn’t quite call it a portrait, but if you click on the image so you can view it in flickr and zoom in to the full resolution, you should be able to see the dark-brown iris that I can see inside that yellow eye-ring.
Finally, I did see a couple of monarchs on the Mexican sunflowers again, but to keep things from getting too monotonous, here’s a pretty clouded sulpher butterfly on either some hairy white oldfield aster or some arrow-leaved aster.
The forecast for tomorrow morning is for more of the same, so I can’t wait to see who I find next.
It was a gorgeous early autumn morning in Estabrook Park, with temps in the low 60s, a very light breeze, and clear skies, so a very fine time to return.
My first pleasant surprise today was finding that the wood duck drakes have gotten their new feathers in, and they look fabulous.
The river water is as low as I believe I’ve ever seen it, so there is a lot of bottom exposed, just as the killdeer like it, and here’s one of a pair foraging for their breakfast near the upstream island.
I didn’t see any warblers today, which doesn’t mean they are all gone, by any means, but most have likely continued south already. In their place, the sparrows that breed up north have arrived, and here’s a young white-crowned sparrow whose crown is still brown.
I would have been a little surprised to find a white-crowned but not a white-throated, which are usually more plentiful, but the sun had to get pretty warm before this one would let us have a nice look.
I had heard that yellow-bellied sapsuckers were around, as well, and they also kept me in suspense until I was almost out of the park. I only found this youngster on the cottonwood trees behind the Benjamin Church House.
I saw several monarchs who have not yet begun their flight to Mexico, and this one might have been checking to see if it will like the food when it gets there before heading out.
Finally, in the couple of weeks that I was away, the crew reshaping the falls appears to have finished with our side, moved their coffer dam to the other side, and has already removed a lot of limestone. I bet the low water helps a bit, far better than the flood, at least, and here’s hoping they’ll be able to wrap things up before the snow flies.
Anne and I just go home, safe and sound, after about 38 hours in taxies, airports, airplanes, trains, and busses, so I’m sorry to say that I won’t make it to Estabrook Park today. I can, however, give you one more glimpse at that amazing Eurasian hoopoe we saw at the Dead Sea just over a week ago.
Now I have to go to the grocery store to get us something to eat and then try to keep my eyes open until at least the sun goes down so I can have a hope of a good night’s sleep. Wish me luck!
By the time you get this, Anne and I should be in a plane or an airport somewhere on our way home, and I might see something interesting out on the tarmac, but just in case, here are a few more critters from the Azraq Wetland Reserve.
I’ve been seeing gray herons since Aqaba, but they’ve been super shy or just too far away. This one, however, must have been quite hungry because it let me sneak this picture.
Here’s that white-eared bulbul again and reassuring me that both of its “ears” are white.
For comparison, here’s a white-spectacled bulbul at the citadel in Amman gobbling down what might be a seed out of one of those cones.
This next picture ain’t great, but it does show the best glimpse I got of our very first white-throated kingfisher (Halcyon smyrnensis). I wish I could blame this one on WordPress’s rendering, and if you do click on the image so you can zoom in on the original, you’ll see it’s not much better, but you can make out the namesake white throat just below the enormous rusty bill.
For those of you trying to keep track at home, I think that makes the 28th new species we’ve seen this trip. There are also another 9 that I was able to ID but not photograph well enough to show you, and now you know my bar is pretty low.
We did make it to Amman, and we did have a nice daytrip to several “castles”, including Qasr Kharana, Qusayr ‘Amra, and Qasr al-Azraq, and the Azraq Wetland Reserve, which held the first freshwater we’ve seen all trip, so I had high hopes, and the reserve did not disappoint.
There were a couple of little grebes (Tachybaptus ruficollis), whom I also saw in Aqaba, but who were too far away there for a decent photo, so this is their debut in this venue.
The bird I was most excited to see, however, was this white-eared bulbul (Pycnonotus leucotis), because it is our very first one and our fourth bulbul over all.
With standing fresh water, I would have been surprised if there were not dragonflies, but this violet dropwing (Trithemis annulata) is still a stunner.
Tomorrow we begin our journey home, but we’ve got a few flights to sit through, so it’s gonna take us a while. Wish us luck, and I’ll try to post something to tide you over until I get back to Estabrook.
Here’s the glossy black and slightly less cooperative male. I read further that “[they are] also known as Dead Sea starlings or Tristram’s grackles, [they are] native to the Middle East, [and they are] the only member of the genus Onychognathus found mainly outside of Africa.”
Luckily, I had a couple of hours before our drive to Petra to go visit the Aqaba Bird Observatory one more time, and a couple of new birds came out to say “hi”. This first one darted around in the top of a tree, as we’ve seen plenty of warblers do in Estabrook, but this one is our first graceful prinia (Prinia gracilis). If “prinia” sounds familiar, perhaps that’s because you read about the tawny-flanked prinia I saw in Malawi a while back.
When I saw this bird, I figured it for another western yellow wagtail, but I remembered what Anne always says, “take the darn picture and worry about who it is later.” Well, she’s been proven right again, and my sources tell me that this little cutie turns out to be yet another wheatear, if you can believe it, an Isabelline wheatear (Oenanthe isabellina), in fact.
I first noticed these critters darting around on the hot sand at Wadi Rum, but I never managed to get a picture, so I was glad to have one more chance to capture a black desert ant (Cataglyphis nigra) on film. I read that they are known for extreme heat tolerance and the ability to navigate by observing the sun’s location, which avoids depending on pheromone traces that can be obliterated by blowing sand and allows taking a direct path back to the nest after locating prey to minimize exposure.
Finally, the blue-spotted Arab butterflies were still plentiful, and this time I got a good look at the dorsal (top/in) side of the wings. They sure are pretty, aren’t they?
Our next stop is Amman, the capital of Jordan, and Anne has us booked on a tour of the Azraq Wetland Reserve, so there might be even more wildlife to see. Keep your fingers crossed.
We did make it to Wadi Rum, “a valley cut into the sandstone and granite rock” where some of Lawrence of Arabia was filmed, and it was spectacular. We had a guide, Ali, who grew up there, and whose mother remembers when and where the movie was made. He drove us around on the soft sand in a Mitsubishi L200 pickup, just like the one I drove to Ukraine a while back, and he was wonderfully terse with his descriptions.
Our first stop was a spot called “Lawrence’s Spring“, and there was indeed water flowing out of the side of a huge rock with camels there to drink it. The bigger draw for me, however, was the wildlife it attracted even in the heat of late morning. This first hearty soul, perched on a trough built to catch water for the camels, is also our very first desert lark (Ammomanes deserti).
When I first looked up the northern wheatear we saw back in Trabzon, I mistakenly read it as “wheat eater”, which made sense to me, and I only managed not to write it that way because I tend to “copy and paste” long names to minimize just such errors. Once I realized my mistake, I had to look up the etymology, of course, and perhaps you will be as amused as I was to read that “the name ‘wheatear’ is not derived from “wheat” or any sense of “ear” [or even “eater”], but is a folk etymology of “white” and “arse“, referring to the prominent white rump found in most species.” Ha!
Anyway, at the first stop already, we could also see large black birds soaring overhead, but we didn’t get a close enough look for an identification until we stopped at Khaz’ali Canyon. There we found these two investigating an eroded sandstone cliff face, and I managed to capture this image, which is just good enough to ID them as our first brown-necked ravens (Corvus ruficollis) and only my second raven species.
Just as in the American southwest, there are rock bridges, and we stopped at the closest, which also happens to be the smallest, aptly called “Little Bridge“, and that is where I was finally able to get a close-up of the little birds we had been hearing twittering all morning but had been struggling to get eyes on. Well, as you can see, we may be able to blame our difficulty on the fact that they happen to be colored perfectly to blend in with the sandstone because they are Sinai rosefinches (Carpodacus synoicus).
Finally, I had been seeing grayish swifts or swallows swooping overhead and low over the sand all morning, and I valiantly tried to track them with my camera or even just my phone, but my efforts were completely in vain, and I despaired that we may never know who they were. Thus, you may imagine my elation when we made a final stop at the visitors center to use their facilities before we began our drive back across the desert to Aqaba, and I spotted a pair swoop in to perch on a little ledge under the portico. I first did my best with my phone, just so I’d have something, and then I bolted back to the car to grab my camera. Thankfully my luck held, and perhaps they had a belly full of flies that needed digesting, because they were still there when I got back, and they didn’t even seem to mind when I captured this portrait. It turns out that they are neither swifts nor swallows but crag martins, so say hello to our first ever pale crag-martin (Ptyonoprogne obsoleta).
Lastly, as I was hunting rosefinches and wheatears, I happened to notice this amazing creature quite casually strolling over the pink sand, and it appears to be a pitted beetle (Adesmia cancellata).
As I mentioned yesterday, we are off to see Wadi Rum today, and I have no idea if I’ll be able to get any wildlife pictures for you, but I’ve got a few left over from yesterday, so let me use this post to get you caught up.
Meanwhile, four large birds soared high above the ponds, and they turned out to be our first ever black storks (Ciconia nigra). Their range extends from Sweden to South Africa and Spain to Japan, so I’m a little surprise that they have evaded me till now, but better late than never, right? I read that “black storks prefer undisturbed forests near water, white storks live in more open areas like fields and wetlands, and black storks are shy and avoid humans, whereas white storks are more common in urban areas and nest on man-made structures,” so that could explain it.
Ponds full of wading birds would hardly be complete without stilts, so here’s a black-winged stilt to round things out.
That’s it from the ABO, for now at least, but before breakfast and our visit, I stopped by the public beach right in town. I was a bit surprised to find that many vacationers, including whole families with children, appeared to have spent the night on the beach, and many were still sleeping there. Thus, I abandoned my hopes of finding any shorebirds, and focused instead on the small garden patches, perhaps community gardens, between the beach and the street behind it lined with shops and hotels. What a goldmine!
Here’s our best look yet, given the low light conditions, at an adult male red-backed shrike in full plumage. What a handsome devil, eh? We did see one in Malawi, but he kept his red back hidden.
For handy reference, here’s a female who was hunting in the next garden over.
