Adding new birds to your list

       It’s that time of the year again when we get to hear and see new and different birds almost every day if we look hard enough. The past few snowstorms haven’t discouraged new migrants from passing through our area as you might have expected.

It’s always satisfying to add new birds to your life list or show your grandkids a colorful rose-breasted grosbeak for the first time. But some folks like to take their birding skills and contributions to a new level and participate in organized bird surveys to detect rare birds as well as document healthy breeding populations of other more common birds.

The Arizona Bird Conservation Initiative, otherwise known as ABCI, is a diverse array of folks interested in birds for one reason or another. Some people that get involved are scientists while others are accountants who contribute with bird surveys on their free weekends. Still, other folks just like to spend time outdoors and want to do something productive while there. This group of bird enthusiasts and their programs working under the umbrella of the ABCI program, conduct a vast array of bird surveys on species from diminutive wrens to our national symbol, the bald eagle.

The ABCI program is looking for volunteers to help survey birds in the White Mountains. There is a bird survey to fit anybody's circadian schedule, from the typical breeding bird sunrise surveys to the mid-day colonial nester survey all the way into the evening with the nightjar road 

route surveys. So you can be productive at any time of the day depending on your preference, even if you aren’t exactly sure what a colonial nester or nightjar is!  

Some are more visual than others even though many birders use their ears more than their eyes. So when you hear folks talking about birding by ear, they are not trying to identify their feathered friends by how big or long their ears are. The nice part of many of these surveys is that you first play the call of the bird you are looking for over a bluetooth speaker and listen for a jealous male of the same species to respond and maybe even try to pick a fight. Training is provided to volunteers since these types of callback surveys can disturb breeding pairs if not done correctly.

The breeding bird surveys are definitely designed for the more experienced birder as you’ll have to be able to distinguish your birds from their calls only, in some cases. Fortunately, breeding birds call often and have distinctive calls that can be used to identify the bird, even for those who have a local accent or dialect to their call. The purpose of these surveys is to document the wide variety of breeding birds who nest in our area every year. Keeping track of which birds nest here and when they arrive or finish their nesting cycle, can help us evaluate their habitat or any other threats that may be affecting the population size.

A much less intensive survey than documenting the many breeding songbirds would be counting the nests of colonial nesting type birds, like great blue herons, double-crested cormorants, and black-crowned night herons. These particular birds like to nest close to each other, sometimes on the same branch and often with a half-dozen other nests in the same tree. Some colonies can number up to a couple of dozen nests, although some are usually not used every year. These colonies can also contain a mixed bag of species living together, but the great blue herons usually dominate in the White Mountain colonies. Volunteers will visit the colonies a couple of times during the summer at any time of the day, using binoculars and spotting scopes if needed to count active nests with the gangly chicks constantly begging for food. Keeping track of these birds helps assess the amount of food available to them as well as the quality of the area’s habitat in general. In addition, it appears that another similar species, neotropical cormorants, are breeding further north each year and these surveys are one way to document that range change.  

Are you more of a night owl than a morning rooster? Then the Nightjar survey might be just for you! What are nightjars? They are a related group of birds that in our area includes the common nighthawk and poor-will types of birds, who all have huge gaping mouths that they use to feed on flying insects at night, many times under bright lights that attract the bugs on Friday nights at the football fields. The nighthawks have slender pointed wings that make a “whooshing” sound as they pull out of steep stoops feeding on moths. Their distinctive calls described as “peents” are often heard before these nocturnal birds are seen and there are no other birds in our area that they could be confused with. Since this bird group’s main diet are insects, they can be sensitive to insecticide use and appear to have declined by more than 50% in the past 50 years in many areas of North America.

Are you a woodworker looking for a new housing project? Making bluebird and kestrel boxes certainly qualifies and can be done in a morning with just scraps or a few dollars worth of lumber, even at today’s prices. Even if you are not so inclined with a hammer and saw, volunteers are needed to help monitor nest boxes that have already been built and erected in the White Mountains.  

Bluebird box “trails” are being developed in our area, which consists of a series of boxes placed along a road, making them easy to check for activity and to clean out in the fall. Nesting results for each box will be added to a national effort to track bluebird populations, including both mountain and western bluebirds who inhabit the White Mountains. Monitoring these boxes provides all kinds of opportunities for bluebird photography.

Nest boxes are also being built and placed in our area for American kestrels, who also lack these types of cavities needed for nesting, now in short supply in the wild. Arizona’s smallest and most colorful falcon, also known as a sparrow hawk, can often be found perched on power lines or fence posts in grasslands as they search for their primary prey of insects, rodents, and small birds. Both kestrels and bluebirds are dependent on woodpeckers, squirrels, and other animals to excavate their nesting cavities as they can not do that themselves. Kestrels are one of the few raptors where the male and female look markedly different from each other, but the young’s plumage, or feather colors and patterns, look very similar to the adults before they learn to fly or fledge. Kestrel box productivity will also be reported to a national database to get a better picture of the US population.

You obviously don’t need to be part of one of these organized or formal efforts in order to help our local bird species. Taking the friends and family out for a hike around a local lake, where you carefully remove monofilament fishing lines, hooks, and sinkers could potentially save the annual production of eagle or osprey chicks for that lake. Unfortunately, these birds of prey often collect fishing lines along with sticks and branches to build their nests. The line becomes a lethal noose that can strangle or entangle any and all of the chicks in a nest. Removing the fishing line and other garbage on the lakeshore will have a direct beneficial effect on the area’s eagles, even if they do not nest on that particular lake, as they hunt most of them in the White Mountains at one time or another.  

 Casual birders can also provide valuable information by reporting sightings of rare birds or reporting any dead eagles or other raptors so that their feathers can be salvaged. For those who want to learn more about White Mountain birds and help with the ABCI effort, just send an email to dgroebner@azgfd.gov or call (928) 532-2308.