Rufous Hummingbird

Rufous Hummingbird

Madera Canyon, Arizona
July 2019
Member of the Hummingbird Family
§A Bouquet of Hummingbirds§

★The Longest Migration Route of all North American Hummingbirds★

★The Northernmost Breeding Hummingbird★

~True Bird Fact~ So, about that Migration Route- it's really pretty impressive. They travel nearly 4000 miles from Mexico to Alaska along the pacific coast, and then back down along the Rocky Mountains. And they do this every year, and at such an incredibly small body size. This migration is among the most impressive in the animal kingdom. Tough birds! Also, helpful, since their strange clockwise route makes them significant pollinators across a really large area.

~Additional Hummingbird Fact~ Hummingbirds are fast, but not so fast that they have no predators. Often these are the same animals that eat insects, which despite previous claims on this blog, does not mean that Hummingbirds are bugs. However, a clever defense that many birds employ is building a nest in a tree occupied by a bird of prey. These predatory birds are too slow and big to be interested in the small and zippy hummingbird, but they do eat the things that eat Hummingbirds. Smart!

How Endangered Are They? I was surprised, dear reader, to see Rufous Hummingbirds were on the IUCN as a Near Threatened Species. After all, there are a lot of them. 19 million, by the IUCN's own estimates. So what is endangering this bird, exactly? Well, it's actually that exacting and specific migration route. See, if something goes wrong at any of those spots, it impacts the hummingbird. Largely we're talking about climate change here, and the spring flowers blooming too early for hummingbirds to feed off of them. But also they are going to be impacted by the large insect die-offs that result from increased use of pesticides in agriculture. Population numbers have been estimated to have dropped by 60% since 1970.

Horned Grebe

Horned Grebe aka. Slavonian Grebe (foreign)
Arrowhead Marsh, Oakland, California, USA
April 2019
Member of the Grebe Family
§A Waterdance of Grebes§

~true bird fact~ These Grebes swallow their own feathers in order to create a 'plug' in their stomach, which helps them filter out fish bones and other harder to digest materials. Parent Grebes will even feed their young these feathers, to get this system going earlier. Makes you wonder why we humans don't eat feathers.

 ~real bird legend~ According to the Blackfoot Native tribe, the Horned Grebe is always the first to spot danger. This is because the Old Man trickster fooled a bunch of ducks into dancing for him with their eyes closed. In this state he was able to bonk them on the head and kill them, but this Grebe, the smallest of the ducks present, peeked, and was able to escape and sound the alarm. This is also how he got his red eyes.

How Endangered Are They? Well, let's start with the good news- there are a lot of these Grebes still remaining- somewhere between 200 and 500,000. Another item to be optimistic about- they have a pretty global distribution living all across North America and Eurasia. However, these birds are going fast. Within the last 30 years, their global numbers have declined by 30%. The picture is much worse in North America where the declined is a much steeped 79%.  The reason? All the usual stuff, all our fault. Climate change, human disturbance of breeding habitat, the destruction of wetlands, and oil spills. We've even messed up their food supply of aquatic insects by introducing Rainbow Trout into bodies of water for fishing purposes. These birds are really getting it from every angle, sadly. My hope is that having survived the machinations of the trickster god, the Horned Grebes can survive us too.

Tricolored Blackbird

Tricolored Blackbird
Vanden Road, Vacaville, California, USA
April 2019
Member of the Blackbird Family
§A Merl of Blackbirds§
★North America's Most Colonial Landbird★ (see below to find out what that means)

~true bird fact~ To encourage their fledglings to leave the nest, parents will arrive with food, but then, instead of feeding the babies, immediately fly off again. This encourages the young to follow. Good parenting? Bad parenting? Sound off in the comments.

Sings badly, but enthusiastically
Can say something off the cuff that just sounds like a well known quote
Pays attention to keeping their white patch looking really white. If it were mine it would probably have a stain on it in seconds. How do they do it?



How Endangered Are They? Classified as 'Threatened' by the IUCN (that's the middle one). There's a lot of disagreement on how many of these nice birds there are now, but everyone seems to agree they're in quite a lot of danger. In my research, I saw numbers between 145,000 and 300,00, depending what year and who was estimating, and everyone seems to think numbers are still declining pretty precipitously. A significant loss, regardless, for a bird that used to number in the millions. Why so endangered? Well, like many birds that have been wiped out (think Passenger Pigeons), they are colonial breeders- meaning that their breeding colonies are relatively few, but in extremely high numbers. Descriptions exist of million-bird flocks. This kind of breeding helped protect colonies from predation. However, now that the marshy habitat they breed in is so regularly lost to development, there are few places that can support such great numbers of birds. The group I observed was probably less than a hundred. Many of the few places that would support them are farm land, which get harvested regularly, leading to massive causalities. Combine this with their small range (they are basically only in California's central valley), and you have a recipe for disaster. Still, many people are trying to save them. They're a 'priority bird' for the Audubon society, and they have their own webpage and conservation program over at UC Davis. Let's all cross our fingers that we can get it together for the Tricolored Blackbirds

For comparison purposes, this is a Red-winged Blackbird, a close relative. They flock together with Tricoloreds and sometimes these guys even have yellow epaulets to make you even more confused. You're looking for bright white. Also, their call is much different.

Snow Goose

Snow Goose
Richmond Marina, Richmond, California, USA
January 2019
Member of the Ducks, Geese, and Swans Family
§A String of Geese§

~true bird fact~ A canny, tough goose to be reckoned with. Well known for their long migratory flights to and from the arctic, these geese are also no joke on foot, where they can outrun most of their predators. Even the baby geese might walk 50 miles in a day to find better nesting ground. And those babies? Largely safe, because the geese prefer to nest near Snowy Owls and Rough-legged Hawks, which prey on their main predators, Arctic Foxes.

Cross this goose at your own peril
A well developed sense of honor
Hardened by battle, prepared for the long winter to come



How Endangered Are They? Not endangered at all, I'm happy to say. But they were, at one point, quite endangered. At one point in the 1900's there were only 2000 birds or so left alive, mostly due to hunting. However strong conservation laws were enacted, and they recovered. Maybe a little too well.
Now there are 5 million of these bad boys, and their population is growing by 5 percent a year. There's so many of them that they're actually sort of damaging the habitat of other animals now in the tundra. New, less restrictive hunting laws have done little to slow their growth, probably because a lot of land that used to be forest is now goose-friendly farmland. Oopsa doopsa, we messed up again, but good for the Snow Goose I guess. I welcome out new Goose overlords.

Black Scoter

Black Scoter aka. Common Scoter
Richmond Marina, Richmond, California, USA
January 2019
Member of the Ducks, Geese, and Swans Family
§A Flush of Ducks§

[Etymology Corner] Common Scoter is a little bit of an archaic name, but it's also grossly inaccurate, since this is the least common of the three North American scoters. The Eastern Hemisphere version of this duck is still called that over there. I bet you thought I was going to tell you where the word 'Scoter' came from here, but nope. There doesn't seem to be any explanation of the origin out there, it's just a word that's used for this genus of sea ducks.

~True Bird Fact~ In France, Roman Catholics were allowed by their church to eat this bird on Fridays (on which you normally can't eat non-fish meats). The reasoning is that they have a 'fishy' taste to them, which raises some questions for me about what Catholics thought makes something a fish, and also makes me even less likely to eat this duck.

Another quote I saw a lot while researching this bird was a description of his call as a 'constant mellow, plaintive whistling', so to me that says that this bird has a real Jeff Bridges vibe, and I don't think any more personality speculation is needed.



How Endangered Are They? Well, not that endangered. They are considered near-threatened by the IUCN with a global population between 350,000 and half a million. However, their population is slowly declining, and they are threatened by oil and gas drilling, as well as climate change. So something to watch out for, at the very least.