Swirling Swallows Soar in SoCal Skies

By Mel Carriere

     I can't help it, Swallows just make me happy.  No matter how many years and cycles of nature pass me by on this planet I still feel a little giddy when the Cliff Swallows arrive here in San Diego.  Something about their extraordinary journey mystifies me.  I'm well aware that plenty of birds migrate, but the way that the Cliff Swallows do it in big bunches and on such a precise schedule is one of the miracles of nature, to me.

It could be that this normally precise schedule was just a little off, or it could be that I just wasn't paying attention, but it seems like they got here a little late this spring.  The truth is that I had almost forgotten about them until last Wednesday, when I finally saw a large swirling mass of Swallows above the High School on my mail route, where it seems like they had locked in to a very fruitful bug source for aerial dining.

One reason why I might have missed the arrival of the Cliff Swallows is because they are no longer nesting on my neighbor's house, and seem to have eschewed residence in my neighborhood completely. I think this might be because many people consider them a pest and they find their mud nests hanging beneath the eaves of their tidy homes to be an eyesore.

The popular online bird fact mills appear to be of the opinion that Cliff Swallows like to nest in large colonies, and although this is certainly true I know they don't mind nesting in small scale groups where they can.  As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, for several years the Swallows nested on the North side of my neighbor's house, under an eave that provided very ample shade.  This locale turned into an annual spring maternity ward consisting of only three or four nests; a tiny but fruitful outpost.  The former residents of this home were very zealous of protecting their bird hatchery, but when the house was unfortunately sold a few years ago the new owners knocked down the nests and the Swallows don't even try to come back now.  As they say, "there goes the neighborhood," for man and Swallows alike.  Unlike the Swallows, the new humans have not been good neighbors, and not only from an ornithological perspective.  But I won't bore and distract you with bad human behavior in this particular venue.

When I was observing the swirling Swallows in their large flying mass last Wednesday I noticed that they seemed to be flying in formation, something that I have not observed with these birds before.  Several dozen Swallows actually seemed to have joined together to create a large circular shaped vortex, almost as if they were herding the insects into a concentrated group for easier munching.

I was watching a television show called Planet Earth that showed dolphins exhibiting this same herding behavior - not with bugs, of course, but with schools of fish beneath the ocean surface.  Could it be possible that the bird brains of the Cliff Swallows are capable of similar complex cooperative hunting behaviors such as this?  I for one do not doubt it.

Just my pet hypothesis.  It's up to real scientists to prove or disprove this, if they choose.  Meanwhile, a brief glance at the Wikipedia page, from where I stole the above picture, provided a new fact  for me that the Cliff Swallows have also eschewed colonizing the famous San Juan Capistrano Mission, where their clockwork March 19th return was the stuff of legends.  But now it appears that the Swallows have taken up nesting at a nearby country club, proving that these birds have very discerning tastes in their choice of nurseries, and now when they are not busy chewing bugs  they are busy eschewing a lot of things; having also apparently eschewed organized religion in favor of a more secular, worldly, jet-set style of existence.

"Petrochelidon pyrrhonota -flight -Palo Alto Baylands-8" by Don DeBold - originally posted to Flickr as Cliff Swallow in flight. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Petrochelidon_pyrrhonota_-flight_-Palo_Alto_Baylands-8.jpg#/media/File:Petrochelidon_pyrrhonota_-flight_-Palo_Alto_Baylands-8.jpg

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Mockingbirds are Singing, but not in My Neighborhood

By Mel Carriere

All around us here in Southern California the signs of spring are in the air, but since we really didn't have much of a winter there is not a significant difference, except for the sun riding a bit higher in the sky.  As I walk the streets of my postal route I try to keep my eyes on the mail but I also keep my eyes and ears tuned to the re-energized  avian activity that comes with the changing of the seasons.  With sadness I take note of the urgent calls of the White Crowned Sparrows as their singing intensifies, meaning that they are probably rounding their friends up for the long flight back north.  In a few days I will hear them no longer.

It is also with a degree of sadness that I hearken to the tune of Mimus polyglottos, best known as The Northern Mockingbird, and I use the word sadness because this persistent, rambling, consistently inconsistent song seems to be heard everywhere these days except in my own neighborhood, where it has been missing for quite a few years now.  Some people wish those damn Mockingbirds would just shut up, especially when at the height of their horniness they sing long into the night, but to me it is a soothing, reassuring sound, indicating that all is well in the in the little ornithological habitat bubble that I live in.

When I first moved into my home in the late spring of 1999 Mockingbirds were very common.  I have an Audubon bird clock in my garage that bellows out a different bird song on the hour, and I remember when, about 15 years ago, a pair of Mockingbirds stopped in a tree across the street to listen to it attentively, perhaps considering whether to add these unknown melodies to their repertoire.

It was also around that time when my wife and I, peeking from our upstairs window, thrilled to the sight of a Mother Mockingbird (could have been a Father, how could I know since they are not sexually dimorphic) feeding its recently hatched fledgling upon our lawn.  These were but a few of the voyeuristic glimpses we have enjoyed into the secret avian world that is available all around us, every day, true life episodes that very few people take advantage of; to the detriment of their own edification and enlightenment.

Perhaps this is relevant, perhaps this is not, but one day many years ago some boys with BB guns moved into a house a few doors to the north, and began the systematic process of shooting down just about everything with feathers in the neighborhood.  For a few months we didn't hear any bird songs at all, but eventually these destructive hominid pests moved away and the birds repopulated.  Repopulated, that is, except for the Mockingbirds, whose absence from the neighborhood's avian chorus that brightens our evenings and mornings is quite deafening; especially when it seems that everywhere else it is business as usual with the Mockers.

I don't know if I can blame the BB gun death squad entirely for the Mockingbird Holocaust that occurred on my block; there could be other ecological factors involved that I have missed.  I also understand that Mockingbird populations are cyclical and some years you just see more than others. But taking these other factors into account, I can also say with a bit of certainty that the Mockingbird's habit of perching conspicuously on a high, open place while singing probably makes it an easy target for marauding boys with BB guns.

February used to be the time when the Mockingbirds started singing on our block.  February passed in silence, and now March has practically swept by us also without a peep from this branch of the Mimidae.  It appears that, with April just around the corner, it is going to be yet another "silent spring" where the Mimus polyglottos community is concerned.


Image is from:  "Mimus polyglottos1" by Ryan Hagerty - This image originates from the National Digital Library of the United States Fish and Wildlife ServiceThis tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information.See Category:Images from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mimus_polyglottos1.jpg#/media/File:Mimus_polyglottos1.jpg


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My Life List #2 - Common Loon

By Mel Carriere

I have decided that when I lack for inspiration for this blog, as I am now, I will simply go back through my life list and pull a bird from it to write about.  This should give me 200 plus topics to pull from in emergencies, so it should serve as a reliable fallback source whenever Mother Nature is hiding her winged marvels from me for whatever cruel, capricious reason.

I don't know how you do your listing, and I'm not at all sure I'm doing mine correctly, but my life list is actually a copy of the American Ornithologists Union (AOU) checklist, which I converted into an Excel spreadsheet that I keep stored on my computer.

I decided to start blogging my list in taxonomic order, but I may change this and jump around randomly from time to time, particularly because when I get to a group like the dabbling ducks or the shorebirds or the gulls that have quite a few entries on the list you may get weary reading about the same locations or circumstances that I first observed these species in, because most of them probably came from the same small group of places.

If you are an observant person, and I expect you are because you engage in a hobby where careful observation is what it is all about, you have probably already asked yourself why this first blog in a series that I just said was going to begin in taxonomic order actually started with the #2 bird on the list.  My answer is that I already wrote about my initial encounter with bird #1, the Pacific Loon, just a couple of weeks ago.  I'll put a link to this article at the end of this one, in case you are interested.

Anyhow, my initial encounter with Gavia immer, and boy was it ever a brief one, came on a combined whale watching slash pelagic birding expedition sponsored by the Audubon society that I went on very close to my birthday in February 2007.  My mother was in San Diego to help celebrate my big 43, so I thought this would be a fun family outing for everyone.  It really was satisfying for everybody except my oldest son, who had no sea legs and spent almost the entire tour below decks, lying on a bench in the cafeteria.  Truth was I should have taken some Dramamine myself as my mother suggested, but being an old salt of 6 years in the Navy I thought I could take anything the Pacific Ocean could throw at me.  As it turns out, however, the small boats toss about a lot more than the big warships do, and I did feel a bit queasy for a while.  The moral of this story is that you should always listen to Mom.

Everyone else in the family was fine because they took their Dramamine, including my youngest son, who was running about topside like a little monkey and would have been swinging from the rigging if they would have let him.  Other than that I won't go into too many details about this expedition because it contributed at least six or seven birds to the life list and I want to save some for later.

The encounter with The Common Loon was so quick that I would have missed it if I had been on my own, but as it turns out there were several highly qualified birders on the boat who pointed out the Loon just past the big 'L' curve in San Diego bay as we were passing the submarine base and making our way out to the end of Point Loma to cross the breakwater.

Luckily I was able to fix my binoculars on the Loon before it dove, and all I saw of it really was a very drab diver in winter plumage.  I did not have the pleasure of laying eyes upon the bejeweled back that was the inspiration of many a Native American legend, and I never heard the haunting call that lends a mysterious quality to Midwestern glacial lakes.

But with so many certified birders on the boat this Loon was a keeper, so I folded it up and tucked it away in my list before the choppy waves on the bay caused me to lose sight of it completely.  Particularly tricky were those long, protruding legs and feet, but I finally got the Loon to reel them in, stop squawking, and go into the list quietly.  And then we were on to the open water, where many a pelagic wonder awaited...


Read about bird #1, the Pacific Loon here


This stupendous shot of a Common Loon in breeding plumage is from:  "Gavia immer -Minocqua, Wisconsin, USA -swimming-8" by John Picken from Chicago, USA - LoonUploaded by snowmanradio. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gavia_immer_-Minocqua,_Wisconsin,_USA_-swimming-8.jpg#/media/File:Gavia_immer_-Minocqua,_Wisconsin,_USA_-swimming-8.jpg


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Birds that I Missed - A Lamentation with a Poem at the End

By Mel Carriere

I didn't really start seriously paying attention to birds until 1999, when I was 35 years old, and by that time I had already missed dozens of great opportunities to lay eyes upon unique and beautiful avian life forms and then reduce them to satisfying little check marks on my life list.  Now I really don't have the resources to travel too much, so I often kick myself thinking back about the things I could have seen had I just taken my nose out of book for a little while and looked around me.

When I first joined the Navy in 1983 I was stationed in Northern Illinois and then the Virginia Beach area, so there is no telling how many birds of the Midwest and Eastern States I could have captured and locked up in my little Pokemon birding ball.  There were great unbroken stands of deciduous woods around the Damnek Naval Training Station at that time, and I tremble with regret when I think of the untapped avian marvels I left behind in these thick forests and surrounding swamps.

It seems like all of these stories are going to be from my Navy experience, because that was the only time that I traveled far and wide outside of the continental United States.  And it was the travelling itself that presented the greatest opportunity to observe birds that not many people, not even very serious birders, get many chances to see.  I went on three six month long Westpac cruises in the Navy covering thousands of miles of ocean, and any number of local operations where we spent days and weeks playing war games in the Pacific well out of sight from the shoreline of San Diego.  But at that time I didn't even know what a "pelagic" bird was and I definitely had never seen one.  Truth is I probably had seen thousands but they never registered in my mind.

I do recall seeing birds that would follow our ship across the Pacific on our long voyages, but I assumed they were just seagulls.  Hell, they looked like seagulls, and I since I didn't know anything about Tubenoses or convergent evolution at the time, that's just what they remained for me for a couple dozen years.  Retrieving this memory from the dusty scrap heap I recall that these "gulls" were rather grayish in color, so I assume they were Fulmars.  I didn't see another Fulmar until 2007, on a whale watching expedition that I had to pay for.

Back in those cheery good old days of the US Navy when we ran over whales and polluted the ocean without a second thought and without regret, we still dumped our trash and garbage "clear the stern," on a near daily basis.  I look back regretfully at the mass "seagull" fests that would gather at these free ocean smorgasbords.  Had I been on the lookout for pelagic species at the time I don't think there would have been a single Procellariiforme that would have been able to elude the dangling snare of my life list.

Perhaps my biggest birding regret comes from my two trips to Australia, where I was too busy drinking Emu lager and chasing birds of the human female persuasion to give a second thought to the feathered variety.  Now I see Facebook photos from Australian birders of parrots, parakeets, and little marvels called fairy wrens that have extraordinarily colored plumage, but what good do they do me?  I was literally on that boat for four years, travelling hither and yon to the four points of the compass, but I figuratively missed the boat completely when it came to birds.

There was one bird that I did manage to lock in my mental cage and bring back with me, and I still guard it jealousy and possessively, even though its raucous chattering sometimes keeps me up at night.  This was the Galah, a pink and gray Cockatoo that swarms across the beautiful green rolling hills of Western Australia in flocks of hundreds of birds.  I managed to capture this one bird, this one among hundreds of potential species that I thoughtlessly skipped, because my shipmates and I had rented a car and driven out into the countryside.  This is probably not a good idea when you are full of Emu lager and you have to drive on the wrong side of the road, and as could be expected at some point we had to pull over on a road in some beautiful farm country to respond to a call of nature.

As we looked on in complete awe, up above us on a wire several dozen, perhaps hundreds of Galahs had perched in voyeuristic fashion to observe the proceedings.  All of us having grown up in the US, where farm country birds are typically very drab, we were not at all accustomed to these brilliantly pink birds gathered in audience above us.  I think this spectacle of three or four Yanks peeing in the dirt for the amusement of parrots made an indelible procession in our memories forever.

The Galahs in their thousands still mock me every time I go the bathroom, seeming to say "You were there and you could have seen a lot of better birds than us!  What the hell were you thinking?"

Therefore, in an attempt to put the Galah ghosts to rest I have composed a little poem.  It contains subtle references to urination, so keep the kids out of the room:


Birds that I missed
Boy am I pissed
Tubenoses at sea
Were ignored by me
Australian wonders
Were birdwatching blunders
The Galahs conspire
To mock me from a wire

Birds that I missed
I'll forever insist
With your nose in a book
You should turn up and look
Or you'll get no surprise
From winged joys in the skies
And forever regret
The checkmarks you don't get


This photo of scores of mocking Galahs on a wire taken from the Graeme Chapman collection.  Visit his extraordinary Website here

Birds by Mel is powered for flight by copious amounts of shade grown, warbler friendly coffee, which unfortunately is very expensive.   I have nothing to do with ad selection here, but unless you find them completely annoying or offensive I would appreciate if you investigated what my sponsors have to say.