Thursday What's in the Camera Blogging

by CKR

I've been picking up the occasional photo, but no really striking or sustained subjects. So here's what I've got, along with a very nice study on hummingbirds from the University of California, Berkeley.

The ravens have been, er, ravenous lately. They descended yesterday on the suet feeder and returned this morning to finish it off. They also eat some of the seed that's out there, but the suet is the real prize. I'm thinking about other places for the feeder where they won't be able to get to it so easily. One raven is always posted as a lookout at the top of the tree. They really, really don't like seeing me, even in the house. The lookout picks up on me first, and my raising the camera to my face is a major no-no. So it's been very hard to get the photos I want.

The Steller's jays make occasional visits, which the scrub jays don't like if they're around. Here are the two in the same place, and a better close-up of a Steller's jay. Look at those laddery-colored feathers in the wings and those white stripes on the face. Beautiful.

I noticed some action at the roadrunner feeder, some of the manufactured bird-food-pelleted suet disappearing, but not all, suggesting that it might be the roadrunner. It's not an unambiguous sign, but the nighttime marauders usually take it all. I was contemplating that and some tracks in the snow that might have been roadrunner, but they were both feet together, widely separated. The roadrunner really does walk and run. During all this consideration of who was doing what to the feeder, the raven gang showed up at the roadrunner feeder and ate the rest of the suet pellets. That seemed like an opportunity. I had a couple of small cans of catfood that the roadrunner had rejected. Why not put them out for the ravens?

So I did, but the ravens had moved on. However, the next morning, as the sky was barely light and I was eating breakfast, there was movement at the feeder. I just caught a glimpse of a ringed tail, close to the ground, moving away from me. No camera nearby. I'm not sure if it was a raccoon or a ringtail. I'd like to believe it was a ringtail, and there was little damage to the other feeders that suggested raccoon, but Tuesday night I heard some noises that might have been raccoon, and the feeder block was smoothed off, the hopper feeder partly dumped. But the suet wasn't eaten until this morning. I have some beef fat that I will put out, hopefully for the roadrunner.

The news from Berkeley is that male Anna's hummingbirds make the noise at the bottom of their mating dive with their tail feathers. That link is worth a click for photos and a video, if you've never seen a hummingbird's mating dive. The female sits in a tree. The male climbs and climbs and climbs in the air, ever more slowly. It reminds me of a hammerhead stall in an airplane, but the flight mechanism is so different, I tend to doubt that's what it is. At some point, the male turns over and points himself down and accelerates rapidly. At the bottom of the dive, he spreads his wings and tail. I've watched broad-tailed hummingbirds do this; the males have a constant trill produced by their wings (or tail?) that makes it easy to hear when they're trying to impress the females. Spreading wings and tail is the only way they've got to brake, and running beak-first into the ground would not be a characteristic that would lead to mating success. So that's the primary reason they do that. The news release is not clear on that.

The video is not as impressive as seeing it live, but it'll do if you don't have a lot of hummingbirds living near you. The news release (and researchers?) also seems to be unaware that for sure, for sure, the broad-tails do this. But what do I know, not having a Ph.D. in ornithology?

I've thought of the sound made by the male broad-tails as a tiny squeaky clatter, but my talent for reproducing sounds in words is quite limited. And I haven't heard an Anna's doing this, so I can't dispute that their sound is a "chirp or a beep." I had attributed it to the wingtip feathers, but the study pretty definitively shows that it comes from the tail feathers.

Lots of birds produce feather-sounds as they fly. Doves and scrub jays produce a soft melodious sound that is very much like the dove's coo, more so for the scrub jays, in my opinion. Ravens have a bit of this, but not as much.