Week 8: Bird Watching Adventures

Time: 10:20 am

Weather: Cloudy, 61 F

Place McCollum Park

This week at my site there is no drastic changes. Vegetation is greener and taller, that's about it.  Berries are growing on the Tall/dull Oregon Grape, Salal, and snowberries. The salal berries are dark blue/purple resembling blueberries. The salmonberries that were plentiful and slightly unripe last week seemed to all disappear. I only saw a few handful, and they were ripe this week, so I'm assuming the wildlife gathered it for food, especially the birds. The berries are bright red! I ate one and it was still sour though. The birds were very active and were congregated in the canopies around fruit bearing bushes, whereas areas without fruit bushes seems to have less calling birds. Smaller, weedy plants have grown taller, along with the grass! All leaves are fully grown on the trees and bushes. I've identified a lot more plants I haven't seen before.

Weekly growth: taller bushes. Smaller sticky currant are growing fully on the trail.

1 meter site! The leaves are bigger than usual and are in full bloom!

Bracken Fern. Found it growing! I guess everything looked like a sword and lady fern. This has rounded edges, triple pinated.

This is growing everywhere! I've tried ID it from the book, but I spent hours and couldn't find it based on the leaves or the flowers. So I'm enlisting the help of the interweb!

Another picture of the above but with leaves that are 3 leaflets, edged, and tall growing. There are hairs on the little flower stems.

This is one of the sites that I took early on in the quarter but felt it wouldn't change much. I was wrong. It's a beautiful little swamp pond with so much vegetation growing near it!

 Some bird pictures:

Spotted Towhee staring and singing. A pretty chirp chirp dededededede noise it makes! Followed by an ugly car breaking noise ""eeearrrrrrk". It was calling with another bird, exchanging calls back and forth. They were having a conversation! Cute :)

Pilleated Wood pecker. I was hearing the "nuk nuk nuk" dolphin sound of this bird but couldn't find it. While scoping around with my binoculars I spotted it! It was looking for insects on a Beech tree.

Different Bird Poses:

Pileated Woodpecker looking for food. Male.

1. Pileated Woodpecker foraging for food on a Beech. It landed on the top of a tree, then incrementally hopped down the tree to look for food. I didn't know they did this!!! But this is a male bird because I saw his red mustache on his face. It pecked its head in the open tree looking for insects. I didn't see it catch anything so maybe it didn't find anything. It wasn't pecking--I didn't hear a pecking noise that I usually do. Probably because the tree was already split open and it was easy prey for the bird. There wasn't any other woodpecker nearby, so there wasn't any interactions with birds. All the sparrows and chickadees left this bird alone. It's too cool to mess with any little birds. This species isn't competitive with other species since it was relaxed and chill.

Pileated Woodpecker in flight. Nice feathers shown.

2. Pileated Woodpecker in flight! I've never seen it up close in flight before. I've only really heard this bird's "nuk, nuk" dolphin like call. But it was soaring from one tree to another area. I was surprised at how low it was flying. It flew about 6-8 meters high, under the canopy. I would've thought it would fly over the canopy since it is such a big and bulky bird, but it didn't. It beautifully navigated itself through the hanging tree branches and leaves like a boss, yo! This bird is so dope it deserves some street cred! Any who... I was watching it through the binoculars and with my eyes, and it was much more beautiful through my own eyes because I could see the whole picture.
The wings were spread so I could see individual feather "fingers". It was white on the upper half and black on the bottom half. I could definitely see its little red mohawk. As I was following it with my eyes, it flew up and out of the canopy to another part of the park that was too far to run to and still see the bird.

Calmly chirping and singing Song sparrow

3. Song sparrow perched on a Maple tree and chirping/calling. I decided to have a little fun with this birdie and play songs with it from song sparrow, junco, thrush to see how it reacts. When I played the sparrow song, it was frantically flying from one bush to another on the other side (kept going to same bush) to try and hide. When it heard the call, it went under a sword fern and huckleberry bush to hide, then flew to a maple tree and perched itself to look for the predator, repeating this pattern at least 5 times. When I stopped playing the song, it repeated patterns another time, then stopped on the maple and stared at me. No joke, it stared at me probably because it heard the song in my direction. Then it calmly started "chip chip" chipping around. This is when I caught a nice sketch of it since it remained there a long time. It was an adult birdie, but not sure if it was female or male. It was a really plump bird, bigger than what I've been seeing at Ravenna or UBNA, so maybe it was a female about to lay eggs? But I don't know if a female would have been acting in the strange way that it was.
After my fake birdie was gone, this birdie was talking with other birds. It was chirping, then singing and waited for replies in which other birds replied. I listened to this bird and another bird (about 15-20 meters away?) exchanging songs and calls. They did this for over 5 minutes. It was fascinating! But the most awesome part is coming up. Brace yourself...

Fighting Song sparrows. Incredibly fast. Never have I seen before.

4. Song sparrow fighting! Okay, so technically it wasn't this sparrow that was fighting, but it was two smaller males fighting near my plump little birdie friend. This is why I think my bird is female--because two smaller males were fighting near the female and the female just watched. It didn't move from its perched tree, it only re-positioned itself.
Here's what happened: while I was watching my birdie, I suddenly heard a loud wavering flag sound (imagine a flag violently waving in the wind. THAT sound.) When I looked over to my left, I saw a salmonberry bush rumble. Then I saw the two males fighting with each other! I quickly sketched this awesome display. But they were violently fast! Then one bird flew back into the trees/bushes more while the other closely followed suit. Then they flew high up into the upper canopy (40 meters?) and I lost sight of them.
I have a couple of hypotheses for the events. One: my plump birdie friend was the female for one of the male birdie chasing the other out because it was a threat. Two: One male got too close to the other male's territory (the female is already in it) and so they were fighting. Three: the bird songs I was playing with my birdie and aggravated the male bird, so it found a song sparrow nearby that thought was calling to the plump bird so it fought with it (if so, I'm sorry little birdies :( ). Four: it was purely coincidental and two males just happened to be fighting next to my birdie friend while it didn't move.  They could've been male friends, or mates, or just a wandering passerby that didn't care.