Hillsboro Peak

First of all, I apologize for the tiny font in some of these posts. It is a good size when I'm creating the post, it looks fine in preview, and when I publish, it comes out tiny. Clearly I haven't mastered the technical part of this.

Sunday was another beautiful day, and Jim and I headed south. Somewhere south of Truth or Consequences, we exited the highway and headed west, through the picturesque little town of Hillsboro. After leaving Hillsboro, the road begins to climb, and has many hairpin turns. We pulled off into a parking lot at a place called Emory pass, where we had the great pleasure of sharing the parking area with a group of motorcycle riders, two of whom were engaged in a heated argument complete with copious use of the F word. After eating our lunch, we headed up the trail to Hillsboro Peak. Most of the hills are covered with evergreens, mostly Ponderosa and Pinon, but there were occasional bright splashes of color from groves of aspen like this one, and even some orange maples, which unfortunately didn’t photograph well. (As a native New Englander, I miss maples, although I don’t miss weeding out hundreds of maple seedlings every spring, or raking up bag after bag of leaves in the fall.)

Partway up the trail, we found this Ponderosa Pine stump that had lots of holes in it. Many of the holes contained acorns. Although we didn’t see the birds, we suspected acorn woodpeckers, which are known for drilling holes in trees, fence posts etc and stuffing them with acorns.

By the way, Ponderosa pines smell wonderful, like vanilla. Most of the Ponderosas on this hike were pretty dry and didn’t have much of an odor, but when they have more sap, they smell heavenly. Also, many of the tree trunks were coated with a sort of hairy moss. It looks very soft, but it felt kind of crunchy. It is said that you can use moss on tree trunks as an indicator of which way is north, but according to these trees, all directions are north.

I liked this tree that had grown out of a rock

and also this rock formation.

The view was wonderful - mountain range after mountain range fading off into the distance.

There were lots of butterflies along the trail – many like this one, and also many little yellow ones.
The best part was on the return trip to the parking lot. We hadn't seen many birds, but at one point, we saw bird activity and stopped. We saw a small flock of pygmy nuthatches, a life bird for Jim, and an olive warbler, a life bird for both of us. The nuthatches were really cute, and I had never gotten this good a look at them before.

On the way back to Albuquerque, we stopped at Bosque del Apache, where I infested Jim’s car with mosquitos. We stopped to look at a large flock of goldfinches and red winged blackbirds, and discovered that there was also a swarm of mosquitos. So Jim said to keep the windows closed when the car was stopped. A little further up the road, we saw a car stopped, and a man standing in the road. We had no idea what he was looking at. When we got closer, he started to approach so I opened the window, and he told us that there was a small rattlesnake basking on the road in front of his car. We drove past him and pulled over, and I jumped out of the car with my camera. (Unfortunately, I couldn’t get close enough to get a really good photo.) As I turned around to go back to the car, I realized that, even worse than leaving the window open, I’d left the door wide open. I was extremely apologetic and embarrassed, and he let me live.

Our next stop was the boardwalk, where every trip I’ve taken to Bosque del Apache with the Audubon birding group has featured a heated discussion about the grebes. There are two types of grebes that look very much alike, which live in the pond at this spot. At least one type of them can be seen any time you visit. The biggest difference between the two types, the western grebe and the Clark’s grebe, is that the black area on the head extends below the eye in one species, and not in the other. To make things worse, the birds are usually so far away that even with a spotting scope, you can’t see them clearly enough to tell if the eye is in the black area or not. But the argument is apparently obligatory. There are also two types of cormorants there that can be discussed, although they are easier to tell apart, and generally much closer. So Jim and I decided we’d better have an argument about the grebes or our visit wouldn’t be complete. We didn’t have a scope, so all we could conclude was that we saw either a Clark’s or a Western grebe ☺ We were able to tell the cormorants apart. By then, it was getting late, so we did a quick tour of the rest of the refuge, saw some cranes and snow geese, and headed for home. The sunset was sensational. It was dark when we got to Jim’s, and the cranes were calling in the fields. I love the sound the cranes make - I describe it as purring for want of anything better, but that isn't really an adequate description. They call from the air, as they fly overhead in big V shaped flocks or in a line.

The botanical gardens and the attack of the killer frog

Saturday was a gorgeous fall day, warm and clear with brilliant blue sky and yellow leaves, and Jim and I decided to try our luck birding at the Botanical gardens. While we didn’t end up seeing a lot of birds, we did see lots of cool plants, model trains, and the attack of the killer frog. We started off with a yummy lunch at Duran’s, where the red chili sauce has, in my opinion, great flavor with just the right amount of heat. Then, feeling a bit stuffed, we headed off for the biopark.

We started off with a visit to the aquarium. It is small, but a nice little aquarium. My favorite exhibit was the jellyfish, especially the big tank of moon jellies. It is very peaceful and meditative watching them all undulate.

After the aquarium, we headed to the botanical gardens. They were having a special model train exhibit, and the first two walled gardens had big train tracks set up in them, with very happy men showing off their trains. After admiring the trains, we walked through the Japanese garden, which is a fairly new exhibit. I had never seen it before. We sat for a while on a bench across from a big waterfall and watched the mallards swim around in the pond. Then we went to the heritage farm exhibit. There were two percherons, a breed of draft horse, in a pen. Draft horses are very large, heavy horses that were bred to pull heavy wagons, plows etc. They are work horses. These horses had hooves twice as big as the hooves of a riding horse. I would not want to be stepped on by one of these! They were very peaceful and mellow and had wonderful eyelashes, as you can see.

Then we went through two greenhouses. One was a Mediterranean garden. I really liked these blue flowers, although I have no idea what they are.

The second greenhouse had cacti and succulents. I love the shapes and patterns of these plants. When I took this first shot, I had no idea there was a cricket on the cactus! (I guess you can't really see the cricket when the photo is this small - it's on the left side of the whitish center part.)

This one reminds me of baby owls.

Our last stop was at the large garden scale train exhibit. It was here that we witnessed the attack of the killer frog. In the railroad setup, there is a farm. The farmhouse is sort of around the corner, and the farmers had no idea of the horror that was about to take place at the barn. While the cows chewed their cuds

And the goats lay in the grass

A frightening creature emerged from the stream that runs by the farm. It was a killer bullfrog! Slowly, hop by hop, it approached the barn. Closer

And closer.

Finally, it went inside the barn, and camped out among the miniature hay bales. It was getting late at this point, and we wondered if the frog spends all his nights in the barn, and if not, what possessed him to enter it this time. I guess without frequent visits to the botanical garden, we’ll never know.

Winter Birds

The birds that just pass through on migration seem to be mostly gone, and now our winter resident birds are arriving: hermit thrushes, mountain chickadees, dark eyed juncos, yellow rumped warblers, and several species of sparrows, including a couple of my favorites. And then of course there are year-round residents.

In the last couple of weeks, we've banded more birds. Here are some of my favorites, and some I got particularly good photos of. (Yes, I know that's terrible grammar, and my grandfather would be rolling over in his grave.)

This little guy is a dark eyed junco. We get mostly two types at the Nature Center and nearby areas: grey headed and Oregon. This is a grey headed. The juncos are easy to recognize when they fly because they have white feathers on the outer edges of their tails, which are clearly visible in flight. They make a strange clicking noise. I like their pink beaks.

And this is a Lincoln's sparrow, which is a very pretty little sparrow. This photo really doesn't do it justice. It's very pretty when viewed close up. It's smaller than the white crowned and song sparrows, the other common winter sparrows where I live. Notice the buffy breast band with streaks.
The song sparrow has been one of my favorite sparrows for a long time. When I lived in Rhode Island, I used to hear them all the time when I was walking my dogs. I never really knew what they looked like though - it was rare that I saw them at all, and I didn't own binoculars so even if I saw one, I couldn't get a good view. Here in New Mexico, they come in for the winter. Sometimes, if we are lucky, we get to hear them sing a little bit before they depart for their breeding grounds. We also have a wren that has a song that is very similar to the song sparrow song, just to make things confusing. (And that same wren often has a section to its song that sounds just like the eastern towhee song, just to confuse a formerly eastern birder even more!) This is also not the best photo - it was shot between the heads of a group of very young girl scouts who were crowding around it and I was lucky to get a photo at all.

Oddly enough, the field mark most people use to identify this sparrow, a central breast spot, is not visible at all when you have the bird in the hand.
We have two types of chickadees here, the black capped, and the mountain. The mountain usually spends the summer up in the Sandias, and comes down to the Rio Grande valley in the winter. The black capped lives in the lower areas year round. The mountain chickadee has less bright, clear colors, and has big white eyebrows which remind me of Spock on Star Trek, especially when viewing the bird from the front.

Chickadees are particularly feisty birds to band - I always thought of them as cute little birds, but they bite viciously. One of the first times I was at the banding station, we were discussing how the government should breed giant mutant chickadees to use for interrogations.

This one is a mountain chickadee.
On Saturday, we banded a bird that we don't usually catch in our nets - it's large and usually can blast its way right out.
Isn't he handsome? This is a male red shafted flicker, a very large woodpecker and a year round resident in Albuquerque. You can tell it's a male by the red moustache. These are really pretty birds, especially close up.

Here, you can see how this bird got the name red shafted - the underside of the wings and tail are red, and so are the shafts of the wing and tail feathers. The shaft of the feather is the stiff central part. The flicker has a bobbing flight, like most woodpeckers and nuthatches, and in flight it flashes the red under the wings, and a white patch on the rump. Notice the pointed tail feathers. They are very stiff and the flicker braces them against tree trunks when climbing or balancing.

Here, you can see the pretty red undersides of the wing and tail. Also, the flicker has heart shaped black spots on the fluffy feathers above his tail feathers - those feathers are known as undertail coverts.

And this is why you shouldn't try this at home, LOL. I am glad that isn't my hand in the picture.

Bird Banding

For the past 2 years, I have been involved in a bird banding project at the Rio Grande Nature Center, near my house. I first found out about this project when I went on the bird walks at the nature center every Saturday and Sunday morning. We would stop by the banding station as part of the walk, and the banders would bring out birds to show us. Then one of us would get to release the bird. I have had parrots since 1989, so I'm used to handling birds. But parrots are much bigger birds. I only became interested in wild birds after moving to Albuquerque. Once I had held a warm, soft tiny songbird (who actually look much smaller in the hand than they do when you see them in the field), I was hooked. I wanted to be involved in this project.

Eventually, I got brave enough to ask if I could help. Steve and Nancy Cox, who head up this project, said yes. So I started hanging out at the banding station. My first season, I got involved 2 weekends before the fall banding season ended, and I figured it would be too cold for me when the winter banding started up in January. So I really didn't get to do much. But last year I learned how to record information and remove birds from nets, and eventually I started coming before sunrise to help put the nets up. (When we would put up the nets at the beginning of this season, bats and nighthawks swooped around us - totally cool. I wouldn't miss being there to put the nets up - the nature center is beautiful at sunrise, with a beautiful view of the Sandia mountains. A couple of weeks ago, there was mist on the ponds, and a lone white pelican swam on one of the misty ponds.)

This season, Steve said I should learn how to process birds. That involves measuring the bird for a band, putting the band on, then taking a wing and tail measurement, checking for molting feathers, assessing the fat and muscle mass, determining the age and sex of the bird if possible (some can't be sexed - only the birds know for sure!) and weighing it. He said chipping sparrows would be a good bird for me to start with. But we are having a really slow season, and we didn't get any more chipping sparrows - just tiny, tiny warblers. Warblers are wonderful birds, but also pains - they never sit still when you are birdwatching and trying to identify them, and they weave themselves through the mist nets we use. And they are not good to learn on. So I asked if white crowned sparrows, a very common fall and winter bird here, would be good. He said yes.

Today I finally got my chance - we caught lots of white crowned sparrows. After they had been processed, I got to do all the processing steps for practice. To asses the fat and muscle on the birds, you have to blow on the soft body feathers really hard until they part and show you the skin underneath - fat is visible through the skin. I also found out that they are much easier to hold than warblers. There are two major ways to handle the birds - the bander's grip, where you make a v with your index and middle finger and place the back of the bird's neck in the v and wrap your hand around the bird, and the leg grip. I do the bander's grip just fine, but I hadn't learned to hold the birds by the legs, and when I tried it with warblers, they escaped my grasp so I let them go so they wouldn't hurt themselves. (You have to hold the birds by the upper part of the leg, near the body, and the warblers would always get one leg loose.) The white crowned sparrows were much easier to hold - even when they flapped their wings, I was able to keep their legs secured, and I was able to hold a bird with one hand and take photos of it with the other.

For anyone who hasn't seen a white crowned sparrow, I'm including photos of one - they are a relatively large, chunky sparrow. They sing all winter, which is unusual. The juveniles have brown and tan stripes on their heads instead of black and white, making it very easy to assess the age. This one is an adult.

Among the other birds we had today were a hermit thrush, one of my favorite birds, and a Wilson's warbler, our most common warbler during fall migration. The hermit thrush has a beautiful song. It's closely related to the American Robin.


This Wilson's warbler is a female - the male has a black cap. They are a very bright yellow.

Another booth

Last weekend I had the opportunity to help out at another outreach booth for Hawks Aloft, the non profit I worked for last Spring and Summer.  This booth was in Santa Fe, at the Native American art museum, which is about an hour North of Albuquerque.  No rooming with raptors required.  Kim and I set out at about 8:30.  While I was waiting for her to show up at the Hawks Aloft office, I got to enjoy the first morning of balloon fiesta.  The sky was filled with balloons, and I grabbed my binoculars out of the car so I could get a better look at them.  I got to see some of my favorites: Nellie B the pink elephant, the witch on her broom, the carousel, the giant Darth Vader head (which I never got to see fully inflated last year) and the girl and boy bee, who hold hands.  (It's two separate balloons, which are owned by different people, but they always go up next to each other, and the pilots maneuver them so they look as though they are holding hands.

So anyway, we made it to Santa Fe, and set up our booth.  We had 4 birds, three small to medium birds, and one large female red tailed hawk.  We set the smaller birds up perched on our table, and brought the large hawk out periodically, since she is more high strung and doesn't like wind (which we were experiencing - it was a cool, gusty day).  Here's our booth - don't ask me what I was laughing at, because I have no idea.

At our last booth, our American Kestrel refused to cooperate with my efforts to photograph him. He was in constant motion.  Last weekend, he was much more cooperative, and posed nicely for me, showing off how pretty he is.  American Kestrels are the smallest of the North American falcons.  One of the unusual things about them is that the males are colored differently from the females.  Most of our raptors can't be sexed by their plumage, although there are a couple who can.  The male kestrel has slate blue on his wings, and the female has black bands all down her tail, but the male has a gorgeous rufous tail with a black band near the tip.  The kestrel is always very popular at booths.

We also had another small falcon with us, a female merlin.  I had worked with this bird before, but I don't think I truly appreciated how pretty she is until working this booth.  She isn't flashy like the kestrel, but she is attractive just the same.  She kept stretching and looking as if she was about to fly.  Unfortunately, she is missing a good portion of one wing - it was so badly broken that it had to be amputated.  All of these birds have injuries that make them unable to survive in the wild.

This is a Mississippi Kite.  I have seen these birds in the wild.  The first time I saw one, it almost looked like a gull, but then I noticed the hooked bill, and when it landed, I saw that it had red eyes.  Our kite has ruffly feathers on his head, for some unknown reason, so he looks a bit as though he has a perm.  I didn't get a photo of this, but he kept holding his dark grey wings out and pumping them slowly, and with his red eye, he reminded me of a vampire, or perhaps a vampire bat.  But he's a very mellow, gentle bird.

And finally, the red tailed hawk.  She is blind in one eye and has a wing injury.  Someone shot her while she was flying - I can't imagine how anyone could do that but people do all sorts of things. She is a very impressive bird.  In the second picture, you can see her red tail.

In addition to our raptors, there were reptiles on display, and also this very cool wolf.  We'll be doing a booth at the wolf sanctuary on the 25th.

There were also Native American dancers who performed.  The first dance was an eagle dance, which I thought was very apropos.  There was also a buffalo dance, but I didn't get any photos of that one.

It was a long day, but enjoyable.  Yes, you answer the same questions over and over, but it's great to see people appreciating these beautiful birds.  In case you are wondering why we didn't bring any owls, owls are considered to be bad omens by some Native American tribes - not appropriate birds to bring to a Native American museum.

A walk in the Bosque

It was pitch black  at 6:15 and I just couldn't motivate myself to go for my walk. I can walk in the woods near work on my lunch break. Usually I go with a coworker, and we talk. On this day, he had other lunch plans, so I went by myself. It was wonderful.

As I entered the woods, I could hear a rock squirrel "chirping" repeatedly. Then I heard a bird - a black phoebe, sitting on a branch and bobbing its tail. Then I passed by an open area where the cottonwood trees had burned in a fire. it always makes me sad to see dead cottonwoods, because they are irreplaceable. They grow very fast, but don't live as long as trees like oaks and maples, and when they get old, they start shedding branches. You don't walk in a cottonwood forest in a wind storm! In order for the seeds to germinate, they have to land on flooded ground, and the Rio Grande is not allowed to flood anymore. The last big flood was in the 1940s, so most of the trees are at least 60 years old. I have really come to love these trees. I love the way their leaves dance and shimmer in the wind, and whisper to me.

After I passed the burned area, the sounds of the world began to recede, and it was just me and the woods. Suddenly, a coyote loped across the trail ahead of me. I suppose for someone who grew up here, coyotes may not be exciting, and probably are viewed as vermin, but to me they are mysterious and beautiful. They are like dogs in so many ways, but so wild at the same time. They have amazing eyes - not docile like dogs at all. I have had many amazing encounters with them and it always feels like a gift. This one melted into the trees, and after I'd gone past some bushes, I looked for him and saw him standing between the trees in the distance. We looked at each other for at least 30 seconds, before I continued walking and let him get back to his business.

Then I entered another area along the path where the droning of insects drowned out all traffic noise, no small feat since there's a road along the edge of the woods in this area. Lizards skittered among the leaves, and the path had sunflowers up to my shoulders on either side.

I crossed over an intersecting path, and suddenly I was surrounded by birds. American goldfinches flitted around me. They are no longer in their breeding colors, and are a dull yellowish tan above, but when seen from below they are very yellow. Flickers flew from tree to tree, showing off the red underside of their wings and with white patch on their rumps. One posed for me and showed me his red mustache and spotted breast. I could hear nuthatches, chickadees and bushtits in the trees. I made a mental note to myself to put my compact binoculars in the car - trying to bird watch without binoculars is very frustrating, although I'm pretty good at birding by ear in this particular habitat.

It was so peaceful among the trees, and I had it all to myself. I could still hear civilization in the distance, but I felt like I was in my own little world. It's a feeling I often have, and some of my favorite memories are of moments like this. For instance, my favorite place as a child was a large stone in a field near my grandparent's weekend cottage. I would sit on the stone, and I could hear faint noises from the house, but I was all by myself. it felt very peaceful and safe. And I used to love to sit by a tidal inlet on a bay and watch the tides turn, while listening to the cars crossing the wooden bridge to the beach in the distance. They were all going to sit together on a beach, and I had my own private little paradise that most people in that town didn't know existed, but somehow the noise of the cars on the bridge in the far distance was comforting. And there's a particular place in the woods near my house like that. I walk to it on a bike trail, and then drop down a small hill into the woods, and suddenly everything changes. You can still hear the noises from the bike trail, but when you drop down, you suddenly hear birds singing all around you, and you are in a world of many different shades of green. It feels magical. It was especially magical when there was a nest with three fluffy white hawk chicks there.

Now that walking in the morning is becoming less of a possibility, I need to work at keeping moments like these in my life - they are a big part of what keeps me centered.

I slept with an owl!

Well, actually, I shared a hotel room with 2 owls, a hawk and a falcon. And it was quite an adventure. I had volunteered to help staff a booth for the organization I worked for last summer. The booth was going to be in a town 3 1/2 hours south of where I live. So Kim, the educator, and I drove down the night before, in a van loaded with stuff, including 4 raptors. I must say, raptors travel much more quietly than my parrots do. YOu would hardly have known they were there. When we got to the hotel room, we decided to let three of the birds have some time out of their travel boxes. The great horned owl was placed beside Kim's bed, the Swainson's hawk was outside the bathroom, and the American Kestrel was on the desk. The burrowing owl stayed in his carrier. We offered each bird a thawed dead mouse, and all ate except the great horned owl. She was too busy looking disgruntled and hissing.

I don't know if you have ever had a chance to look at an owl close up, but they are really good at glaring and looking disgruntled. This one kept making herself really tall. Then she would glare and hiss. The "horns" are not ears, they are actually tufts of feathers, and hers were at the angle of the ears of a disgruntled cat. In fact, she reminded me very much of a peevish cat. Near her travel box, there was a wooden cabinet which had a small fridge and microwave in it. Every once in a while, she would hop from her travel box top to the top of the cabinet, with a big thud, and then she'd hop back down. It is a bit disconcerting reading in bed with a very large owl glaring at you. Anyway, eventually we turned out the light, hoping she wouldn't hoot all night. She didn't, but she did thud around a bit, although I slept through that, and she also jumped down to the floor once, which did wake me up, since Kim had to turn on the light and retrieve her.

In the morning, while Kim was in the shower, the owl decided she'd had enough of all this, and jumped down on the floor and started flapping around and crashing into furniture. So I put on the leather glove and tried to get her to perch on my hand. She wanted none of it. She laid her legs flat on the floor, puffed up, spread her wings and hissed repeatedly. I started thinking about how great horned owls can exert 500 lb of pressure per square inch with their grip, and how this owl barely knew me, and I decided I'd just let her stay on the floor and keep her from hurting herself. (All the birds were wearing jesses, which are leather straps and attach to a lead of some sort, so they can't fly away, so I could use the lead to control how far she could go.)

Owls look touchably soft, don't they?  But I wouldn't advise trying it...

The hawk, in contrast to the owl, was perfectly calm all night, and was perched in the same place in the morning as she had been at night. Before we went to bed, she was making really cute little hawk noises that reminded me of some of the noises my favorite pet parrot makes. This particular hawk is extremely mellow, and majestic looking, except when she is begging for mice. She is very interested in eating and would happily binge on mice if allowed.

 

After we boxed the two large birds, we let the burrowing owl, who is a really cute little owl, have the run of the bathroom while we were eating breakfast. Of course, he pooped on the bath mat.

Our booth was a great success. I almost got to be on the radio - there was a radio station there and the dj was going to interview me but he ended up not doing it. He kept getting the species names of the hawks wrong, which was sort of amusing. The birds all behaved well, and we answered the same questions over and over. It was fun talking to people and seeing them appreciate the birds. At about 5, we headed back home.

Here's the hawk with our fundraiser quilt, which I helped to make.  Miraculously, despite the fact that hawks are very good at projectile pooping, the quilt survived unscathed.