2004-5 PHOTOS PAGE 4
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A few more winter residents - Belted Kingfishers show up in late summer, but several remain to winter on the Flow-way. They are notoriously cautious - this one perched about 20-30 yards from me while I was playing a screech owl tape to attract passerines. Not close enough for a frame-filling portrait, but the best I've been able to get to date. In the middle is a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker - this bird is an immature bird that doesn't yet have the bright red throat or forehead patches the adults acquire. They are also quite shy and easily overlooked - I find them by call as often as by sight. On the right is yet another variant on the male Common Yellowthroat just coming into adult plumage. Getting the full adult males out into the open like this is an order of magnitude more difficult.
The same Common Yellowthroat in a more acrobatic posture. On the right is a Song Sparrow - these birds are present in small numbers throughout the winter, but like most of the sparrows, they prefer to stay hidden in deep brush. Luckily, their chip notes are distinctive.
A trio of Orange-crowned Warbler shots - as is typical with this species, the orange-crown is rarely seen except when the birds are displaying to one another. I've seen it perhaps 5 times. This warbler illustrates one of the great conundrums of bird photography; you never know when you are going to get a good opportunity to photograph a particular species. I'm completing my 5th year of surveying and photographing birds at Emeralda, and I see a few Orange-crowned Warblers nearly every week between late October and mid-March or so. Yet before this fall, I've never had more than a marginal opportunity to photograph them. Though they will often approach a screech owl tape, sometimes quite near, they are furtive, and usually sneak in for one brief approach and then move away. They rarely stop moving. So though I have a half-dozen or so shots of this species from previous winters, they are all mediocre or worse. This fall I've already had at least 6 or 7 great opportunities to photograph this species (not all of which resulted in successful shots - that's the way bird photography works). Why are they being so cooperative all of a sudden? You tell me.
That's another Blue-gray Gnatcatcher on the right below. They have been cooperative and obliging since the day I began this project.
Three of the birds above all show somewhat similar patterns of population dynamics in fall and winter. White-eyed Vireos (above left) are tremendously abundant in fall migration, but drop off dramatically in early winter. Whether this reflects real differences in number or differences in behavior, I'm not sure, but when I do see them in winter they seem very responsive to screech owl recordings, so I suspect the population size drops dramatically in winter. It's not unusual to see or hear several dozen per day in migration, but some winter days I have to really work to get one or two. The same is true of Gray Catbirds (above right) - these birds sometimes number over a hundred per census during their peak abundance in September and October. For most of the winter, getting more than a half dozen per census is unusual. Finally, the Palm Warblers (below, left) show a somewhat similar pattern, though they usually remain the most abundant of the three during the winter. In most winters, their numbers are exceeded in winter by the numbers of Yellow-rumped Warblers, but in the past two winters, Palms have often the been the most abundant warbler on many winter censuses. This seems to be mostly due to decreases in the numbers of Yellow-rumps in many areas of my survey route during the past couple of winters.
The Yellow-bellied Sapsucker (below, right) is a regular winter resident that I find in low numbers. This winter seems to be a good year for them - most winters I see 1 or 2 birds along my route, but this winter I have been regularly spotting 4-6. This bird is the same individual as in the photo at the top, taken several weeks later. He is always in the same small patch of willows every morning when I get to this spot. You can see sap flowing out of some of the drill holes on this branch from which the bird is hanging.
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