Eno's Pond Park 12/12--Townsend's Warbler

© Steve Weiss
Many thanks for permission to use. 

For the third time in an as many weeks, I went down to Eno's Pond Park, a relatively obscure park in Forked River where the front end is a county park and the back part a section of Forsythe NWR. It is the front part, a lawn and paved path just before the woods, where 2 Townsend's Warblers have been hanging out, one a male and the other either an immature male or a female (they look similar).  The normal range for these birds is out west. On Sunday, I'd spent 4 hours walking around this very small park in intermittent rain and drizzle looking for either one of these birds without any luck, although I did see my first Purple Finches of the year, as well as a very late Osprey & Baltimore Oriole. When I arrived, I met a photographer/birder I know who'd seen the male around a half hour before. He pointed out the area, maybe half a football field away. I resigned myself to staring into cedars and waiting. 

At least on Sunday there were a lot of birds to sort through including dozens of Yellow-rumped Warblers, each of which had to be glassed as one of them could actually be the Townsend's. Today's activity was not nearly as lively. Other birders and photographers appeared, and I paced back and forth with them for about an hour, which is stretching the limits of my patience. The Osprey flew overhead, so I had one rare bird to report, but then I decided to go toward the entrance of the park where I'd spent most of Sunday, just to find some birds, tired as I was at staring at cedar trees. When I got toward the parking lot, Steve showed up, so I walked back through the lawn with him, hoping my luck would change. But I couldn't bear just standing there anymore, so the wacky idea of actually walking into the cedar grove occurred to me. I didn't walk in more than 20 feet when I saw and heard some action in the trees--yellow-rumps, naturally, as well as a titmouse chattering. I looked at the 5 or 6 yellow-rump above me when one of them, in a skinny cedar was not a yellow-rump but, finally, the male Townsend's with its very distinct black mask and heavy barring on the flanks. I called for the group, but the bird moved off, leaving in its wake a Blue-headed Vireo which everyone else managed to see but all I got was a non-countable silhouette for a brief second. 

I hate when, on rare occasions, I'm the only one to spot the bird. Even though I'm positive of my sighting, I still feel both like a phony and undeservedly lucky, so I was happy & relieved when after about another half hour (I just couldn't bring myself to leave), Steve spotted the warbler high up in some cedars, on the left side of the path that goes into the wooded section of the park. It wasn't too far away from where I'd made my initial sighting and in the direction that both the Townsend's and vireo had gone. Steve again saw the vireo and Larry again missed it, but we all did get much better, if brief looks, at the Townsend's. Steve kindly provided the photograph above, since I don't do well at multi-tasking. My camera is way too slow to photograph a flitting warbling at a distance.

I thought this was just a county lifer and state year bird, assuming that I'd seen the species on our Oregon trip but it turns out that while I did have a have a few western warblers on the trip, I missed Townsend's a couple of times, so this turned out to be year bird too. 

It's a Townsend's Warbler for the time being, but since the American Ornithological Society has resolved to rename all "eponymous species" this bird will eventually have a new "common" name. Ostensibly, the rationale is that an eponymous common name tells you nothing about the species whereas something like "Black-and-white Warbler" does, but that is a very thin reed since it is hard to see the red belly of a Red-bellied Woodpecker, virtually no one has ever seen the orange crown of an Orange-crowned Warbler, and many, many species have place names that are wildly irrelevant to the bird like Cape May Warbler, Philadelphia Vireo, or Carolina Wren.  The real reason is "inclusiveness" because a lot of these birds have been named after people whose lives we don't approve of anymore. (Townsend, from what I can tell, led a relatively blameless and impoverished life--although he did study to be a dentist so I can imagine someone hating him for that--but he never practiced.) It is hard for me to imagine someone developing an aversion to birding because of the names of birds--bird names are just sounds after a while--it's hard enough to distinguish a Cooper's Hawk from a Sharp-shinned without worrying about who Cooper was. 

So I was wondering today what the Townsend's new name might be. Black-masked Warbler? Black-striped Yellow Warbler? Sometimes the binomial scientific names are descriptions of the bird, but in this case it is no help since the scientific name for Townsend's Warbler is Setophaga townsendii. And there's the irony. Since the real name is the binomial, and since the binomial is sacrosanct, the birds will still retain their bad guy eponyms in many cases. 

Example: 

McCown's Longspur. McCown was a confederate officer and Native American killer who happened to come upon this species in the west while taking a break from his genocidal activities and had it named for him. Recently the name was changed to the descriptive Thick-billed Longspur. Good, it does have a very heavy beak. However, the binomial scientific name: Rhynchophanes mccownii. If you bother to translate that into English it means McCown's Thick-billed Longspur. The name isn't really changed at all. So if this isn't patronizing, I don't know what is--what the AOS is essentially saying is--get interested in birds, but don't study them too hard, or you might find how what they're really called. 

Barnegat Light SP 12/9--King Eider

Today I was planning on looking for birds I like--specifically Common Goldeneye on LBI--instead of birds I "need" for the year. Then last night my buddy Bob Auster called and suggested a birding outing, so we settled on Barnegat Light SP because we both "needed" a duck that had been reported there for the last few days. I figured Bob who probably has sharper eyes than me and definitely more patience would be able to pick out the oxymoronic hen King Eider that was supposedly in with a raft of Common Eiders at the end of the jetty.

Long-tailed Duck, Barnegat Light.

The language-loving Larry cringes every time the birding Larry has to say something like "hen King Eider" or "male swamphen," or (and this would be extremely hypothetical) "female Emperor Penguin." No one was happier when Common Moorhen got changed back to Common Gallinule, because, as I used to tediously point out, there are no moors in North America and half the birds aren't hens. And when an old birder tells me that he prefers "Oldsquaw" to Long-tailed Duck I begin to mutter very unpleasantly about casual racism and again about how half of them aren't squaws anyway.

So, with all that said and the fact that a hen Somateria spectabilis is not a particularly interesting bird to look at, being a medium-sized brown duck, I wasn't inclined to freeze my butt off looking for one by myself, but two of us looking might be fun. It was, kind of, and, ironically, I found the bird first, bobbing on the north end of the jetty, as advertised with a huge flock of eiders that also had mixture of both Black and Surf Scoters. Neither Bob or I was inclined to risk life, limb, and optics by walking out on the jetty out to the where the flock was--that's what scopes are for. We climbed up on the jetty at a spot where the sand had built up enough to make getting up there seem not too dangerous, but no way were we going rock-hopping. Of course, this means no photographs of the birds but the way it was bobbing in the waves and slipping out of sight, I don't know if even getting a 1000 feet closer would have helped.

Harlequin Ducks, Bayview Marina

Having got my "tick" plus all the usual birds you'd expect to see at and around the jetty except for Purple Sandpiper, making it two times this month I've missed it, we left the park and hit the usual spots along the bay. Our first stop, the Bayview Marina had a surprise. Bob pointed out two drake Harlequin Ducks (Histrionicus histrionicus) floating along between the piers. I can't think of a time that I've seen Harlequins in calm water--they're always diving very close to rocks or jetties somewhere.

We worked our way down to Sunset Park in Harvey Cedars and brought out the scopes to scan the big flocks of Buffleheads in the bay. And, as they reliably but mysteriously almost always are, there were Common Goldeneyes to be found. Why this little section of the bay gets goldeneyes while if you scan a mile north or south, you won't find them, is what makes birding so "interesting."

We built up a decent little winter list with some "quality" sightings. Our list for Barnegat Light SP will suffice:
26 species
Brant 25
King Eider 1 Continuing hen
Common Eider 200
Harlequin Duck 10
Surf Scoter 5
White-winged Scoter 1 Close in to shore
Black Scoter 20
Long-tailed Duck 75 A number of flocks and some very close in.
Bufflehead 10
Red-breasted Merganser 1
Rock Pigeon 9
Ruddy Turnstone 15
Sanderling 20
Dunlin 5
Ring-billed Gull 1
Herring Gull 200
Great Black-backed Gull 25
Red-throated Loon 2 One very close to shore
Common Loon 3
Great Cormorant 1
American Crow 6
Northern Mockingbird 1
European Starling 100
Dark-eyed Junco 2
Yellow-rumped Warbler 3
House Sparrow 10

Red-throated Loon, Barnegat Light SP

Armchair Birds

California Scrub-Jay, Bodega Bay, California
Photo: Shari Zirlin

Every summer the American Ornithologist Union (AOU) revises its checklist, changing the taxonomical order of birds, revising nomenclature, placing birds or replacing birds in different families, but most importantly, to listers, splitting and lumping species.

Since "species" is a slippery definition, it isn't often clear if birds that look very much alike are sub-species of one another or actually different species altogether, or, the opposite, if birds that look different are actually the same species. A the dictionary definition of species, an animal that mates with another of the same species to produce offspring that in turn are able to reproduce, isn't really applicable in many cases. Many birds hybridize and their progeny are capable of reproduction--otherwise there wouldn't be any backcrosses to drive birders nuts. Every dabbling duck you see probably has some Mallard in it. With DNA now playing the major role in determining what is and isn't a species, and with lots of Ph. D candidates looking for a thesis, every year produces "new" species and every year birds get lost. The cool thing is to get an "armchair bird" on your list, one where a bird you have already seen suddenly becomes a different species, which is why it pays to pay attention to sub-species.

I haven't traveled enough to have this happen to me very often. The only example I can think of up 'til this year  is whip-poor-will. When we first heard the Eastern Whip-poor-will in our backyard I was excited because I thought it was a new state bird. We'd heard whip-poor-will in Arizona, years before. But when I went to enter the bird in eBird I saw that sometime since our trip to Arizona, whip-poor-wills in the west had become Mexican Whip-poor-wills, so not only was the whip whooping away dementedly in our backyard a state bird, it was also a lifer.

So I was pleased to read, this summer, that the Western Scrub-Jays we had seen in California and the Western Scrub-Jays we had seen in New Mexico, were, based on arcane DNA analysis, actually two species, the former California Scrub-Jay and the latter Woodhouse's Scrub-Jay. Nice, I thought, number 778 on the list.

American Coot, Clove Lakes Park, Staten Island

But the AOU giveth and the AOU taketh away. Looking at my list after the taxonomical changes had been made by eBird (an arduous 3 day process to change literally millions of records) I saw that my life list total hadn't risen by one. Further investigation into the "losses" section of the AOU list, I was dismayed to find that the experts had determined the Caribbean Coots we'd seen many times in Puerto Rico were nothing but American Coots with white (instead of red) facial shields.

And for all I (or according to one theory I've read, ornithologists) know, the Eurasian Coots we saw in France are also the same species but since they don't migrate and the populations are isolated from one another we'll never know if they could mate with it each other in the wild. Isolation supposedly leads to speciation--but not necessarily.

So my life list stays at 777--I'm lucky it's that number because there was a lot of speculation that Hoary Redpoll was just a sub-species of Common Redpoll (their DNA supposedly matches in the high 90's) and would be lumped. Considering that I went to Minnesota and froze my ass off to get that bird it would be a big disappointment to find out that it was "just" a Common Redpoll in the end.