2/9/18 and 2/16/18 Field Observation 1: ID and Flight Physiology

I am covering two separate birding excersions as I only managed to actually see a single bird during my first one. I would've liked to do my second walk earlier but I was sick for most of this week.

On February 9th I participated in a WFB 130 bird walk with TAs Alex and Danielle. We met at Aiken at 8 am and walked to the patch of pine trees near the UVM Interfaith Center. It was very cold and there was a good deal of snow on the ground. We could hear lots of birds, notably calls from the Northern Cardinal, American Crow, and Black-capped Chickadee. Of these, the only bird we actually spotted was a single Black-capped Chickadee flitting between two pine trees. It's flight style seemed to be short bursts of fast flaps followed by short, steep descent glides or parabolas.
We then moved further down the path to a second larger thicket of pines closer to Redstone campus. These pines were much taller and many lacked any lower branches, most starting at least 15 feet above the ground. We continued to hear calls from the aformentioned species, as well as that of a Blue Jay. We spotted several squirrel nests but no birds. This area borders some residential property, and we noticed a couple of bird feeders hung in the yards though they were not visited during the time we were there. After about an hour we decided to go back inside.

My second excursion was on February 16th, I was still feeling a bit under the weather but I had some errands to run down by the UMall and I knew that there was some wooded area near there, as well as American Crows and Rock Pigeons that hung around the mall parking lot. I got to the location a little after 3 pm. The weather wasn't great, it was snowing heavily for a while and I didn't see many birds. Once I ran my errands however the sky had cleared up and I saw, as expected, several small flocks of Rock Pigeons and American Crows. The crows were generally solitary, and when they did group together they didn't seem to coordinate their movement in any meaningful way. They tended towards even, powerful flaps with minimal gliding unless heading directly into the wind. Their wings were broad and roughly even in width from base to tip, the primaries splayed out widely, giving an appearence of fingers. The Rock Pigeons on the other hand formed cohesive groups of between 7 and 12 indivuduals. They flapped relativley infrequently, spending most of their time gliding. Their wings had a more streamlined shape than the crows, with less visible separation between the primary feathers. The nearby wooded areas prooved to be relativley barren in terms of bird activity at the time, possibly due to the intermittent snow and rain.

Posted on February 16, 2018 10:01 PM by rwhennes