Why Can't The Weather Be Worse? and Other Meteorological Musings

North Carolina has pretty much had a perfect year in terms of weather. Sure, we had a few days that didn't get above freezing back in January, but overall it's been comfortable. The summer wasn't hot, we got more than enough rain, and the sunshine was almost always out. No droughts, no severe weather. Just about perfect. Unless you're a birder.

As a Piedmont-bound avian enthusiast, I always hope for two things: hurricanes and droughts. This is backwards. This is wrong. This might make me a terrible person. But it's the truth. I have yet to experience real hurricane birding. Instead, I find myself salivating over the post-Fran and Ernesto lists from several years ago. I thought I would finally get my chance this year, as Arthur barreled toward the coast. But the bastard curved away, sparing the coast from damage but also sparing my list from a bird or two. I scoped the ocean for hours, and all I got was a shearwater sp.

I thought this storm, Hurricane Arthur, would be my chance. It wasn't.

I'll be honest - I'm an obsessive county lister. It's a fact. And nothing would improve my Wake County list (my home county, also where Raleigh is for any out-of-staters) more than a few big mudflats and a strong tropical cyclone. This list's rate of expansion has ground to a near halt, save for the occasional fall warbler. Bring on the storm-petrels, the Pterodromas, the sooty terns; the American Golden-Plovers, the Ruffs, the phalaropes. I need them.

Wilson's Storm-Petrel is a bird I'd love to add to my Wake County list some day. But I can't in this perfect weather.

This brings me to my second gripe with this weather - the rain. Every rain shower keeps some shorebirdy mudflat underwater. In my pre-birding days, back in elementary school, it seemed like every year was a drought. The mudflats, I hear, were nothing short of epic. Even last year saw a dry enough spell to produce two Baird's Sandpipers at Lake Crabtree's ephemeral mud island. But this year, it's rained too damn much. The reservoirs are more than full, making city officials happier than Pine Siskins at a thistle feeder, but leaving me shorebirdless. Is it too much to ask for a dry spell each Fall Migration for my plovers and sandpipers to show up? I don't think so.

Why has the weather been simultaneously great and terrible this year? I blame El Niño, the famed climatic event centered around the Eastern Pacific. This giant pool of hot water off the Peruvian coastline gives the Pacific jet stream a straight trajectory across the North American continent. This shears and pushes away any hurricanes trying to form in the Atlantic, and brings above-average rainfall to the southern half of the country. How annoying.  It might make West Coast birding a little more exciting, but it certainly does nothing to help out North Carolina birders like me.

Pacific Jet Stream under El Niño conditions.

Now let's just hope for a brutal winter, which the four-lobed Polar jet stream should give us. I could go for some nice waterfowl right about now.

NFCs- An Expert's Perspective, from a Very Special Guest

Nocturnal Flight Calls: the most accurate and conclusive method of identifying species of thrush, warbler, sparrow, rail, etc. during migration, or any time of year, for that matter. Through many years of intensive research, Dr. N. Seeper has formulated a multitude of theories associated with Nocturnal Flight Calls. Read his in-depth account here, a Birder's Conundrum special guest! Note: We here at TBC do not condone the information presented here, nor do we agree with it.

Dear birders: I am here to clear something up. I have been slighted, intimidated, and belittled by some members of the birding community, and some of these members are professional people. I will have you know that I can be considered a true expert due to my prestigious education as a former student athlete at UNC-Chapel Hill. I know very little of NFC. But in my 18 years of living with NFC, I have learned their ways. Let me teach you all about NFC - so here, eat this!

Theory One: The Thrushold means you got a thrush!

Formerly known as the Thrushhold, the AOU Committee on Words recently voted to take out the second "h" saying that it was "unnecessary" and that it "made the word look made-up." Anyway, The Thrushold is the most important theory that I have developed. After poring over hours and hours of spectrograms, I have deduced that there is a threshold of sorts delineating thrushes from other migrants. The dark band of white noise located between 4 and 5 kHz acts as the dividing line between all thrush NFCs and all non-thrush NFCs. To put this into one definitive statement: If a call lies beneath the 4-5 kHz thrushold, then it is a thrush, if it lies above the thrushold, then it is not a thrush and is probably a warbler, sparrow, heron, trogon, owl, etc. 

Note the dark thrushold.

Theory Two: Light Rain means a good night for calls!
View the map below. Those clusters of green are a smattering of light showers picked up by the Doppler radar. This amount of light rain directly corresponds with heavy migration and, therefore, good flight calls. However, this is not only true during migration. Any time there is light rain, there will be beautiful migration and abundant flight calls, even if the rain occurs in February. It seems that much of this rain (rather mysteriously, I might add) does not make it to the ground, and the stars are even visible! It is a strange effect that I have a hard time explaining.

See all this rain? This shows that there was a good flight on 10/5/14.

Theory Three: Mourning Flight - the "Experts" have it all wrong!
If you are an "educated" birder, you may read about the so-called Mourning Flight from bird-rich places such as Cape May. These experts are mistaken, however.  The only species I have seen perform true Mourning Flight is Zenaida macroura, the Mourning Dove. After all, this is the very reason it is called Mourning Flight!  I was walking through a field mid-February at dawn, when a hundred or so Mourning Doves flushed from the ground. It was spectacular to actually witness Mourning Flight first hand, and is a memory that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

Exemplary Mourning Flight as seen in Southern Indiana.
(photo credit: almostdaily news)

P.S. I definitely recommend purchasing The Guide to the Common Towhees of the Carolinas and Virginia - I love that book! I use it for all of my towhsss identification problems when I visit NC!

Graph - Birdiness vs. Social Acceptability

Birders aren't known for being cool.  This is partially due to the inherently obsessive nature of our hobby, but also because of the, um, obscure places we tend to visit.  When was the last time your neighbor dropped by the local waste treatment plant just for the hell of it?  Never.  Because they are normal.

(Click to enlarge)

Our high-tech graphics department produced this precise visual representing several popular destinations, comparing social acceptability among non-birders to the locale's birdiness per acre.  It is generally frowned upon to stare into someone else's backyard with binoculars, but this awkward endeavor can yield some great birds.  In the unlikely event a birder is concerned about their "coolness", this graph can help them weigh the worth of each location before committing social suicide.

United States of Birds - All-time High Counts

Have you ever witnessed a mega-flock of birds?  Perhaps it was thousands of Red-winged Blackbirds undulating above a field, or Snow Geese congregating before a long migration.  eBird has a feature where users can observe the all-time high counts of all species within a given state.  We used this feature to find what species had been seen in the highest numbers in that state at one point in time.  For example, the report of 500,000 Sooty Shearwaters from Oregon was the largest flock of any species ever seen there (according to eBird data, which ranges from 1823-2014).  We did this for each state and plotted the species on a map using our revolutionary Birder's Conundrum mapmaking software:

Clearly, a few states have had vast flocks of some awesome birds.  Crested Auklets in Alaska, Sooty Shearwaters in the Northwest, and Red-necked Phalaropes in Maine.  Other, more unfortunate states have shitty birds like Starlings (sorry Massachusetts and Kentucky, but really?) or the Brown-headed Cowbirds in Lousiana.  In fact, the all-time high count of any species in the entire country belongs to those that Cajun flock of cowbirds.  It's probably no surprise that many of the more southerly states are represented by the rather ubiquitous Red-winged Blackbird, as many birders in the Southeast probably come across a sizable flock of these icterids at some point each year.  Snow Geese, with their habit to conglomerate en masse, also made quite a showing, filling 6 of the states.

Note: We are not saying that these counts are necessarily accurate, we are just reporting what is out there.

The full run-down:

Red-winged Blackbird (12 states)
Arkansas- 1,000,000
California- 1,001,000
Colorado- 75,000
Delaware- 900,000
Georgia- 2,000,000
Illinois- 1,080,000
Kansas- 1,600,000
Mississippi- 1,000,000
Missouri- 7,200,000
North Carolina- 1,000,000
Pennsylvania- 1,000,000
Texas- 1,000,000

Snow Goose (6 states)
Montana- 300,000
Nebraska- 900,000
New Mexico- 50,000
New York- 1,000,000
South Dakota- 400,000
Vermont- 44,000

Common Grackle (4 states)
Indiana- 750,000
Maryland- 502,000
New Hampshire- 343,000
Virginia- 1,500,000

Purple Martin (3 states)
South Carolina- 800,000
Tennessee- 1,000,000
West Virginia- 40,000

American Coot (3 states)
Alabama- 111,750
Nevada- 75,000
Wyoming- 8,000

American Robin (3 states)
Florida- 5,000,075
New Jersey- 250,000
Oklahoma- 460,000

European Starling (2 states)
Kentucky- 2,500,000
Massachusetts- 2,000,000

Tree Swallow (2 states)
Arizona- 1,200,000
Connecticut- 1,000,000

Sooty Shearwater (2 states)
Oregon- 500,000
Washington- 500,000

Canvasback (2 states)
Iowa- 330,055
Minnesota- 93,505

Franklin's Gull (1 state)
North Dakota- 340,000

Eared Grebe (1 state)
Utah- 500,000

Mallard (1 state)
Idaho- 100,000

Crested Auklet (1 state)
Alaska- 2,000,000

Wedge-tailed Shearwater (1 state)
Hawaii- 50,000

Red-necked Phalarope (1 state)
Maine- 200,000

Brown-headed Cowbird (1 state)
Louisiana- 76,000,000 (<--What?!)

Canada Goose (1 state)
Rhode Island- 12,000

Double-crested Cormorant (1 state)
Wisconsin- 300,000

Broad-winged Hawk (1 state)
Michigan- 255,641

American Crow (1 state)
Ohio- 500,000

The Bird Color Conundrum - 17 Shades of Gray

We already covered the colors that span the gap between red and brown - so now we can move on to the equally perplexing realm of the grayscale.  Many birds have some sort of coloration between white and black - and from the Slaty-tailed Trogon to the Snowy Egret, these colors can be baffling to the average observer.  This post, organized from lightest to darkest, should help quell your worries about this color conundrum:

White - The presence of all color - everything is being reflected back into your eyes.
Example: White-throated Sparrow, White Ibis, White-eared Ground-Sparrow

Snowy - This color is so ridiculously close to white it shouldn't even exist.  But "Snowy Owl" sounds a hell of a lot cooler than "White Owl", so we'll keep it.

Example: Snowy Owl, Snowy Cotinga, Snowy Egret, Snowy Plover

Snowy Owl - Dare County, NC

Ivory - The color of ivory, a yellowish off-white - it's the stuff they killed elephants for, and why there are all those Europeans hanging out in Africa in Heart of Darkness.
Example: Ivory Gull

Ash - The color of ash - like the bottom of the fire pit at the campground.  A light, washed-out gray.

Example: Ash-throated Flycatcher

Ash-throated Flycatcher - Dare County, NC (same day as the Snowy Owl above, I might add!)

Ashy - Almost the color of ash.  Almost.

Example: Ashy-headed Greenlet

Glaucous - In Latin, glaucus means blue-gray.  In English, it's basically a light gray with a slightly bluish tone.

Example: Glaucous Gull, Glaucous-winged Gull

Cinereous - Quite similar to ash, but slightly darker and tinged with brown.  Cinis means "ashes" in Latin.

Example: Cinereous Tinamou, Cinereous Finch

Grayish - Another one of those "-ish" suffixes.  It's pretty much gray...

Example: Grayish Saltator

Gray - Just saying "gray" can be a bit vague - but specifically, it is the exact halfway point between black and white.
Example: Gray Catbird, Gray Gull, Gray Flycatcher, Gray Hawk

Silver - Ag. The color of the element. A shining, sparkling, gray...but on birds it's really just gray.
Example: Silver-breasted Broadbill, Silver Oriole, Silver-beaked Tanager

Dusky - The color of the sky as the last wisps of sunlight recede o'er the horizon. Dark gray.
Example: Dusky Flycatcher

Sooty - The stuff that collects on the inside of chimneys and covers the living room carpet every Christmas morning. The color of burned carbon.
Example: Sooty Tern, Sooty Shearwater

Slate - One of my favorite colors - a dark gray, with a bluish tinge (like the metamorphic rock).  Basically a much darker version of glaucous.
Example: Slate-throated Redstart

Slate-throated Redstart - Santa Elena, Costa Rica

Slaty - Almost the color of slate.  Almost.  It seems like this is the form of "slate" used to describe birds more frequently, but I may be wrong.
Example: Slaty-backed Gull, Slaty Antwren, Slaty-tailed Trogon

Plumbeous -  Lead-colored. Like Ferruginous, this color comes from the latin name of the element.
Example: Plumbeous Vireo

Coal - The color of the fossil fuel West Virginians and Tea Party-ers love so much.  Almost black, like how snowy is almost white.

Example: Coal-crested Finch

Black - The absence of color.  No light is reflected back.  Everyone knows this.
Example: Great Black-backed Gull, Black-cheeked Woodpecker, Common Black-Hawk, Melodious Blackbird

Black-cheeked Woodpecker - La Selva, Costa Rica