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Wildcat Canyon Birding: Early August

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Hermit Warbler

I’ve always enjoyed sharing my love of birds and nature, whether with students in the classroom, field techs on a research trip, or strangers I might meet on the trail. In fact, this was a big reason why I started my photography business. Since I haven’t been able to do this much in person this year, I’ve started to write up some short nuggets to share online. These have been focused on Wildcat Canyon (my local open space), and I’ve been posting versions of these on our Nextdoor network so I can reach neighbors who have ready access to the park. So far the feedback has been really positive and I’ve gotten a lot of messages of thanks along with questions and observations shared.

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SUMMER BIRDS IN WILDCAT CANYON PARK. With the hills covered in beaten down brown grass, August may not seem like an interesting time to look for birds, but it is! What’s going on in the park these days? I’ve put together a few highlights from my own experience walking there, with some help from a citizen science platform called eBird. For example, eBird can summarize the seasonal occurrence of all the birds that have been reported in Wildcat Canyon.

https://ebird.org/barchart?r=L388820&yr=all&m=

What have you been seeing? YOUNGSTERS: Most birds have already finished their nesting season, but family life for many species extends once the nest is empty. Look for groups of Dark-eyed Juncos and Spotted Towhees with the fledglings still showing streaky plumage. Young crows and ravens sound like spoiled brats as they give their higher nasal begging calls. Keep your eye on the ridges for young red-tailed hawks taking advantage of the updraft to look for rodents on the slopes below. In past years I’ve seen more than a dozen from one spot! And our fledgling Great-horned Owls should still be around somewhere!

FALL MIGRATION BEGINS: It’s still a bit early for many of the migrating songbirds, but it’s never too soon to start looking for birds making their way to or through the Bay Area in the fall. I’ve seen a few notices of Western Tanagers already making their way south, including one along McBryde Avenue near the park. These are a great bird to find since they do only pause here in the East Bay Hills during migration. Plus they are gorgeous! Try to get a good look at their beaks to make sure you can separate them from the similarly-sized Black-headed Grosbeak or Hooded/Bullock’s Orioles. For a tougher “migration challenge” in the park, look for another bird that only visits briefly in the spring and fall, the Hermit Warbler. I’ve only seen these little yellow-faced beauties a few times.

WHO’S LEAVING. Some of our summer breeders have left or will leave by the end of August. For example, Ash-throated Flycatchers and our cavity-nesting Tree and Violet-green Swallows, common sights throughout the spring, will be much harder to find by Labor Day. Also, get your last looks at Lazuil Bunting if you can find some, although they are more easily found in the spring when their cheerful song rings out from the mustard and willows.

OUTSIDE THE PARK: Actually, the best migrations going on right now are not in the hills and woodlands. Instead, check along the bay, coast, or other spots where there’s lots of mud or water. I’m talking about Shorebirds! Many species of sandpipers, plovers, and their relatives breed well to the north. Many species have already started their southward migration. Often the adults leave the breeding grounds first, and the fledglings will leave a little later. Shorebirds are one of the trickiest groups of birds to master, and you’ll benefit from good optics like spotting scopes to see more of the fine detail. Even if sorting through field guides to identify shorebirds isn’t (yet) your cup of tea, this is still a great time to appreciate shorebirds in the Bay Area. Not only are some of the adults still in their breeding plumage, but the young may be sporting crisp colorful new feathers as well.

Good birding!

On owls: the balance between love and obsession

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Owlet takes flight

Reposting another essay I wrote this year for Golden Gate Audubon. There haven’t been a lot of things to celebrate in 2020, but one highlight has been in finding two Great Horned Owl families in Wildcat Canyon, my local open space. In this piece I talk a bit about taking a moment to evaluate my impact on the birds, in light of the potential negative effects that too much attention can have on these birds. The essay features lots of my photographs as well!

Essay is here, from August 2020.

On Covid and Research

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Wilson's Warbler

It’s apparently been ages since I’ve updated my site here! I’ll share an essay I wrote this spring that was published by the Golden Gate Audubon Society, a large local chapter of the national conservation organization. Given the start of the Covid closures, GGAS put out a call to members for essays on their experience with birds and birding during the shelter-in-place regulations that we still, more or less, are facing here in Northern California. Many people wrote about the opportunities of focusing on their local birds, or the importance of connecting with nature during challenging times. My thoughts turned to the hurdles my colleagues in the sciences would be facing.

Essay is here, from April 2020: When Birds Are More Than A Hobby.

Congrats Anna on AmNat Paper

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Dr. Anna Perry

A hearty congratulations to Anna Perry, former graduate student in Gail’s lab, for finally seeing the publication of her first major paper from her dissertation.  Check out the July American Naturalist to see the paper and for links to the supplementary materials.

This project started with questions about using the 2nd generation sage-grouse robots to study how males respond to signals of interest or disinterest from females. Our first robot experiments employed a less dynamic robot and we mainly adjusted the proximity to males rather than the robot’s posture or movements. The newer robots that Gail developed with several engineers (Jose Mojica, Scott McKibben, and Jonathan Tran) were more mobile and could simulate pecking at the ground as well as looking around. We anticipated that these simulated behaviors would trick males into thinking we

The journey of this paper started with Anna planning and supervising a series of experiments on the sage-grouse leks in Wyoming, trying test males repeatedly with the robot expressing more or less interested behavior. She also had to design a study to record the behavior of live female sage-grouse to ensure that the movements we had the robot carry out actually relate to live females (this will be a second paper hopefully coming out soon). But in spite of all the work to conduct these studies in the field, and to work with numerous UC Davis undergraduates in the lab to collect data from the resulting video tapes, this turned out to be the quick part of the project.

Anna realized that to really answer questions about how hard a male was willing to work, she needed to rethink how we talk about the sequence of displays that a male sage-grouse performs on the lek. Rather than simply summarizing numbers of struts or simple rates or averages, Anna worked with Richard McElreath and Dave Harris to formulate these bouts of behavior as sequences with probabilities of either continuing in a high-intensity bout or transitioning out of a bout into a rest period (I’m somewhat simplifying here). To write the code to analyze the sage-grouse display data, as well set up simulated data sets to show this technique offer tangible advantages to traditional display metrics, took several additional years! Yes, years!

The result of all this is a published product that is among the most careful and meticulous I’ve ever been a part of. Way to go Anna!

Behind the Scenes: Eclipse Photos

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Standing victoriously next to my camera set-up

I was going to just write a sentence or two about actually taking the photos, but when this part of the story stretched to multiple pages, I realized it deserved it’s own post. Warning: possibly of interest only to would-be camera nerds.  This is pitched at a fairly basic level. Eventually I plan to edit in some links to external articles from at the end of this post. The story of my eclipse trip can be found in the previous post, and a flickr album with more photos can be viewed here.

 

My main goal was to get a photo of the sun’s corona at totality along with some photos of the partial eclipse. I wasn’t trying to make one of those neat composite images showing the entire progression of the eclipse. Since I didn’t know what it was going to look like at the park until I got there, I didn’t plan on doing anything wide-angle to capture the eclipse and the landscape. No video. Just the money shot. Simplifying was also important since I had to fly from the west coast and didn’t want to bring everything I own.

Camera: I went with my older DSLR camera (Canon 60D) over my newer camera. Although in most ways inferior, the 60D had one important advantage- a flip-out, fully adjustable LCD screen. In testing the week before, I found this amazingly helpful when trying to aim and focus when pointing almost vertically at the mid-day sun.

Lens: For the lens, I used my oft-neglected Canon 400mm f/5.6. I usually leave this at home for wildlife because I have other lenses that do the “long lens” job as well or better. But this is a really sharp lens, and since I was going use a tripod I thought the lack of image stabilization wouldn’t hurt me. Additionally, being a fixed focal length lens rather than a zoom might actually be an advantage. There’s something called “zoom creep” or “lens creep”- heavy zoom lenses can inadvertently zoom in or out if pointed much above or below the horizon due to the weight of the lens itself. Again, not often a big issue for photographing wildlife that’s in front of you, but when pointing up at the sky for long periods of time, I thought it could lead to problems.

Filter: To shoot the eclipse before and after totality, I purchased a 77mm solar filter from StarGuy. This is not a cheap filter (especially for being basically a small swatch of mylar in a filter ring), and if you enjoy doing things on the cheap you can probably search the internet for cheaper solutions to not frying your camera sensor.  Luckily the 400mm lens has a 77mm filter thread as do several other of my heavy-rotation lenses. A quick side note about filters: if you have lenses of different diameters and want to use a filter on all of them- you can buy for the larger size and buy “step-down” rings to get it to screw into the smaller one.

Tripod, etc. Even with a decent tripod and tripod head (I used my Gimball head since it’s made for bigger lenses and a little easier to control than a ballhead and easier to point vertically than the panhead I used for my spotting scope), a 400mm lens will show a lot of shake. I hung my backpack off my tripod to further minimize shake through the tripod. I used both a wired remote and the 2-second timer feature so I could capture the image after the vibrations of physically touching the camera had dampened. I also attempted keep the shutter speed as high as possible by shooting at relatively high ISO settings (I think 800-1600 ISO). Although this is an older sensor and high ISO noise can be an issue, I figured that I could fix some of the sensor noise on the computer. It’s much harder to fix an image that is blurry due to shake or motion during too long of an exposure.

I manually focused using the LCD (i.e. “Live View”) rather than the optical viewfinder- in fact I never used the optical viewfinder once it was on the tripod. Not only was it safer for my eyes not to be looking towards the sun, it was ergonomically better to be able to stand and look comfortably. Moreover, the camera has an option to zoom in during live view which really helped in seeing more detail when fine tuning during focusing.

MISTAKES WERE MADE

Even with a practice run on a full California sun the week before, this was a difficult task. The light changes as the sun disappears, and during totality there are only a couple of minutes to try to take in the spectacle while still getting some good photos.

1-    Removing the filter at totality. I remembered to do this, which is good. However, I didn’t think about the implications of unscrewing a filter when relying on manual focus. The lens rotated a bit during this process. As in rotated slightly out of focus. Thankfully I eventually noticed and re-focused when I had to re-aim the camera to track the continued movement of the sun across the sky, but the first few photos I took during totality are trash because of this blunder.

2-    Auto-Exposure Bracketing. This is a feature that’s been common in cameras for at least 30 years. Because it can be a little fiddly to know how your camera’s light meter is actually reading a scene, you can have your camera automatically capture extra images that are over or under exposed.  This is a great idea if you might end up liking one of those alternative exposures better than the “correct” one. Also, if you are into more advanced post-processing of your photos in the computer, you can combine parts of these stacks of exposures to create a manufactured image with more detail in the darker and lighter parts of the image (this is called High Dynamic Range or HDR photography). I didn’t end up doing bracketing, and I’m not really sure why since it’s “free” in every way except for adding 3 to 5 times more photos to sort through.  I ended up paying enough attention to the lights and darks on the screen in Live View that I ended up with images I was happy with, but it was kind of silly of me not to avail myself of this great tool on the camera.

My one wide-angle shot from a point&shoot camera

3- More “scene” images. There’s only so much one can do in the 2-plus minutes of a total eclipse. One of my biggest priorities was to make sure I was experiencing the eclipse- pausing to take in the wonder with my senses and let the spectacular phenomenon wash over me. That said, next time (in 7 years), I’d like to squeeze in a few extra snaps from a second camera to get the whole sky and horizon, and maybe have a video camera aimed at the crowd to get their reaction. I had my phone set to do this but somehow abandoned the plan once we got near totality. Or maybe I should just leave this for a friend to do!