birds

[<BS>]

After moving to an area where Pileated Woodpeckers could be seen and heard, it took a few years for it to dawn on me that they were the inspiration for the Woody Woodpecker Song.

[Tad Eareckson]

A couple days ago I read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_woodpecker
Acorn woodpecker - Wikipedia

Walter Lantz is believed to have patterned the call of his cartoon character Woody Woodpecker on that of the acorn woodpecker, while patterning his appearance on that of the pileated woodpecker which has a prominent crest.

fired up iBird PRO on my phone, played all the Acorn Woodpecker calls. Pretty good match.
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Mostly finished with the tropical bird trip reports. I'd wanted to do a reasonable cover of Belize but had a fair idea about what a massive time and effort commitment it would be. No unfounded fears there whatsoever.

Finding good representative photos was a real bitch. As I got smarter I stopped searching images with Google and shifted to Flickr 'cause:

- They chop high resolution jobs into the lower resolution images which work well on forums such as this one. 800 width is pretty desirable and the uploads of more recent years have that option.

- Lotsa people organize relevant photos in albums which often prove very useful.

I've tried to use photos illustrating what I was actually seeing as best as possible - considerations such as location, habitat type, weather, lighting, subspecies, direction of flight...

I hate vertical/portrait formats 'cause:
- computer displays are horizontal/landscape
- scrolling's a bitch
But with birds like woodpeckers, trogons, motmots one is usually stuck.

Must've spent thousands of hours searching through search results. Nine outta ten times when ya find a PERFECT BEAUTIFUL shot the motherfucker will have it locked so's it's not downloadable, displayable, legally useable. But every now and then ya get lucky and find someone who does excellent work and just wants to share it with like-minded individuals. And the albums in which such shots are organized (see above) are often GOLD MINES of relevant material. And I've often pulled up a great shot of something I've needed and found it to be by the same photographer I've already used for something else not particularly closely related. And those quality photographers who want share their work are now getting a few more pairs of eyeballs courtesy Kite Strings.

I've edited previous posts as I've found additional quality shots - amending, replacing, both - and will continue to do so. Also likely that I'll have additional posts now and then.

Spinoff from all this time and effort - I've learned a lot more about the stuff I've seen and places I've been and will likely be better prepared to take better advantage of what a place has to offer if I do another one of these sometime down the road. (Probably pack a lead pipe to deal with any guide who feels it would be too dangerous to pull over for a good look at Groove-Billed Toucans.)
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Post Number moves to quintuple digits after this one.

[<BS>]

Thanks for the correction about the Woody Woodpecker Song. I never verified my assumption of its inspiration or I might have learned about Walter. It seems Walter Lantz deserves more credit for accuracy than I was achieving or giving.

I started seeing around 3-4 inch cone shaped holes in some old pine stumps and then got lucky enough to see who was making them. Granted it wasn't hard wood, but big chips were flying. Pileated woodpeckers are amazing.

[Steve Davy]

Mostly finished with the tropical bird trip reports.

Thank God! These bird trip reports have been a laborious task to read, and I hope that I never get to endure that form of torture again.

[Tad Eareckson]

Brian,

Curse you. You got Post 10000 with that one. Oh well, I got 9999 and 10001 - both cool numbers.

The http://www.kitestrings.org page will be reporting 9930 total posts prior to this one: 10003.

The discrepancy is due to deletions of posts:
- spam from the early days when access was immediately available to anything that registered
- those of approved users by same (and never by another party (with moderator privileges)

Steve,

I'll try to do the Arctic next time. Species diversity tends to go down as latitude goes up.
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My previous residence was an old neighborhood in an older forested area (South Haven - SW of Annapolis on the South River). Had an old oak an arm's reach out of a second floor window. In colder weather would smear it with refrigerated bacon grease and watch a pair of Pileateds making it disappear from just inside the glass. I was spoiled rotten.

Male:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tillyphoto/8448480318/

Brian Tillotson

Female:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tillyphoto/8466036923/

Brian Tillotson

The place also served as a major non breeding season Vulture roost (both species). They'd hang out in the late day sun on the SW facing cliff over the river then pour into the pines out back and disappear. I'd always hafta be careful coming home after dark to avoid spooking them.
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Edit - 2017/03/31 00:50:00 UTC

Note - as I did a bit earlier - the hint of barring visible on the sides of the birds' chest and compare to the Lineated:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/boblewis/25210962300/

Robert Lewis

Those to birds were pretty obviously the same species pretty recently on the evolutionary timeline. I checked to see if they hybridize on a range overlap but discovered that there's a gap - the Pileateds don't quite make it into Mexico and the Lineateds don't quite make it into the US. So nope. (And once that wall goes up...)

[<BS>]

Found this while looking around to compare calls. Some are saying that the original inspiration was the Acorn woodpecker, but Woody's characteristics are based on the Pileated.
Woody's call:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3caNrHJ7q1g

Pileated Woodpecker call:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/Dryocopus_pileatus.ogg

Acorn Woodpecker calls:
http://d2fbmjy3x0sdua.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/ACOWOO_1.callsnum1_CAkc_1.mp3?uuid=58cc48f13dfc7
http://d2fbmjy3x0sdua.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/ACOWOO_2.callsnum2_CAkc_1.mp3?uuid=58cc48f13e20f
http://d2fbmjy3x0sdua.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/ACOWOO_3.callsnum3_CAkc_1.mp3?uuid=58cc48f13e435

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woody_Woodpecker

Origin[edit]
According to Walter Lantz's press agent, the idea for Woody came during the producer's honeymoon with his wife, Gracie, in Lake Sherwood, California. A noisy acorn woodpecker[2] outside their cabin kept the couple awake at night, and when a heavy rain started, they learned that the bird had bored holes in their cabin's roof. As both Walter and Gracie told Dallas attorney Rod Phelps during a visit, Walter wanted to shoot the thing, but Gracie suggested that her husband make a cartoon about the bird, and thus Woody was born.[6] Woody shares many characteristics in common with the pileated woodpecker in terms of both physical appearance as well as his characteristic laugh, which resembles the call of the pileated woodpecker. These similarities are apparently the result of the artistic license of the creators, and have caused much confusion within the birding community amongst those who have attempted to classify Woody's species.[2]

Gracie Lantz Dies; Invented Woody Woodpecker
March 19, 1992
http://articles.latimes.com/1992-03-19/local/me-5718_1_woody-woodpecker

http://ocvn.osu.edu/news/woody-woodpecker-what-he

[Tad Eareckson]

Quinn just soloed - for a couple minutes a couple minutes before noon local.

Been wanting to get her airborne outdoors under something on the order of controlled circumstances to maximize my chances of getting her back as quickly as possible if something unplanned happens down the road.

Got her a year minus thirteen days ago, as y'all may recall, horribly clipped and hitting the linoleum floor so hard that she'd sequentially break off all of her tail feathers by latish June. The summer's molt got everything replaced save for a couple starboard outboard secondaries which are missing tips. (And thus they should be replaced very early on this year's molt which started on 2017/03/31 or slightly before with the dumping of her starboard outboard tail feather.)

So having no flight experience until several weeks shy of her third hatchday she's been very leery of unknown LZs. Tends to land in just a few places in the house - cage, kitchen curtain support, "playpen" (feeding station), split-level railing, microwave and over kitchen cabinets (both viewed as nesting sites and aggressively defended), finger, shoulder.

Winter and early spring were out for outdoors training 'cause of the Cooper's threat but they haven't been around for a while and the feeders have been stacked up with lotsa relaxed Grackles and Goldfinches (just recently back in breeding plumage).

So I brought her back in from her cage on the back deck, gave her some preening and cuddle time, took her back out and plopped her on the deck railing (free at last).

She just sat in the sun and preened for a while like nothing was unusual - then started looking around. I reached to pick her up and she took off.

She was freaking out a fair bit, making lotsa noise, climbing steeply, no idea about where to land. Trees are all tall Tulips without much in the way of lower landing friendly branches. Gave the peak of the roof a thought or two, took maybe a couple laps, explored the back woods, then came in from the south on a long flat final straight for the friendly familiar extended right index finger.

Then back in the cage and get my heartbeat back under control.

I'd been expecting her to land a bit high somewhere then spend an hour or two yelling her head off wanting to be rescued and Yours Truly having to stay within visual and/or hearing range trying to convince her to come back down.

This couldn't have gone any better. On the next drill she's highly likely to be both less freaked out and thinking finger.

Still a small danger of a migrating Cooper's coming through and I don't wanna push my luck but when the wild birds are fledging the Coops are virtually zero threat to an adult strong flyer like her and I'll be able to give her some substantial training time.

[TheFjordflier]

Found this live cam from Norway.
A pair of sea eagles nesting.
This link:
http://zooom.no/havornreiret/live
or the Youtube one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0psBzooOGGQ

[Steve Davy]

The video above has stopped functioning. This one is now playable:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmIZEgj61Eg

[Tad Eareckson]

Fuckin' bird just scared the crap outta me.

I'd given her a lot of flight/loose time since her first solo including a high wind session in which she was able to and did gain a lot of altitude quickly which got her into high perches in the Tulip Trees. And initially these guys don't like coming back down to targets at steep descent paths. They tend to start making a lot of requests for the other party to come up and join them. And this is an issue I've been trying to train out of her.

Cool, clear, NW breezy this morning. She was getting more comfortable landing high in trees and exploring the overstory around the heavily wooded property and I was enjoying seeing her picking up some wild bird competence.

On this session got her back a couple times and she was talking so I could monitor her behavior and position fairly well from both in the living room - where I was doing forum stuff - and out around the house. Most of the time it was impossible to get visual locks on her 'cause she's exactly the color and about the size of a Tulip leaf and the foliage is full, fresh, and lush now.

Went out at 10:38 local a minute or two after last audio contact. Got NOTHING. Started worrying about Cooper's Hawks and Rat Snakes but neither of those made much sense 'cause the place is lousy with passerine stuff and nobody had made or was making alarm calls. (I never cut her loose without first checking for the presence of relaxed locals.)

Kept calling, walked up the street a bit... Nothing. Heart started pounding, got worried sick, got in the car, started expanding the search radius. Keep stopping, killing the engine, getting out, calling, listening... Nothing.

Only thought was that since she'd been doing breeding cycle behavior a dispersal trigger might have kicked in. But that was still a crap scenario to explain something so abrupt.

Drove up to County Animal Control to fill out a card (stone age - only way you can do it), talked to a nice guy at the window. Headed back home to start doing some Facebook options and the goddam bird makes a low pass at the cage on the back deck right after I rounded the corner.

Apparently she'd been close the whole time and had just gone into stationary and silent mode. ("Hi. Was just talking to you about the bird... You can tear up the card.")

What an emotional roller coaster. I was feeling stupid and irresponsible and hating myself and now I'm feeling vindicated in having made the right calls. There's always a risk involved in cutting one of these guys loose but there are substantial benefits to go with the training and experience. Hope I'll be able to manage a balance that'll keep everybody safe and happy.