Blue-Winged Teal

Blue-winged teal are on the move at Goose Pond Sanctuary!

Recently we saw an impressive flock of 200 blue-wings.  Blue- wings are small ducks, fast in flight, flocks twisting and turning in unison.  In fall the best identification is the on the upper wing coverts that are blue-gray and the secondaries form an iridescent green speculum and the underwing is whitish.  

Blue-winged teal are generally the first ducks to head south in the fall and the last ones to return north in the spring. Adult drakes depart the breeding grounds well before adult hens and immatures. Most blue-winged teal flocks seen after mid-September are composed largely of adult hens and immatures. Blue-winged teal winter in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas and also in Central and South America.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service conducts annual aerial waterfowl breeding surveys that were developed by wildlife biologists including Art Hawkins, a Aldo Leopold graduate student at Faville Grove Sanctuary.  This year, the Service estimated the US and Canada spring blue-winged teal population at 8,550,000 and 73 % above the long-term average.  This is the second most abundant duck behind the mallard.  The Wisconsin DNR estimated the state’s 2015 population at 59,000.  At Goose Pond we only found four nesting pairs of blue-wings compared to an average of about 25 pairs.   The pond completely filled in with arrowhead this summer that provided excellent brood cover but did not allow us to see any broods for the bird atlas.

Blue-winged teal are surface feeders and prefer to feed on mud flats or in shallow water where there is floating and shallowly submerged vegetation plus abundant small aquatic animal life. They primarily eat vegetative matter consisting of seeds or stems and leaves of many plant species including sedges, grasses, pondweed, smartweed, and duckweed.  They also feed on animal matter such as mollusks, crustaceans, and insects.

Goose Pond water levels are below normal this fall even though we received over five inches of rain the third week of September.  However, the low water levels are providing ideal habitat for teal and other dabbling ducks. We hope you get a chance to see blue-winged teal before they depart for warmer areas.

Written by Mark and Sue Foote-Martin, Goose Pond Sanctuary Managers

Photo by Len Blumin, Flickr Creative Commons

Black and White Warbler

Migration is waning for warblers, and the next few days might be your last chance to see black-and-white warblers this year.

I spotted a few black-and-white warblers this morning in the Ledge Savanna, scurrying between trees and fallen logs. This is characteristic behavior for these birds, as they forage for insects among dead wood and sapsucker swells. These warblers behave more like nuthatches in the way they cling, slide, and hop along trees. Their long hind claw and heavy legs help them to nimbly maneuver through forest habitats.

Despite living in deciduous and mixed forests with plenty of perches and foraging throughout the canopy, black-and-white warblers are ground nesting birds. They build their nests near the base of trees with a composition of forest products. Leaves, bark, and pine needles make up the bulk with moss and dried grasses for a fine lining.

Black-and-white warblers are thought to be good indicators of forest quality, as they typically nest in extensive and mature blocks of forest. The birds breed almost exclusively in the northern half of the state, though they have been known to breed in the forest interiors of the Baraboo Hills and the Kettle Moraine State Forest.

You might be able to find the birds at Faville Grove in the Ledge Savanna, along the Crawfish River, or in Faville Woods.

Written by Drew Harry, Faville Grove Land Steward

Photo by Kenneth Cole Schneider, Flickr Creative Commons

Bobolink

Summer wanes; the children are grown;
Fun and frolic no more he knows;
Robert of Lincoln’s a humdrum crone;
Off he flies, and we sing as he goes:
Bob-o’-link, bob-o’-link,
Spink, spank, spink;
When you can pipe that merry old strain,
Robert of Lincoln, come back again.
Chee, chee, chee.

-William Cullen Bryant

William Cullen Bryant wrote a poem about Robert of Lincoln and ended the poem with above verse.

Summer is waning at Goose Pond Sanctuary and the Sanctuary is serving as a stop-over and refueling site for migrating wildlife including bobolinks that are heading south. They are a long distance migrant heading on a 6,000 mile journey to the grasslands, wetlands, and grain fields of interior southern South America.

Bobolinks are in the blackbird family and their species name, oryzivorus means “rice-eating” and refers to this bird’s appetite for rice and other grains, especially during migration and in winter. Sam Robbins nick name for bobolinks was “rice bird” since they like to feed on wild rice in Wisconsin that ripens in late August and September.    

A flock of 60 bobolinks were first seen at Goose Pond on August 29 as they fed on Pennsylvania smartweeds seeds from plants located south of our barn. Smartweeds are abundant this year and the seeds provide high energy fuel. Bobolinks were still present in the same smartweed patch on September 10th. The male is unmistakable in spring finery of black, white, and yellow but before fall migration he molts into a striped brown appearance like that of the female.

Bobolinks will be leaving us shortly since they have a long way to go. It is interesting that migrating bobolinks can orient themselves with the earth’s magnetic field, thanks to iron oxide in bristles of its nasal cavity and in tissues around the olfactory bulb and nerve. Bobolinks also use the starry night sky to guide their travels.   

We hope you get a chance to see some rice birds on fall migration and look forward to their return in spring!

Written by Mark Martin & Sue Foote-Martin

Photo by USFWS Midwest, Flickr Creative Commons

Great Egret

There's a bird, it's all white, flying towards a dead tree. It's a great egret. A couple of its group have flown into the tree before me. Graceful, in its white plumage sliding silently towards the tree, the bird looks out of place, but its relatives in the dead hickory look decorated and stately. They are the decoration, strung about the treeline like ornaments. The egret in flight glides toward the tree, picks its spot, flares its wings, and drills a tree branch. Knocked onto its back in mid-air, the bird rights itself and flies slowly in a circle around the nearby pond. I try to track the bird, see where it goes, but more egrets circle in from the west and I lose track. Most of the birds land successfully in the trees, though a few more drill branches. I count sixteen in all. Are they only looking for a place to spend the night?

As it turns out, these birds stay for about a week, perched in trees and wading in the pond along Highway 89 here at Faville Grove Sanctuary. Some stragglers still remain. The sixteen pioneers on the first day turned into hundreds of egrets a few days later. A handful of great blue herons joined the stand. Herons are a bit larger, but the egrets steal the show this week. Cars stop along Highway 89 to spectate, pausing their commute, grocery run, and progress. How many times have these cars, these people, stopped, in awe of nature in their own backyards? This week they stopped where the egrets did. On the 89 pond, the stopped cars don't have much to see beside the stillness of the egrets. The white birds seem enough.

They are for me. Wading imperceptibly, one bird takes a stab into the water. Every ten seconds or so this recurs. The movement, however quick, doesn't affect the group's stillness.

People have been trying to glean something from egrets for a long time. It started as hats. Egret plumage made great wear for women's hats. Around the 1890's state Audubon societies started forming to protect birds from the feather trade. This represented one of the first explicit conservation movements. Wearing birds on your head meant you were progressive, upper middle class, but it also meant that someone had killed a bird to put on your head. Activists against feathered hats declared hats “unwomanly.” Their arguments considered the grace and beauty of the birds, their use on farms keeping down insects, but their most provocative argument at the time was that the birds being killed were mothers. In the case of snowy egrets in Florida, it was most useful to wait until the birds had a nest and then raid the nest since they adults wouldn't leave their young. Adults were killed, the young left to die in their nests. This imagery twisted the meaning of hat wearing from fashion to morality—women were embracing womanhood with hats, but in doing so they were killing mothers.

Of course, the women weren't doing the actual killing. The complicity of the middle men—sportsmen and shippers—was overlooked. Also overlooked was the ecology of the egret. Females were not the only birds dying. Egrets split time on the nest, and so half of the dead birds were male. The other arguments about the grace and the beauty of the birds don't necessarily hold up either. Egrets practice siblicide, where the larger chicks kill their younger siblings. They're also a bit awkward landing in trees, as I witnessed. The snowy egret became, and still is, part of the logo for the National Audubon Society. The efforts of activists reversed the prospects of many birds, and egrets have been recovering since. It is estimated that more than 95% of the egret population in North America was killed in the 19th and early 20th century.

You can find a lot of this history, and much more environmental history, in Jennifer Price's book Flight Maps. Price argues that the birds of the feather trade were unmoored from their ecology and the destruction of habitat and birds came about because economic forces separated connections to nature.

Where did the egrets at Faville Grove come from? Probably Horicon Marsh, or another rookery around the Oshkosh area. With such numbers though, it's possible that the birds we witnessed this past week were from all over: the Mississippi River, Canada, Minnesota. Those sixteen great egrets the first day were perhaps a flight map for other migrating egrets this week. They found wetlands, stillness, frogs, and insects. We were happy to have them.  

Photo by Dennis Church, Flickr Creative Commons

Northern Mockingbird

A rare summer resident in Wisconsin, the northern mockingbird is often seen so sporadically around the state that searching for evidence of breeding is not unlike looking for a needle in a haystack.

In fact, Sam Robbins wrote in 1991 that on average eight sightings were reported each year since 1960. With that knowledge, Goose Pond Sanctuary staff felt very fortunate to spot a northern mockingbird atop a tree along the eastern edge of the Hopkins Road Prairie on June 25th.

The northern mockingbird is fairly easy to identify and frequently gives a "wing flash" display, where it half or fully opens its wings in jerky intermediate steps, showing off the big white patches. We frequently think of the northern mocking bird as a southern species. This might be one species that increases in Wisconsin with climate change.

The bird was heard before it was seen, stringing together many different calls in a seemingly endless effort – a characteristic of the species. An adept mimic, the northern mockingbird is able to perfectly replicate many of Wisconsin’s beloved bird calls, including those of the American robin, eastern bluebird, mourning dove, tree swallow, whip-poor-will, and meadowlark. Each individual continues to add new sounds to its range, and an adult male may learn around 200 songs in its lifetime.  Northern Mockingbirds sing all through the day, and often into the night. Most nocturnal singers are unmated males, which sing more than mated males during the day, too. Nighttime singing is more common during the full moon.

Several days after the first sighting, David Shealer, a black tern researcher from Loras College, spotted a northern mockingbird on a telephone wire near the intersection of Highways 22 and 51/60 in North Leeds, less than a mile northeast of Hopkins Road Prairie. Despite our best efforts to locate the bird, this was the last sighting near Goose Pond Sanctuary.

Northern mockingbirds are often seen singing high atop vegetation, fences, and telephone wires, but prefer feeding in areas with open ground and shrubby vegetation, like hedges, fruiting bushes, and thickets.

In early summer, Sue Foote-Martin, co-manager of Goose Pond Sanctuary, spotted a northern mockingbird at their property in Columbia County that has an easement held by Madison Audubon Society. That made three sightings in one summer in Columbia County – not too shabby.

Columbia County has a history of northern mockingbird nesting activity, with two of the seven confirmed nesting sites found within a few miles of Goose Pond during the six years of the first Wisconsin Breeding Bird Atlas. Nests can be found in trees and shrubs 3-10 feet off the ground, but may be even higher.  Hopefully our shrub plantings at Goose Pond will attract northern mockingbirds in the future. Atlas workers will have to be extremely vigilant and very lucky if they hope to find the needle in the haystack.

Written by Tony Abate, former Goose Pond Sanctuary Land Steward

Photo by Eric Heupel, Flickr Creative Commons