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

American Goldfinch

Great horned owls initiated the nesting season in southern Wisconsin in February, and the American goldfinch is ending the region's nesting season late this August.  Almost everyone is familiar with this cheery species - a favorite feeder bird that likes to feed on sunflower chips.

On August 27th, we found a female goldfinch incubating eggs in a nest in a willow sapling about four feet high.  We have been seeing many goldfinches this summer and were not surprised to find a nest in late August.

Goldfinches are late nesters and they like to use thistle down to line their nest.  By nesting late they also avoid parasitism by brown-headed cowbirds.  Another benefit of nesting late is that newly-fledged young will be able to find seeds that are ripening.  

At Goose Pond Sanctuary goldfinches like to feed on prairie dock and sawtooth sunflower seeds. We usually pick the prairie dock seeds just before they are ripe, or we risk losing them to the goldfinches. If we see large flocks of goldfinches in the prairie, it is a phenological signal that it is time to collect the seed of these two species!

This week, we observed young barn swallows and mourning doves in nests and the goldfinch nest will probably be the last active nest we will find for the first year of the bird atlas project.  However, we are still looking for families/broods of some species such as wild turkeys.  We enjoyed working on the bird atlas project this year and are now busy entering our data.  If you find a bird species that you would like to submit atlas records for, please contact your atlas coordinator found in the link provided here. http://wsobirds.org/atlas-county-coordinators

Written by Mark Martin & Sue Foote-Martin

Photo by Chad Horwedel