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The Birding Club of Delaware County is a birding club located in Delaware
County, Pennsylvania, with the purpose
of expanding individual interest in and
study of wild birds.
The Birding Club of Delaware County is
open to birders and bird watchers of all
skill levels.
Membership is from September through
August.
Meetings are held the 2nd Wednesday of
each month from September through June at the Marple Township Library Meeting
Room. Meetings begin at 7:30PM.
Visitors are always welcome.
For additional information regarding
membership, please contact John
D’Amico at 610-566-1461
or email [email protected].
Websites
BCDC: www.bcdelco.org
RTPHW: www.rtphawkwatch.org
All materials, illustrations and photos are copyrighted 2011, by the Birding Club of
Delaware County, all rights reserved.
May 2012
Volume 14, Issue 5
1 Programs
2 Field Trip Schedule
3 Trip Report
John D’Amico
4-6 Bird is the Word
Amy Langman
7-8 The Great Peanut Caper
Mariana Pesthy
N E W S L E T T E R
Inside This Issue
May 9 - Dan Kunkle
Superfund to Super Habitat
The Kittatinny Ridge in the vicinity of Lehigh Gap near
Allentown, PA, well known for its importance to migrant
hawks and other wildlife, was devastated by air pollution from
zinc smelters in the first half of the 20th century. Vegetative
cover on about 3,000 acres was lost, approximately 2.5 feet of
topsoil eroded from the slopes of the ridge, and a barren
landscape of rock and metal contaminated mineral soil was left
behind. The area was declared a Superfund Site in 1983.
Dan Kunkle, the Executive Director of the Lehigh Gap Nature
Center, will describe how this moonscape was converted back
into a living, thriving ecosystem.
Wednesday, June 13
Annual BCDC Picnic at Ridley Creek State Park -- See
Page 2 for details
Programs May - June
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UPCOMING BCDC FIELD TRIPS
Sunday, May 6 Still more spring migrants at Haverford College
Meet at south visitor parking lot at 7:30 AM
Leader: Sheryl Johnson 610-649-4621
Wednesday, May 9 Depending on when you read this, there may still be time to join the Las Vegas
to Monday, May 14 group. Call Carl Perretta for details at 610-872-6862 or email
him at [email protected]
Saturday, May 12 Spring migrants at White Clay Creek, DE
Meet at Painter’s Crossing (Rtes. 1 and 202) at 6:45 AM
Leader: Chris Pugliese 610-431-9533
Wednesday, June 13 Annual BCDC Picnic at Ridley Creek State Park
Who: You! Your Family! Your Friends! All are welcome!
Where: Ridley Creek State Park, Area #8
When: Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Picnic starts around 5:00 pm. (Pavilion available at 8:00 am.)
BCDC Provides: Soft drinks, Ice, Water, Charcoal, Lighter Fluid,
Plates, Napkins, Cooking Utensils
You Bring: Your food, plus some to share (if desired)
IMPORTANT NOTES Please contact the field trip leader in advance so you can be notified of any changes.
Plan to arrive 15 minutes prior to departure time.
Please check our website at www.bcdelco.org for updates.
Field Trip Coordinators: Amy or Chris Langman, 610-566-4091
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After a week of mild temperatures and good reports from Middle Creek (Sandhill Crane, Golden Eagle, Northern Shrike etc.), I was enthused about the upcoming trip. Considering these high paid weather forecasters are wrong fifty percent of the time, I figured they would get this prediction wrong. That theory vaporized as my wife and I stood in the parking lot with seventeen other BCDC members shivering in sub-freezing temperatures and a twenty mile an hour wind.
We started out searching the area where the Sandhill Crane was reported the day before. We didn't find the crane, but did see some flying and soaring raptors such as Bald Eagle, Red-tail, and American Kestrel. Snow Geese also ventured into the substantial wind.
The rest of the trip was a duck hunt and considering the majority of the birds had already departed, we had a pretty good variety. Both scaups, Redheads, Hooded Mergansers, Gadwall, and Ring-necks topped the list.
Back at the center, during our lunch break, we saw Black-capped Chickadee and Tree Sparrows at the feeders.
On the way out, we received a call from Sheryl Johnson saying she had spotted a Golden Eagle. Rats!!
All in all, we had a good day with a great group. Our combined tally was 56 species.
Bird Trivia
What bird is also known colloquially as the “Peabody Bird”?
Aanswer: White-throated Sparrow John D’Amico’s Field Trip Report of Saturday, March 10
We welcome members’ contributions to our newsletter, so if you have reports, announcements, reviews,
poetry, essays, or photographs that would be of interest to our BCDC birding community, please submit them
to the editor:
Carl Perretta, e-mail: [email protected]
The deadline for the September newsletter is Friday, August 24, 2012.
Club questions or suggestions? Contact Sheryl Johnson, President: [email protected].
Suggestions for or leading of field trips? Contact Amy or Chris Langman, Field Trip Coordinator:
Bird sightings to report? Contact Dave Eberly, Bird Reports Editor: [email protected].
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Bird is the Word - Hermit Thrush by Amy Langman
Hermit Thrush (Catharus guttatus)
Hermit: One that has withdrawn from society, a recluse
The Brown Thrush
There’s a merry brown thrush
Sitting up in the tree.
She’s singing to me! She’s singing to me!
And what does she say, little girl, little boy?
“Oh, the world’s running over with joy!
Don’t you hear? Don’t you see?
Hush! Look! In my tree,
I’m as happy as can be.”
Lucy Larcom
The state bird of Vermont’s song has been my cell phone ring tone for several years, so I thought this beautiful
bird would make a good subject. The Hermit Thrush is a small olive-brown to red to gray-brown bird with rich
brown on head and back , white underparts and pink legs and feet. It has a conspicuous rufous rump and tail,
unlike others in its genus. The brown-and-yellow, slender bill is slightly raised. The head is round with a
slight, pale eye ring and the tail is fairly long. The Hermit Thrush, which shows limited sexual dimorphism, is
approximately 6.5 to 7.5 inches in length and
weighs approximately 1.2 ounces or less.
It stands upright and is slightly smaller than the
American Robin. It has a swift, direct flight and
perches low to the ground on fallen logs and
shrubs. It will wander into open areas on trails
and clearings. As shown in photo 1, the Hermit
Thrush will cock its tail. It may then bob it slowly
while flicking its wings prior to taking flight. Its
predator response is to “hunker down”, by
crouching or pulling back its head. The bird is
well camouflaged while crouched, as seen in
photograph 2 (next page) taken at John Heinz
Wildlife Refuge (Hint: Follow the log). Photo 1
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This thrush is typically found in understories around edges or openings from boreal forests of the far north, to
deciduous woods and mountain forests. It is found frequently across the United States throughout the winter in
lower-elevation deciduous forests
(the only member of its genus to
winter regularly in the United
States).
The Hermit Thrush has a varied
insect diet of beetles, caterpillars,
grasshoppers, crickets, bees, ants,
wasps, flies, and earthworms. It
will occasionally eat small
amphibians and reptiles.
Generally Hermit Thrushes do not
visit feeders, but will eat berries
(as seen in the acrobatic
photograph 3) from backyards in
winter. The photographs were
taken in our yard in Lima, Pennsylvania this winter
and seed did not appear to satisfy its appetite.
Foraging typically consists of rummaging/scraping through leaf litter or
seizing insects with the bill, similar to an American Robin. This thrush
is capable of hovering and gleaning insects from foliage. In winter,
Hermit Thrushes will forage with kinglets, chickadees, titmice, and
Brown Creepers (which sounds like a good, ‘cheep’ alarm system).
Like any thrush, the song has many descriptions: melodious, haunting,
beautiful, melancholy, mysterious, ethereal. There is a sustained whistle
at the beginning, and an ending that sounds like an echo of its own song.
The thrush can sound like a cat’s “mew” around its nest. The female has
distinct sounds while rearranging her eggs, greeting her mate, and
warning of a predator. The song is typically sung from a high perch in
an isolated tree.
In a kind of marathon of romance, the male chases the female in circles
during courtship. Tree nesting is more common west of the Rocky
Mountains, while nesting on the ground or in low vegetation is more
common east of the Rockies. Once the nesting location is determined,
nest building by the female typically takes 7 to 10 days. Three to six
light blue eggs, occasionally with brown spots, are laid in a cup nest constructed of grass, leaves, and pine needles,
held together with mud and covered with lichens on the outside. There is a soft lining inside the nest. Incubation
lasts 11 to 13 days, and the helpless young fledge in an average of 12 days. Pairs commonly raise one or two broods
in a season (potentially three in its southern range). Males gather food for the young, while females feed the
nestlings.
The Hermit Thrush is one of the most widely distributed forest-nesting, migratory birds in North America. It
breeds from central Alaska east to Newfoundland and south to southern California, New Mexico, Wisconsin, and
Photo 2 - spot the thrush
Photo 3
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Virginia. It is a short-distance night migrant through the center of the United States. It is also the last of the genus
Catharus to migrate south in the fall (September/October), and first to head north in the spring (as early as March).
It spends its summers throughout Canada and the Rocky Mountains and winters to southern United States and
Mexico (the bird can migrate as far south as Guatemala). It is a year-round resident along the northern Pacific coast
and in small areas in Nevada, southern California, and Arizona.
The Hermit Thrush population has generally been increasing over the last 50 years, but is threatened by night
migration that causes collisions with transmission towers and buildings. Least Concern is its current IUCN
(International Union for Conservation of nature) evaluation status.
According to Bird Banding Lab website reports, a recovery rate of 0.23 percent has been documented from 1955 to
1997 for the Hermit Thrush. These banding studies show that the Hermit Thrush can live up to seven years in the
wild.
Interesting behaviors and facts about the Hermit Thrush:
Similar species are Swainson’s, Bicknell’s, and Gray-cheeeked Thrushes and the Veery. In the northeast mountains,
a Veery will inhabit the lowest elevations, Hermit Thrush the middle elevations, and Swainson’s Thrush the high
elevations.
Nests have been discovered on a grave, a golf course and in a mine shaft. One Hermit Thrush was seen feeding a
nestling a salamander more than 1.5 inches long.
In his elegy for Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom.”, Walt Whitman saw the Hermit
Thrush as a symbol of the American voice. "A Hermit Thrush" is the name of a poem by the American poet Amy
Clampitt. A Hermit Thrush appears in the fifth section ("What the Thunder Said") of the T. S. Eliot poem The Waste
Land.
There are two to possibly four subspecies of Hermit Thrush in Washington.
There are musical bands called Hermit Thrushes, Hermit
Thrush, and the Thrush Hermits.
A group of thrushes is called a ‘hermitage’ or ‘mutation’ of
thrushes.
Photograph credits: Amy Langman
Good-looking bird
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The Curious Case of the Great Peanut Caper
by Mariana Pesthy
For those who read my story last year of the Red-bellied Woodpeckers, this is a continuation of sorts. That story ended with papa Red-bellied bringing his young chick to the peanut feeder hanging at the edge of our deck. As summer turned into fall, all the Red-bellied woodpeckers left the vicinity of our back deck one by one.
First the female, then both mature males, disappeared from the scene by October. The chick, whose plumage soon showed it to be a male, continued to visit until mid-October when it too, stopped visiting our deck peanut feeder.
It was a very cold day in the middle of January this year when I saw the first Red-bellied Woodpecker return to our deck. It was the now-mature male Red-bellied chick from last fall. He sported very bright fresh plumage, and landed on the peanut feeder directly, from a very distant forest tree. He ap-peared to be a bird on familiar territory. For the rest of January, he was the lone Red-bellied Woodpecker visiting our deck. On the second day of Febru-ary, I noticed a female Red-bellied on the deck. She was new to the area, and she hopped around on the deck floor and posts, picking between wood planks for tidbits. She was also very wary. She flew off as soon as she spot-ted me looking at her through the windows. In the ensuing days, I could see the pair together exploring the various rotted tree limbs in the woods.
Meanwhile, around late January I was delighted to find a Brown Creeper crawling about on our deck. We have occasionally seen Brown Creepers spiraling up mature trees but this one was actually frequenting our deck, crawling on the deck planks, which in our experience, is unprecedented.
In the meantime, the new female Red-bellied and the male Red-bellied showed up around our deck almost every-day. First, the young male would arrive and feed on the peanut feeder at the deck edge. The female would soon show up either on the tree stump or on any of the trees near the deck. Afterward, she and the male would hop around together on any of the bigger trees. During the early days of February, the pair of woodpeckers were investigating some bare tree trunks in the back woods. On these occasions, I would have my camera at the ready to photograph them.
Pretty soon I noticed some very interesting things going on with the pair. The Red-bellied male is almost always the first to arrive on the scene. He would land and feed on the peanut feeder. Afterward, he would fly to nearby trees, most often directly to the tallest Japanese maple just off the deck. Then the female Red-bellied would show up either on the deck or directly at the tree. She has never been seen on the peanut feeder itself. She is very shy around the deck, where she often finds beech nuts and seeds scattered about and caught between the planks. As soon as she caught sight of me looking at her, she would immediately take off and fly to the same Japanese Maple tree where the male had been moments before.
On this particular day, I noticed her poking around on the main trunk of the Japanese maple just off the deck. I watched her through my binoculars, and saw her reaching into a hole in the trunk and pull out a large piece of peanut
which most likely was put there by the male, as she was never seen on the peanut feeder herself. To my sur-prise, she put it right back and resumed climbing up the tree. I had picked up the camera to photograph her, but instead found the Brown Creeper where the Red-bellied female had been just moments ago.
The male, stashing goodies
Where’s my Peanut?
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I happily took some photographs of the Brown Creeper before it too, flew off.
Soon afterwards I saw the female Red-bellied fly back to the same spot, so I quickly grabbed the camera and shot both stills and movies of her for quite awhile, because she was looking up and down many times over the same stretch of the tree and seemed to be searching for something. She turned her head up, down, sideways and all the way backward, as only birds can.
I only found out the cause of the female’s apparent agitation when the pictures were downloaded later that night: my pic-ture had caught the Brown Creeper taking the peanut that was stashed by the male woodpecker, certainly for the wood-peckers’ future use. This explained the puzzlement and searching looks of the Red-bellied female that I had noticed and recorded on film. What drama and what a story that I had inadvertently captured, though unknown to me at the time!
In the ensuing days, I found to my amusement that whenever I tried to photograph the Red-bellied female on the deck, I was just as likely to see the Brown Creeper in my camera viewfinder! At first, I chalked it up to coincidence, but I soon realized that the Creeper was following the female wood-pecker. It seems that wherever the Red-bellied female ap-peared, the Creeper would soon follow. Often, I can almost count on the Brown Creeper’s showing up as soon as the Red-bellied female departs. And their appearances happened often in quick succession. The woodpecker female was very wary, and would fly off as soon as she saw me with my cam-era pointed at her. Then the next thing I knew, it would be the Brown Creeper in my camera viewfinder. After a few days, I realized that the Brown Creeper had found unwitting benefactors in the curious arrangement between the young Red-bellied pair.
Apparently, the male Red-bellied has edible tidbits, such as peanuts, stashed away for the female, and presumably himself, at various favorite spots ,including that hole in the Japanese Maple. The Brown Creeper often finds and takes the peanuts and tidbits stashed by the hapless Red-bellied pair. But the caper did not last very long. By late February, the Brown Creeper had moved on, leaving the young Red-bellied pair to a less eventful courtship season.
Collecting goodies - but for whom?
The culprit at deck level
Caught in the act!
