Ice Formations

When I was looking for birds at Scherman Hoffman on Saturday, I also noticed some interesting ice formations. Even though Saturday itself was relatively warm, the preceding few days and nights had been cold enough to freeze both the ground and standing water. The Passaic River, which flows through the preserve, was partially iced over. In some places the ice was in flat sheets. In other places it formed globular clusters or looked almost like drapery (as in the image above).

Despite the ice, the river ran as fast as ever.

A hard freeze combined with uneven ground surfaces made for some interesting shapes underfoot. Even as the ground around it was softening, this bit of ice kept its dagger-like shape.

I have always been fascinated by the ability of a hard freeze to reshape the ground by pushing it up in some places. In this case frost pushed up a mossy patch, and then the moss collapsed in places. The result is like a cliff in miniature.

Birds at Scherman Hoffman Wildlife Sanctuary

Yesterday I was at Scherman Hoffman Wildlife Sanctuary, one of several preserves operated by New Jersey Audubon. The woods were mostly quiet, as I expected on a winter day, but there were patches of bird activity. One patch was along a trail that loops around a grassy field. There were a lot of sparrows busy in one of the hedgerows. Dark-eyed Juncos, White-throated Sparrows, Song Sparrows, and Field Sparrows all darted in and out of the bushes. Other small birds such as Black-capped Chickadees and Tufted Titmice was also active in the same spot. The reason for such a concentration of activity was apparent on the other side of the hedgerow, where a small stream was flowing. Birds were darting from the bushes down to the stream to drink or bathe. I photographed the junco below during its second dip into the stream.

Another concentration of activity was around the nature center's birdfeeders. Their feeders attracted the usual suspects: chickadees, titmice, White-breasted Nuthatches, and Downy Woodpeckers. In addition, some other birds like American Goldfinches and Blue Jays seemed to be attracted by the activity but did not actually come down from the trees around the center to the feeders. A few Eastern Bluebirds were sitting in a holly tree nearby.

The Black-capped Chickadees really liked one particular feeder that was shaped like a snowman. I am not sure why they favored this one so much, but they visited this feeder much more than the other feeders, and other birds mostly stayed away from it.

This Downy Woodpecker made use of the suet feeder.

A Lingering Osprey

Yesterday afternoon I went back to Donaldson Park in the hopes of finding the Northern Parula that I had seen there on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week. I looked carefully and even sat for a while in the area where I had seen it, but it never appeared. One negative result does not necessarily mean that it is gone, but it might be. Instead of the warbler, I saw another lingerer. As I was finishing up my walk along the river, an Osprey flew upstream and landed on one of the poles along the river bank. The sighting was a real surprise; previously my latest sighting of an Osprey in New Jersey was November 26 at Sandy Hook, and my latest in the county was November 3. It was especially unexpected since the river is developing some ice patches. This one was cooperative enough to sit close by for a few photos before it flew back downstream.

Loose Feathers #268

Short-tailed Albatross / USFWS

Birds and birding news

• The photo at the top of this post shows a female Short-tailed Albatross incubating her egg in a colony of Laysan Albatrosses on Eastern Island of Midway Atoll NWR. If the egg hatches it will be the first hatch of this species outside Japan in recent history. Update: Here is a little more background information about Short-tailed Albatrosses from BirdLife and USA Today.
• Fossil remains of a giant stork were found on the Indonesian island of Flores. The storks, named Leptoptilos robustus, stood about 6 feet tall and lived about 20,000 to 50,000 years ago. In prehistoric times, the island featured many dwarf and giant species, including some very small hominins.
• This week a new database of bird sounds, the Avian Vocalizations Center (AVoCet), became available to the public.
• NextEra Energy Resources plans to replace 2,400 of the older turbines and shut down some others at the infamous Altamont Pass wind farm. The new turbines should generate power more efficiently and (hopefully) kill fewer migratory birds and bats.
• A copy of John James Audubon's Birds of America sold at auction this week for $11,542,683. The BBC has a video with a look inside the book.
• At least some small birds, like European Bee-eaters (Merops apiaster), are able to soar while on migration; this technique allows them to travel quickly with less energy expenditure than flapping.
• A Purple Sandpiper was spotted in Utah for the first time. Normally the species sticks to the East Coast in winter.
• New Jersey's Bald Eagle population is thriving enough to move into less attractive nesting grounds in the middle of the state. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania is trying to add protections to two eagle nests in the Philadelphia area.
• Juncos are a welcome sight on cold winter days.
• Conservationists in Indonesia have succeeded in protecting key nesting grounds and stopping egg poaching to save the endangered Maleo (Macrocephalon maleo).
• Australians recently found two albino Blue-winged Kookaburras.

Birds in the blogosphere

• eBird Birding News and Features: eBird animated occurrence maps
• Punctuated Equilibrium: The World Parrot Count
• 10,000 Birds: New York State's First Hermit Warbler
• Sibley Guides: A perplexing shrike

Oil spill

• A government environmental commissioner reported that Canada would not be able to respond effectively to a major oil spill. It also needs to monitor the effect of tar sands oil mining on local water supplies.

Environment and biodiversity

• Blue whales can capture up to 500 kg of krill, good for 457,000 calories, in a single mouthful. This makes it the most efficient eater among sea mammals.
• New Jersey's Oyster Creek nuclear reactor will stop operating by 2019, ten years earlier than planned. The reactor is the oldest operating nuclear power plant in the United States and would have had to build a cooling tower to stop pumping hot water into Barnegat Bay if it did not close. WolfeNotes has a roundup of the rest of the environmental news out of Trenton yesterday, including progress on new restoration plans for Barnegat Bay.
• This week there has been more vocal criticism from scientists of the NASA study that reported bacteria subsisting on arsenic.
• The Obama administration decided to further delay implementation of new environmental regulations for reducing smog and for industrial boilers.
• Four people and four businesses were charged with dumping raw sewage and restaurant waste into Shell Bank Creek in Brooklyn, New York.
• Scientists have been monitoring a former open-pit coal mine in Germany to see what sort of ecosystem develops there. The site was covered in sediments and graded, but it was otherwise untouched. Development and succession have occurred faster than expected, with the first trees appearing in five years.

Carnivals

• Berry Go Round #34
• Carnival of the Blue #43

Photos of the Tardy Northern Parula

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I found a first-winter Northern Parula in my local park on Tuesday afternoon. Yesterday afternoon, I returned to the park and re-found the warbler foraging in more or less the same spot along the riverbank. This time I was able to take some photos to document the sighting better.

Northern Parulas are not regular winter residents in New Jersey. In fact, most of them are gone by mid-October, with only a few lingering into November. Like other warblers, Northern Parulas are primarily insectivorous, which makes it difficult for them to survive a cold winter at northerly latitudes. While they breed throughout eastern North America, they spend their winters in the Caribbean or Mexico and Central America. This warbler should be well south of here by now.

The greenish head and green-tinged flight feathers mark it as a first-winter bird, and the lack of any orange or red markings around the neck suggest that it is a female. (I am not sure whether that character is reliable for sexing first-year birds.) One detail I had not noticed initially but saw in the photos is the yellow wash on the flanks. Not all field guides show this marking.

I probably ended up with more photos of this part of the bird than any other.