Guest Blogger: Tips for Birding Havasu

Now that we're into mid-November, things are really begin to pick up here on Lake Havasu.  It's a prime time for birding the LCRV, and now is also the time for visitors to check out the area.  Below, David Vander Pluym steps in as a guest blogger to provide some tips for birding Lake Havasu and other large reservoirs!  Also, be sure to check out the links on the right side bar for useful websites for visitors.

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November and December are prime times to bird Lake Havasu with waterfowl migration under way. With all three species of scoters as well as a Red-throated Loon and the now regular large numbers of Greater Scaup and smaller number of Barrow’s Goldeneyes having arrived for the winter it’s a great time to be out and looking! One of the main questions we are asked is how do you find these birds? Given that the majorities of birders in Arizona live away from large reservoirs and are not used to identifying birds at such a distance this is a very understandable question. Below I will try to offer some tips and guidance for looking for birds on the lake.

First and foremost, be aware that compared to sewage treatment plants and places like Willcox, Lake Havasu is huge; you are often trying to identify birds that are a mile away or more. To give everyone some perspectives here are some distances starting with the Bill Williams arm. From the NWR HQ the nearest reed island is ~.45 miles away while the distant end of the buoy line is roughly .7 miles away. To put this in perspective Lake Cochise at its longest point is only .4 miles long! Scanning the main body of Lake Havasu the birds are often more distant. Scanning from the red and white lighthouse on Pittsburgh Pt. the ferry boat that crosses the lake, at its closest point is ~1.35 miles away! At the north end the lake is still about a mile across. Added to this even in winter heat haze can be a problem, making seeing a bird a mile away difficult, let alone identifying one. Generally when the sun is most intense it is best to skip the main body of the lake.

Now for some tips, number one of which is to bring a good scope. As I mentioned the distances are great and having a good scope certainly helps. If you don’t have a great scope, that’s ok, but you should be prepared to let some birds go as being simply too far away to identify as well as knowing you might miss something. You can also help with some of the distances by checking multiple locations, as some may be closer to an interesting bird than others.  For example, in the Bill Williams arm it is often helpful to walk the CAP peninsula to get closer to some of the distant flocks of diving ducks.

Second and equally important is patience. There can be a lot of birds around and it can take time to go through them all. The birds often move around a lot, feeding flocks will form, boats will flush birds, or they may just decide another spot is better. Waiting around will give you the chance to spot something that has finally moved out from its hidden cove. It is easy to spend a couple hours on a good day scanning from one spot. This also can help with changing your perspective on the size of birds. If you are used to seeing birds up close it takes a while to relearn field marks that are useful on distant birds. Because of the distance involved, it isn’t uncommon to think you have come across a rare grebe because it looks huge compared to the Common Loon behind it, only to realize it is a Pied-billed Grebe that is a quarter or even a half mile closer than the loon!

Be sure and study up ahead of time knowing what field marks are useful at a distance to help you spot the birds. Things like knowing that Red-throated Loons are about the same length as a Western/Clark’s Grebe, while a Pacific Loon is slightly bigger is the type of knowledge useful for trying to figure out what that distant loon is. Finally knowing what birds are expected and where can be helpful. There is now an invasive mussel in Lake Havasu and it is particularly common in the Bill Williams Arm. Because of this, species like Barrow’s Goldeneye and scoters are most likely there. Does this mean that you shouldn’t look for them elsewhere? Of course not, scoters can be found below Parker Dam or on the main body of Lake Havasu. However for time spent scanning, I have seen far more scoters in the Bill Williams Arm than all other areas of Lake Havasu combined. A final note on scaup, because of the mussel Greater Scaup have increased astronomically in certain areas. They are now the expected species in the Bill Williams Arm and around Pittsburgh Pt and it can often be difficult to find a Lesser Scaup at these locations when they are not actively migrating. Lesser is still the more common species around Parker Dam and in the shallow weedy waters of the north end of Lake Havasu. 

I hope these couple of tips will help out on your next visit to Lake Havasu!

-David Vander Pluym

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Now I'd be interested in hearing what kind of specific information and tips would be most helpful to visitors and readers.  Share your problems, experiences, questions, etc. in the comments!

Searching for 'Spurs

I admit it, my blogging has suffered lately as it falls further down on my list of priorities.  I have made a personal resolution to post more, and I have a draft post half-written about my recent revisit to the Arizona Strip!  In the meantime, since I had a very nice morning of birding, I thought I'd jot a few lines about the experience of looking for longspurs (Spoiler: it's more than a few lines).

The most expected species of longspur in the LCRV (and across Arizona) is Chestnut-collared.  I picked up 2 or 3 migrant Chestnut-collars earlier this fall, all heard giving their distinctive "kiddle-diddle" call.  I knew the other three species would be much more difficult to pick up.  Lapland is rare anywhere in Arizona, but they probably occur annually in the LCRV.  McCown's, on the other hand, winters in southeast Arizona and turns up semi-regularly in central Arizona, but it is casual in the LCRV.  Smith's has not been recorded in the LCRV at all, although it has turned up at the Salton Sea.

Two days ago, while birding with Paul Lehman and Barbara Carlson, we made a stop at some fields in the Mohave Valley that were recently plowed and covered in Horned Larks.  This is the perfect situation for Lapland Longspur--and not bad for McCown's, either.  Both species prefer bare ground (Chestnut-collared and Smith's prefer grass).  So today, dreaming of 'spurs, David and I returned to those fields ready to spend a day staring at dirt and gray birds.  We arrived at the fields around 10:00 and soon saw swarms of larks.  Driving down a few farm roads, we positioned ourselves in decent light fairly close to some lark flocks, and we began to scan.

My strategy for longspur searching goes something like this:
1. Find a field with a bunch of horned larks
2. Listen when the larks fly for longspur flight calls
3. Scan through foraging larks, looking for, well, anything that's not a lark
4. Look through flying lark flocks for longspurs flashing their distinctive tail patterns

It turns out that all those points have their challenges.  The Mohave Valley hasn't had large lark flocks until recently, when a number of the fields were plowed or harvested.  Listening for longspurs in a flock of larks can be the best way to find them, but of course you're trying to ignore the many little lark calls and hoping to pick out a rattle (which all four species do), the "kiddle-diddle" of Chestnut-collared, or the "pink" of a McCown's.  It takes some practice to pick out 'spurs visually, whether the birds are flying or feeding.  They tend to hunch down while they feed and hide behind clumps of grass or dirt.  In flight, the flocks twist and turn, but there's the chance to catch a glimpse of a distinctive tail pattern (all four species are different).

I was focusing on point #3, scoping through a lark flock looking for streaky skulkers, when a few birds flew in to join the flock.  As one of these birds banked, I saw a black-and-white tail with more white toward the body and a dark tip.  It wasn't a good enough view to tell if it was a McCown's or Chestnut-collared, but it was a longspur tail.  The bird soon came out from behind a clod of dirt and I noted a broad buffy supercilium with a hint of darker auriculars, a fairly plain face pattern.  Then it turned and I saw rufous lesser coverts: a McCown's Longspur!  David was able to see it and we studied the bird for a few minutes before the flock took flight and reshuffled.

David then walked down the road to scan another field full of larks, while I stayed to scan the same flock.  After a few minutes, another 'spur walked across my field of view.  This one was streaky, much streakier than the McCown's.  As it walked I noted a dark border to the auriculars and rufous greater coverts, and I called to David that I had a Lapland Longspur!  He ran up but the flock reshuffled before he was able to see the bird.  We continued scanning, hoping to spot it again, and soon David said that he had a Lap.  Looking in David's scope, I saw a different bird than the one I had seen--a much brighter individual with a black breast patch.

Within 20 minutes we had seen three longspurs, a Lapland and a McCown's!  We ended up staying for another hour, until the wind picked up and I couldn't see objects as single images anymore.  As lark flocks flew overhead, we heard short rattles of longspurs, and David saw a Chestnut-collared to add to the day's list.  Not a bad way to spend the morning!

Keeping notes and eBird

After a great weekend of birding, the field notebook I was using was filled to its last page.  This always gives me a great sense of accomplishment, wrapping up a notebook's worth of birding experiences and ornithological data.  On top of that, I was proud for another reason - of the pile of notebooks whose whereabouts are known, all of those bird data have been entered into eBird.  It took some time to catch up, especially with the many checklists I still had to enter from Costa Rica.  All was complete, and it got me thinking about this pile of notebooks collecting dust in a closet.  Sure, those data are all online now, but there's more than bird checklists in those notebooks.  Sketches, notes on birding locations, county birds, even historic records I copied out of old issues of North American Birds during long days at the museum - all of that is still in there.  So I decided to label my notebooks.  Nothing extensive, just my name, the date range, countries and states included, and any other notable goodies.

I have to admit that during the labeling process, I uncovered a half-full notebook spanning 2006 to 2009, with barely any of the checklists entered!  It took me two days to go through the pages, figuring out what was already in eBird, and entering the remaining checklists.

All of this work I put in begs the question, why bother putting all this stuff into eBird?  I don't throw away the notebooks afterward, and I keep all my lists in Excel spreadsheets anyway.  For me, there are so many good reasons to use eBird that it's hard to know where to start!

So let's start with the purely selfish reasons: it's a free listing software.  I've never paid for listing software, but from what I know, that stuff isn't half as good as eBird.  The only list I really keep in eBird right now is my Mohave County year list.  It takes me 18 seconds to pull it up, and I can see when and where I first got each species.  Say I want to look at all my observations of Blue-gray Gnatcatcher in Mohave County in 2011, I click on the bird and it turns out I've only had them twice, once at Lehman Hill and the next day at Kohen Ranch.  I can click on the location for Lehman Hill and see that I've seen 45 species there this year.  I can do the same with my life list - say I want to see in how many states and countries I've seen Ovenbird.  I click on the species and eBird shows that I've entered observations of Ovenbird from Veracruz (Mexico), Maine, Ohio, and California.  If I'm only interested in numbers, there's a page called "My eBird" where I can browse any list total that I'm interested in.  Glancing at the "states" section, I can see that I've entered the most species for California, with 388.  I have 107 species in Washington, 1 for Michigan.  This is curious...I've never been to Michigan.  I click on the "1" and see that I have House Sparrow on a checklist for the Detroit airport...well I guess you have to start somewhere.

But eBird is not a listing software.  It's a citizen science project.  The Cornell Lab of Ornithology uses all these observations as a massive data set, similar to other citizen science projects such as the Great Backyard Bird Count, Christmas Bird Counts, Project FeederWatch, Breeding Bird Surveys, etc.  Only a lot bigger.  So if you're using eBird as a listing software, and you're entering sightings at the county level instead of specific locations, or putting a month or a year or a lifetime's worth of sightings into one checklist, you're sidestepping the utility of those sightings to science.  eBird reviewers find those checklists and remove them from the data set - your lists aren't affected, but those kinds of checklists just aren't useful to the project.

So why is that important?  How does eBird use all those data, anyway?  I'm always interested in that very question, since I like to know how my work is paying off for the birds!  One of my favorite articles on the eBird home page is on the Animated Occurrence Maps that have been created for several bird species.  Check out a few of these maps.  Biologists use eBird data to create a model predicting the presence or absence of a species in a given area on a given date.  It's not completely accurate, but it does paint quite a picture of where a species occurs and how it moves throughout the year.  Biologists also use eBird to track species of concern, such as Rusty Blackbird.

Finally, my favorite thing about the eBird data set is that it is open for anyone to use and explore.  A few examples.  Let's say I really want to see a Black Rail - not a hypothetical situation.  I can look at the global range map for that species to see where it occurs.  Since it occurs in Arizona, that's probably my best bet to find one.  So I can pull up another map showing me where Black Rails have been reported in Arizona, with specific locations, dates, numbers, and observers.  I see that almost all the records fall on the Bill Williams, including a bright yellow recent observation.  I click that marker to see that this species has been recorded several times in the past month between Highway 95 and the gate on Planet Ranch Rd.

The maps are great, but I really love using eBird's bar charts.  Let's use another example.  Say I'm going to Costa Rica, and I'll be spending a lot of time in the province of Heredia.  I can pull up a bar chart showing me what species have been recorded, and their annual occurrence.  Or, imagine we're in Washington County, New York in April, and it's a totally new place.  I really want to see, say, a Snow Bunting.  I can check out that bar chart to find that I should pick a new target bird, because Snow Buntings depart in mid-March.  There only limit to the utility of the eBird data set is what is entered by birders like you and me!

eBird is for anyone interested in birds, no matter their skill level.  No one is expected to find and identify every bird, and there is an extensive review process to find and review sightings that are out of range and/or season.  That leads me to a word of advice.  If you're entering eBird and suddenly the program asks you to click a box to confirm a sighting, go ahead and confirm it if you're sure of what you saw!  Then click the "Yes" at the top of the page where it asks if you want to enter more details, and write a description of the bird you saw, or an explanation of how you arrived at an unusually high count.  I do this even for a continuing rarity, or for a count that I don't think is unusually high.  When you click that "confirm" box, an eBird reviewer then decides whether there is enough information to enter that sighting into the permanent scientific record.  They may even email you to ask for more details.  Writing a description as soon as the record is flagged is a good habit to get into, and it saves everyone time.

Get out there and eBird!

Links

There are quite a few webpages and videos out there right now that are at least a little relevant to LCRV birding, so I'd like to share some here.

For anyone looking for information on birding the LCRV, there is quite a bit out there!  Mark Stevenson wrote an excellent article, mainly on where to bird the valley.  For the average birder making a one- or two-day trip, this is the best source of info - read it here.  Of course, most birders coming through the area are seeking some known rarity.  For information on current rarities, David and I maintain a Google map.  I also maintain a Google map for birding locations in western Arizona, currently just Mohave County, that has a bunch of sites for the birder who wants to try something new or different - check it out here.

Arizona Highways ran a very cool segment on the Bill Williams River.  It has a bit of the history of the area, what to do there, shows some beautiful scenery, and features local birder John West!

Of more general birding interest, I wanted to share this article.  It's by Oregonian Dave Irons, on the lost art of written bird descriptions.  I highly recommend reading it and practicing the tips given by Dave...I know I am always trying to improve my written descriptions!  One paragraph in particular was quite poignant...

No one but you can truly know what you saw or determine what you get to count on your own life list. The purpose of collecting written documentations is so that they can be archived for future generations. In my view, an unaccepted report is just as valid as one that has been accepted. In each case, the only thing we know for sure is that a particular time and place the reporting observer believed that they saw a particular species of bird and was confident enough in their observation that they reported it to others. Whether the local field notes editor or your regional records committee decides that your description is sufficient to endorse and further publish is a completely different matter.

 Last but not least, bird blogger Laura Kammermeier has been busy making the funniest birding videos I've ever seen!  Check out "I Saw a Rare Bird", "There It Is. Over There!", and "Let's Get Our Larophilia On, Shall We?"