Sporting a dapper black cap, a sky-blue bill accentuating a chestnut-brown body, a gleaming white cheek patch, and black perky tail feathers, a male Ruddy Duck in breeding season assumes an entirely different bearing from his nondescript winter alter ego. All in all, with its small size, broad flattened bill, disproportionately large head, and distinct,…

Yellow-billed Cuckoos (Coccyzus americanus) are fairly common in the eastern U.S. But in the last half-century, they have become rare in the West. Over the past 10 years in San Diego County, eBird shows unique sightings only 15 times—almost always a single bird in June or July, at Lake Henshaw, Lake Hodges, the Anza Borrego…

A member of the silky-flycatcher family, the Phainopepla inhabits the Southwest and Mexico. The male has a thin frame; shiny black plumage; piercing crimson eyes; and a sparse, cow-lick crest. In contrast to the male’s shimmering plumage, the similarly shaped female sports sooty gray feathers with the same crimson eyes and wispy crest. In flight,…

“Hey—grab the scope! What’s that bird?” I pointed to a small, dark bird with a distinctly dipping tail, sitting upright on a distant branch overhanging the river. For the Colorado Breeding Bird Atlas, we were surveying our block of pinyon/juniper, high-altitude conifers, and a short stretch of the Arkansas River in central Colorado, to document…

A “tall, thin tramp in a swallow-tailed coat.” A “long striped snake on two legs.” A lanky, blue and purple cartoon character with a flopping crest, constantly foiling Wile E. Coyote. What do these descriptions have in common? They all belong to the Greater Roadrunner. A large, loping, ground-loving member of the cuckoo family, this…

Walking past the sage-scrub open space in the pre-dawn winter twilight, I heard a number of birds singing loudly. Some sounded like Song Sparrows improvising a different intro and jazzier closing notes—maybe a different song for winter than summer? Others made me think of extremely musical Spotted Towhees, although Spotteds (and most songbirds) don’t sing…

Just before my shift started, I walked into the baby bird room at the wildlife rehabilitation center. A distinctive sound ringing through the room—”WEE-urrr, WEE-urrr”—transported me back more than five years and 1,000 miles. The soundtrack of late summer in the pinyon-juniper habitat of our previous home in the Colorado mountains—baby Black-headed Grosbeaks were in…

They typically nest in large colonies, occasionally numbering in the thousands. Within these noisy, chattering colonies, they push “neighborliness” to the limit, laying eggs in or even moving their eggs into their neighbors’ nests. They recognize the voices of their offspring even among thousands of other kids squawking to be fed. They spy on their…

Naming a species a “least” this-or-that or a “lesser” such-and-such smacks a bit of disparagement. The bird exists only in relationship to a larger/greater/“better” bird. The Lesser Goldfinch’s comparator is its Spinus congener, the American Goldfinch. In this context, the Lesser Goldfinch comes up short in several ways. It measures ½” (10%) shorter and weighs…

When I set out to write about a species, I start with “What is interesting about this species?” With hummingbirds, though, what isn’t interesting about them? The smallest of all birds, most of the hummingbirds seen in California weigh between 0.1 and 0.3 ounces (~2.5 – 4 grams) or less than 5 original M&Ms. Probably…

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Tripping the Light Fantastic