New rule, 52 species

I am adding driving with a full car (4 passengers) to my Green Big Year list. Carpooling for birders is something I want to encourage!

I will keep a note of birds seen with aid of car and present two separate totals at the end of the year.

Yesterday I exercised the carpool rule to the max. at 6am my father, Todd, Adrian and myself met at a parking lot on Columbus Ave in South Philly. All four of us piled in the car to do a rarity sweep. Our goal was the Common Chaffinch in Hunterton TWP, NJ, Snowy Owl at Merrill Creek Reservoir and Say's Phoebe in Bucks County PA. The chaffinch is a first for NJ, it is a European finch, very common in gardens. Only 2 or 3 records before in NE Canada. The bird was visiting feeders behind a birder's house. I'll write more when I get the photos.
Posted by Tony Croasdale at 3:12 PM 0 comments
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
added rule to Green Year

Green Big Year

As of January 1st 2011 I will be doing a "Green Big
Year"

Going green isn't meant to be self imposed hardship or inconvenience. The point is to highlight alternatives to using large amounts of fossil fuel for a hobby.

1. I will only count birds seen from foot, bike, sailboat, human powered watercraft, or public transportation.

2. I will not count birds even under rule #1 if I flew, drove, or was driven to location specifically for birding. For example, if I flew to AZ for birding, I cannot count birds on a hike up Madera Canyon.

3. I can accept a short ride to a birding location if traveled by the rule #1. Such as accepting a ride to Militia Hill Hawk Watch, if I took the train to Ft Washington.

Wild Philadelphia

I started a new blog with my dad called Wild Philadelphia. www.wildphiladelphia.blogspot.com

I will still be making retro blogs on here starting soon and what ever else I do outside the Philly area.

Back From Brazil

Woah, such an amazing trip. 360 species of bird! I will be doing much "retro-posting" over the next few weeks to catch up. Also considering there is an ivory gull in Cape May and other goodies around, you can expect me to be posting about local trips as well!

Salto Marato

Tiger Rat Snake

We arrived in Guanacasava and took a bus up into the Atlantic Rainforest. of the Salto Marato reserve. On the way I spotted guria cuckoos and a black-and-white monjita in a pasture. Salto Marato is a private nature reserve by Fundacao Obotacario. Fundacao O Botacario is a conservation organization funded by the O Botacario cosmetic company.

Salto Marato is a relatively small reserve at 7,000 acres, however it adjoins some much larger reserves. One of the requirements of O Boticario to purchase land for a reserve is that it adjoins another protected area. This is in keeping with the theory of Biogeography, that an intact area of habitat of a certain size will have higher biodiversity than the same area of fragmented habitat.

Upon arrival at the reserve we were shown a tiger rat snake at the entrance by volunteer, Romeiro.
We had our first presentation by Zulekia, the reserve director. During the coffee break I spotted a channel-billed toucan on a bare tree outside the visitor center.

We learned about the severe degradation of the Atlantic Forest to less than 7% of it's original coverage. Zulekia explained how the over harvesting of palmito palm for hearts of palm causes a trophic cascade as it is such an important food source for furgiverous animals. Loss of this species reduces the amount of seed-dispersing birds in the forest.

Lapwing at Coritiba vs Corinthians

Brazil

Lapwing at Botanical Garden, Curitiba

It's been a while since my last post. A month perhaps. I have a lot to cover. Denali, Anchorage, Philly. Pine Barrens, Key Largo and Brazil. I write this in a private Brazilian hospital emergency room waiting room. I'm waiting for program's TA as she has come down with bronchitis and has a high fever. I'm watching a TV show about Cape gannets in Portuguese. I'm in Curitiba, a city of two million in the state of Parana in southern Brazil.

It's fitting that the show I'm watching is about South Africa as I am in another part of the southern hemisphere's sub tropics. I find the southern temperate regions especially fascinating. I want to spend more time exploring these regions. I am especially interested in auracaria forests. Curitiba's city seal is of a Brazilian pine, an auracauria. These columnar trees with strange upside-down umbrella crowns are found thorough the city. Unfortunately I don't think my trip will visit any wild stands auracauria forest. It will have to wait till my next visit when I also travel to Argentina and Chile to see monkey puzzle tree forests.

I guess I'll start in Brazil since I'm here. I'll fill in the rest with “retro-blogs” when I'm home. We arrived in Brazil about two weeks ago. We landed in Sao Paulo and took a connecting flight to Curitibia. Not surprisingly the first bird was black vulture followed by a southern lapwing. The hostel we stayed in was fantastic and had fantastic grounds to bird. Tropical parula, an unidentified spinetail and many southern house wrens and rufous bellied thrush were found from the decks. Rufous honeros are everywhere here and it's really cool to see their mud dome nests on telephone poles and Brazilian pines. We spent the rest of the day eating at a churrascaria (Brazilian barbeque and buffet) and visiting the botanical gardens.

Southern lapwings are everywhere, and I mean everywhere. All over the botanical gardens, even walking on top of the topiary hedges. Lapwings are noisy, the local name, “quero-quero “ means “I want, I want”. It's apt as the birds do sound like a whiny child. I even saw a lapwing with chick remain on the field during a football match. Coritibia aka Coxa (Curitiba's team) played the Corinthians from Sao Paulo. The lapwing and chick never left the field! Occasionally a player would come too close and the mother would fly up and even harass the players. I don't know how the chick wasn't trampled.

OK back to the story. After some morning birding at the hostel and breakfast were off to Paranagua. Brazilian breakfast consists of sweet breads, caramel spread, chocolate cake, ham and of course, coffe. We took the ferry from Paranagua across a bay to Guaraquecaba.

. During the crossing we saw cocoi herons as well as great egrets and little blue herons feeding on mud flats near mangroves. The bay in surrounded by rainforest covered mountains. We had several dolphin sightings. The low triangular and non curved dorsal fins made me think they may be La Plata dolphins, the South American estuarine members of the river dolphin family. However they are apparently shy of boats and occur in low densities. Maybe we saw more than one kind of dolphin? Soon we saw our first brown boobies diving into the dolphin pods. Magnificent frigate birds were constantly overhead and often mixed with black vultures in thermals over islands. Occasionally a frigatebird could be seen pursuing a booby or royal tern. I believe I saw a snowy-capped tern, but I'm not sure if they occur over such open water. I think they are more of a marsh tern. Out n the bay I witnessed one of the most amazing wildlife spectacles I ever witnessed, two rafts of neotropic cormorants in the THOUSANDS!. I never know neotropic cormorants occurred in such congregations. There must have been ten thousand between the two groups. Brown boobies were also in big numbers, in groups of dozens and even some in the hundreds. With the bay surrounded by mountains I suspect the bay could be quite steep and deep, maybe there is a canyon and an upwelling like a mini Monterrey Bay? Maybe it is a seasonal occurrence, the birds and dolphins drawn to spawning fish or a anadromous fish run.