Random Bird: Abert's Towhee

Kenn wrote this back in December: (Today, January 22, we're scheduled to be finishing our exploration of the Antarctic Peninsula and starting to head toward the legendary rough waters of the Drake Passage. Internet access is unlikely, so we pre-set this post to appear in our absence.)

If you’re more than about 300 miles away from Phoenix, Arizona, I can pretty much guarantee that you won’t be seeing Abert’s Towhee today. And neither will we. This is a bird with a very limited range, found only in thickets along lowland streams in the American southwest. Some southwestern birds become more common as you head south into Mexico, but not Abert’s Towhee; it barely crosses the border into the northern edge of Mexico. Most of its range is in Arizona and a small area of southeastern California, with tiny toeholds in New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah.

In most places this bird lurks inside dense thickets, scratching among the leaf-litter with both feet in the manner of other towhees, and it’s usually hard to see. You’re more likely to hear its voice, a series of sharp ringing notes (and that's just as well; it sounds better than it looks). In some places, though, the bird is increasing and spreading into new habitats. Within the last three decades or so, this has become a common suburban bird in parts of Phoenix and Yuma, Arizona. It has also expanded its range into new areas, such as along Sonoita Creek in southern Arizona, where we know from careful past study that it hadn’t been present in earlier years.

Abert’s Towhee shows up on some "watchlists" of birds of conservation concern, presumably because its total range looks small on the map. In my opinion, this is misguided: we should reserve such designations for birds that are actually vulnerable or declining. Abert’s Towhee has been expanding its range and adapting to new habitats, so it’s doing very well. If conservation groups get into a mindset of padding the lists of "threatened" or "near-threatened" birds, after a while the whole exercise starts to take on a sense of the-sky-is-falling absurdity.

Random Bird: Blackbird

Kenn wrote this back in December: (Today, January 7, we're supposed to be boarding ship in Tierra del Fuego to head toward the Antarctic, and we set this post to be published in our absence.)

So who would call a bird simply "Blackbird?" The British. Look at bird books from England, especially older ones, and you’ll see bird names like Blackbird, Heron, Wren, Jay, Swallow, etc., as if there were only one bird in each of these groups. Those British sometimes act as if they had invented the English language!

Anyway, The Blackbird (which Americans often refer to as "Eurasian Blackbird") is not at all related to the blackbird family (Icteridae), a strictly New World group which includes our familiar Red-winged Blackbird as well as grackles, cowbirds, American orioles, meadowlarks, and others. In fact, the (Eurasian) Blackbird is a very close relative of the American Robin (which is not closely related to the European Robin ... Got that? There will be a quiz in the morning). The Blackbird is native to Europe, Asia, and North Africa, and has been introduced into Australia and New Zealand. There are a few records from eastern Canada, but there are some doubts about how those birds may have arrived there. The Blackbird shown above is one that we watched in Copenhagen, Denmark, in September 2005. Aside from the color of its feathers, it looked for all the world like an American Robin, and acted like one, too, perfectly at home in a tiny park in the big city.

Not only is this blackbird very widespread in the Old World, it’s also culturally important. "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie" would have been this species. The Beatles' song "Blackbird," with the lines about "Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly," was referring to this species. But when it comes to the Wallace Stevens poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," the answer is unclear; Stevens was an American but some of his blackbirds seem to have a European tilt.

Random Bird: Purple-bibbed Whitetip

Kenn wrote this back in December: (Today, January 5, we're supposed to be leading a group of birders to the Otamendi Nature Reserve north of Buenos Aires, Argentina. It's unlikely that we'll have a chance to post anything, so this "random bird" is set to post in our absence.)

That’s one of the great things about being a bird blogger. Who else gets to title a post "Purple-bibbed Whitetip?"

This small hummingbird (technically Urosticte benjamini) occurs only on the west slope of the Andes in Colombia and Ecuador, mostly in the understory of dense forest in the subtropical zone. It had been considered "rare to uncommon and perhaps local" and "not often seen" as recently as 2001. That was when the outstanding two-volume "The Birds of Ecuador," by Bob Ridgely and Paul Greenfield, was published. But since then, a number of ecotourism lodges in Ecuador have put up hummingbird feeders, and suddenly this rare-and-not-often-seen hummer has become a lot easier to see. The establishment of feeders in many tropical areas has not changed the actual distribution of hummingbirds, but it has certainly altered our understanding of where they live.

I had seen this bird’s only close relative, the Rufous-vented Whitetip, in Peru several years ago, but I’d never encountered the Purple-bibbed until February 2006, when Kim and I got to watch (and photograph) this species at leisure at the Tandayapa Bird Lodge, near Mindo, Ecuador. The purple bibs of the males were visible only in certain lights, but the odd white tips to their central tail feathers were very conspicuous.