Green Season in Trinidad and Tobago

From back home in Ohio, Kenn writes: Most birding tours to Trinidad and Tobago (T & T) are planned for winter or early spring. That’s the season when you can expect the highest total number of species, because the local resident birds are joined by migrants from the north -- padding the list with birds that you could have seen back in Ohio or New Jersey during the summer. People who judge the success of a birding trip by the sheer number of species seen (we’re not among them) might see that as reason enough to go to Trinidad in winter.

Winter and early spring are the seasons when most other tourists go to T & T also. Partly they go in winter to escape the cold weather up north. But another factor is that the other half of the year, June through November, is what used to be referred to as Trinidad’s rainy season.

I say "used to be" because we’ve changed it. That half of the year is now known as the "Green Season."

Yeah, there’s some rain. But we just spent eight very full days in T & T at the peak of the Green Season, and rain was never an inconvenience for us. We carried rain jackets, we carried plastic bags for the cameras and binoculars, and we used common sense about watching the sky. Showers came a couple of times a day but they were brief, and then the skies cleared again. We didn’t lose more than a few minutes to rain, and in between, the birding was fantastic.

I’ve already written about our extraordinary night with the leatherback sea turtles. That’s an experience you won’t have in winter, because the turtles aren’t breeding then. In a more directly bird-related vein, the Green Season also has a lot of breeding bird activity. The total number of species present may be lower than in mid-winter, but the resident tropical birds are highly active and visible. We saw plenty of evidence of that during our visit.

Palm Tanagers were everywhere in T & T, including in the towns. At the Asa Wright Nature Centre, a pair was nesting inside the living room of the main house, and the adults were coming and going without any regard for all the humans on the verandah. We decided that this could be called "Palm Tanager" because it might easily land on the palm of your hand.

This Barred Antshrike nest at the Grafton Estate on Tobago was just one of many nests we found during our trip.

These male Golden-headed Manakins (and 7 or 8 of their buddies) were displaying like mad at a "lek," or communal dancing ground, down one of the trails at Asa Wright. The gaudy males perform little moonwalks and other dances while making buzzing and trilling notes, all to attract females. Which suggests to me that those female manakins must have really weird tastes!

Over on the Main Ridge on Tobago, the male Blue-backed Manakins were similarly preoccupied with doing freaky dances and making strange noises.

Some of the most interesting breeding behavior that we saw involved Common Potoos on the grounds of the Asa Wright Nature Centre. Potoos are genuinely bizarre creatures. Distantly related to nighthawks and Whip-poor-wills, but classified in a different family, potoos spend the day perched bolt upright on high tree branches, looking for all the world like dead stubs. At night, they fly around catching large insects in flight. The naturalists at Asa Wright had located a potoo nest, which really just consisted of a depression on a high branch where the female would have laid her single egg a few weeks earlier. The poor blurry photo above shows an adult potoo brooding the young bird. If it's hard to see what's going on, the next couple of photos should help. Here's a photo taken a couple of days later, when the adult was roosting atop a different perch. Even here, it doesn't really look like a bird. It's facing toward us, and its very short, broad bill is pointing up toward the left.

And here's the young Common Potoo by itself, still perched on the spot where it had hatched. Its bill is pointing up toward the right, and its eyes are closed. Good camouflage, isn't it? It doesn't really look like a dead stub of a branch -- it looks more like a discarded pale teddy bear, plucked from the trash can and tossed up into the tree -- but it doesn't look very edible. Predators aren't likely to go for it.

Here the young potoo has lowered its head a little, its bill is pointing toward the right, and its eye is slightly open. See the eye? (It's under that impressive bushy eyebrow.) Does the shape of the bird make sense now?

Here the little tyke is more thoroughly hunched down. Possibly because it senses that it's just about to start raining. Um, I mean, greening. This isn't the rainy season, it's the Green Season!

Here's Kim (just right of center), surrounded by a group of students and their teachers, showing them the baby Common Potoo through our digiscoping setup. We saw several groups of students during the time we were at Asa Wright, and it was inspiring to see the amount of educational programming that was going on at that fine nature center.

Incidentally, anyone who wants to visit Asa Wright Nature Centre, or explore nature anywhere in Trinidad and Tobago, should contact Caligo Ventures. They are THE experts on birding and natural history in T & T, and they're the exclusive agents for Asa Wright in the USA. Mark Hedden from Caligo traveled with us in T & T, and he proved to be a very impressive guy in terms of his dedication to birding, conservation, and quality travel.

Touching the Graceful Monsters

From amid a huge file of still-unprocessed photos, Kenn writes:

Baby leatherback sea turtles hatch out of eggs buried in sand and start a desperate scramble down the beach toward the water, and if they make it, they may not see land again for years. During those years they are maturing from palm-sized rubber toys into enormous sea monsters. Full-grown adult leatherbacks are the world’s largest turtles, up to seven feet long and weighing up to a ton. They are also the most wide-ranging turtles on the planet, found almost throughout the world’s oceans, traveling from the tropics to the edges of the polar regions. They are also, throughout their vast range, seriously endangered.

With streamlined leathery shells and powerful front flippers, the leatherbacks can fly through the depths with astonishing grace and speed, diving to more than half a mile below the sea surface and staying submerged for more than an hour. Their great size is no hindrance in the sea, where they are the most graceful of giants. Male leatherbacks will spend the rest of their lives in this state of grace. But unlike whales or dolphins, which have developed the ability to give birth at sea, adult female leatherbacks must go through the ordeal of returning to land to lay their eggs.

And an ordeal it must be, too, when she comes to land. As the female leatherback crawls from the surf onto the beach at night, in an instant she is transformed from graceful ballerina of the sea to clumsy, heavy drudge, plowing more than a thousand pounds of hard flesh forward with slow sweeps of her flippers, dragging herself face-first through the sand as she seeks the perfect spot to lay those precious eggs. Talk about a mother’s love demanding sacrifice. It may take two or three hours or more for her to drag herself ashore, find the right spot, dig a hole, lay the eggs, cover them over, and then drag herself, exhausted, back to the sea.

If we were to stumble across this phenomenon by chance, it would be our instinct to stay far back, to avoid disturbing this intimate ordeal of an endangered species. But Kim and I were lucky enough one night last week to be at Matura Beach, Trinidad, as insiders. We were in the company of local wardens who are almost as extraordinary, in their own way, as the turtles. Some of these men have been walking these beaches three or four nights a week during the nesting season for the last twenty years. Their devotion to the huge reptiles is obvious, but they also know exactly what visitors can and cannot do. So they told us when we had to stay back with lights off, when we could approach, when we could actually touch the mother leatherback as she was laying her eggs. Their guidance gave us the confidence to move in close without fear that we would seem disrespectful of the great beasts.

Here's a size comparison. Admittedly, Kim is quite petite, but our friend Pete Dunne (just behind Kim, with binoculars) is a normal-sized guy, so you can see that the female leatherback sea turtle is a huge animal.

The wardens had flashlight with red lenses (red light, they said, did not disturb the turtles), and in the glow of these we could watch the process. The huge female leatherback was digging with extraordinary delicacy, using her hind flippers to ladle out scoops of sand and toss them to the side, while her head and front flippers were merely spread-eagled on the sand. Periodically she would reach down with her hind flippers as if testing the depth of the hole she had created. Only after she had started laying eggs did the wardens tell us we could turn on lights and take flash photos.

Without the encouragement and guidance of the dedicated turtle wardens at Matura Beach, we never would have dreamed of getting this close to these colossal animals.

Here's a closeup of the head of one female leatherback while she was laying eggs: eyes closed, seemingly in a trance. Her head was larger than a bowling ball.

The wardens found a group of baby leatherbacks that had just hatched and were scrambling down the beach toward the water in the dark. To our amazement, the wardens picked them up and handed them to us for closer looks. Apparently this doesn't do the baby turtles any harm, and the wardens routinely handle the animals as part of their monitoring and research.

There were a number of people on the beach that night -- not only our little group of Leica-sponsored birders, but also the wardens on the beach, a number of EarthWatch volunteer helpers, and a couple of groups of students and tourists. And we were all reveling in the experience, but not in a partying sense of reveling, more like a spiritual rush, a deep sense of awe. It was extraordinary to watch these leviathans out of their element, vulnerable and slow as they finished the task of covering over their eggs with sand and went dragging back down the beach, looking slow and spent, soon to disappear again into the wilderness of the sea.

Eye-burners of Caroni

From the Asa Wright Nature Centre, Trinidad, Kenn writes: Birding in Trinidad is turning out to be even more fun than I’d expected.

I started reading about Trinidad -- and about the Asa Wright Nature Centre -- when I was just a kid. The center was established in 1967, making it one of the first nature centers anywhere in the tropics, and I first heard about it as a place that people would go for their introduction to tropical birds. But I had my tropical-bird intro in Mexico, since (as a penniless teenager) I could hitch-hike to the border and then take the cheap buses south. Later, when I ventured deeper into the tropics, I went to Peru and Ecuador and Venezuela, not to Trinidad. Working as a professional leader of birding tours, it made more sense for me to take groups to Venezuela (with a total bird list of over 1400 species) than to the island of Trinidad, just off the Venezuelan coast (with a total bird list of fewer than 500 species). So even though I knew Trinidad was famous for birding, I had already seen virtually all the bird species possible on that island nation, and I just hadn’t gotten around to visiting.

Fast-forward to July 2009. Jeff Bouton was looking to promote ecotourism to Asa Wright Nature Centre, and looking for people to try out the new Leica digiscoping setup, so (as Kim has described in a separate post), here we are. And as I said, birding in Trinidad is turning out to be more fun, more interesting, more exciting than I’d expected.

Take our evening visit to Caroni Swamp. I had been hearing about Caroni for decades -- one of the most famous birding swamps on the planet -- and a couple of evenings ago, we were able to visit. Lester Nanan took us in on his boat, a wide-hulled, flat-bottomed boat, practically a barge, so stable that we were even able to set up scopes and tripods for viewing from the deck.

Kim on the watch from Lester Nanan's boat among the mangroves

We were out cruising channels through the mangroves for more than three hours, seeing all kinds of amazing birds -- the American Pygmy Kingfisher, a tiny kingfisher, like a green-and-orange sparrow with a huge honking bill; the Greater Ani, a big, black, long-tailed bird with staring yellow eyes, looking like a flying yardstick when it flopped into the air; the Bicolored Conebill, a little bird that refused to look as drab and colorless as its illustration in the book; and dozens more.

But the star of the show, the reason why thousands of people visit here, is the Scarlet Ibis. This brilliant red bird, this glowing, shockingly red bird, all red with tiny black tips on its outer wing feathers, comes in to Caroni Swamp to roost by the thousands at some seasons. In July they were only coming in by the hundreds. But even hundreds of Scarlet Ibises make for a jaw-dropping spectacle.

We anchored about a quarter mile from a mangrove island where many of them would come to roost, and watched in awe as these spectacular birds came swooping in out of the sunset. Lester Nanan told us that years ago, people used to poach the ibises. But when Trinidad gained its independence in 1962, the Scarlet Ibis was designated as the national bird, and with the growth of national pride, the poaching stopped.

A small part of the Scarlet Ibis concentration. The photo may not look great, but consider the fact that we were digiscoping it, with the tripod set up on a boat, from a quarter mile away --

In years past I had taken tour groups to places in Venezuela where seven species of ibises occurred, where Scarlet Ibis was just one of the local species. Even there, of course, you don’t overlook this brilliant red bird. But the species never had the impact on me there that it did in Caroni Swamp, where Scarlet Ibis was THE ibis, the emblem bird of this wonderful island. Kim was calling the birds "eye-burners," and the name certainly seemed appropriate. It helped that we were toasting the birds with rum punch that was about the same color as the ibises, but the sight alone would have been intoxicating.

Kim modeling the rum punch

Another digiscoped view of a small part of the ibis concentration

Along the Oregon Trail

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: The last few days were like a blur, almost, inspiring me to think of a new title: "Blur-ding with Kenn and Kim!" Friday night our band played at Mango Mama’s in Port Clinton, and it felt like one of our best performances yet, but we didn’t have time to bask in the afterglow of a rocking fine time: I had to hurry home, in most un-rockerly fashion, and sleep for a couple of hours. At 3:45 a.m. I was leaving the house to drive to the Cleveland airport so I could fly to Boise, Idaho, get into a rental car, drive three and a half hours west into Oregon, and arrive in the town of Burns in time to set up and give the Saturday evening keynote talk at the 28th annual John Scharff Migratory Bird Festival.

If you’re familiar with the concept of bird festivals, that figure will have caught your eye: 28th annual? Has any bird festival been around that long? There are now hundreds of bird and nature festivals all over North America, but most of them have sprung up within the last decade or two. A couple of the long-standing events, the Festival of the Cranes in Socorro, New Mexico, and the Hummer/Bird Festival in Rockport, Texas, are now about twenty years old. But the festival in Burns, Oregon, preceded them. If I’m counting correctly, they would have held their first event in 1982, years before most of the current festivals got off the ground.

Burns is the largest town in Harney County, a huge county (larger than Massachusetts) with a population of only about 8,000. Birders know Burns for the proximity of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, a fabulous area for huge numbers of waterbirds, and for the wealth of raptors, sagebrush country species, and other wonderful birds in the surrounding area. The Harney County Chamber of Commerce, working with the refuge staff and with other biologists in the area, have created one of the finest bird festivals anywhere. For several days each spring, the festival takes over the local high school and the local fair grounds, local businesses roll out the welcome mat in an obvious way (see the sample signs to the right), and hundreds of people come from all over the northwest to attend.

After my marathon of rock concert / air travel / long drive, I arrived in somewhat woozy state, but the organizers made me feel welcome and at ease immediately. Jessica Boone, director of the Chamber of Commerce, and Carey Goss, the energetic Visitor Services Manager from the Malheur refuge, were in the final stages of setting up inside a huge building at the fair grounds, with a dozen young volunteers from the high school softball team helping out. In no time I had my laptop hooked up to a projector, and I had an hour to relax before the crowd started to arrive. So of course I went outside. In the parking lot I ran into my longtime friends Harley and Karyl Klein, who had come down from the Portland area, but our conversation was constantly interrupted as we paused to stare at the waves of Ross’s Geese and Snow Geese flying overhead. Literally thousands of white geese streamed over the parking lot as we stood there. What a way to welcome people to a bird festival!

In conversations later that evening and the following morning, I talked to dozens of people who had come from several hours’ drive away to attend the festival, and who had been coming annually for many years. And I could understand why. Aside from the fact that I was missing sleep somewhat and missing Kim very intensely, this was one of the most delightful bird festivals I had ever attended. We’ll certainly make a point of coming here together in some future year.

For more infomation about this festival, visit http://www.migratorybirdfestival.com/index.htm

Antarctica: Outline of the trip

From home base in Ohio, Kenn writes: We traveled to the Antarctic on board the Clipper Adventurer from January 7 to 25, 2009, on a birding and wildlife expedition sponsored by Victor Emanuel Nature Tours. Before and after the voyage we were in Argentina, starting in the capital city of Buenos Aires and joining the ship in the southern outpost city of Ushuaia. The map below will help to put these points in a world perspective.

Points for reference: 1. Buenos Aires, Argentina. 2. Ushuaia, Argentina. 3. Antarctic Peninsula.

The vast majority of expedition cruises to Antarctica go from South America to the Antarctic Peninsula, and the map shows why. South America extends much farther south than Africa or Australia, and the Antarctic Peninsula is the northernmost point of the white continent, so the crossing is feasible for many kinds of ships. There are also some expedition cruises that go south from New Zealand and take in the subantarctic islands of that country, and a few cruises that go south through the bird-rich waters of South Africa to the continent's edge, and we would like to try those routes eventually. But so far, all five of my trips have originated in South America.

Most world maps (like the one above) show Antarctica as an ill-defined mass along the lower edge, so it's hard for most people to get an idea of the continent's size. Antarctica is huge -- near the size of Australia and Europe combined. It is roughly centered on the South Pole, and the interior of the continent is the coldest region on earth. We confess that, as naturalists, we're not very interested in visiting the South Pole; nothing lives there except a few dedicated scientists. Remarkably, the South Polar Skua has occurred there as a stray, having flown many hundreds of miles across lifeless ice and rock, but we'd rather watch birds like this out at the Antarctic coastline where they belong.

The majority of expedition cruises from Ushuia go straight across the Drake Passage to the Antarctic Peninsula and back. But our trip was focused on birds and wildlife, so we took the longer route northeast to the Falkland Islands, farther east to remote South Georgia Island, then southwest to the Antarctic Peninsula and back north across the Drake Passage. On the voyage we spent eight full days at sea (enjoying fabulous seabirds, whales, and dolphins), and during the other ten days we made landings at no fewer than 18 sites. This was Kim's first trip to the region and I can say without hesitation that it was my best trip ever. In subsequent posts we'll be describing the experiences of the voyage in detail.

A Link to the Falklands

From cyberspace, Kenn writes: If we're on schedule, today we'll be on the Falklands, those cold but beautiful rocky islands east of the southern tip of South America. We probably won't be able to post from out there. But for a taste of what we might be seeing, you can check out Alan Henry's blog, Birding in the Falkland Islands. Alan has lived in the Falklands since 1987 and is an expert on the birdlife there. Naturally, it's exciting for him to find birds that are rare on the islands -- including visitors that would be common for us in North America, like Barn Swallow and Lesser Yellowlegs. But he also includes photos of his everyday local birds, like Falkland Steamer Ducks and Rockhopper Penguins!

In With The New Year

From the Time Machine, Kenn writes: If this attempt at pre-publishing actually works, this will post at 6:55 in the morning (eastern standard time) on January 1, 2009. And if all goes according to plan, at that point Kim and I will be all bleary-eyed and hot. Not as a result of partying all night, but as a result of being on a plane all night, on a nine-hour flight from Dallas to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Buenos Aires is at the edge of the tropics, and January 1 is the height of summer there, which is where the "hot" part comes from. Or at least, most of it.

We’ll be out of the country for about four weeks, with several days in northern Argentina, a couple in Tierra del Fuego, and then a long voyage by ship to the Falklands, South Georgia Island, and the Antarctic Peninsula. If possible -- if we can connect to the internet for less than a million dollars -- we’ll attempt to post some bird pix from Argentina, or maybe even from the ship, if the satellite hookup works. But it’s possible that we won’t be able to post anything to the blog for four weeks.

Since we don’t want to lose any of our loyal readers, we’re attempting this thing where we’ve pre-scheduled a number of posts to appear while we’re gone. They won’t be quite every day (but some days might have two). I probably won’t do anything blatant like posting lots of pictures of Kim birding in a bikini (although you never know ... ). We might do things like posting photos of sexy birds, quiz questions with fabulous prizes, or our secret directions to a Carolina Parakeet nesting site. You never know.

It’s possible that I’ve screwed up the technique and that all of our carefully scheduled posts will come spewing out at once, crashing the system. If so -- well, live and learn. But please check back often to see if that has happened. And we’ll be "live" again by the end of January, if not before.

Our very best wishes to all of our birding friends, including those whom we haven't met yet, for a rewarding and hopeful and prosperous new year.

Ice, Ice, Baby

From Port Clinton, Ohio, Kenn writes: We braved the intense cold and the ice-covered roads last night to go to band practice, and then the weather socked us anyway: Sully, our lead guitar player, was called away for an emergency having to do with pipes freezing and bursting. The rest of the band spent a while working out chord progressions of new material anyway before calling it a night.

At some point, messing around, I started playing the famous bassline from the hit "Under Pressure" by David Bowie and Queen -- the same bassline that was lifted, essentially note for note, by Vanilla Ice for his hit single rap classic "Ice Ice Baby." Kim had performed this song a couple of times with her old band, Four Thorn Rose, not as a planned part of the show but to fill in time while someone changed a broken guitar string. Sure enough, as soon as I started playing the bassline, Kim jumped in with the lyric, delivering it with tons of rapper attitude: Will it ever stop, yo -- I don’t know ... Deadly, when I play a dope melody, anything less than the best is a felony ... Girls were hot wearin' less than bikinis, Rockman lovers drivin' Lamborghinis ... ice, ice, baby ... On and on, a rap anthem, all the more authentically gangsta-ish because it’s based on a stolen bassline. Fletch jumped in on drums, and the handful of other people hanging around at Mango Mama’s watched in awe as Kim rapped out this long long song without missing a beat.

We can’t help thinking about ice right now. It has been wickedly cold the last few days; on Sunday, when we had expected to do the Fremont Christmas Bird Count, the temperature went down to 4 Fahrenheit with wind chills of 25 below zero. The ice storm that we had Friday morning -- the last time the temp was barely above freezing -- coated everything with thick ice that’s still there. In a separate post, we’ll talk about how the birds are faring in this weather. But for anyone who keeps bird feeders, this is the weather in which the birds need help the most. They can find food under snow, but when ice locks things up, the birds can be in serious trouble.

After all this cold weather, we’re looking forward to going away -- to Antarctica! I know from previous experience that the weather is surprisingly mild at this season. We travel by ship along the coastline, and the temperature rarely gets much below freezing. It would be different, it would be unimaginably cold, if we went to the Antarctic interior, but we wouldn’t be seeing birds there. So we’ll explore the islands and the coast, and we’ll see lots of ice, but we won’t encounter the kind of intense cold that has hit the American Midwest the last few days.

Coronation Island, in the South Orkney Islands, off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Kenn took this photo on his third Antarctic trip in 1992.