My birding gear

I have a lot of tools I use both in the field and at home that help my birding.  Sometimes I think about paring down and going back to basics, but then I look at my photos and I remember that my eBird lists help the Cornell Lab of Ornithology study all kinds of things related to birds.  So here are the things I use:

Binoculars:  About 5 years ago, I invested in a pair of Eagle Optics Ranger 10x42s.  These binoculars are waterproof and come with a lifetime warranty, and I love them.

Camera: Last year I bought a gently used Canon XSi on eBay.  Best.  Purchase.  Ever!  I use either a 75-300mm or a 500mm fixed lens for my bird photos.

Scope: Barska 20-60x60.  It was a gift a number of years ago, when I was starting to get more serious about birding.  At around $100, it was the perfect scope at the time since I didn't know then how much I'd get into birding.

Camera phone: iPhone 4S.  I've been taking pictures with this through my scope without the aid of any kind of attachment, but it's probably time to get an adapter so I can get better pictures more easily (instead of wiggling the phone around in front of the scope's eyepiece and hoping it'll line up just right in time for me to get a decent photo before the bird moves out of view).

Maps: Apple Maps on my iPhone to provide turn-by-turn directions when I'm driving somewhere unfamiliar.  And in Iowa, I use my Sportsman's Atlas to find nearby parks and other wildlife areas or to decide where I want to go.  I also use the BirdsEye app's Find Nearby Birds feature to see what other birders have reported in the area when I'm trying to decide where to go birding.

Checklist app: BirdLog North America.  This lets me immediately upload my birding lists to eBird.

Field guides:  On my iPhone I have iBird Pro.  I use it and the Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America to help me ID birds when I'm on the road.  I try to avoid looking up birds while I'm actively birding and just use a notebook to make notes and sketch out the field markers of an unidentified bird I'm seeing.  Then I go back later and ID it.  At home I have my (quite heavy) Sibley Guide to Birds, which is my favorite of all North America bird guides because of all the detail it shows, but I find its size and weight too unwieldy to take it into the field with me.

When I need to identify a bird call or song, I use iBird Pro and 2 websites: WhatBird and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's All About Birds.  One great feature of WhatBird is they list similar-sounding species.  So let's say you heard a bird that sounded kind of like a Chipping Sparrow, but you know it wasn't that species.  You can go to WhatBird's Chipping Sparrow page, and they have a list of other species who sound like a Chipping Sparrow.  You can even listen to each one!

It's a lot of tools, I know.  I didn't start using them all at once, but now I consider them all pretty essential.  Yes I could probably get by with just my binoculars and one field guide, but all the "extras" help me be a better birder (I'm taking to you, spotting scope and WhatBird), help me find new birding spots (Sportsman's Atlas and BirdsEye), or help my birding contribute to the bigger picture or share my passion with others (eBird and cameras).

Maffitt Reservoir Sunday

We've had quite variable weather in April so far - rain and snow, and temperatures ranging from the 70s to the 30s.  This past Sunday was mild - scattered rain showers and temps in the 50s - so Mr Pescador and I spent a little time out at Maffitt Reservoir.  There were lots of waterfowl on the lake - Northern Shovelers, Hooded Mergansers, Gadwalls, Lesser Scaup, Mallards, Ring-necked Ducks, Bufflehead, Ruddy Ducks (I love these tiny divers :) ), and of course Canada Geese.  I'm struggling with scaup right now - I suspect I've seen Greater Scaup at some point this year (because I've seen a lot of scaup) but I probably need to have someone point out the differences to me when we're looking at them in person.  I keep studying my field guides and I'm familiar with the field marks that separate the 2 species, but they're pretty subtle differences (at least on paper).  Plus my cheap Barska spotting scope, as much as I love it, gets darker the more I try to zoom in.  So when I try to get really close looks at head and bill shapes, it gets too dark for me to see very clearly.  I guess it's time to start saving up for a new scope.  My Barska is great at 20x, so if it's a species I'm familiar with I can use them to view and ID birds from afar.  But if I need to use them for gulls, shorebirds (sandpipers and plovers), or fall warblers (when they've lost their colorful breeding plumage) my scope falls short.  But enough about that, onto the birds!

The sparrows are really starting to show up - Song, Vesper, and Field Sparrows were all singing.  I also spotted a Lark Sparrow lurking in a tree.  And when I drove down to the fishing pier on the east shore, a Common Loon and some feisty American Coots were there to keep me company.

The coots were diving down and bringing aquatic plants up to the surface to eat.  They were all taking turns doing the diving and trying to steal from each other.

Dive!  And then when a coot successfully brings something to the surface, its efforts are rewarded by some good old kleptoparasitism:

Kleptoparasitism is a long, complicated word that basically describes a behavior where one animal will harass another (who has food) in an attempt to get them to drop some or all of that food.  If successful, the one doing the stealing gets the benefit of a meal without having to spend all that energy catching/collecting that food.

My year list is now to 83 species - not bad considering my back injury!

Catching up - March birding

Wow, a lot has happened in the last month.  Unfortunately it wasn't all birding, but I did get some good birding in when I could.

At the end of March, I went down to the Kellerton area.  My target species: Greater Prairie-Chicken.  Even though I've been involved in prairie-chicken conservation for the last 7 years, I'm a bit embarrassed to admit they were not yet on my life list.  I decided this was the year to fix that, so on a Friday afternoon Mr Pescador and I got in the car and made the trip to Kellerton.

What makes Kellerton so special?  It's an area the Iowa DNR is actively managing for prairie-chickens.  This means they have been hard at work restoring large patches of prairie (imagine that, prairie-chickens prefer open prairie habitat :) ).  As a result, the Kellerton area has some 10,000+ acres of prairie habitat.  And the last couple of years, they have been trapping chickens in Nebraska and releasing them in Kellerton to help add some genetic diversity to the population (and boost their numbers).  So, since it was the start of their breeding season, and there's a known population, Kellerton was my best chance to see these charismatic birds.  If you haven't seen the males' booming dance display, check out this youtube video:

During the breeding season, the birds will gather at a lek - basically an open area where the males can dance and strut their stuff, while the females watch and choose a male to be their mate.

We arrived at Kellerton about an hour before sunset (prairie-chickens do most of their dancing at dawn and dusk).  There were lots of other birds to look at and listen to while waiting for the prairie-chickens to come out.  The Eastern Meadowlarks were back in force, singing their sweet "spring of the year" and chasing each other.

Horned larks were singing from the road edges.

Just before dusk, we spotted a group of chickens fly along a ridge and land out of sight about 3/4 of a mile away to the east.  Consulting my Sportsman's Atlas, I saw there was another gravel road one mile east so we decided to head over there and hopefully find the group.  On the first pass down the road, we didn't spot anything other than some Red-winged Blackbirds.  After about 2 miles, I decided to turn around and head back for the highway.  And wouldn't you know, as we were turning around a group of 6 prairie-chickens scurried across the road in front of us, heading into the cover of corn stubble, with a Ring-necked Pheasant rooster close behind.  I quickly grabbed my binocs and managed to watch 2 of them escape into denser cover.  And then, just like that, they were gone again.

The next day, still smiling about successfully seeing Greater Prairie-Chickens, I decided to try for another "clean-up" species - the Short-eared Owl.  I live less than an hour from the Neal Smith NWR, which has a known population of SEOWs, and yet they were glaringly absent from my life list.  So I picked Mr Pescador up from work and we drove out to the refuge.  While the day before had been warm (upper 60s), a cold front was moving in.  As we neared sunset (the owls usually make their appearance right before dusk to begin hunting), fog started to creep in.

In about 15 minutes, it was thicker than peanut butter (as Yukon Cornelius would say).  There could have been Short-eared Owls flying all around me and I wouldn't know they were there - darn them and their super-stealthy silent flight. :)  That just means I'll have to spend more time out at Neal Smith, with its 5600 acres of habitat and 200+ bird species.