Cheyenne Christmas Bird Count report

The bushtit made its first appearance on the Cheyenne Christmas Bird Count Dec. 17, 2022. A small flock has been hanging out at Lions Park this fall. Photo by Grant Frost.

Cheyenne Christmas Bird Count had several remarkable observations

By Barb Gorges

            Perhaps somewhere in the archives of Rocky Mountain National Park is my signature on a piece of paper from the cylinder on Hallett’s Peak, proving I made it to the top in August 1973.

            Short of birth, death and graduation records, most of us don’t lead a permanently, well-documented life. But if you participate in a Christmas Bird Count, you can look yourself up online, at least back to 2005. More important are the number of birds counted, distances traveled and the weather conditions. That data goes back to 1900 (1974 for Cheyenne).

Explore the data at https://netapp.audubon.org/cbcobservation/. The address changes whenever the sponsor, the National Audubon Society, reorganizes its website.

            This year was the 123^rd Christmas Bird Count, straddling the year end of 2022-2023. The Cheyenne count was held Dec. 17, 2022, within a 7.5-mile-diameter count circle centered on the State Capitol.

            The 20 participants together walked 26 miles, drove 76 miles and watched feeders for 15 hours.

            Here is the list of 51 species and how many were seen of each, plus a few notes.

Cackling Goose 97

            These geese used to be lumped with Canada geese as four smaller subspecies, sometimes as small as a mallard, and are showing up more often.

Canada Goose 1,148

            These may be a mix of a non-migratory local flock and some migrating here when there’s open water.

Snow Goose 1

            Oh no – is this species of goose thinking about wintering here too?

Mallard 354

Northern Shoveler 8

Redhead 1

Ring-necked Duck 2

Green-winged Teal 22

Common Goldeneye 7

Gadwall 2

Rock Dove (pigeon) 129

            There’s a much larger flock in northeast Cheyenne that eluded us.

Eurasian-collared Dove 181

Wilsons’s Snipe 3

            They know where there’s a spring providing open water.

Northern Harrier 5

Sharp-shinned Hawk 2

Cooper’s Hawk 1

Bald Eagle 4

Red-tailed Hawk 12

Rough-legged Hawk 4

Ferruginous Hawk 2

Eastern-screech Owl 1

Great-horned Owl 2

            Good showing of raptors, including the merlin and kestrel listed below.

Belted Kingfisher 2

            Always a couple along Crow Creek.

Downy Woodpecker 5

Hairy Woodpecker 1

Northern Flicker 15

American Kestrel 1

            Not all of them migrate farther south.

Merlin 1

Northern Shrike 2

Blue Jay 13

            This eastern bird continues to increase in numbers here.

Black-billed Magpie 80

            It should really be the state bird since it stays year round and cleans up carcasses.

American Crow 133

Common Raven 30

            Lorie Chesnut videoed a flock of 25. Jane Dorn, who studied ravens for her masters degree, said young birds may flock, otherwise, ravens hang out in ones and twos. To tell them apart from crows, listen for the raven’s croak compared to the crow’s caw. Also, when flying, the raven’s tail looks like the point of a diamond. The crow’s looks like a half-circle fan. Crows are only 17.5 inches from beak tip to tail, ravens are 24 inches.

Black-capped Chickadee 14

            I need to more careful in assuming all the chickadees I see are mountains and check for their white “eyebrows,” which the black-cappeds don’t have.

Mountain Chickadee 22

Horned Lark 9

Red-breasted Nuthatch 4

White-breasted Nuthatch 4

Brown Creeper 2

            These are very hard to see. They are like a moving piece of bark on a tree trunk.

European Starling 444

Townsend’s Solitaire 10

            This relation of the robin is more slender and is all gray. It likes to sit at the tip top of trees, especially junipers, eating their berries.

American Robin 5

            Every year there are a few that winter here. We aren’t sure if these birds spent the summer here or if these are birds that came from farther north.

Cedar Waxwing 6

            Waxwings only show up when they find fruit still on the tree or shrub so seeing them is very lucky.

House Sparrow 432

House Finch 119

American Goldfinch 2

American Tree Sparrow 42

            In summer, small flocks of sparrows are often chipping sparrows. But they leave in fall and the tree sparrows come for the winter.

Dark-eyed Junco 59

Song Sparrow 2

            They are almost always year round, by a creek.

Bushtit 10

            This is the flock our Christmas Bird Count compiler, Grant Frost, has been watching this fall. We are happy they stayed for their first count here. If they make it through the winter, they might decide to stay and make a state breeding record.

Pine Warbler 1

            This is the same bird that has been hanging out in Chuck Seniawski’s backyard this fall. Nice it could stick around and provide a count record.

Golden-crowned Kinglet count week

            Not an unusual bird in winter, but there are not many to be seen, plus they are tiny and not noticeable in the treetops where they hang out.

Barb Gorges is the author of “Cheyenne Birds by the Month,” www.YuccaRoadPress.com. Her previous columns are at https://cheyennebirdbanter.wordpress.com. Contact her at bgorges4@msn.com.

Searching eastern woodlands for birds

Spotting an eastern bluebird in Pennsylvania was a treat for Cheyenne birders Barb and Mark Gorges. Photo by Mark Gorges.

Cheyenne birders search Pennsylvania and New York woodlands for eastern birds

By Barb Gorges

            Mark and I couldn’t hear any birds over the sound of wind in the leaves. That’s not unusual for Wyoming, but we were in Pennsylvania where the trees will grow a complete canopy without anyone planting them. Finding birds is dependent on hearing them, even more so than here.

            We were at the Churchville Nature Center in Bucks County, my favorite place to bird when visiting my aunt. The goldenrod and purple asters were in full bloom in the little meadow and robins were picking fruit from all kinds of shrubs. But in the trees, it seemed birdless until we reached a little swale protected from the wind and suddenly there was a swarm of chickadees, titmice and warblers for a few minutes.

            There were no birds to be seen on the reservoir. The waterbirds and shorebirds must have already tucked in for the coming storm, waiting for the afternoon’s deluge.

We counted only 11 species altogether. For the Saturday morning bird walk before our visit, 19 local birders listed 64 species. Timing and experience make a big difference. I keep forgetting to look into hiring local bird guides when we travel.

            In the Ithaca, New York, area, we had the help of our son Bryan and his wife, Jessie, both avid birders. They have experience identifying birds we rarely see in Cheyenne, like black-throated green warbler. They pointed out the sound of a Carolina wren, unseen in the brush. They also pointed out that sometimes one-note calls in the trees are chipmunks or tree frogs.

            The Finger Lakes region has a plethora of public land to explore and bird. We hiked the gorge at Watkins Glen State Park our first morning, as early as Jessie could get us on the road. It is black shale sculpted by water, dim and deep and deafening—no birds could be heard over the numerous waterfalls full of rain. The sun rarely reaches into the gorge at 9 a.m. but later the steep trail is crowded with people.

            Have you heard of Finger Lakes National Forest? It’s a scattering of parcels between Seneca and Cayuga lakes, tiny compared to any of the national forests in Wyoming, but then again, with all those trees in the way, the boundaries are not very noticeable. We hiked the Potomac trails where in late September fall color was just beginning to show.

Finger Lakes National Forest, late September. Photo by Barb Gorges.

            Our second day of birding hikes began with the Dorothy McIlroy Bird Sanctuary northeast of Ithaca. A creek and wetlands attract a lot of birds to this property owned and managed by the Finger Lakes Land Trust. It commemorates a woman who had a significant role in the early days of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The shrub fen and peat swamp were bordered by hemlock trees, unusual for the immediate area, but old friends of mine from my central Wisconsin days.

            Next, we hiked and birded nearby Bear Swamp State Forest Park. Didn’t see any bears but found interesting mushrooms and Jessie found a red eft, the teenage stage of the eastern newt.

I’ve read that the overpopulation of deer has affected eastern forests, browsing the shrub and young tree understory layer of vegetation to the point that you can see quite a way through the tree trunks. It must negatively affect birds that specialize in that layer.

Where there was normal understory, I made a new friend, a small tree, striped maple, named for the vertical ridges on its stems. It is also known as moosewood. It’s a favorite moose food and the name of my favorite Ithaca restaurant.

One stop we made between Philadelphia and Ithaca was to see the Rodale Institute, a proponent of organic gardening and farming beginning in 1947. Back in 1978 I contributed a story to their magazine, an interview with the designer of a safer bluebird house. Mark and I opted for the self-guided tour of the fields and greenhouses, which you can hear at their website.

Rodale is now a proponent of organic regenerative agriculture, as well as planting for pollinators. However, they apparently haven’t banned outdoor cats yet, so they aren’t entirely bird-friendly. Ironically, in the shrubbery by the creek there were a lot of catbirds.

While we wistfully compared the unwanted extra precipitation the East has had lately with our western drought, we are still happy with our choice to live in Wyoming, where the horizon stretches much farther.

There are animals besides birds in the trees. Eastern Gray Squirrel by Mark Gorges.

    

When chickadees change their tune

Black-capped Chickadees usually sound the same everywhere, but Dave Gammon explored little pockets of improvisation. Photo courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Published April 15, 2004, in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, “Young chickadees may be changing age-old song.”

2014 Update: David Gammon is now an assistant professor at Elon University in North Carolina where he continues to research in these areas of interest: vocal mimicry in northern mockingbirds, bioacoustics (study of the sounds of organisms) and cultural evolution and social learning in animals.

By Barb Gorges

Black-capped chickadees were the stars of the storytelling at the Cheyenne-High Plains Audubon lecture last month.

Dave Gammon, a doctoral candidate in the biology department at Colorado State University, was the storyteller. As all graduate students do, Dave had had the opportunity to ask a question and investigate possible answers and was now ready to tell his story.

To begin with, in deference to his major professor’s expertise, he chose to study chickadees. While Dave observed a captive specimen in the lab, it proceeded to sing a variation on the standard “fee-bee” tune that they are known for.

Reading the literature regarding black-capped chickadees, Dave discovered a study that showed that all across the country, they have one song that sounds pretty much the same everywhere, except in certain pockets.

Dave discovered in Fort Collins the males have three songs (only males sing). Where others sing the standard fee-bee, these birds have added an introductory syllable for a second song Dave describes as “fa-fee-bee,” or sometimes a third, “chick-a-fee-bee.”

All up and down the Poudre River corridor, full of trees essential to chickadee habitat, the songs are similar, though there is a slight variation from northwest to southeast. However, out on the prairie, in isolated islands of trees in small towns and on ranches, chickadees have added additional introductory notes to the “fa-fee-bee” song.

A lone bird on a ranch near the Wyoming border, which Dave recorded and nicknamed Ivan, was singing half a dozen introductory notes. To some extent, Dave recorded something similar among the chickadees at Guernsey in eastern Wyoming. Why does this happen and how does it happen? These were the questions Dave set out to answer.

He employed about 50 volunteers, who helped capture songs with dish microphones, and the good will of more than 20 landowners. He was able to incorporate and replay samples of those songs for us in his PowerPoint presentation as well as depicting them graphically as sonograms—lines representing the pitch, depth and length of sounds.

In chickadee culture, Dave said, the males are the first to rise. They sing without much notice of other males until they realize the females are awake. Then they stop abruptly and get directly to the mating business. Later in the day singing is more a matter of declaring territorial boundaries.

Perhaps having a repertoire of more than one song type helps these chickadees communicate better. Many songbirds have more than one song and scientists seem to think it’s an advantage.

Dave tested to see if different songs were reserved for females, the males’ way of showing off, but could find no statistical evidence.

Perhaps defending males would match particular songs of aggressors or vice versa, sort of a “Your Mama” insult competition, escalating until fisticuffs—or at least wing beating occurred. But unlike other bird species, there was no significant statistical difference.

Perhaps, thought Dave, these changes in chickadee song are merely accidental, the result of young birds making mistakes and never being corrected Does humanizing that idea make parents responsible for the beginning of heavy metal music?

A chickadee nestling, Dave said, is born in a cavity of a tree, insulated from noise. During incubation and after hatching, he is unlikely to hear his father sing near the nest because it would attract predators. After a few weeks, the youngster leaps from the nest, never to return and moves up to one or two kilometers away where he stays the rest of his life.

Normally, in prime chickadee habitat, where the woods stretch for miles, wherever the young chickadee lands, he will be surrounded by chickadee mentors. If he makes singing mistakes, and he will—Dave has recorded juveniles really jazzing things up—he’ll learn to conform.

But if any young chickadees ever disperse as far as old Ivan’s lonely place, they’ll probably wind up sounding much like him. What would their mothers think if they knew!

Apparently there are other pockets of subversive chickadee song in an example of convergent evolution: Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., Puget Sound, Wash., Fort Lupton, Colo., and Guernsey, Wyo. The only Cheyenne chickadees Dave found were mixed pairs of mountains and black-caps—another interesting conundrum.

And then one of the audience members, visiting from Casper, thought maybe her backyard chickadees might also sing “fa-fee-bee.” Dave’s eyes lit up.

The new questions are: How widespread is this phenomenon? How long ago did these breaks from the standard “fee-bee” occur? Will a multiple song repertoire eventually prove to be advantageous to chickadee survival and population growth? What new variations will this year’s hatchlings come up with?

Dave would like to squeeze in one more chickadee field season. We hope wherever he lands his first job after earning his degree, it’s in black-capped chickadee habitat.