Anna’s Hummingbird — First State Record (p.a.)

 

Yesterday was a decent day for migrant birds at local birding hot spot Saylorville Reservoir.  Good numbers of shorebirds were lingering late, the first sizable push of diving ducks arrived, and a couple moderately rare species, Western Grebe and Black Scoter, kept things interesting.  With a cold front pushing through last night, it looked like today might be even better.  Turns out that was not the case at the lake.  It was one of those fronts that clears out what was already present but doesn’t seem to bring much with it.  After a quick lap around the lake, I figured my birding was over for the day, and I headed home.  My parents came to visit us for the afternoon, and after they headed for home, I kicked back on the couch to watch some football.  At around 5:oo pm, I couldn’t have been more stunned when a hummingbird suddenly appeared at my feeder.  It had been over two weeks since my last young Ruby-throated Hummingbird had disappeared and I didn’t expect to see another hummingbird until spring.  Over the next forty minutes the bird came back three more times giving me time to photograph it.  Surprisingly, it was a male with some pinkish colored gorget feathers.  A check of my Sibley pretty much confirmed my initial though–Anna’s Hummingbird.  Anna’s has not previously recorded from Iowa.  It is a permanent resident from Vancouver Island south to Baja, and east through Arizona and New Mexico to the panhandle of Texas.  While generally not migratory, it does have a tendency to stray out of range, and was considered overdue for Iowa.  I emailed a couple of nationally recognized hummingbird experts who confirmed the ID and then posted it to the Iowa bird listserve.  Hopefully the bird will stick around long enough for people to get to see it.

I tell whoever will listen that they should leave their hummer feeders up until they freeze, as it is well known among birders that rare vagrant hummers often show up late, after all the migrant Ruby-throateds are long gone.  I didn’t ever expect that advice to pay off at my own feeder, but I guess everyone gets lucky now and then.  Here are a few shots of Iowa’s first state record (p.a.) Anna’s Hummingbird:

Anna's Hummingbird, Saylorville, Polk Co., IA, 31 Oct 2010

Anna's Hummingbird, Polk Co., IA, 31 Oct 2010

Anna's Hummingbird, Saylorville, Polk Co., IA, 31 Oct 2010

p.a. = pending acceptance by the Iowa Ornithologists’ Union Records Committee

Iowa Ornithologists Union Meeting

This past weekend was the IOU‘s 2010 Fall meeting, held at Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge in Jasper County, Iowa.  This refuge was largely corn and bean fields when the property was acquired, but has now been restored to native prairie vegetation.  It is a great place for grassland birds during the breeding season, and is a regular spot for migrating Short-eared Owls and, last fall at least, Smith’s Longspurs.  The weekend field trips didn’t have any luck with the longspurs, but did produce a diverse list of sparrows among the 111 species recorded.  Below are some really mediocre shots of some of the birds found on the refuge.  I’ve quickly found that bird photography is a lot tougher than bug photography–I think because I can’t just circle around a bird to get the sun at my back like I can with an insect.  Hopefully I will get better at this over the winter while the bugs are scarce.

First up are the three big Zonotrichia sparrows (aka “Zonies”):

Harris's Sparrow, Neal Smith NWR, IA, 25 Oct 2010.

Searching for Leonard’s Skipper

I’ve spent parts of the last several weekends looking for Leonard’s Skippers (Hesperia leonardus) in the Loess Hills, and somewhat to my surprise, have actually found some.  This comes after making targeted searches over the last two years for Poweshiek Skipperling, Ottoe Skipper, Arogos Skipper, Mulberry Wing, Dion Skipper, and Dusted Skipper and failing without exception.  I had begun to think that I was no longer capable of finding uncommon skippers after having good success in the summer of 2008.

Leonard’s Skippers are kind of interesting for several reasons.  One is that they are the latest resident skipper to appear, with a single brood flying from late August through September.  Another is that two very different looking subspecies occur in Iowa, which were formerly considered separate species (H. l. leonardus of the east and H. l. pawnee of the Great Plains).  The range maps in the popular field guides are confusing at best when it comes to where in the Midwest this species occurs and which subspecies occurs where.  The Kaufman guide shows Leonard’s throughout Iowa, Nebraska, and Missouri even though in Iowa it is essentially confined to the Loess Hills.  Butterflies Through Binoculars shows it confined to the Loess Hills but shows these to be exclusively H. l. pawnee.  In Missouri,  H. l. leonardus occurs on the Ozark Plateau but is apparently absent from areas adjacent to Iowa including the southern terminus of the Loess Hills.  In Nebraska, H. l. pawnee is found in the western 2/3 of the state but I haven’t found any suggestion that either subspecies is extant in eastern Nebraska.  So basically the Iowa Loess Hills skippers range the entire length of the hills, but are surrounded by unoccupied areas to the east, west, and south for hundreds of miles.

A Vagrant Bird and Tiger Beetles

It was another hot, humid weekend in central Iowa.  Saturday got off to a good start with the first good vagrant bird of the fall season.  On Thursday, longtime Iowa birders Eugene and Eloise Armstrong had a Selasphorus hummingbird appear at their Madison County farmstead.  Selasphorus is a western genus that contains several similar species. The one most likely to stray east, and the only one recorded in Iowa so far, is the Rufous Hummingbird.  However, there are a few Allen’s Hummingbird records in the east, and except for adult males, the two species are nearly identical.  So, most females and immatures go down in the record books as ‘Selasphorus species’ due to lack of definitive IDs.  With the bird still present Friday night, birding friend Jim Sinclair and I met at the Armstrongs’ Saturday morning to try to see it.  Neither one of us had seen this bird in Iowa before, and we are both to the point where getting new state birds is getting tough, so this was pretty exciting.  Fortunately, the Armstrongs were sitting out back in their lawnchairs watching their feeder set up, and had seen the bird several times already.  Of their four feeders, three were being swarmed by 7-8 Ruby-throated Hummingbirds, while the other was being guarded by the Selasphorus.  Anytime a Ruby-throat would try to feed at it, the Selasphorus would dart out of a tree and chase it off.  All the birds were fairly confiding, and I was able to photograph our target at relatively close range.

Rufous Hummingbird, Armstrong residence, Madison Co., IA, 21 Aug 2010.

So that’s one of the good shots from an aesthetic perspective.  But, to confirm the identification without the bird in hand requires photos of the throat and the fanned tail. 

A New Species for Iowa

Last Sunday, Cory Gregory and I made a trip up to Plymouth County in the far northwest corner of Iowa.  Plymouth County borders South Dakota and is separated from it by the Big Sioux River.  It contains some of the most extensive prairie tracts left in Iowa, including the Nature Conservancy’s Broken Kettle Grasslands, home to Iowa’s only Black-billed Magpies and Prairie Rattlesnakes, and the Plymouth County Conservation Board’s Five Ridge Prairie.  The target of our trip was the Ottoe Skipper, a species neither of us had seen before, which occurs on the drier, shorter grass prairies of the Loess Hills.  We started at Five Ridge Prairie because it has historically had a good population of Ottoes.  If you check the photos of this species in Glassberg’s Butterflies Through Binoculars-The East, you will see that they were taken at this location.

After a bit of a hike along the access road, we made it up to one of the large ridges where the slopes looked like appropriate habitat.  We quickly started seeing Regal Fritillaries, and they proved to be fairly common.  Also common were the large grassland cicada Tibicen dorsatus and a robber fly that I think is Proctacanthus milbertii.

Proctacanthus milbertii, Five Ridge Prairie, Plymouth County, IA, 1 August 2010

Most exciting were some dragonflies that were hanging out on the trail along the ridge top.  When I first got a look at one that perched ahead of us, I told Cory that I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was a new state record.

Southern Invasion

On July 20, Chris Edwards wrote a post to the Iowa Insect email list relaying Mike Reese’s suggestion that Iowans be on the lookout for Funereal Duskywing.  This is a skipper species from desert habitats of southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas with a known tendency to stray northward.  It had recently been reported from the St. Louis and Kansas City areas of Missouri and a single individual had made it to Wisconsin.  This species had not been previous reported from Iowa (ever), but with this apparent invasion underway, it seemed reasonable that it would turn up.

It didn’t take long.  The next day, Mark Brown reported that he had photographed a Funereal in Webster County on July 19.  Ray Moranz, a butterfly ecologist doing field work in Ringgold County, reported seeing one on July 18, but was unable to catch or photograph it.  With these reports, plus the Missouri and Wisconsin sightings, it seemed like a good idea to spend a day in southern Iowa seeing if I could turn one up.  My basic strategy was to visit a couple spots where I have previously had both high diversity and high numbers of butterflies.  My first choice was Slip Bluff Park in Decatur County.  This is a great spot because it is about as far south as you can get in Iowa, it sits right by I-35 for a relatively quick drive down, and it has diverse habitats that have repeatedly produced rare insects.

I arrived at 9:30 to find butterflies literally everywhere.  Red-spotted Purples, Question Marks, and Eastern Commas lined the roads and sulphurs were puddling everywhere there was mud.

Little Yellows, Slip Bluff Park, Decatur County, IA, 25 July 2010

Among the usual Clouded and Orange Sulphurs were large numbers of Little Yellows.  Little Yellows are a southern immigrant species, meaning that they don’t overwinter in Iowa in any stage of their life cycle, but must recolonize as adults flying north each year.

Back from the Pacific Northwest

Jaclyn and I recently took our first vacation together that didn’t include other members of the family.  Kind of a honeymoon a few years after the fact.  Like many things, this trip was a compromise–we spent time shopping and looking at touristy stuff in the cities, but we spent a couple days in natural areas as well.  Fortunately we both enjoyed both aspects of the trip, and the only thing that could have made it better would have been a few more days to explore.

We started off by driving to Vancouver, BC.  This is short ~27 hour drive which we accomplished in two days.  We spent a couple days wandering around Vancouver, then drove south to spend the night in Mount Vernon, WA.  The next morning we headed to Anacortes, WA , where we went on whale watching trip with Island Adventures.  After having been on a couple really good dedicated pelagic birding trips off northern California, I was not entirely sure how a “mere” whale watching trip would measure up, but the chance to see wild Orcas again was too good to pass up.  Fortunately, the boat we were on had both a good captain and a good naturalist who made sure we spent plenty of time looking for non-Orca wildlife in addition to the great Orca watching.  Highlights were lots of Harbor Seals, a Minke Whale, Harbor Porpoises, lots of Rhinoceros Auklets and Pigeon Guillemots, and smaller numbers of Common Murres, Marbled Murrelets, Black Oystercatchers, and Heerman’s Gulls.

Male Orca, Puget Sound, WA, 30 June 2010.

Next, we spent a day walking around downtown Seattle, visiting typical tourist spots like the Pike Place fish market, the Space Needle, and the original Starbucks.  The next morning we took the ferry from Seattle over to the Olympic Peninsula for a day at Olympic National Park.