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Learn your boreal birds – boreal chickadee
Posted on March 21st, 2010 2 comments Add a comment >>
Now I’m sure many readers are familiar with our year-round Adirondack resident black-capped chickadee. They’re the clever acrobats of the woods who seem to eat birdfeeders clean all winter long. But if you venture off the beaten pathways a bit and find a remote red spruce, tamarack, and balsam fir forest you might come upon black-caps’ close cousin the boreal chickadee.
Chances are you will hear a boreal chickadee before you see it. The songs are similar to black-caps but more nasal and scratchy in quality. I hear “sicka-day-day” instead of the lighter chicka-dee-dee of black caps.
So once you’ve honed in on the call notes you now have to find the bird. …and the trick to finding boreal chickadees is to look deep into the conifer trees, specifically near the trunk of the tree. For some reason boreals spend a lot of their foraging time near the trunk. Are there more insects found there? Are they better protected from predators deeper in the boughs of the trees? Heck if I know! But about 8 times out of ten you’ll find them there.
So this one tip should help you focus your search when you come upon an active group of chickadees in a conifer forest. Certainly look at all the chickadees but then go further and look at those birds found on the inner branches of trees.
Where the black-capped shows black color on its head and throat, you will find that’s been replaced with a chestnut-brown color for the boreal cap, and a softer gray nape, or back of the head.
Most striking to me are the soft, brown or peach-colored flanks on the sides of boreals. To me that stands out as a field mark that is very different from black caps.
As its name tells us, this year-round resident bird is a true boreal species seeking the dense confier forests throughout the Adirondacks. Likewise, this is a bird high on the lists of many birdwatchers seeking a view of it through their binoculars or camera!
One of my favorite spots to look for boreal chickadees is along the snowmobile and mountain bike trails at Bloomingdale Bog where I access the trails from County Rt 55 near the hamlet of Bloomingdale, NY.
Good birding!
Photo credit: Boreal Chickadee – Wikipedia
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Learn Your Boreal Birds-Gray Jay
Posted on February 26th, 2010 3 comments Add a comment >>
I’d like to start a new feature here on Notes from the field which I’ll call “Learn your boreal birds“. This title refers to the many species of birds that spend a majority of their time in the Boreal Forest region of North America.
What is boreal again? Boreal forests make up a fair percentage of our forested land in the Adirondacks. It’s made up of mostly coniferous trees or cone-bearing species (pine, spruce, fir, tamarack,cedar).
If you were to map out the boreal region on a globe, it would be shown as a continuous ring of green encompassing northern Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia, and Siberia.
But as luck would have it, the Adirondacks, due to several factors including; soil, bedrock, local microclimates, and vegetation, has a version of boreal that we can see/access from many back roads throughout the region.
As we’ll see in future postings, some of our boreal birds are year-round residents and some are summer residents only. These summer only birds will spend the winter months down in the tropical regions of South and Central America and then migrate to the Adirondacks in the spring.
I’ll start this series with the year-round resident Gray Jay. Clicking this link will take you directly to the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s(CLO) “All About Birds” website. If you look at the Jay’s home range map you’ll see a tiny dot where the Adirondacks are. We’re lucky because this is the only area in New York State where this jay can be found. Gray jays are related to all the family(Corvidae) members of the jays, crows, and ravens of North America.
You can read all about the life history of gray jay on CLO site but I’d like to focus on our Adirondack population. I’ll often find gray jays squealing and screeching along the Bloomingdale Bog trail(snowmobile trail in winter). I find the best part of the trail to see the jays is to drive to the northern access point (along County Rt 55) between Gabriels and Bloomingdale. Here you can walk south along the trail, and listen carefully as you do, for the high-pitched squawking the jays make as they approach the trial.
Over the past two summers, I’ve come across several pairs of gray jay with their very dark gray young(photo above right). This leads us to believe that gray jays have had several successful breeding seasons in a row. At one site I counted 4 young!
Gray jays have the wonderul ability to “stash” food in various places in the forest. They will often put food in the crotch of tree limbs, or bury it, or place it in an abandoned nest hole in a tree. All this so it has food(if it remembers where) to tide it over during the winter months.
Gray jays are rather tame and will often approach humans and feed out of hands…if there’s some good food in that hand. Keep some granola in your coat pocket if you’re heading into a bog.
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