The Nature of Delaware

Photos and post by Joe Sebastiani, Seasonal Program Team Leader

Are you feeling like you’ve had too much indoor time with the lingering snow on the ground and temperatures below freezing lately?  Here are a few ideas to get you outdoors, even if it is in your own backyard. 

Start keeping track of the birds you see in your yard for the year.  I started doing this on January 1st, and I have found 40 species as of yesterday.  My goal is 100 species identified from the yard this year.  All birds you see or hear while you are in your yard count, even birds flying overhead.  I am maintaining the yard list on my e-bird account, which is where I keep all of my bird records.  This site is run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.  I urge you to check out www.ebird.org and start an account.  Keep your yard list on this fun on-line database, and go to the “add a yard” button in the data tab to compare them with other birders in the USA and the state you live in.  In Pennsylvania where I live, there is actually a state-wide, year-long yard bird list contest that I am participating in, and you can too if you are a resident. 

Carolina Wrens are a frequent visitor to my feeding station. I am trying to get them to eat the Brown Stinkbugs that are wintering in my house. I put the stinkbugs where they would be an obvious meal, but they haven't been interested so far.

E-bird takes your data and makes it available to the scientific community through the Avian Knowledge Network, so therefore your observations are useful to our understanding of birds.  If you like e-bird, you can add individual bird sightings or whole lists into the database from anywhere on earth!  If you have lists collecting dust from years past, enter those as well to immortalize your observations.  Now it sounds like you have a winter project to get excited about!  If you want some help with e-bird, please contact me. 

This Carolina Chickadee was visiting my feeders over the weekend. Notice the band on the right leg? I live close to the site of the Bird Banding at Bucktoe program that is held every September, which is probably where this bird was banded.

Another chance to force yourself outdoors is a birding event called the Great Backyard Bird Count, February 18-21.  Pick any time, or several times during this four day period to find birds in your backyard, nearby park, or neighborhood.  Enter your sightings into the Great Backyard Bird Count website to help scientists get a mid-winter snapshot of bird populations around the country.  Last year, almost 100,000 checklists were submitted.

This Tufted Titmouse was visiting my feeder this weekend and is also wearing a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service band. I see these banded birds at my feeders regularly since we've banded lots of Chickadees and Titmice at Bucktoe Creek Preserve over years, and these birds do not migrate.

Join us on these upcoming Delaware Nature Society programs: Breakfast and Backyard Bird Count program, February 18th, 8-11am at Ashland Nature Center.  A diner-style breakfast is included.  Birds of the Marsh and Mini e-bird Workshop at the Dupont Environmental Education Center on March 6, 8-11am.

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By Jason Beale, Abbott’s Mill Nature Center Manager

As the days shorten and leaf fall continues, birdwatchers begin to focus in on the legions of returning waterfowl and wintering raptors that fill the marshes and fields of the Delmarva Peninsula.  Few destinations are as unique and productive than Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, near Cambridge, Maryland.  Along with legions of Ducks, Geese, and Swans, the refuge hosts a tremendous number of wintering Bald Eagles – more than any other site on the East Coast, north of Florida.  But wait, there’s more!  Each year a few Golden Eagles find the vast, open habitats suitable for making a living during the winter.  In and around the forest, another distinct species keeps busy – the endangered Delmarva Fox Squirrel.  This large, grizzled-gray squirrel only makes it home on the peninsula in scattered patches of open forest.

Despite being well-known winter residents, experiencing the sights and sounds of thousands of Snow Geese in close proximity is exhilarating. Photo by Joe Sebastiani.

Once again, Delaware Nature Society is offering a trip to Blackwater on Wedneday, December 7th.  Groups will depart from both Abbott’s Mill Nature Center in Milford and the DuPont Environmental Education Center in Wilmington.  Both groups will depart from their respective sites at 7:30am and return around 4:30pm.

Tundra Swans are one of Delmarva's largest bird species. Photo by Joe Sebastiani.

We’ll stop briefly at the visitor’s center before beginning our tour.  We’ll then travel the wildlife drive auto tour, with periodic stops and short hikes in wooded areas.  After a short lunch, we’ll tour the refuge perimeter and open marshes that fringe the Chesapeake Bay area.  Time permitting, we’ll venture to the Cambridge waterfront to look for Canvasback, Redhead, and other bay ducks that winter in the area.

Golden Eagles, like this juvenile, regularly winter at Blackwater. Photo by Derek Stoner

Blackwater Wildlife Tour

Wednesday, December 7th

Abbott’s Mill Nature Center: 7:30am-4:30pm

Member/Non-Member: $22/$30

DuPont Environmental Education Center: 7:30am-4:30pm

Member/Non-Member: $22/$30

To register, contact Fiona Smith at (302) 239-2334 x. 134. Dress for the weather and bring a bag lunch.

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By Joe Sebastiani, Seasonal Program Team Leader

Fifth and final post about the Delaware Nature Society trip to Cuba, November 2010.

With most of our bird surveying wrapped up, we spent the last few days of our trip to Cuba in the amazing Valle de Vinales.  This is the location of yet another national park, Parque Nacional Vinales, which is also classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  This spectacular area is recognized for its dramatic rocky outcrops known as magotes coupled with traditional farms and villages in the Sierra de los Organos mountains.

The area is kind of like a tropical version of the Lancaster County Amish country, except there are no strip malls, outlets, chain restaurants, etc.  Farmers grow tobacco, coffee, oranges, sugarcane, and other produce under towering limestone magotes and cliffs.  They plow their fields with oxen, travel by horse-powered carts, and seem to live very simple lives.  Visitors come to hike, bike, and ride horseback through this traditional Cuban landscape, as well as just plain relax. 

Limestone hills called magotes tower above traditional Cuban agricultural fields in the Parque Nacional Vinales. Photo by Joe Sebastiani

We spent a few days here wrapping up bird surveys and enjoying the amazing views.  The main difference in habitat here was the native Caribbean Pine forest and native vegetation on the magotes.  Cuban Solitaires sang from high up lending an eerie jungle-like sound to the farmland where we stood.  The magotes retain virgin forest, since they are difficult to access for resource extraction.  At the base of magotes, our guide, Giraldo Alayon was very busy pointing out native palms, wildflowers, and other plants that are rare and endemic to Cuba.

Giraldo Alayon, our guide on the trip, describes the natural history of the bats that live in this cave. The magotes are full of caves, and harbor many, many bat roosts. We saw thousands pour out of this cave at dusk. Photo by Joe Sebastiani

Birding in this area yielded most of the same kinds of birds we had seen earlier on the trip.  There are a few notable species worth mentioning, however.  The Olive-capped Warbler is a bird that lives in the pine forests of Cuba and the Bahamas.  We were able to get very good looks and photographs of this species here and it was very  common in pine forest.

Olive-capped Warblers were common in the Caribbean Pine forest of the Vinales area. Photo by Joe Sebastiani

On a sad note, we witnessed first-hand, the illegal wild bird trade here in Vinales.  In Cuba, capturing wild birds for the pet trade is rather common, although it is illegal.  It is part of the culture to keep songbirds in cages, sometimes used for “singing competitions”, much like a cock-fight.  People get together with their birds to see who has the better singer, and even bet money on the outcome!  I am not sure how you decide who is a better singer, but that is what happens.  The birds of choice tend to be Cuban Bullfinches and Cuban Grassquits.  We saw Bullfinches in cages on people’s balconies in various towns, and in Vinales we saw a Cuban Grassquit shortly after it had been caught.  A Cuban Grassquit is a small finch that is mostly black and green with a yellow wash around the face.  It only lives in Cuba.

A boy carries a Cuban Grassquit in a cage. Although illegal, it is still common practice in Cuba to trap wild songbirds for pets. Photo by Joe Sebastiani

As a consequence of trapping, Cuban Grassquits are very scarcely seen around towns and villages.  We managed to find 3 or 4 of them in the wild, but they are greatly outnumbered by the Yellow-faced Grassquit, which is a weak singer, and therefore not sought-after as a cage bird.

Our trip to Cuba came to an end after our visit to Vinales.  Cuba exceeded everyone’s expectations in many, many ways.  Not only is it beautiful, but it has many huge preserved natural areas and large national parks.  The people of Cuba are very friendly and welcoming, and I made many friends on the trip that I am sure I will keep in touch with for a long time.  Towns and cities are very clean and people seem to respect where they live.  In terms of trash, it is a much cleaner place than the United States, and certainly way cleaner than other Latin American countries I have visited.  If Americans are ever allowed to go to Cuba legally, I am sure the wonderful places we visited will be flooded with us.  I hope you can get there someday.

I would like to thank all of the Delaware Nature Society members that took part in the trip to Cuba.  I sincerely hope you had as great a trip as I did.  I would also like to thank Gary Markowski and the Caribbean Conservation Trust for making this wonderful trip possible.  Also, a very special thanks is in order for Dr. Giraldo Alayon, our naturalist-guide for the trip.  We really got more than just a naturalist.  Dr. Alayon is well known in the Caribbean as the foremost expert on spiders of the West Indies and Central America.  He has discovered, described, and named many species new to science.  He has published more than 100 papers on the systematics and biogeography of spiders and insects of the region.  He has also been a serious birder since 1977, and has published 15 papers related to avian biology and behavior.  He is currently working on a book about the Cuban Ivory-billed Woodpecker, which he has seen in eastern Cuba during expeditions to find the species in the 1980′s and 1990′s.  Dr. Alayon is a past president of the Cuban Zoological Society, and is the current Curator of Arachnida at the National Museum of Natural History in Havana and earned his PhD from the University of Havana. 

Here I am with Dr. Giraldo Alayon in Vinales. He took a break from listening to Guns and Roses for this photograph taken by Ron Majors.

Since our visit to Cuba was officially classified as a Humanitarian Environmental visit to assist with long-term ornithological bird surveys, I will provide the entire list of species we found.  The list follows the latest Clements World Checklist:

1. Wood Duck
2. Blue-winged Teal
3. Helmeted Guineafowl
4. Least Grebe
5. Pied-billed Grebe
6. American Flamingo
7. Brown Pelican
8. Neotropic Cormorant
9. Double-crested Cormorant
10. Anhinga
11. Magnificent Frigatebird
12. Great Blue Heron
13. Great Egret
14. Snowy Egret
15. Little Blue Heron
16. Tricolored Heron
17. Reddish Egret
18. Cattle Egret
19. Green Heron
20. White Ibis
21. Roseate Spoonbill
22. Wood Stork
23. Turkey Vulture
24. Osprey
25. Snail Kite
26. Northern Harrier
27. Cuban Black-hawk
28. Red-tailed Hawk
29. Crested Caracara
30. American Kestrel
31. Merlin
32. Peregrine Falcon
33. Clapper Rail
34. Sora
35. Purple Gallinule
36. Common Moorhen
37. American Coot
38. Limpkin
39. Black-bellied Plover
40. Killdeer
41. Black-necked Stilt
42. Spotted Sandpiper
43. Solitary Sandpiper
44. Greater Yellowlegs
45. Least Sandpiper
46. Wilson’s Snipe
47. Laughing Gull
48. Caspian Tern
49. Forster’s Tern
50. Royal Tern
51. Rock Pigeon
52. Scaly-naped Pigeon
53. White-crowned Pigeon
54. Eurasian Collared-dove
55. White-winged Dove
56. Zenaida Dove
57. Mourning Dove
58. Common Ground-dove
59. Blue-headed Quail-dove
60. Cuban Parrot
61. Yellow-billed Cuckoo
62. Great Lizard-cuckoo
63. Smooth-billed Ani
64. Bare-legged Owl
65. Cuban Pygmy-owl
66. Stygian Owl
67. Greater Antillean Nightjar (aka: Cuban Nightjar)
68. Antillean Palm-swift
69. Cuban Emerald
70. Bee Hummingbird
71. Cuban Trogon
72. Cuban Tody
73. Belted Kingfisher
74. West Indian Woodpecker
75. Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
76. Cuban Green Woodpecker
77. Northern Flicker
78. Fernandina’s Flicker
79. Cuban Pewee
80. Eastern Phoebe
81. La Sagra’s Flycatcher
82. Loggerhead Kingbird
83. Giant Kingbird
84. White-eyed Vireo
85. Cuban Vireo
86. Yellow-throated Vireo
87. Cuban Crow
88. Tree Swallow
89. Barn Swallow
90. Zapata Wren
91. Blue-gray Gnatcatcher
92. Ruby-crowned Kinglet
93. Cuban Solitaire
94. Red-legged Thrush
95. Gray Catbird
96. Northern Mockingbird
97. Tennessee Warbler
98. Northern Parula
99. Yellow Warbler
100. Magnolia Warbler
101. Cape May Warbler
102. Black-throated Blue Warbler
103. Yellow-rumped Warbler
104. Black-throated Green Warbler
105. Yellow-throated Warbler
106. Olive-capped Warbler
107. Prairie Warbler
108. Palm Warbler
109. Black-and-white Warbler
110. American Redstart
111. Worm-eating Warbler
112. Ovenbird
113. Northern Waterthrush
114. Louisiana Waterthrush
115. Common Yellowthroat
116. Yellow-headed Warbler
117. Hooded Warbler
118. Western Spindalis
119. Red-legged Honeycreeper
120. Cuban Bullfinch
121. Cuban Grassquit
122. Yellow-faced Grassquit
123. Lincoln’s Sparrow
124. Summer Tanager
125. Indigo Bunting
126. Tawny-shouldered Blackbird
127. Eastern Meadowlark
128. Cuban Blackbird
129. Greater Antillean Grackle
130. Greater Antillean Oriole (aka: Cuban Oriole)
131. House Sparrow
132. Nutmeg Mannikin
133. Tricolored Munia

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By Joe Sebastiani, Seasonal Program Team Leader

Fourth in a series about the Delaware Nature Society bird survey trip to Cuba in November, 2010.

Guanahacabibes National Park was my favorite part of Cuba.  Named after the original inhabitants of the area, the Guanahatabeys, this area is at Cuba’s western tip and is very remote and wild.  We stayed at a dive center called Maria la Gorda, which means “Maria the fatso.”  Legend has is that Maria was a prostitute who was captured by pirates and left here on this remote beach many years ago, where she lived out the rest of her years.  Pretty strange, huh? 

The National Park covers over 1,000 square kilometers and is also designated as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.  Not only does this area offer world-class scuba diving, but it contains miles of mangrove swamp, coastal thicket vegetation, and limestone karst forest.  We surveyed birds for three wonderful days here, enjoying expert park staff, lots of wildlife, beautiful scenery, and fantastic tropical sunsets.

Of particular interest bird-wise were migrants from North America that we identified.  This was potentially our greatest ornithological contribution of the entire two-week trip.  The first cold front of the season passed the day prior to our arrival, possibly delivering a fresh crop of migrants from the north.  Specifically, we found three species that are not often found in Cuba.  The first was a Lincoln’s Sparrow, which is apparently very rare.  Our Cuban guide, Osmani Borrego, had never seen one.  Next, we found an Eastern Phoebe, classified in the Cuban bird guide as a vagrant.  A vagrant means that it does not regularly occur there.  Third, we found a Ruby-crowned Kinglet, another vagrant to Cuba, with very few records in the country.  All of these were found in the same area on the same day.  Maybe these birds are actually more common than what is published in the books, and that more study is needed on their occurrence.  Perhaps we made a valuable contribution to Cuban bird knowledge after all.

Enjoy a short video highlighting the scenery and some of the other birds we found while in the remote, pristine, and beautiful Guanahacabibes National Park and Biosphere Reserve.

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