john@nmtsun.nmt.edu (John Shipman) (11/11/89)
There hasn't been much time for red-hot birding trips lately, so the birds have been coming to see us right in town. In a normal year, Scrub Jays are pretty scarce in town. I might hear them for a week or two in the fall, then they move on. This year surely was different! There have been numbers of Scrub Jays moving down to the valley; I've been hearing and seeing them in the yard pretty much all day, every day since September 19. However, not in my wildest dreams did I expect THREE SPECIES of jays. The pair of Blue Jays have been here since October 16, and my neighbor Phil and I have seen a Steller's Jay off and on since the 25th. Phil had seen a Blue Jay once in my backyard in a previous year, and I'd seen a Steller's Jay down the street once, but those were both isolated sightings during heavy snowstorms. The Blue Jays are south and west from their usual range, and the Steller's Jay is not usually out of the mountains. Word is that the early summer drought caused a crash in the acorn and berry crops. This has impacted not only the birds but the bears as well; Albuquerque had a serious invasion of bears this year. In one highly publicized incident, a bear up a phone pole was darted and bounced off a transformer in a shower of sparks. Some people called up the Game & Fish Department and complained that the fire department should have caught her in one of their nets. Come on, people, use a little common sense! What is that wounded bear going to do when she hits the net, thank you and shake your hand? Despite her thirty-foot fall to the pavement, she was not injured except for burns, and has recuperated and been released. These are tough animals! There was a Lewis' Woodpecker across the street most of last week, making a shuttle run from a pecan tree down the block to his favorite nut-cracking station atop a phone pole. They are normally quite uncommon in the valley here. And finally, Phil and I got a new state bird this week, in his own backyard. We've had Inca Doves in our yards sporadically for years. Then one of them struck Phil as a little odd. Compared with some nearby Inca Doves, it had more or less the same body size and shape, but the tail was stubby, the back was a plain, unmarked tan without the scalloped effect of the dark feather-edgings of the Inca Dove, and it had some dark spots on the folded wing; in binoculars, it looked like the dark wing spots got a bit larger towards the rear. We had the luxury of studying this bird with a 40x scope at a range of about fifty feet. At this range, you could tell that the greater coverts were marked with a dark brown diagonal stripe about midway along their length, and the reason the spots to the rear looked larger was because the more posteriorly located coverts were longer and less of the dark stripe was covered up by a shorter covert. There's nothing quite like being able to see the pattern of individual feather markings to give your descriptions that ring of authenticity that convinces the authorities. However, that doesn't mean we won't also try to get pictures. The irony was that Phil and I had looked several times for Common Ground-Dove in the far corners of the state, without any luck, and now here was one in the back yard! Anyone else having a weird year? -- John Shipman/Zoological Data Processing/Socorro, New Mexico john@nmtsun.nmt.edu, ucbvax!unmvax!nmtsun!john ``Let's go outside and commiserate with nature.'' [Dave Farber]