Olaf Danielson's Blog, page 9

Birds, Bees, Squirrels, and Viruses

As I sit here watching and rewatching the numbers from this coronavirus epidemic spread, and we could talk about that.  We could talk about purposely self -isolation and as a birder, just sitting still and waiting for birds to come to you.  I was successful today.  I saw a common loon fly overhead in Florida.  I saw Nanday parakeets, wood storks, and I saw a swallowtailed kite...-year birds.  But I just had to go out and do something besides watching the traffic and storks fly by.
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Just outside my window my flowers have been inundated by bees....Eastern Carpenter Bees no less.   They look like bumblebees, so what actually is a carpenter bee?  These bees are large, generally much quieter than bumblebees, and have less hair on their abdomens.  They are great garden pollinators and generally great to have around except they can be a nuisance since they have a taste for wood, and like chewing out holes on houses, fences, sheds and anything else.  Their holes look like they are made by good sized drill bits.  As far as I can tell they are not threatened.  There is also a southern carpenter bee also found in Florida and distinguishing these is not easy.  The above bee is a male as determined by eye location.

Then we have the curious case of the Sherman's Fox Squirrel
Kind of a handsome chunky rodent.  I ran into one the other day while biking, figuring I wouldn't run into any virus out on a bike trail.  I did run across this squirrel.  Once a subspecies of the fox squirrel in its own right only found in central Florida up to about the Georgia border, recently the subspecies was eliminated as a taxonomic classification and now just another Southern Fox Squirrel.

This squirrel has been protected from hunting for a few years and in 2017, a big study was enacted on this squirrel as worry about long leaf pine and wire grass habitat degradation impacting this species was the idea since the last survey.  There was no public input during a two month period and in the end, the squirrel ended up not being listed.  It makes sense that this squirrel found in similar habitat with the Florida scrub jay would be in trouble, but apparently lumping it with a more widespread subspecies is the answer....I hope not.

I just got a note that my daughter Lauren's Organic Chemistry professor just went into quarantine due to exposure to a positive individual.  I assume her college (Hamline Univ) will close tomorrow.  As she self-isolates 1700 miles from us, one wonders what is the thing to do?  Go get her and possibly expose ourselves to a possibly fatal illness (I have risks, a lung injury from 20 years ago)? or watch birds, bees, and squirrels?  Obviously, she has to stay away from her grandparents.

Life isn't supposed to have choices like this....

I could rant some more on this but well....I'm trying to distract myself.   I'm still only 7 days from being on a plane south from Minneapolis so I could have been exposed, too.  I was as careful as anyone could be, last to board plane, touched nothing, ate nothing, drank nothing, cloroxed the airplane seat, everything....one just doesn't know.
good luck to you all, we all need some luck.
Olaf

Not your mother's Caribbean Cruise

You may think I make some of what I write about up.  You may ask, questions like is Olaf really a naked birder?  Is Olaf really the Dos Equis man?  Well, I don't and I am, but sadly no, just a bit of a likeness spread by my PR machine.             Everything in life, for me at least, goes (or comes) full circle and after having such a nice time on the Big Nude Boat in 2019 with a friend named Stuart (long story, buy the book for that), I convinced Silja to go on the 2020 version. We rented a cabin and made plans for the February 2020 sailing by watching the horrors of the Plagueboat, the Diamond Princess, in Yokohama, Japan and worried of what possibly we had got ourselves.  The day came for departure and we gathered to leave Tampa thinking of the worst and hoping for the best.  Some of the dock workers in Tampa commented snidely.  “I’ve never seen so much luggage for a bunch of nudists.”  Which was true and it was not.  All I know is we traveled light, as one does have to dress to eat in the main dining room and in three of the ports (not Roatan) but nowhere else, one needs something to wear.  The Carnival Legend would be our naked home for a week, and hopefully not longer.
Key West, FL 2/24/2020            It was clear on this boat even just a day into it that this voyage had a different feel to it.  Bare Necessities (BN), the travel company that runs these nude cruises, is much more in the background on this cruise.  Their self-appointed cruise director on previous excursions named Barry, as rumor had it, had a falling out with BN.  Direction was absent on this ship, and so his hosting of parties and events was gone, and BN had no one in his place.  Things like the group picture wasn’t advertised except for on the daily program.  We never read it until after it happened and by the looks of the picture, not that many others did. I have seen very few BN employees around at any of the events, and even a toast of champagne given to BN was done over the loudspeaker by the Carnival cruise director.  This was their 30th anniversary cruise.  I guess after thirty years, things change and maybe there is more to the story.   As the trip wore on, more and more people worried about the virus especially after we sailed by an infamous MSC ship that had been denied port in three countries but allowed to dock in Cozumel before a riot of some sort broke out and passengers had to be subdued by pepper spray.  Would that happen on a nude cruise?  One wouldn’t think so but even here, people were hogging cushions from chairs to make theirs more comfortable which seemed rude.             To make matters worse, I also learned that this was a Pepsi-only cruise, unlike 2019, a Coca-Cola-only cruise.  I had tried to by the “Bubble package” but it had gotten screwed up which was lucky since I couldn’t even drink any of the soda offered as Pepsi gives me an MSG-like reaction. The Carnival Legend is a somewhat smaller ship than the Carnival Sunshine, and there was less space.  Possibly due to the success of the 2019 cruise and increased bookings, the organizers didn’t offer incentives to get the younger crowd on this sailing, so gone were most of the Florida Young Naturists who livened up the 2019 version and left this one with an older average age.  The weather didn’t cooperate and the itinerary didn’t help matters either.  Last year after a cold day at sea the first stop Carnival’s private island in the Bahamas was invaded by 3000 nude people. Everyone had a marvelous time, but unfortunately, the first stop in 2020 being Key West, with no nude options for shore excursions, didn’t get the cruise off to a great start.              We landed in Key West after an uneventful first morning at sea.  After turning east west of the Dry Tortugas, I saw my first seabird, a female magnificent frigatebird, but shortly thereafter, we had to get dressed to arrive into the US port of Key West.             Our time in the self-described Conch Republic was only for five hours and we got in at noon.  There wasn’t all that much one could do in such a short time.  We rented bicycles for $16 each and looked around for a few birds and did some people watching.  It is still a month early for decent birding here so all we saw was a few warblers and a few butterflies.   Monk
Silja and the Key West Chicken, the most established introduced exotic in North America from pre-1800 
We drove past a block-long line for a picture at the southernmost point of the US, apparently it was the place to be with three hundred people loitering in line to do so, but seemed insane to me.  I was going to take a picture of the process to highlight the absurdity of it all but that would only give credence to something that needs to be purged.             I found a twelve-pack of Coke zero to bring back to the ship.  Silja tracked down some lip-gloss and after a few miles of avoiding traffic we turned the bicycles in, and both of us took a tourist picture by the end of US Highway 1, something we did back in 2013, the last time we were here together.  I guess this is what we have to do now each time we come to Key West.
                 We came back to the boat, watched it sail away and then had a marvelous dinner in the steakhouse restaurant with some Club Orient refugees, for lack of a better term.  The entertainment, including the comedians were lame so we went to bed early.                  The next morning my wife announced that if we wanted to go to Columbia in 2021 (the destination of the 2021 Nude Cruise), we might as well just go there and arrange a birding tour on our own or just pick a nakation destination at some other place. For Silja to offer that (a birding trip) is a mighty powerful statement that cruise life is not her thing.  I just hoped that we could survive the remaining five days on this trip.  But I agree, getting drunk and hanging out at bars on a ship and then drinking more is not our scene, clothed or not.  Hopefully, the organizers of this cruise will see that the different mix of people on this boat has left it with a different vibe and they will try to get it going, but I have my doubts and it was never happened.
Mahahual, Mexico 2/26/2020            If I was doing a nude year in 2020, I would have taken the day trip to a nude day trip near this sleepy artificial cruise destination.  They made Costa Maya (the name of just the port) sixteen years ago and it hasn’t done much for Mahahual in the years that followed.  Streets made and platted remain overgrown and abandoned.  I haven’t been to the mainland of Mexico since 1997.  23 years ago, the Minnesota Gophers made it to the Final Four.  We watched them lose to Kentucky at a bar in Zihuantanejo, on the opposite coast.  As such, I needed many Mexican birds.  I had made arrangements with local guide Victor Rosales, who took me and my wife out for the day as no one else on the ship wanted to go.  We started at the Chacchoben ruins.

Spider monkeys
            Victor quickly got us in before the cruise ship passengers and we scoured the area for birds.  We saw spider monkeys and the best bird we found was just a laughing falcon, a bird I’d seen in Costa Rica, but still a nice bird and photo.
Laughing falcon
            We drove around a little and saw some fun birds including six lifers.  I had a camera malfunction on a squirrel cuckoo, but at an abandoned spa we found three black-headed trogons, the best bird on the trip for me. Black-headed trogon             We found a tree in the small city on a neglected block which had berries and birds.  I finally got a photo of a Yucatan woodpecker, I( had heard one the year before but not seen it on Cozumel (long story)   Yucatan Woodpecker
            Victor was a good guide and a nice guy.  It was lucky to have found him by chance.  I’d recommend him for any birding in the area.  I didn’t bring up the fact I am a naked birder.  I figure it would get lost in the translation.  Maybe I could have added a few birds to my lifetime naked list, but I was just happy to do my own thing for a day and avoid the cruise ship outings. Rufous tailed hummingbird
Yellow throated euphonia
Young immature Yucatan Jays, a lifer bird
Paya Bay, Roatan, Honduras February 27, 2020
 My re-return to the Garden of Eden, my name for Paya Bay Resort on Roatan happened in the middle of a downpour.  Unlike 2019, we had no goofy stores after being hungover playing naked beer pong to the wee hours of the day.  We’d gone to bed early and the difference of ship time and local time did not cause us any issues.  But this was no beach weather day.  It was windy, wet, and nasty outside.  The rain according to Forest Gump could be described as big ol' fat rain.
A tropical washout Even Leroy thought it was a little wetMany of the people that went out here on the east end, made a u-turn and went back to the boat.  This seemed to be a frequent happening as we saw guests do this here and also on Cozumel. There was a break for a while in the weather.  I went birding, Silja read.            I saw some birds that were on my nude list previously and enjoyed a place we’ve visited now separate five times.
Mangrove Vireo
Yucatan vireo Canivet's emerald Erato heliconian 
Tropical Buckeye            We thought about how much we liked Paya Bay and thought about booking a trip there in the future.  Before we went back to the ship, I went back to have a moment at the Tree of Harmony.  
I thought about how I had ended my 2016 big year here with the death of my grandmother the day after returning.  I thought about what I had deduced in 2019, in that I needed to spend all trips, if possible, with my lovely bride of nearly 30 years.  In 2020, I thought of some what ifs…what if we’d die from COVID-19 and the coronavirus?  What if the world economy collapsed?  What if we’d never get back here?            Edward Abbey, wrote in Desert Solitude about finding the prettiest place on earth, which is different for different people.  His was the redrock country near Moab, Utah.  Ours was St. Martin until it wasn’t and now, maybe it is here at Paya near this tree.  Maybe, like I read in a book here on our 2017 visit in  Finding Abbey, a book about finding the hidden grave of Edward Abbey, it isn’t about actually finding anything.  It is about the search, and maybe that is true for us.  Life is the journey, and NOT the destination.            We drove back contently to the ship and shortly, it rained again.  That evening we met up with two couples we had met on the Grand Canyon nude rafting trip and had a great reconnection.  That is also what life is about, the connections.
You could have read about the Cozumel portion of this trip already so I'll just repeat pictures of two of my lifer birds.
Cozumel Vireo
Cozumel emerald
Leap year day on the Carnival Legend turned out to be much like the rest, rather plain and without much excitement day.  I did spot a red-footed booby and a brown booby somewhere north of Cuba as we waited out this day at sea looking for something to amuse ourselves, I began to think about the previous week.  Some of the other guests were saying things like even that was a waste of a very good week.  I tried to think of a phrase or word to describe this trip.  The trip wasn't bad, the food wasn't bad, and well, the company was good.All I could come up with to describe this cruise was white toast—white toast without butter.  Like I said, this cruise wasn’t bad just like white toast isn’t bad, but it was unremarkable and just plain, and nothing really worth writing about any further.It made me think of larger issues, like one can’t go back to the past.  The past is past.  The 2019 cruise was great but past fun has no bearing on future fun.  In a larger sense, and how I started this project, St. Martin was fun but it is now gone and over so now we are moving on, finding newer and hopefully other great things to experience.   Many of these trips will lead to new birds, sometimes I will be wearing clothing and sometimes I won’t be. Silja and I decided to buy an RV lot in Lutz, Florida from a seller who lives in Alberta and is having health issues and I think we will avoid most cruises in the future unless they are going to exotic locations like the South Pacific.  Other St. Martin owners are buying condos in Treasure Island and another, a house nearby in another nude development, Paradise Lakes.  Maybe Club Orient will like a phoenix, rise again some day, and if that happens, we will probably add it to our itinerary.  This fall, going to Asia.and Brazil.All I can say is that wherever we go, we will wear lots of sunscreen and in all likelihood, you, my readers will get to read about it.

Two out of three ain't bad

Island endemic birds are always a listing problem.  Islands from the South Pacific to the South Atlantic to even the Channel Islands of California have species found nowhere else.  This means vacations to the Caribbean have to include spots like Barbuda to get a warbler, and San Andres Island (Where?) to get the San Andres Vireo...and if they haven't yet, they should.
This brings me to Cozumel, and island I'm not so happy with in general, as the whole seven cruise ships landing at the same time scene is not my scene among others.
I was here last year, I saw some birds, but missed all the endemics....today....I had plans
1) Get some sun
2) Avoid Montezuma's revenge
3) not let the duty-free store and the shops get to me
and
4) Get two birds

Why just two birds?
Cozumel has THREE Endemic birds
the three Cozumel named species
the Cozumel vireo, the Cozumel emerald, AND the Cozumel thrasher, one if I find it, I'll be a hero, or nobody will believe me, and this leads us to why one should go see these birds ASAP.

Unfortunately, there is another problem with island endemics, their propensity to go extinct.  Living in a small place with limited resources can lead to problems should habitats change or a new predator shows up like rats, snakes, and cats, the Cozumel thrasher fits in here, more on that later

After a few hours on a private beach today, Silja and I walked over to the Planetarium to try to dig out at least the vireo.  Like I said, my 2019 visit to this place failed.  We came back to the center of the economy on the island and ran the gauntlet of people selling cigars, renting scooters, selling leather, and everything and started to look for the vireo.  It took a while and even after I found a trail in the hammock, well, sort of a trail, we saw some warblers but then, the vireo showed up and almost let me take a good photo.

It was a cute little vireo, and a lifer bird.
So we  then went back out to the flowers in the parking lot.  I saw a hummer in a tree and then I lost track of it...I looked everywhere and then my wife spotted it.  It was the wrong hummer, a green breasted mango sitting on a nest.  It was a cute bird, though but one I'd seen many many times on Roatan
So we kept at it, until the futility of it all set in.  Silja sat on a curb, I looked five more minutes and then  started to put my camera safely back in my backpack.  I wasn't taking my expensive equipment in full view of all the people in this town, I might not make it back with it all.

A local woman was sweeping the sidewalk and then a young man came rushing at me and then pointed a few feet behind my wife.  I was suspicious, but then I looked in the small palm tree...
A female Cozumel emerald on a nest

That was a lucky find and it left only the Cozumel thrasher, unfortunately, that is a bird that has not been seen since 2007, and now presumed extinct.  No one is totally sure, but the numbers dropped after hurricanes and invasive boa introductions have also been implicated.  This bird may still be out there somewhere, but I never saw anything that even looked like a thrasher.  Two out of three ain't bad to steal a Meatloaf saying.

Cozumel...?  Now I won't have to come back, so it is all good news, well except for the poor thrasher....

Olaf

Studying the Historical records of Birds

Art History meets birding, archaeology meets ornithology.  In 1902, Paul Gauguin painted Le Sorcier d' Hiva Oa, (Maquessan Man in a red cape).  I have always been a fan of Gauguin but I had never seen this painting that hangs in a museum in Belgium.  Gauguin painted this while he lived on Hiva Oa and then a year later he died and was buried on this minimally consequential island in the Marquesas.  This painting's importance transcends art, it transcends a lot and what we know about species and what "scientists" have reported or what is found in books.  
        Sometimes something odd is the important thing on a work of art.  Others see the color, the depiction of native life, the bigger meaning, and a select few only see birds.  Located in the lower left of the painting (viewer's right) is a depiction of a dog killing a bird, and not just any bird, a bird scientists had only a fossil record of and thought extinct as much as 600 years before white man had even visited this lonely South Pacific Island.  It is a  bird Gauguin would never have even read about because the fossils hadn't been found in 1902.
        Yet somehow Gauguin saw one, and even more amazingly, he painted it, he painted a bird not "discovered" until well after his death in 1903 but still described by islanders.  How could that be?
         Porphyrio paepae the Marquesas swamphen, is a thought extinct flightless bird similar to the many rails that populate isolated islands all over the world from the Galapagos to Mauritius to the Atlantic, it seems a flightless rail pair found themselves on just about any isolated piece of land and started a new population which evolved into a new species.  How and why did this happen on Hiva Oa?  The story is incomplete and will probably always remain so.
         I saw a Gough moorhen in the South Atlantic and scientists don't agree how this bird may have repopulated Tristan da Cunha after the bird was extirpated on that island a hundred years ago and suddenly reemerged fifty years later.  The answer there is that it must have been reintroduced by islanders of course because how else could it?  Eventhough the local population on Tristan disagrees.
        Gauguin painting a picture of a bird no white man had seen on the island he died and was buried on is one thing but is there more?  Are there any other reports?
        By chance, I am reading a copy of Fatu-Hiva, back to nature we bought at a Monastery that was liquidating.  This is the somewhat incredible and amazing tale of Thor Heyerdahl's first epic adventure to an island to do an experiment in becoming Adam and Eve.  How he convinced a 17 year old woman to do this before he had even dated her, is also amazing, but I digress.  Thor Heyerdahl is my inspiration and the best explorer of the 20th Century IMHO.  Later, he would sail Kon-tiki in an even crazier tale, but one in which he got his inspiration by what else he saw on Hiva Oa, statues and stone carving of things that don't occur in the South Pacific, including large cats and huge crocodile resembling lizards.  He pondered where the artists had seen their subjects and unlike everyone else in academia, he turned towards the east and South America.
       On page 161 of this old book he writes...

Suddenly Terai halted his stallion and pointed to the trail in front of him.  We had reached a hillock with low ferns, and a bird without wings was standing in the middle of the path, watching us.  Then it ran faster than a little hen along the trail and disappeared like lightning into sort of a tunnel in the ferns.  We had heard of the wingless bird, a strange species quite unknown to ornithologists.  The islanders had often seen it but never managed to capture one, as it always disappeared into holes and tunnels at great speed.....we searched a labyrinth of galleries crisscrossing the fern-clad hillocks, but we failed to see this mysterious bird again.

      Wow, that sounds like a flightless rail to me.  This was in 1937, 32 years after Gauguin's painting and generally like his actually proven theories (he recreated the sea voyage on Kontiki among other things) on the origin of the Polynesian people that came from the east and not the west, this report has been largely ignored or dismissed.  How could it not be true?  What other bird could it be?  Why would Heyerdahl make this up?  Not one for hyperbole, he found statues and even Gauguin's old gun, in which Gauguin had carved the stock.  So why not see this bird?
      Rails are strange birds and serial colonizers, one, the Aldabra rail evolved twice on the same island after it colonized it, got extirpated from a flood and then recolonized it thousands of years later and re-evolved through a process called iterative evolution into basically the same flightless bird.
      There has also been much debate about the Tahiti Rail,
      This bird was documented from Cook's expedition and then went extinct at some point probably around the same time as the Marquesas swamphen, but then there is the local islander version who reported it on a nearby uninhabited island until just two generations ago, maybe later, many describing the bird exactly, but other "researchers and scientists" don't buy the islander's tale and think for whatever reason, the bird died out a long time ago.  Some of the problem is that much of the work on this bird was done by an amateur ornithologist, and not an accepted elite.  If you haven't figured it out yet, if no one knows who you are, your theories are suspect.  That is the way this club works.  Thor Heyerdahl dealt with this his whole life in archaeology as he was a trained biologist, NOT an archaeologist and it caused him much angst. But even the skeptics say that unlike "hearsay records" like the rail on Hiva Oa, there is enough documented evidence to say that the bird actually existed.  I guess Heyerdahl and Gauguin saw phantoms and ghosts.
       If a bird lived but no one took a picture or no official scientist captured a specimen did it even exist at all?  Listers of birds, like me, fight this all the time.  What is evidence?  Even with a picture....it needs to be a better picture, or is the picture even taken where they say it is?  It never ends, armchair skeptics and internet trolls are everywhere.  I can only imagine the naysayers at meetings accusing Heyerdahl of never actually making the Kontiki voyage
      Many of these birds are extinct now, or haven't been seen for so long, they are considered extinct, but the rail on Guam has had it's numbers increase.  That bird almost went extinct due to the brown tree snake, many others were eaten or destroyed by rat invasions.
      In the big scheme of things, if a bird went extinct in 1412, 1902, or 1937...does it really matter?  Dead is dead, right?  I think it matters.  We need some hope, since exotic birds are going extinct, that is a fact.  There have been stories of people seeing extinct Hawaiian birds over the decades.  These have not been proven.  Sometimes they are spoken of like one would refer to a mentally challenged relative, dismissively and condescendingly.  I guess it would be nice to know if the Ivory-billed woodpecker still exists somewhere in secret, maybe in Arkansas, the Big Thicket in Texas, or maybe Cuba.  I know of a few people who have spent time looking, and well, imagining a sound or a flash of a suspected bird.  Many birders and especially lay people think these people need to up their lithium doses, but I think a few of these birds (rails or woodpeckers) are still out there, somewhere.  Which is more likely...bigfoot or the ivory-billed woodpecker?
      The Imperial woodpecker may still exist in the Sierra Madre but some searchers have never came back from looking probably killed by drug lords, and so any wide spread searching seems like suicide to me, but who knows, it is good to have hope.
     So, if Thor Heyerdahl had a bird list, he had a bird on it no one else in the 20th century had, and a bird none of the rest of us will ever see, but there are still cool birds out there as I try to get 8000 world life birds.
       I'm not heading to the South Pacific this year, but suspect that in 20 months, I will be following in the footsteps of Paul Gauguin on my way to New Zealand, assuming COVID-19 doesn't get me.  I got easier birds to get in the meantime.  Although 2020 is a rather tame year, on Saturday I leave for a trek to fill in some holes from my Mexican bird list, then I'm lying low until fall for trips to Brazil and Bhutan where I should get me some cool stories and interesting lifer birds.
      It does amaze me that even reading about another interest I have (megalithic archaeology) occasionally I get distracted into the land of birds.
      Art history and ornithology have come together to solve a mystery...or maybe cause one....who knew?

keep exploring

Olaf
     

Everything old is new again

There is nothing like the sweet thoughts of impending lifer beer.  The cool crisp taste of the hops or the bite of carbonation on the palate. The aroma of cooked wheat and barley malt, oh it is so good, and for ABA land and me increasingly rare.  I did chase a swift down in the Keys in November, and well, that was two months ago now. But today...we are properly chilling an Alaska Amber

I figured that eventually, I'd get a duck called the white-cheeked pintail in Florida, a bird I have seen no less than a thousand of, (in St Martin) and a bird of some difficulty in that there are white cheeks at Busch Gardens, exotic duck ponds, zoos, parks, and all over the state.  I chased one in December 2017 on Key Biscayne and missed it by a few hours and then flew all the way back to San Diego for a Nazca Booby and then flew all the way to New Brunswick for a mistle thrush and a crazy 2 out of three "Z" ain't bad double, five days of basically flying--crisscrossing the continent in a Z .  It was nuts.  That bird was pretty much felt to be a legit wild pintail but most of them are suspect, and I was in no hurry.

This bird showed up as we we were getting to Costa Rica and I was suspicious, it was on the wrong side of the state from where this bird lives in Cuba and the Bahamas.  How did one get to Naples and in a golf course pond no less, but as it turned out, it was unbanded, no clipped toe, was acting wild, and then the local birders even got a weather consult.  The SW Florida Birders are quite thorough and persistent.  Dave McQuade forwarded this to me.


I am an atmospheric sciences professor at Penn State University. Last week, while on a family vacation, I saw the White-cheeked Pintail presently in Naples, Florida. Yesterday, I looked at weather maps that preceded the occurrence of this bird. I generated and then downloaded these maps from the NOAA/Physical Sciences Division Climate Analysis and Plotting Tools website, which is https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/cgi-bin/data/getpage.pl . I have posted these weather maps on eBird, together with a detailed discussion of the maps in relation to the occurrence of the Naples White-cheeked Pintail. The eBird link is https://ebird.org/checklist/S62795465 .

The weather maps show winds that are favorable for a vagrant White-cheeked Pintail that arrived either in the early afternoon of Dec. 27 or sometime during the day on Dec. 28, 1-2 days before the White-cheeked Pintail was first observed in Naples on Dec. 29. On these two days, the wind vectors are oriented westward from the Bahamas toward the southern tip of Florida, and farther to the west, the winds are oriented northwestward in a direction parallel to the southwest coast of Florida. Therefore, if the White-cheeked Pintail is indeed a natural vagrant, and it flew parallel to the local wind vector, it could have flown westward from the Bahamas to the southern tip of Florida, and then parallel to the southwest coast of Florida, coming down in Naples. Following such a route, the White-cheeked Pintail would have first encountered land on the southwest coast of Florida, not the expected east coast of Florida. In other words, the weather 1-2 days before the White-cheeked Pintail was first seen appeared to being close to "perfect" for its occurrence as a natural vagrant in Naples.

There are no other times during the entire month of December 2019 that were favorable for a White-cheeked Pintail reaching Naples. The wind direction on the morning of Dec. 27 as well as 15 days earlier on Dec. 12 was also westward, but the bird would have had to cross all of southern Florida to reach Naples, an unlikely scenario.

In summary, the weather maps suggest that the likelihood that this bird is a natural vagrant is substantially higher than that for a typical White-cheeked Pintail sighting in south Florida.

Steven B. Feldstein
Professor and Senior Scientist
Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science
516 Walker Building
The Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA 16802 USA       

It was good enough for me.  We left South Dakota on Wednesday and drove down hard, we got a little ill, had to watch the NDSU Bison win a national championship, the Vikings lose and the Packers win, and then today I could go.

I took along a local guy a few campers over from us at the campground, named Tim on his first bird chase and he thought it was interesting.

We got delayed thirty minutes when a pickup with a trailer got wedged into a McDonald's drive-thru, and then I was shaking my head wondering how come I hadn't gone to McDonald's before the gas station.  While we were waiting in the overflow line for our sandwiches an employee sheepishly walked out to us asked if we could substitute bacon for sausage, something we didn't want to know about happened to all of the sausage..  Maybe it was good we weren't earlier?  Things always work out for us.

We got down to Naples and then scouted the area and luckily I saw two birders I recognized from Connecticut, and I think from another duck chase to New York for a garganey in 2016.  They had scopes up, we stashed the car, walked a couple of blocks and I set up shop, got my scope up and bingo, there it was on the other side of the pond loafing with some blue-wings and a small group of mottled ducks.


Some bikers rode by and asked what the name of the duck was that we were watching.  "Fred!"  I yelled back.  It could be an Ethel, I guess, the sexes are the same with this species.  The guys from Connecticut left and who should walk up to me, but Tony Lau from Minnesota.  It was old home week, again, in Florida, last time I met an old birding friend from Georgia and Alaska down here and now Tony, small world birders

I've chased a few birds with Tony before.  "I thought you were in Costa Rica."  Tony said.
"Yea, that was last week."  I replied, it was.

Then a boat moved into where the ducks were hanging out and they all flushed and the white-cheeked pintail flew up and over my head and that as they say, was that.  It was gone.  It was good we hadn't slept in, the duck wasn't waiting around today.  What they guy in the boat was up to, wasn't clear, but if his goal was to push the duck somewhere else, it worked.



Tony had gotten lifer bird 559 I think, and this was 803 for me, depending on what I am doing with the yellow chevroned parakeet, countable now in California and I'm not sure what they are doing in Florida, seen one as recently in Florida as last year and I haven't counted that one.   Luckily a sixth birder showed a minute before they flushed and just got the bird, so everyone I met was happy, even Tim, surviving his first bird chase.  His significant other was getting an ultrasound for a DVT at 2PM so we needed to hurry back to North Tampa.

I also saw a nice green heron
 and a wood stork...with more mottled ducks

All year birds because it is a new year and everything old is new again, you got to love us listers our lives repeat every year, just like the white cheeked pintail, a common bird I don't even take photos of in the Caribbean anymore (I got great ones) is today's great bird!
Again everything old is new again...

Congrats Tony!  Good lifer

Me, I'm getting the beer chilled
Cheers!

Olaf

Storks in the Attic and Skeletons in the Closet

The European white stork (Ciconia ciconia), a photogenic iconic bird that is as much wrapped in mythology as it is with ecology.  I've first seen the bird back in 1980, in Germany on my way to a tortuous day watching the Passion play, but the photo above was taken in Denmark in 1964, two years before I was even born.  Yet, the photos and the rights to this and below are controlled by me, as executor of my Grandmother's estate, but that isn't the story...to be quite honest, I will never know who the rightful owners of these pictures are or for that matter how they came to be...treasures in the attic or better put skeletons in the closet.  So, I'll share this story.               An odd thing happened to me on the last scheduled sorting party held at my dearest departed Grandmother's house.   I found something odd and it perplexed me for most of the fall.  It made me sleep poorly and caused me to be uneasy, to be honest, it is still bothering me.  It bugged for a kind of odd reason, too.  Who are we?  Why are we?  Do our lives have meaning?  What if you have nobody and leave no one behind, did your life have purpose?  Does it matter?  All this emanated from a large box of old slides found in my grandmother's attic, hidden in a corner.                  I looked at them, from two huge trips, mostly scenic pictures of a epic three-month Scandinavia tour in 1964 and a huge western US National Parks trip in 1962.  But who previously owned these slides?  They weren't from our family.  I looked at them all, old Kodachromes, and wondered, where did my grandparents even get these and why.  Who are the sporadic people in them.  It was bewildering as to why?  Who?  A wise person would have just chucked them but it bothered me as to all of these memories and stories, now lost, they would be owned by someone, an heir, or even the real person, maybe still alive, and it was my job as Executor to find them.               Then in the bottom of the box, under smaller boxes of high end slide, almost hidden and never seen was a carefully handwritten travelogue written in third person.  There were no names, no references and only one clue, they left from Waterloo, IA on a specially chartered SAS plane for a two-month trip (I'll get into the extra month). Back in the days when you could all stand by the plane for a photo!Who could even afford something like this?  I thought it odd that almost all of the people going on this were women, but then I realized, the men had to work, these were housewives or widows.  This was the Sixties.  It was an odd deal, these pictures, It was like I was being a voyeur into someone else's life, someone's past but maybe, they were meant for me?  Maybe the person from the grave was talking to me.  Then it hit me, it had to be cousin Verda.   How I even remember her is surprising.It is hard to describe her.  Words like nice and sweet would never ever come to mind.  Manipulative, is a better word for her, as is condescending.  You could use eccentric but only that wouldn't describe her.  She wasn't Disney's Corella DeVille, but kind of a mean version of Hyacinth Bucket from Keeping up Appearances.  She was the classic Bertha Better-than-you.  It is odd thinking about her now, as she had no reason to feel superior.  Yes, she had money, but she didn’t have children, she had no legacy, she lived kind of a hollow life.  Her husband was the only son of a high-ranking railroad official for a regional railroad in Waterloo, IA.  But he wasn’t anything important and never made a mark in life that I ever heard of.  In fact, the one time I met him, he gave me the creeps and seemed like a Hollywood Creation himself. I met Verda a handful of times.  They weren’t happy memories.  Verda was the only child of the oldest son and heir of the Iowa Brenizer family, my great grandfather Brenizer was the third born son, he and his older brother (#2) moved to Wisconsin since they were not the heir.  My Grandmother was Verda’s youngest cousin.  Her mother got divorced from her father when she was six. There was something odd there and some story, but I don’t remember being told anything and I'm sure it was lost.   It is not good to speak ill of the dead, but from what I heard, Verda was entitled and spoiled as a child, and it didn't improve as she got older.  When I was conscious about her, she struck me as an odd bitter woman.  My Grandmother didn't like her, but was tolerant since she was family.  My grandfather despised her like few others and made himself scarce when she was around.  He didn’t trust her husband at all and when he died somewhat young, Grandpa Allwin seemed somewhat happy or at least relieved that he wouldn’t be visiting again.  My grandparents would always say snide things about Verda while playing cards with my grandmother's sister and husband.  Uncle Martin could go on a tirade about Verda.  He hated her most of all.  Then he’d need a whiskey sour to wash the sour thought of her down.  She'd show up once a year, usually in summer (I was never in her house, despite visiting Waterloo twice as a child in tow to visit another sister Grandmother had down there), but Verda would get funny about not getting invited properly and she offended easily and might not show up for a few years.   It was always a tense time when Cousin Verda showed up.  She was also known to no show, which would be considered rude by everyone else.  We just seemed relieved.  When she was around, she'd frequently talk about what my grandmother didn't have, and what she, as in Verda, had.  Never understanding that what my grandmother had of most value was her family.  She'd bring odd gifts and sometimes would say she had just the right thing, she'd order it, and then send us the bill and expect being paid.  When Grandmother died, she had saved every letter her cousins had sent her including Verda.  The letters were oddly in third person narrative and about Verda and her father, her life and never mentioning much from any other perspective.  I guess it was good and right that these two should end the family lines of the two respective families.  In the end, I don’t think anyone got any of her money, and all we got apparently were these slides.  I still wonder when she gave them to my grandmother.  I’d ask what Verda was thinking, but her mind was different than everyone else’s so even the answer could be confusing. Cousin Verda Opal McDonald right, her most flattering picture of the set, the scowl is subdued. Unknown traveler on left looks more interesting and happy.  Maybe she is laughing at Verda? Verda with her father John Brenizer, taken circa 1911 long after her mother had left the family, one of two photos of her I know of.  She is also pictured at the side of my Great Great grandfather Eli Brenizer, the last known picture he ever had takenVerda was a good writer and her prose was enlightening, but in 3rd person, it was odd, she always wrote like that.  She even stayed after the tour to find out where her mother's family was suspected to be from, Mora, Sweden of all places, according to the manuscript.  Mora is the home of Anders Zorn.  This was near where the Danielson clan hailed from, which is odd since her mother has been forever listed as German.  One wonders if there was more to her mother’s story than what is known.  She never mentioned her by name, just her mother's family.  Why was she hunting for her home?  Sweden?  Was she adopted?  Was her mother someone else and Verda was adopted?  Maybe she had spent her 88-year life compensating for inner insecurities.  Something sure seemed odd, but it isn't worth my digging any further, it isn’t my life.  Verda, and everyone on that side of the family is gone, buried at graves no one visits, she is long forgotten, or on pictures I’m not keeping.  She is referenced here, but not fondly, and this isn’t how I’d like to be remembered.  All I can say is she did go on one cool trip, and I guess there was that.  The old cars in Wyoming were also neat.I’d like the story behind this picture…the bus is parked on the right so it is in Norway. Interesting bus passengers in Norway       Then I found something interesting, pictures of the Kon-Tiki raft by my hero, Thor Heyerdahl, I had just dedicated an adventure project to him and here, Verda and I had crossed paths, fifty years apart at the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo.  We met our Norwegian exchange student outside it.  I just sent my 65 year old copy of Kon-Tiki Expedition narrative to a business associate in Oklahoma two weeks ago.  Everything in my life comes full circle, even this.


So that was it, there were some stork nests on roofs in Denmark, some pretty waterfalls, Fishing Bridge in Yellowstone and more bears, lots of bears, and in the end, I guess since she does not have an heir, I know of, I will chuck them all.  What had taken a lot of money and many, many hours of careful organizing will now be just waste in a landfill.  Such is the fate of history.  The keys to stories are memories shared with family members and friends.  It is too bad that old Verda never had anybody, but that is the price many pay.  I've been castigated by some as a breeder for having children.  Well, that is what life is.  I don;t plan on being alone in my olden golden years, sending old slides to a first cousin I think is beneath me.
           Why didn’t she pay to bring Aunt Ethel or Grandma Lucille with?  They seemed to be the only relatives that cared a little about her.  Three months with Verda pulling the strings in Europe?  OMG!  That would have been an adventure,
            I’m glad I have my children.  I’m glad I have all the we’ve done together.  I’m extremely glad we had this last Thanksgiving cleaning Grandma's house, but please, PLEASE, though, take these Kodachromes away!
Yellowstone bear, can you ID those cars? The classic old Yellowstone bear photo, this one 1962, and the photo is all mine...well sort of Swedish train Norwegian Stave church Norway as the driving is on the right They still drove on the left in Sweden in 1964 Oslo, Søttene mai, May 17th, 1964 Fishing Bridge, Yellowstone Park 1962 Norway 1964 Norwegian Road, 1964 Storks in Denmark

Swedish Swans and DucksNOW BACK TO FLORIDA, I'M IN SEARCH OF BETTER WEATHER...AND MAYBE A DUCK

Olaf

The Hunt for Tody, it takes a lot of Cojones

There is always a bird out there taunting me.  The nemesis bird, big and small vex us all.  It seems no where is safe from the nemeses.  So goes the story of Tody
The 2019 version of the New Year's family trip was going to Costa Rica instead of St Martin for the obvious reason that our house was gone and for two additional  reasons.  First, my son, Tyko bought me a Costa Rican bird guide as a gift. I figured it was an omen.  Secondly, Suncountry as cheapand direct flights to Liberia.  It was difficult to find accommodation on short notice but we found two rooms at the small Finca Verde Lodge.  It was neither nature hotel nor much of anything.  It was out of the way, in the forest featured only four rooms and it must be birdy, I assumedAs I suspected the flight south on Suncountry was late.  It wasn’t for the lack of a plane.  A bad snowstorm was coming and the area around the airport was coated in freezing rain. Driving to the airport took cajones, big ones.  I peered over a rather slick and steep hill on Danvers Avenue north of the MSP airport and it was like looking into a abyss, but inch by inch, I slid the truck down and then crossing the Minnesota River cars were all over the highway.  People passed the first six car pile up and tried to drive fast.  Behind us, someone was sideways on the bridge.  Luckily, we got through but a flight attendant didn’t and our departure was pushed back well over an hour..  Such are the joys of travel.  We’d get there when we got there and although I was worried about finding our tiny hotel in the dark, I guess we’d get there too, when we got there.  Even if it was tomorrow.     There are five things that one needs for a stress-free and happy trip.  First, the airlines need to fly on-time and safely.  One’s luggage needs to arrive, and you need to pack the correct items.  Then, you need your local transportation, you can't spend the entire trip at the airport.  Forth, you need your hotel or at least a hotel.  Finally, you need some food, eventually.  Well, on this trip, we had some of these.  Is 2 out of 5 not bad?  How about just one?As a person who packs light, packing is usually easy.  Often the question is whether to bring a towel or not to bring a towel, but this is a different sort of trip.  The night before departure, our son Allwin checked up the weather report.  Liberia, Costa Rica is the driest place in Costa Rica and it is firmly in dry season.  I had my rain forest gear packed—camera rain guards, dry bag, rain coat, rain hiking hat, and assorted smaller waterproof bags, zip locks and such.  I scratched my head, as my carry-on was tight on space, and at the hotel in Minneapolis, I rechecked the weather, dry skies ahead for as far as we could see.  So, I throw out the raincoat, the second coat, then the dry bag and seeing I could squeeze in a bathrobe, I through it all out.  Then somehow, I forget to put all but a two shirts back in.  Now, I’m ready (except for not knowing I forgot to pack many shirts) Our 9 AM departure time slides as we realize something or someone is missing, first, to 10 and then 11, we board. then we got two flight attendants that show, one goes and the other stays, that takes thirty minutes to sort out, then we got to de-ice.  We leave three hours late.  It is a safe flight.  So, we land safely, get through customs and I hunt for Hertz.  Hertz is always the best?  I find the guy.  “My Daniel.  I got good news and bad news for you.  We no longer have a car for you, but these guys over here, do.  They have just the car.”     It turns out they did for $600 more money and the Tucson becomes a Prius, which becomes a Tucson again.  No deals there.  The guy gave me a card to call so I could get a better rate next time.  What can you do?  I can complain to Hertz.  They aren’t going to help.  We needed a car.  It was late, the family was starving and we still had a couple of hours to drive in the dark, maybe only forty five miles but the traffic in Liberia is awful we are warned.  We headed out.   We found our hotel, the Finca Verde Lodge, in Bijaqua, on the slopes of the Tenorio Volcano.  We creep up a dark and rutted road to a sign that is painted on an old satellite dish. It turns out they have a small restaurant, it looks open and for a moment we look saved.  Then it starts to rain outside, not just a gentle rain but big ole fat rain, the potholes are soon large puddles.  “This is the dry season?”  I ask the members of the family.  We walk in and look to check in at the bar.  "Daniel..."  The woman makes a face.  "Mr. Allwin..."  She has my middle name for some reason.  Jorge, the manager happens to be there, she motions him over. he makes a face.“What is your name?”  he asks me again looking confused in very Spanish English.  He sighs.  “Well, I got some bad news for you.  We didn’t think you were coming.  You didn’t answer my email.”  I show him my Travelocity booking number.  He motions that awayI put my hand to my face.  I play with my phone, turning it on to foreign charges.  I know I didn’t get an email, I got a hotels.com message to confirm, which I had actually done that (I thought it was to confirm two rooms), but then I missed the second one.  I was in the RV somewhere in Texas.  I hadn’t been on hotels.com since November.  Now the rain isn’t bothering me so much, since we apparently don’t have a room.  Then Jorge’s eyes light up as the woman (probably his sister) says something to him coming from the back.  “I have good news and bad news for you.  We have no rooms tonight, but tomorrow, lots of room.”  Thinking now we will be sleeping in the car or at the open-air café, I look back at my annoyed family.  I could at least bundle myself in my rain coat except that it is in a bag in the back of our truck in Minneapolis.  Luckily, it turned out that was just the bad news, he had some cabin he knew of where we could stay at for the first night.  So, we followed him down the hill and shockingly were invited in to two not so bad rooms.  We had to trudge through the mud a little, but it worked.  We came back, and ordered food, and went to sleep hoping the rain was an anomaly.  It wasn’t.  It turns out, Liberia is in a whole different climate than just a little ways up here.  The weather report up in Bijagua?  Rain, with chances of thunderstorms, followed by more rain, heavy rain, intermittent with thick fog followed by mist with occasional rain.  The room was dry and I awoke to the something noisy outside.  I suspected howler monkeys, but just couldn’t see them, as I couldn’t even see the chairs outside, it was that foggy.  Then I noticed my lack of basically anything clothing related save my bathrobe.  I put in on, walked out and sat down.  Then I took it off, no one could see me anyhow.  I let the drizzle cool my idiocy.  I go to a rainforest and I talk myself out of bringing rain gear.  Olaf is the stupidest man in the universe.  I see a flash of yellow, then a song.  It is a kiskadee, or maybe a boat-billed flycatcher, the first I have, the second, I need.  The bird is perched somewhere, I can’t even see the line of hedge it is perched on.  I hear unidentified parrots flying over.  I look in my guidebook.  Six species could be here.  At least the monkeys are identifiable.  Nothing sounds like howlers.  I walk in and go back to bed.  No use birding, the weather had me beaten.  We eventually get organized, have breakfast, watch the rain intensify, and lode up the car with our stuff.  We drive into the village to see what is available.  The answer is little.  No umbrellas, and only emergency rain ponchos and garbage bags.  We load up on both.  We drive around, find a French hotel with a nice restaurant up the hill which surprisingly had rooms, I see a few birds which quiets the spirit and we go check in.After that, some surprising things happened.  First, the life at the hotel improved, our rooms at Finca Verde were not as nice as the one night.  But after two nights, they upgraded us to the one really nice room they had.  We gave that to the kids.  Secondly, the rain…ah the rain.  Bad weather and Olaf is like red wine and red meat.  I checked the report again and it looked horrid but then something odd happened.  The weather gods gave us a break.  The fog parted, the rain ended, and the weather forecasts proved wrong.  The sun even came out.  I never took my rain poncho even out of the bag it came in.  Even the day we went to the very wet St. Elaena Preserve on the next volcano, Arenal, a place it always rains, but it didn’t.It became an odd trip, as everyone, everyone looked at us odd that we were staying for eight nights in Bijagua.  From the waitstaff to the managers of the hotels, to other tourists, everyone asked the same question.  Eight nights, here?  I seemed birdy and there were some trails assuming the weather held.    The second morning my daughter learned a valuable life lesson about shoes in the tropics or even for the desert.  One must always check what is in your shoes before you put them on.  I’ve had mice, scorpions, and my daughter, now, three-inch spiders.A scream went out in the rainforest as we were readying for our first hike.  “There is something in my show”, Lauren said pulling out her foot in a bit of a panic.  She looked in shock.  We laughed and then a realization.

Hey, something IS in the shoe, it doesn’t want to come out
That is a really BIG spider!  Yuck!
Lessons learned and with nothing else to do.  We started a slow search for birds especially, the hunt for tody, the tody motmot, a bird that I’ve searched for in Belize twice, Honduras, once, and well, let me put it this way: I have seen more jaguars, more ocelots, more poisonous snakes, slept on more docks, and been rescued more by Francis Ford Copula than I’ve seen tody motmots.  In Costa Rica, they are found only around three volcanoes, the two that Bijagua sits in between, and another farther northwest.  It was one of three birds I really wanted to see.  The aracari wasn’t even a lifer bird.  I had seen one on the steps of a pyramid but had run out of film twenty years earlier, the resplendent quetzal would be something very lucky to find the single day we would be visiting its habitat a three-hour drive away.Luckily, the local trails we hiked in were prime tody habitat, so I just pretended to be hiking.  But as the week went on one thing became clear, I was seeing a steady diet of lifer birds, but not tody.  I listened, I called, I even used payback a little but nothing.   I wanted to find toucans but none of them appeared.  We got lucky and got a reservation  at the French place for New Years eve, that was nice.  January 1 night?  Crackers and peanut butter.  Nothing was open or at least open and had food.  Then a got a desired photo, a collared aracari, then it seems, they were everywhere, even the local feeder one amigo at the feeder

then two and would you believe three? how about four? five?  
Could there ever be five collared aracaris on a platform?  Yes, but the variegated squirrel said otherwise as the fifth landed it came and stole the banana.
then we got yellow-throated toucans
keel-billed toucans
We saw Lesson's motmot
Broad-billed motmot but no Tody
Between the lumps, the splits, the renames, it was overwhelming.  I'm still looking at photos. What IS this?  Three-striped warbler in the field guide but it is now a Costa Rican warbler, who knew?
Gosh and then there were the butterflies....I just punted, it was 4th down and 70, in a real game I would have taken the safety...geez. I posted this butterfly on an ID page and got laughed at as what I was thinking  wasn't even in the same end of the field guide.  It was a butterfly, but skippers are as close to swallowtails as where I was looking.  Funny thing, even the expert couldn't ID it as to a species, family....a Costa Rican butterfly guide would be needed except it seems, it would be a Nobel prize worthy project.
Then we have flycatchers....OMG Kiskadee versus Social flycatcher versus Gray-capped versus rusty-margined?Wait, they are white-ringed flycatchers.  White-ringed? this is a gray-capped.  I identified both on the plane home.  The life list keeps giving
My wife wanted to see a quetzel before they go extinct, so we drove up into the highlands, three hours by bad roads.  We hiked in a preserve, but all we found was quick glances at small birds and poisonous snakes Don't worry, this isn't a real Fer-de-lance, only a salmon-bellied racer, it won't kill you, they are pretty feisty though....there were other snakes, scary snakes, snakes in the trail.
So no quetzel...so we went to lunch.  I saw four individual birds sitting outside after lunch, all lifers and the only ones of the trip
Magenta-throated woodstar
Striped-tailed hummingbird

Silver-throated tanager
And then...he flew by, not a tody, but a male resplendent quetzel THE bird of Costa Rica holy cow, the worst photo ever, but still identifiable...wow, four birds, four lifers, and an overpriced tourist lunch.
We continued roaming around and seeing single birds that were representing speciesWe saw a black cowled orioles


 Even pacific screech owls, we had two at this roost we stumbled upon when I was trying to point out a red-lored parrot seen clearly through a window above them.  My wife thought I was joking.  "Your showing us the owls correct?"  

"What Owls?"  It was a lucky parrot


the lucky parrot shot through a hole a foot above a hard to find owl

I saw a slate throated redstart, not a lifer, but still cool
 a slate tailed trogon (female) 
 A white collared manikin 

We had sloths over out cabin...
Everybody was trying to get in on the tourist dollars to see sloths 
I'm not sure how well that worked though.  I guess any body that stops is a bonus.

We had Capuchins raiding bananas
  
Howler monkeys waking us up, every morning at first light
and waterfalls
We floated the river for boat billed herons and bitterns.
No tody!  But we were seeing a tremendous variety of birds.  So the search for Tody continued on to the last day.  I went out early and grabbed a local guy who showed tourists the sloths, he seemed to know some about Tody, yea, close by, yes, we started 150 feet from where I woke up and then.....he whistled and then it answered, we got closer and closer it kept answering and then...IT RAINED!!!!!  We aren't so lucky as a mist or a passing shower, it hadn't rained this hard all week, and Manny went back to the cafe.  I followed, slipping on the the mud climbing out of the rivine.  I had breakfast, drank coffee and swore quietly.  SO CLOSE!!!!!  I finally walked out to the road and screamed.  Screaming helps sometimes.  The rain stopped.  Manny saw me walking back.  "You okay boss?  I heard a funny noise."  He asked.  "Go find Tody now."  He said and off we went, he whistled once and there it was.  Tody motmot
Lifer tody motmot
We fist bumped and he went back to work and then the family went out for the final hike.  I walked four hundred yards on the volcano to the north and then another tody flew in.

It was also there on the way back, another flew over my head, and then that evening, they called behind my bed, one was on the way to drinks, motmot here, motmot there, a tody motmot everywhere.  The way it goes.  One day's nemesis is another's trash bird.   It was time to go home, now that the birding gods were mocking me.
It took my seven days to get the photo of the lone long billed hermit feeding at a small group of flowers ever morning at 0830 over a river.  five mornings I could not get a shot and on the final morning I got a photo, one hard bird to get and even at this, it isn't that good of a photo.\
It was a bit overwhelming.  63 lifer birds....and a great family trip.  It was a fun spontaneous trip, it seemed we got by at times on a wing and a prayer but no one died, just one awfully big spider in a shoe and some close encounters of the slithering kind.  I left some Costa Rica on the bone, so I'll be back.  Tody....?  Nemesis no more that bird.....I came I saw, and then I saw some more...oh well....even a bonus quetzel,  and even the Vikings won....life is GOOD
Olaf

Pearl

  We were driving home from Florida and I got a message from Barry Parkin of Aberdeen, SD that there was a Project Snowstorm Snowy in my area.  Unfortunately, we were still in Missouri, and that evening when we were home, we had to hustle off to Wisconsin to start our Christmas celebration.  I wasn't even sure what Project Snowstorm was, I had assumed he was talking about the weather.
Barry resent me a pin location on the 23rd, so deciding that a 60 mile drive was better than a 500 mile drive up to NW Minnesota to get my year owl, it was then he sent me a link. This owl I was chasing even had a name..."Pearl"
Pearl is a two-year-old female snowy owl, trapped Nov. 27, 2019, near Woodworth, ND by Matt Solensky of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Northern Prairie Research Center,and named for nearby Pearl Lake. Her transmitter was funded by generous donations from the public.  It had made a bee-line for my ranch right after it was tagged.

The grey dot is my ranch, it spent December 12th on my property. So, I went owl hunting.  I struck out on the 23rd.  My daily tally, a kestrel and 12 horned larks driving 40 miles up on the Coteau, the Coteau des Prairie is a barren, windswept, lifeless place this time of year.  Back at my house I was pleased to say.  "I've got siskins!"  Always a nice, albeit transient bunch of birds.

Including this one with something weird going on with it's beak. I got going earlier on Christmas eve, it is better to look for snowy owls at first light.  I was going to have a Christmas owl if it killed me, so in the fog, off I went to usually where it is the foggiest place in South Dakota, but oddly today, it was the clearest, well, it was till gray and a bit foggy.  At least around here, it was about as good as it could be.
I climbed up on the Coteau, drove around, I met up with a coyote hunter.  He told me a cryptic tale of his son having been seeing snowy owls around as he worked nearby.  It wasn't a hot tip so we parted ways.  I flushed, of all things a greater prairie chicken, no small find itself, at least up here.  There are a few occasionally around.  I saw one ten years ago, thirty miles northwest of here.  Some birds are probably dispersing from Minnesota as they are known to disperse.  Tagged birds in Wisconsin dispersed hundreds of miles and they were known to even migrate back in the day.  This was just a single bird, and it flew in from the north.  I tried and failed to get a good picture.
Then three miles away, I tallied three crows on a carcass and three sharp-tailed grouse in a tree.  It was slow birding, but better than the day before and then I began to think.  Where could that guy's son even work?  I was in the middle of nowhere.  There isn't even a house on every six square miles.  A milk truck passed me as I was pulled off the side of the most major road in the area.  I looked at a starling, then it hit me.  A dairy!  There was a large dairy about a mile southwest of me.  Owls eat rats, dairies have rats.  Then I thought like an owl.  I've seen two snowy owls in trees, maybe 20 on fence posts.  One on a round bale, some on the ground, and on the ground with this snow would be nearly impossible to find, and a few on normal electrical poles.  The most I've seen in the Dakotas have been on the big transmission towers.  I could see way down behind me a new high transmission line, carrying power from a new windmill farm, the banes of the prairies, crossing the road behind me about two miles.  I stood out and followed it, wondering where it went.  I saw a mile south it turned and ran parallel of me heading west.  Most of the roads here are not passable in the winter, and are barely passable even in the summer.  No one plows them.  I drove down a mile past the dead end road that had the dairy on it and I found a pretty decent road and headed south.  I could see generally where the road was under the crusted snow and ice and crested a hill and could see the power line crossing ahead of me.
If I was an owl, I'd spend the day up there, hunt rats a mile over at night, and spend the day in solitude up on a tower.  Suddenly something big and white flew over ahead of my truck.  It was coming from the dairy.
BINGO!
It was Pearl.  It lit up on one of the towers and watched me watch it.
 I had my Christmas Owl!
I left her where I found her, watching for voles and waiting for another after dark hunting raid on the diary.  She is providing valuable tracking data and hopefully having a good winter and staying off the roads so she can head back north in the spring and some year breed making more snowy owls.
So this is my present, thanks Pearl, all I want for Christmas ....is "you!"My apologies to Mariah CareyMerry Christmas Pearl and to all of you, it is time to go skating!



Olaf

Swift afoot

BIRD CHASES and RV trips are like a box of chocolate, you never know what you are going to get.  I can almost hear Forest, Forest Gump saying this.  Maybe it was just that I had spent a night near Bayou la Batre, Alabama recently.
             I had not chased a life-bird for North America since before New Years in 2018, the blackhawk up in Maine.  It had been over 10 months.  I had seen over 450 life world birds as a consolation, so I'm not complaining. There had been many quality and cool birds out there, but I had either been in the Southern Hemisphere or Europe, driving my RV, or been on the brink of some mandatory obligatory activity where I could not get away.  Most of these birds had been nowhere even near to me or been unchasable in Alaska.  
          I had contemplated chasing a green-breasted mango in South Texas that had been reported when we were in El Paso but it was only a one day wonder and by the time I got Big Bird my RV, to San Antonio no one was still reporting the hummingbird.  We continued heading east.  It was a bird I’d photographed in Roatan in February anyway and seen many many times. 
            Another bird I had seen in February, this one in Jamaica, was the Antillean palm swift and one of these had been reported in South Florida. It is hard to chase swifts, they don’t usually stick but this bird had arrived in the summer and been seen for a couple of weeks and then disappeared but in October, it had returned to Marathon about six miles away from its original location.  It was a code 5, and prior to this bird, only a pair that had shown up after a hurricane in the early Seventies had ever been reported.  It was a great bird but one I never planned on seeing but as we got closer to Florida I began to think…maybe?            We came to Florida and immediately I chased a Florida Scrub-jay for my year list, it turned out Don and Nancy Harrington, of our Antarctica and Europe trips were camped a half mile away from us and he needed it as a life bird.  I had a guaranteed go to spot.  finding it took a few minutes.             I talked to Don after we chased the scrub-jay and he was game for a real chase, and since I had nothing to do on Monday the day before we had to depart Florida albiet temporary, we took off on Sunday.  The plan was simple.  Stay in Florida City and meet Larry Manfredi the next morning, a local expert and a fun guy to bird with.  I could have probably found the bird easily myself, but I had been lazy to do any homework and I hadn’t seen Larry since 2016 and well, it is good to catch up with people.  Life is too short and one can lose track of people.            We arrived at the golf course in Marathon about 9:30 on Veterans Day.  Standing out in the ruins of the front nine was a familiar face, Chris Feeney, a man who had spent a month getting great birds up in Alaska and seemed to have been everywhere in the last year, knocking his list up to over twenty more than me.  He was sitting on ABA 823 with two in the bank.  That was not including Hawaii.  Chris had never even birded the 50th state.  Larry called him and he hadn’t seen the bird yet that day.  He had bagged it the day before.            So, we started looking.  It was basically finding a place with a good view and look for a quick bird that was not a swallow.  I saw my lifer mangrove skipper first. Mangrove skipper
We switched locations and then there it was, lifer #802.  We saw the Cuban bird at distance for brief times and then met up with Chris Feeney and took a break for lunch.  It was after a really nice lunch.  Later, I had decided that I would rather hunt for butterflies when the swift made some passes that were almost too close.    Antillean Palm Swift
It was a great bird, and this was much closer than I’d seen the bird in Jamaica, but I was 300 miles from my RV in Lutz and we had a 2000 mile trip to leave on in the morning.  It was also worth the trip to see some of the aftermath of Hurricane Irma.  This golf course had been severely hurt by the winds and the surge.  Palm trees were still topped and they had only opened half of the course.  The camping areas of nearby Long Key State Park had been destroyed and it looked nothing like the last time I had been there chasing a grassquit and a dove back in 2016.  It brought me back to St Martin and where I had started this writing project I was currently on.We got to Lutz at 8 PM and after a night of sleep, I awoke, packed the car with a dog, closed the RV, rounded up two cats, and a wife, and we headed out.  Then thirty minutes later after we had realized we had forgotten cat food and circled back, we left again.  It was a beautiful 78 degrees, later ten miles north of the Georgia border, it was 58, by Atlanta it was 42, and in Nashville, it was now 26 degrees.  10 hours and a loss of 56 degrees.  They even had snow on the ground.  I began to wonder why we were leaving the south.  The next morning, the hills of Tennessee gave way to the fields of Kentucky, but it was still a cold ride home, and there was even freezing rain by the time we got to Iowa.  I had only packed my sandals and well, my feet would have to toughen up before I could get home and find some shoes.  We stayed about a mile where my wife and I had lived in Evansdale, Iowa near Waterloo.  That was 22 years ago.  It had been an eventful two decades of life.  Lauren, out daughter, wasn’t even a thought when we lived in Iowa.  We were too busy with the twins.  I have always liked Iowa and driving US 20 that next morning was quite enjoyable.  I dropped Silja off in Sioux Falls to go to a concert with her book club.I got home at four, let the pets out of the car, and then made a 45 miles sprint to our cabin to turn on the heat and hope the place hadn’t frozen up.  It had already been below zero and Enemy Swim Lake was frozen over.  I arrived at dusk and the temp inside was just 39 degrees, but luckily nothing had frozen inside as the warmer ground under the house had kept it above freezing.  The furnace fired up without problems. 
I came back home for the first time in 7000 miles and two months.  I was tired.  The TV and the internet were down.  I had no food in the house and all it seemed I had was a bottle of Ardbeg scotch.  I made do.  I drank a toast to a long journey and by 9 PM, I was asleep, exhausted.  It had been a long trek—a very long trek, but like the others this year, it was now over and soon another new one would begin. 
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AFTER WE ARRIVED home for the first time in two months, we turned around after less than twenty four hours and drove the northwestern Wisconsin for my sister’s and my father’s birthday party.  As has been the trend lately, a family gathering includes cleaning out my beloved grandmother’s house.   Being a creature of the depression, she saved everything and also collected fine antiques.  One never knows what one might find or how it would move you.            On a previous trip we found left over alcohol from the Seventies.  Cheap Phillips vodka from 1972 still tasted like old cheap vodka in 2019.  A case of Bruenig’s Beer from Rice Lake, Wisconsin (it closed in 1974) made us all laugh as I threw it out in the dumpster.  All of this was found hidden in grandma’s favorite hiding place for important artifacts.  Under thirty years of taxes, her prized pickles, was a box of deeds and all of this old booze.  I was afraid to even taste the sloe gin.  Does anyone even drink that these days?            My family was always very well read for periodicals and newspapers.  For thirty years, two daily papers and at least six weekly newspapers were received at my grandparents house.  I believe every gardening magazine ever created was delivered monthly in care of my grandmother Lucille.  My grandfather read Fur, Fish, and Game religiously every month which was also the first magazine that ever published something I had written, a letter to the editor on sucker fishing.  If I desired a subscription to about any magazine, I would never have the request rejected.  I got everything from Outdoor Life to Time, the Sporting News to Sports Illustrated.  My friends in school also looked forward to me receiving my copy of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue which was banned at my high school for being too provocative.  I think I even sold one year’s copy to a fellow lusty teenager.  The results of all of this current events reading was my near mastery of current event competitions in school. The other result were stacks of old magazines and newspapers with stories that interested my grandmother stashed around.  Throwing away a magazine was something my grandmother didn’t like to do, especially a gardening magazine.We were throwing out a pile of old Life and Look magazines from the Sixties when I came across a classic that got me to thinking a little.   Dated June 1962 was this issue with Marilyn Monroe on the cover.  I’m not sure, but this is probably her last cover ever while she was alive, as just a few weeks later, she would die from too many pills.  This story involves some outtakes from the movie Some like it hot.    A skinny-dip you’ll never see on the screen celebrates her nudity.  The article is suggestive as hell, but remember, Life was a family magazine and the pictures are pulled so that they don’t really show anything.  Probably like my old SI Swimsuit issue, I bet I could have sold this issue two decades later for a tidy sum, that is if I had found it.  I felt a little like I had missed an opportunity at commerce.               One thing that is proven by this magazine that even in 1962, nude recreation and nude activities fascinate readers.  Maybe it is just the thought of seeing a cheeky pose of Hollywood’s biggest starlet of the time, but in reality, it shouldn’t matter.  Marilyn Monroe was not the first person to swim naked, in fact, many years before this, swimming naked was the rule and not the exception.  Theodore Roosevelt would take a walk from the White House and jump in the Potomac for a dip.  I guess it was just that no one talked about it and it was especially true that no one brought with a camera.   Who would have been interested in a naked picture of our portly President?  Even today, typically, no one brings a camera or at least they shouldn’t.              My son wanted this magazine.  His interest was not for the movie icon or her shapely buttocks.  He is a Millennial.  “Marilyn who?”  He asked me.  Being the graduate student he was attracted by the article, Cancer may be infectious.  I don’t think that article is why this magazine is for sale on Ebay for prices that are above $50.00.
Olaf

Viva Villa!

It is said that Francisco "Pancho" Villa had between 23 and 75 wives.  Some sources say he had at least 75 but only 23 have been documented with names and dates these days, but he was known for having children with 16 women.  He did not believe in divorce or annulment so upon his death in 1923, he could have had the most wives by any non-Mormon in North America since the Spanish arrived.  He was successful in convincing the priests and judges to burn many of the records, so proof wasn't always an easy thing and girls literally begged him in some towns to impregnate them.  It must have seemed odd after his death that three women showed up to act as the grieving widows. 
       So why am I suddenly interested in Pancho Villa?
       On March 9, 1916, the last time a foreign army invaded the United States, it happened in...Columbus, New Mexico, a question most will not answer correctly and today, we were there.  The Battle of Columbus led to much...probably none of it good.
12 Army and 8 civilians were killed on the US side, with over 100 Mexicans killed
Odd machines of war were in use
Much of the town was destroyed but the railroad and the depot were intact, within a month Columbus would be the center of 250,000 troops amassed on the border
A little history:
Within a day, a full scale military incursion was authorized by President Wilson and Columbus was made into a huge staging area for an entire division of the Army, then more.  Exactly a week later, General Pershing sent advance companies into Mexico in the plan of eliminating Villa at best or dispersing his military forces at worst.  It ended 11 months later.   During the course of the action, The US Forces killed many key Villa allies, including his chief lieutenant being one of three men shot personally by Lt George Patton.  The Villanistas counter-attacked Glenn Springs and Boquillas, Texas both now in Big Bend National park (Boquillas is Rio Grande Village and Glenn Springs is a Ghost Town on the west side where there is only a small sign now, and where I got my lesser nighthawk in my big year in 2016).  There a small US detachment was destroyed.  A month later four, US Troops were killed at San Ygnatio, another birding location. 

During the main incursion, the US Army encountered Mexican Regular Army and almost brought the two countries into a full scale war, but despite all of this...Pancho Villa escaped and the US needed to withdraw the troops so we could enter World War I as almost all of our regular troops were in Mexico.  The US and not the Mexican Army would put an end to the Villinistas actions on the border as a 1919 Raid on Juarez across from El Paso would cause over a dozen US casualties due to stray bullets that the commander of the US forces immediately retaliated by sending in 1200 troops into Mexico and dispersed Villa's Division of the North so thoroughly that he sued for peace and retired.  Many marriages and just three years later, he was assassinated.  He was 45.

To be descriptive, the entire deal was IMHO one large waste of money, lives, and time. 

We had just left from another famous place, the Chihuahua Mountains where Geronimo periodically hid between various previous incursions by the US Calvary into Mexico chasing him and his band.  This was 30 years earlier.  Silja and I hiked many of the trails and found hidden springs and saw the wildlife of the beautiful area.

Cave Creek from above
Silja at Chihuahua National Monument
We hiked the canyon trails to find birds and butterflies and went up in the pines to get the chickadee,  yes that chickadee and I saw Mexican chickadees three times but they would not come out of the trees to be photographed.  I found a couple of birders down on the bottom looking hopefully for a chickadee or two6 and thinking the titmice they had heard briefly were chickadees and I had to tell them, "you aere way too low" and gave them directions, but later on there was no evidence they had gone up the mountain, I think the road to Onion Saddle scared them, heck, it scares me, but if you want that bird, there is no short cut.   I did photograph yellow-eyed juncos.  I always like these guys, they look sinister.
Then I saw the four Arizonas...  Arizona woodpecker
Arizona Giant-skipper
Arizona metalmark
Arizona Sister
I love these mountains and the twilight of our last day sort of described a lot for this country  Extreme Southern New Mexico and SE AZ is changing, and I'm not sure if it is a good thing.

A beautiful sunset before a truly black night.  Villa et al tried to destroy much of this area and leave people in fear, after Geronimo previously did and we ended up carting away the natives to captivity in Oklahoma.  Now the jobs have pretty much all dried up, much like the towns of Rodeo, Antelope Wells, Animas, and especially Hachita.  The railroad pulled out in 1961 as did much of the mining and even the Sky Gypsy scheme of John McAfee  a decade ago ended up pretty much yielding nothing short of a really strange story and some serious head scratching (by me).  The Sky Gypsy story is too bizarre to repeat here so look it up. 

Now we got the new perceived border issues, and it is true that a focus place of illegal crossing was between Hachita and both sides of Columbus (I have first hand visualization of that years ago).  I have read some recent musings out of the Big East Coast media saying that nothing has been built of Trump's wall and many people are all smiles and patting themselves on the back thinking what they read is true.  Sorry folks, there IS A WALL being built....

The wall being built hard and fast westward, east of Columbus, NM
 I can give you directions and you can probably drive right up to it.  I suspect that lazy reporters aren't driving out east of Columbus to see what is going on because NO ONE is ever out here driving on Hwy 9.  It is easier to sit in New York and act smart.  There are no direct flights to El Paso from DC or NYC. 

The last time I drove this way, I met 67 border patrol cars and two sheriff's deputies, but no private vehicles....this year, that was down to 37 and 1 cop.  Last time I was stopped five times while birding by Border Patrol but this time in the RV, nothing, although I wasn't stopping and wasn't out taking pictures, every five miles.  There were cement trucks about every three miles, driving 100 miles from a cement plant near El Paso, which is owned by Grupo Cementos de Chihuahua, a Mexican company....sigh.  How ironic is that? 

BTW, I did meet only three civilian cars east of Hachita in 140 miles, besides construction crews.
The last time I drove here I spotted 17 illegals sneaking across the road, this time nadda one.
I hear that illegal traffic has moved to west of Douglas, AZ.

Where are these large helicopters were going or coming from made me wonder.   I hope they weren't on border patrol, as they went north in Columbus they are heading away.
I don't care if you are for or against the wall, since it is being built, and what I think or you  think doesn't matter and it is probably needed here but not in the LRGV.  No one wants to solve the real problem in reality.  What is the next phase, build gun turrets on the wall?  It seems so East Germany in the Sixties but I guess that was to keep people in, not out.  There IS a problem and by and large we have all caused it.   We want cheap goods, cheap labor, really cheap food, we don't want to do the dirty jobs in America, and we turn a blind eye to the elites and large corporations that hire them on the QT.  How many domestics are truly legal?   

We drove through El Paso, I almost went into bronchospasm.  We also ignore Juarez (a city of 1.4 million).  Here we are, having a fit (rightfully so, to a degree) about global warming and all these fires in California, when one of the largest (yes) cities in America, El Paso has a terrible smog problem that you never hear about.  You rarely ever hear about El Paso.  It is a metro area larger than Detroit, Minneapolis, or well almost anywhere.  It is like it just doesn't exist.  Because of the lax rules on emissions right next door in Juarez, yet all of that 'stuff' they produce comes to us, smog included.   Ban plastic...it is a better use of our time

Oh well, can't fix it anyhow and we always tend to forget history.  We are like fish biting at the shiny bait... 
So what did I learn...
1) Villa is still thought of fondly as a man for the the little person, yet in Villa's case, besides all of his brides, it is documented that he raped many ...many women hundreds to thousands, even shooting many that tried to shoot him after the fact.  So Villa was a bad man, a very bad man.
2) The Chihuahuas Mtns and valleys are gorgeous
3) Mexican chickadees can be really hard to photograph
4) They are really building the wall, at least near Columbus NM, they are

Drive the desert of southern New Mexico...

Olaf