Bird of the Week, 15

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azGEYpChlVk


So, here we are, the final Bird of the Week in the Great Bird Race for 2014. Next week you will be taking a break and enjoying the company of family and celebrating the birth of our Lord, the creator of all the birds. It is through His love for us that He has given us all the beautiful creatures to enjoy and that is one of the main reasons I like to watch birds because it always reminds me of Him.


The Heron family consist of what we call waders and is actually divided into three subgroups, Herons, Egrets, and Bitterns. I tried to find out what the difference is between Herons and Egrets and no one could actually separate them definitively so it's probably less confusing to just group them like the bird books do in the group of all the waders.


In North America, there are actually seven different Herons or Egrets that can appear in a white phase. Four of them are always white and the other three have a white phase like a previous bird of the week, the Reddish Egret.  (hint) This Bird of the Week has one distinctive feature that does not occur on any of the others.   Separating the Herons and Egrets  involves comparing bill shape and color and leg color, and once you check these features, it is not difficult to determine which of the waders you are looking at.


In this video you will see one of the feeding strategies that the waders use, which is to scurry around and scare up fish so they can see them and hopefully spear one. I was hoping to get a successful hunt on video but that didn't happen while I was filming.  This should not be a difficult ID


This week, we did another bird chase to hopefully find another rare bird for the list. Snowy Owls breed in Northern Canada and Alaska and usually do not come south of the boarder into the lower forty-eight states very often. The boarding states usually get a few birds but when food sources are scarce, the owls will come farther south and some years there is an invasion of sorts where lots of them show up. Last year was the biggest invasion of Snowy Owls on record and this seems to be continuing somewhat, there have already been three separate Owls discovered in Oregon this winter. One showed up in Dallas, Oregon week ago Saturday so Monday the 8th, we went over and were lucky enough to find it. This might be the only one I will see during the big year.

Snowy Owl in Dallas, Oregon, Dec 8, 2014

With the start of the new year, Mrs Sutherland and I will be hitting the road again. Our plans are to head south to Texas where we are picking up a small camper trailer that we ordered and rather than spend the money to have it delivered we are using the money for a road trip and hope to spend six to eight weeks in mostly warm sunshine in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. These four states have most of the North American bird species so this should go a long way to reaching my goal of finding a minimum of 500 bird species by August 31, 2015. Looking forward to some really cool birds of the week and maybe a surprise foreign bird of the week as well.

Watch for my final post of the year toward the end of this week and I will discuss Christmas Bird Counts and post the latest additions to the list.  


Good Luck, happy New Year and happy birding.