Valediction for juncos and fall foliage

David Speiser, who took the extraordinary photo below, writes:
Hi Marie,

Juncos are still around, especially by Sparrow Rock, and there is still some nice foliage clinging to the trees. But they both might be gone shortly.

David
http://www.lilibirds.com

Still in the Ramble--the Big One

Dr. Claude Bloch writes: The Great-horned Owl was seen this am in the Ramble again. Here are two magnificent pictures taken yesterday by David Speiser
Great Horned Owl - 11/18/09

Wood Duck 11/18/09
Photos by David Speiser
For other photos, check out http://www.lilibirds.com


PS The tree the owl [above] is roosting in is a Sweetgum. That's the one with the hanging spiky seed balls. Each one resembles the medieval weapon called a mace.

Waxwings, waxwings, waxwings and a hawk

Though the Great Horned Owl remained in the park yesterday, he [or she] was hard to photograph. The photographers returned to their favorite subject: Cedar Waxwings.
Photo by David Speiser who wrote:

Marie,
I finally tracked down the Cedar Waxwings today. They were just settling in for a meal when an immature Red-tailed Hawk flushed the flock. The Waxwings did not return.
Regards,
David

Immature Red-tailed Hawk 11/17/09
Photo by David Speiser
www.lilibirds.com


Above, the same photo I posted on 11/9, taken by Beth Bergman.
A few days later a frequent Central Park birdwatcher now living in Maine wrote me:

Hi Marie,

The photo of the cedar waxwing in head- on position shows the bird with a berry that looks way too big for it to swallow. It always amazes me that down goes the berry, no problem at all. Volunteering at Avian Haven, a wild bird rehabilitation center in Maine, has given me many opportunities to feed cedar waxwing nestlings so I know they manage much larger pieces of fruit or berries than I often feel comfortable feeding them! What is interesting to watch is when injured adult birds are put in the enclosures with the babies, they readily will take the berries from the tweezers in rapid succession and then regurgitate them one at a time to feed the young ones themselves. The berries reappear in their beaks just like magic! Fledglings often line up along a perch to beg and will pass a berry from bird to bird before one swallows it. Watching this food-sharing kind of behavior makes it one of my favorite species of bird to tweezer-feed!

Hope all is well with you and everyone who keeps track of all the CP bird happenings!

Amy in Rockport Maine

PS from Marie:
Maybe so much berry-gobbling requires frequent whistle-wetting by the waxwings.

Murray Head took the picture below yesterday and provided the caption:


Cedar Waxwings wetting their beaks in a puddle south of The Great Lawn.

On Great Horned Owls

Photo at left by Lloyd Spitalnik
Great Horned Owl - 1/10/06

The report on eBirds today was what everyone hoped to hear:

Great Horned Owl spotted by Susan Loesser in Ramble near Azalea Bridge, 1:15 pm.

The odds are increasing that this owl may be in the park for a long, or at least longish visit.

In Central Park in the Dark I wrote about the last time a Great Horned Owl settled into Central Park for a lengthy stay. That was in 2006 and the owl stayed for 40 days.

Below, an excerpt from the chapter entitled Little Red and the Big Bad Owl, with the first of several notes from our favorite Red-tailed Hawk expert, John Blakeman.

from Central Park in the Dark, pp 215-217.

{Previously, Chris Wood, a brand new birdwatcher, discovers a Great Horned Owl in a willow near Willow Rock during the 2006 Christmas Bird Count)

In the history of Central Park birdwatching, no great horned owl had ever visited the park for more than a couple of days. But Chris’s owl didn’t leave after the first day, or the next or the next. Soon crowds gathered every night to see that rare event, a great horned owl fly-out. As the days turned into weeks, some of us began to worry: What if the bird had moved in to stay, the way Pale Male had done some fifteen years earlier? Would that make trouble for our resident red-tailed hawk pair?

The hawk expert John Blakeman seemed to know as much about nocturnal raptors as he did about redtails and other daytime hawks. In answer to our questions, he wrote:

Red-tails and great horneds in the East, South, and Midwest have a remarkable relationship, an ecological détente, as it were. Here’s how it usually works:

:

The crucial fact is that great horned owls don’t build nests.They simply expropriate (read that as steal) existing ones. No one—even if they could see at night—will ever observe an owl bringing twigs to a nest site. Owls don’t do that. The great horneds just perch themselves on an existing red-tail’s nest in December or January and claim it. GHOs [a common abbreviation among birders] are larger and more muscular than red-tails, and at night redtails can see about as well as we can. Red-tails will intelligently abandon a nest claimed by a great horned owl. The hawks will frequently go just a short distance and build a new nest, sometimes even in the same woodlot, perhaps only a few hundred yards from the old nest.

At night a great horned owl could easily drop down upon an incubating red-tail and have her for a midnight snack. Conversely, in broad daylight, when a female owl is hunkered down over her owlets, a red-tail could do a classic red-tail stoop, dive, and take the head off the owl before it knew what hit her.

But these things seldom happen. There seems to be an understanding between the species that the owls will do their things at night, and the hawks theirs in daylight. By this arrangement, the owls find beautifully formed, existing nests to claim each December (long before the redtails resume nesting activities). As for the red-tails, they don’t get killed by the larger, more aggressive owls This is a raptorial version of MAD, mutually assured destruction, the tenuous but effective arrangement between American and Soviet thermonuclear powers that used to be talked about during the Cold War.

So far there have been no MAD things in Central Park. So far there has been only one ecological superpower, the red-tailed hawks. But might that change? I think it could. Great horned owls hunt for and kill the same prey as red-tails, rodents. They use exactly the same habitat, only at night instead of in the hawks’ day-hunting periods. And clearly there is an abundance of available food in Central Park. Because they are nocturnal hunters, great horneds aren’t going to take many pigeons. But at night there will be a surfeit of rats that owls could thrive upon, the same population of rats the red-tails catch by day.

Blakeman’s letter allayed our anxieties about the red-tailed hawks. Obviously Central Park has more than enough rats to go around, enough for Pale Male’s family and for a great horned owl family. But as we studied various accounts of GHOs and their behavior, we began to understand what Blakeman meant when he called it a new superpower. This was one big savage hunter! Maybe the powerful red-tailed hawk had worked out a cordial détente with the GHO over the centuries. But what about smaller creatures? What about the screech owls we had come to be so fond of? According to A. C. Bent’s Life History of North American Birds, the great horned owl “is not particular as to what it kills for food and will take what is most available and most easily caught.” It does on occasion eat birds, even other owls. Bent’s long paragraph about the avian preferences of Bubo virginianus itemizes the various owl species on the big owl’s carte du jour—barred owls, saw-whet owls, long-eared owls, and short-eared owls. But the eastern screech owl leads the list. It is the great horned’s favorite dinner-owl.

Who's back?

Ardith Bondi wrote early this morning:
Hi Marie-

I thought you might like a photo of this imposing fellow who was roosting high up in the Ramble yesterday.

Ardith


Great Horned Owl- 11/15/09
Photo by Ardith Bondi

PS It was in the wooded area between the Summerhouse and the Oven, according to Bruce Yolton. Could still be there today...