birding – Eyes on the Wild

The iNaturalist app (iNat) has transformed how I and many others interact with nature. BiN (Before iNat) I would see something, and spend hours with one of a shelf-full of books trying to work out what I had seen. Now, I photograph it, enter a location, and show iNat the picture. And it knows! Or at least it gives me a shortlist of possibilities. It also shows me a map of where else it has been seen. Occasionally, mainly for small insects, it turns out it has hardly ever been seen in Maine, and I think, proudly, that I have documented a rarity. But have I??

Numbers can be low for many reasons other than real rarity; here are some of those reasons:

a thinly populated area, with few observers, true of my corner of Maine

it is only just starting to colonize an area, for a variety of reasons, so it may be locally rare but globally common

it lives in inaccessible environments such as marshes, or high in trees
it is drab and commonplace, so no-one thinks to submit an observation (house spider, ant)

it is hard to see and photograph, because it is very tiny, or well-camouflaged, or never stops moving

its numbers are indeed dropping, for environmental reasons such as climate change or habitat loss

I’ll show you a “rarity” or two, but hang onto that scepticism. One encouraging (but not at all conclusive) indication of rarity is that most of them don’t even have a common name! They have all been recorded 5 or fewer times in Maine. I’ve ranked them by the total number of observations, starting with the ones MOST often recorded, and ending with what might be the rarest:

Harmostes fraterculus has 1161 total observations, 5 in Maine. It is on a Common Boneset flower.

This is compared to 5800 for the closely related Harmostes reflexulus, including dozens in Maine:

Fourteen-spotted Leaf Beetle, Cryptocephalus guttulatus, has 667 total, only 1 other in Maine. This seems to be the extreme northern edge of its range. A result of climate change?

Stictopleurus punctiventris has 198 total observations, mainly in Canada. Only 5 others in Maine, 4 of them this year.

Pissonotus basalis has a mere 29 total observations, from Tennessee to Nova Scotia. None in Maine, except for me. This seems to be the best candidate for a real rarity, but it is very, very tiny, 3mm or o.1″and it also moved fast, so who knows.

To put all this in context, Maine has 370,421 observations of 6114 species of insects, and the most common observation, the Monarch Butterfly, has 4,523 observations. I suspect it would have far more but everyone knows what they are looking at, so they do not think to ask iNaturalist.

Do try it, it is a wonderful app, and you are contributing to citizen science when you upload an observation.

As summer reaches its peak, the nesting season is more or less over, but like teenagers the baby birds are not yet independent. They have mostly left their nests, and sit on branches cheeping urgently for food deliveries. Soon they will have to fend for themselves, and then migrate. Mortality is high in this interlude betwixt the parental home and true adulthood.

These are some I have seen in the last few weeks. In my big hickory tree, two Hairy Woodpecker chicks hopped around:

The House Wren fledglings are still being fed, three days after leaving the nest, and several trees away:

A White-breasted Nuthatch seemed to have only a single chick:

A chickadee had ended up on the ground, but it clambered back up to a low branch shortly after I took the photo.

Black-capped Chickadee fledgling on ground by beaver pond.

The next shot is a food delivery by a Common Yellowthroat mother, right:

Common Yellowthroat fledgling, left, and mother, right

She then pokes it down the fledgling’s throat:

A hummingbird posing on my garden trellis:

The scaly head feathers are distinctive for juveniles. At this age, you can’t reliably tell if it is male or female; the male’s ruby throat only develops later. However, male fledglings usually have streaks on the throat. so the pure white throat of this bird suggests it is female…

On the water, the ducklings are becoming more independent too. This Wood Duck duckling was nowhere near any adults, with just one sibling.