Black-feathered harbingers of doom all look the same.  If you can tell crows from ravens at a distance, you’re sharper than I’ll ever be.  The only ways I can tell are by habits and vocalizations, and mostly the latter.

The first place I strongly suspect that I saw a raven, not a crow, was in Seattle, at a flophouse some penny-ante drug lord had briefly tricked my family into renting, surrounded by seven foot tall, no doubt tick infested grass.  Me and my siblings were feral monkeys entertained by nonsense, pushing our feet at each other’s faces and saying “stinkyfoot, stinkyfoot,” out on the porch.  Suddenly a sing-song voice from the top of a very tall utility pole sang it back to us.  Quoth the raven, “stinkyfoot stinkyfoot heeheeheehee.”  It must have said it at least twice, because I recall looking straight at the bird – it must have gotten our attention.

It’s possible that was a crow.  They can mimic; they’re much more common in the city.  But they are usually not that good at mimicry.

Not that ravens are spot on either.  I might have saved ravenposting for another day, but for the first time I’ve been able to definitively ID one in Federal Way, in the parking lot of the WinCo, just last Friday.  It was the voice.  Ravens have a big, echoing, throaty voice.  What was the call?  I don’t know if it was part of the usual raven repertoire, but to me it sounded very much like the world’s worst impression of a crow.

I still wasn’t 100% sure it wasn’t the world’s most raveny sounding crow, until I saw it flying away – mobbed by crows!  There were even more chasing this raven than I’d usually see chasing birds of prey, and it was only a little bit larger than they were.  I may not be able to tell ravens from crows, but the birds themselves have no trouble with that at all.

(off topic, the same day I may have glimpsed a slightly leucistic crow, grey instead of black, but it was hard to be 100% sure in driveby.)

I only saw definitely ID’d ravens as an adult for the first time this last October, on my honeymoon to the Olympic Peninsula, which is why their voices were still fresh in my mind.  They have a pretty crowish lifestyle to go with their crowish looks.  They have smaller groups, are more likely to fly solo, are larger (barely), and have a much wider variety of vocalizations.

Crows elsewhere in the world might be much smaller than ravens in those places, more easy to tell apart.  I speak from Pacific Northwest USA experience.  Both species have a lot of individual variation, and I have no doubt that here the very largest crow may be larger than the very smallest raven.  But when you see the mobbing, it’s clear enough who’s who.  It’s also an opportunity to see how ravens are just that little bit better at soaring flight, with fewer wing strokes.

They avoid cities and suburbs where crows dominate, because crows treat them very badly.  I wonder that ravens might prefer higher altitudes, because I saw them the most as I was close to mountains, but probably not.  I know they can be found in a lot of different biomes, from US Southwestern desert to the northern island of Hokkaido, Japan.  Ravens get around.  Like ospreys, barn owls, barn swallows, and peregrine falcons, this is a “cosmopolitan” bird, found across much of the world.

Back when Karl of Linne was still giving pretentious Latin names to everybody, they’d be considered the same species over the whole range.  But these days, genetic work is helping tease out subspecies and “cryptic” species, nested within larger populations, and I don’t know where ravens stand in that regard at the moment.  Humans only spread around the world about 1200 generations ago?  Something like that.  In a similar space of time, ravens have had 10,000 generations, so likely to have speciated more than we have, one would imagine.

On the honeymoon we stayed at a cabin-esque thing by a lake in the woods.  In the evening, the ravens would make a call like the world’s biggest bullfrog.  Not super far off from the call of a great blue heron, as I think about it.  But at least one time we witnessed the bird making the noise, so I’m pretty sure on that one.  Their day time call is a little less booming but still froggy, and they do all sorts of weird variants and mimicry as well.  I’m glad they’re still able to make some kind of room for themselves in a crow’s world.  Nice to see somebody other than the usual corvids on occasion.

What kinda raven stories do you have?

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Shorebirds, or charadriiformes, are birds that like shores.  The end.  Wait, no, they may have evolved in and prefer shores, but some get farther afield.  Seagulls are the most familiar, but little brown sandpipery things are also familiar to most of us.  Hard to identify and incredibly diverse at that.  Seagulls stray pretty far from shore, crisscrossing the continent to eat garbage.  Also found inland are killdeers.

Killdeers are more of those little brown sandpipery things.  They have bold black and white horizontal striping on their head and neck, but it doesn’t look at all bold from fifteen feet away.  Instead it serves to break up their shape, make them very hard to see.  Effective camouflage, which is why you see it on everything from badgers to nuthatches.  They have a big blood red eye, but still, nice looking little birds.

They sing “killdeer, killdeer, killdeer,” and I feel like I’ve only ever heard them do that song when in flight?  They live in scrubby fields, nesting in tall grass.  Unfortunately, fields get mowed, so they probably face a lot of tragedies.  Sometimes they’ll live in a parking lot, where grass grows in the cracks at the edges, and again, if a new tenant decides to make something proper of the location, bye-bye killdeers.

I used to see them in the abandoned lot across the street from the Federal Way Transit Center, but that field was converted into a well manicured park, and I haven’t seen them there since.  I saw one on a little trail by the WinCo in Federal Way, and I’ve seen them near a shore up by the Canadian border, on a bird watching trip.  I’ve heard them before dawn or after dusk near my old workplace in Auburn and even in my apartment complex in Federal Way.  Would not be surprised to hear them by my condo, tho I haven’t yet.

For all that, they’re still not a very common sighting for me – now.  I used to see huge flocks of them, a long time ago, when I had no idea what they were.  Auburn is a town cut in half by a big wide train yard.  Just a few over- and under- passes get you past those tracks.  They’re hopping these days, but when I was young, back in the 1990s, they were less busy, less well maintained.  The yard had little activity and little security.  When walking home from a friend’s house at three in the morning, or from watching a movie at the mall, I would sometimes walk along A Street by that train yard, or walk across it.  And there were so many killdeers there.

I can ID them years after the fact because I remembered their call.  They’d run around on the ground or take flight in fear of me, or stray breezes, or just for fun.  I didn’t understand what they were doing; still don’t.  Before I saw them running, I’d even thought are those bats?  Is the killdeer call echolocation?  I could only see them in the distance, drab and flappy.  I didn’t know much of anything back then.

Anyway, next time you’re in an abandoned parking lot or crappy gravel pit or funky field, anywhere USA, if you see a lil brown shorebird flap and killdeer away, pay your respects.

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In honor of folksy affable war criminals, welcome to a post on known unknowns.  Not the most known unknown, as Triple Six Mafia once called themselves.  The birds I’ve seen but haven’t ID’d.  Not the ones I don’t care about, like figuring out which flavor of samey seagull I just saw, but ones that have gotten my goat.  My goat can get got.

Of course, there are the white birds in tight formation streaking along 320th in Federal Way WA just east of I-5, that I’ve mentioned in posts and comments.  Still no idea who they are, tho leaning toward a fairly small gull species.  But I won’t bore you with that one today.  Instead…

That Thrush Tho.  Swainson’s?  Hermit?  One time at West Hylebos Wetlands Park in Federal Way the trees were filled with these drab nothing-ass thrushes.  I remember them being more grey, like hermit thrushes, but swainson’s are much more commonly seen, and it’s less cringe to assume you saw the more common of the possible IDs.  Strangely, there were dozens on one trip, and zero any other time I’ve been.  Passing through, maybe.

The Swarm.  Where I used to work in Auburn, one random day the sky over a particular field was full of birds, behaving very weirdly.  I’ve never seen anything exactly like it before or since, and I couldn’t ID them.  I assume they were some form of North American blackbird, probably brewer’s, which I’ve seen at a walmart parking lot not far from there.  But they were all centered over this one field about five hundred feet per side, ignoring all the adjacent fields and parking lots they could have used, flying forty to seventy feet up, just zooming around each other yelling, nonstop.  Mating season?  Hellifino.

The Cormorants.  When I lived in Seattle near the Ballard Bridge, I’d take the bus up and down Nickerson Street, where in the winter I could see dozens of black cormorants perched in a bare tree next to the water.  They looked like vultures; real cool.  But were they brandt’s or pelagic?  Binches are basically identical except some tiny details in the eyes or whatever.

Again, if you’re a Washington bird person familiar with those neighborhoods who has experience with the same beasts to narrow it down for me, holler.  Otherwise, the sheistiness continues.

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In the Pacific Northwest of the USA, it’s mostly true that most of our birds are drab as hell.  You want a red-ass red bird, you gotta head east of the mountains.  The Puget Sound isn’t where color goes to die, but it’s close.  It’s where color goes to take a restless nap under fungus-hued clouds.  The famous red on a migratory thrush‘s breast is fine.  It can look good under the right light.  Nothing on a cardinal tho.

The american robin’s cousin the varied thrush is easily the fanciest thrush in Washington, with more than a red breast.  It’s streaked with black and orange, like a local oriole wannabe (less bright than that bird of course; gotta stay grunge).  I’ve seen them on my porch, seen ’em in a tree, back at the old apartment complex.  Doubt I’ll see them at my new home.  In all, fewer than five sightings.  When I look them up on the web, it is said they are “common.”  Not in my experience.

I know nothing about them except that they are thrushes, they look cool, and I felt lucky to see them.  I often struggle to remember their name, wanting to call them “painted thrushes” for some reason.  What do you know about varied thrushes?

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You know how they have birding apps where you can record bird calls, and have them identified?  Great.  And how people would play recordings of calls off their phones to attract birds and get a better look at them?  Not cool.  Scientists have said “stop doin’ that.”  I knew of these things.  But still…

One day I got “Merlin” from Cornell Labs on my phone and used it to ID all the birds I couldn’t see at West Hylebos Wetlands Park.  Some of those birds I have, to this day, never seen – only heard.  There were at least three species of warbler alone that showed in the recordings, plus all sorts of other beasties.

Warblers are tiny passerine / perching birds, which mostly come in combos of yellow black and white, with some green made by combining black and yellow, grey from combining black and white.  The yellowest warbler is just straight yellow, and wilson’s adds to this a jaunty little black cap.  The black cap of a black-capped chickadee doesn’t look very cap-like because it attaches to and mirrors the black on their chins.  The black cap on wilson’s warbler looks very cap-like, or maybe like a little hairdo, because the rest of the bird’s head is very bright yellow.

Warblers have a more “hunched” look than chickadees, almost like they’re shading toward the body language of trunk-climbing birds – creepers and nuthatches – but they’re not all the way there yet.  They’re shy enough I’ve almost never seen them, hiding in summer foliage of bushes and short trees.

On the occasion of first getting Merlin and seeing it recognize all the calls, I was quite excited.  Also frustrated that I couldn’t see any of the birds, but pleased to know they were out there.  When it IDs a bird, you can click a little information profile on them.  That profile includes a few pictures, and also some sample calls you can play back.  I didn’t even think about it before pressing play, and a wilson’s warbler appeared in the trees nearby.

The sun was shining in the fresh green leaves, making them appear yellow.  The bird was just about the same size as the leaves, and you wouldn’t think bright yellow good camouflage, but it was.  Only the movement and song caught my eye.  Was it looking for a lover or flexing on a rival?  I don’t know, but I do know I was wasting its precious calories.  But damn, that’s a cute little bird.

Anyway, I couldn’t resist.  I tried to summon some other species by playing their songs, to no avail.  I’m naughty, but at least I had the decency to not play the wilson’s song again.  Give ’em a break.  And since that day, I have not done that again.

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My brother was living in Kansas with wife and kid.  He helped with air fare so I could visit.  His favorite thing  is going to zoos, so we went on big long car rides to visit Wichita and Kansas zoos.  During one of these rides, in the great distance, flying over those “amber waves of grain,” I saw a lone, massive, white bird.  Based on an impression of its form and flight, I decided it was a white pelican – the only one I’ve ever seen, assuming the ID was even right.

I’ve only ever seen the smaller brown pelican on a trip to Ocean Shores, a tourist spot in my state.  They looked like pterosaurs in flight, and I saw a few very long flight feathers shed on the beach.  Very cool.  But I never have gotten a close-up look at a pelican, even though it’s apparently a pretty easy thing to do.  In internet videos they do not seem at all shy.

Like the herons I mentioned, pelicans are ridiculous eaters.  You can find videos of them eating random birds the size of their own heads, trying to eat things that won’t even fit down their own elastic gullets, or just staring menacingly at humans, as if to say “give up the goods.”  Not every creature needs to be thinking deep thoughts.  That’s fine.  Live to eat, if you will.  If they were about anything other than cramming stuff in their throat, what would that even be?  Pelican poetry.

Not much to say; this bird was a glimpse.

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I’ve been reminded recently that glaucous-winged and western seagulls hybridize in my region so heavily there’s a common name for the hybrid swarm – olympic gulls.  But I’m relatively sure the most populous seagulls in my ol’ stompin’ grounds of Federal Way are pure glaucous-winged.  Their wingtips look straight-up white, and they are pale as ghosts, gliding through the treetops.  Or chilling in the parking lot of the mall.

The gullish mallrats are nice-looking.  I like the sound of their calls.  I think they nest at the largely abandoned park & ride behind the mall, and when traffic clears out in the evening around the mall itself, they like to sit right on the ground.  Not sure what they get out of the concrete beach, but it’s cool to see wildlife that close up.

Other times I’ve seen seagulls in the past, they’ve probably been the hybrids, or western gulls, or I don’t even know.  Seagulls are notoriously difficult to tell apart, save for the species that have the most extreme differences.  Hybridization doesn’t help the issue, so mostly I don’t even bother trying to get a positive ID.  Don’t care enough.

I will continue to like seagulls until the day one shits on me, and may that day never come.  They are pretty and their sound is iconic.  It’s the music of a place like Puget Sound.  I wanna grab one under my arm and give it a hug.  Bitches can steal my ice cream any time.  I just hope I get a good look at them.

I heard most of the seagulls in Australia are tiny things.  Around here they are mighty big.  When I was a small child and saw some flying in front of cathedral’s stained glass windows, I fancied they were so huge that they must be albatrosses.  No, odds are that I have never seen an albatross.  Seagulls here tho.  Big ‘uns.

Seagulls fly by “dynamic soaring,” where they rely less on broad wings catching all of the air than on long narrow wings making the best use of whatever air they can get.  The result is that they fly in pretty distinctive ways.  Usually, it looks something like a hawk’s flight, but lower altitude and much faster.

Like many prolific wild animals, it’s easy to see tragedy in their lives, all over the place.  Injury, death, illness.  I’ve seen a juvenile wandering around a parking garage in SoDo with no parent in sight, unable or unwilling to fly away.  Come here, birdy.  I pick you up like a football and take you home…  No, I’ll never do that.  But they make me want to.

There are a lot of good internet videos of seagulls being funny.  Probably no small amount of cruel videos as well; tread carefully.  One of my faves is a smaller gull in the UK using the cat door to run into this little cottage and eat cat food.  Also winning, the little steppy dance some do to raise edible creatures from the sand.  Check ’em out.

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House finches are a very common bird in urban and suburban areas here.  As befits the name house finch.  I suppose they may breed in rafters; I wouldn’t know.  I do know they don’t belong here.  There are closely related indigenous finches that are surely being hedged out by them.  House finches are boring LBBs.  Some are streaky (females? juveniles?), some are just beige, but they have a kind of red that magically appears when the sun comes out.  Sometimes kinda pretty.  More noteworthy is their elaborate song, which is nice to hear, since the other common perching bird in their territory is the much less musical house sparrow.

Let’s talk about places.

Mexico?  Some animals that are out of balance with nature spread naturally with the increase of human populations, like coyotes and anna’s hummingbirds and opossums.  Some are actively imported, like house sparrows and starlings were to the US.  I feel like I’ve read that house finches in america were descended from pet bird trade, but I think they’re from Mexico?  So they could’ve just gradually moved north, being better adapted to city life than their cousins.

Seattle.  The first place I took note of these birds was in downtown Seattle, near the Cornish* campus on the edge of the South Lake Union neighborhood.  I saw and mostly heard a flock in the little trees down there, making the world sound a little nicer.

Federal Way.  We tried feeding birds on our balcony for a while.  The house finches had an interesting behavior that set them apart from the rest.  Whenever my husband sneezed, even from indoors on the other side of a pane of glass, they’d get scared into flying off.  They’d come right back, but it was a level of caution that even smaller birds like chickadees didn’t bother with.

Auburn.  My current employer used to have a cool building in Auburn, not far from the railroad tracks, surrounded by big fields, edged with some nice tall trees.  Goodbye wildlife, they moved.  On the old campus, there were some disused buildings that served as nesting grounds for a lot of birds, and I think primarily for house finches.  For the moment, the current owners of those buildings haven’t torn them down, and I suspect that when you see house finches at the mall, they were born and bred next to my old call center.

They’re a common bird where I live now, though I think they don’t come down to the ground level in my cul-de-sac as much as others.  I usually just hear the song or see them fly between trees.  I don’t think much about them, but they’re fine.  Bird it up, homies.

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*Cornish College of the Arts has waxed and waned over the years.  Early this millennium, they worked hard to get accreditation, and build up their program.  But they’ve always been primarily a dumping ground for the rich kids that were too indolent to be business majors, and the bullshit student body conspired with the bullshit administration and the bullshit rich donors to squander that work, the graduating class dwindling from dozens to a handful, in the space of ten years, the classes going from at least half-assed intellectual fare down to “finger-painting, if you feel like it today.”  They were recently acquired by a better university, and they fucking deserved it.