Birder's World Field of View

An outrage against hawks and falcons

Take a look at this photo: It shows a large two-tiered cage known as a Swedish goshawk trap. Two birds sit inside, separated by a wire floor: a Cooper’s Hawk above and a pigeon (the bait) below. The image is the least stomach-turning of several I received recently. They document an outrage.

As you can read in "Birding Briefs" in our February 2008 issue, a pigeon breeder’s club in California, Oregon, and other states has been killing thousands of hawks and falcons a year in violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act — and bragging about it. An undercover investigation by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service revealed the killings. We didn't receive the photos in time to run them in the magazine, so I'm sharing them here.

FWS agents discovered the hawk above at the home of a pigeon breeder in Houston. When they approached the house, the breeder’s wife attempted to hide the bird by throwing blankets over the trap — the same blankets visible in the picture. The agents photographed the scene, then freed the bird.

Through the chain-link fence here you can see the backyard of defendant Juan Navarro’s home in Los Angeles. A trap sits on the ground. Inside it is a Cooper’s Hawk. Navarro was president of the National Birmingham Roller Club (NBRC) when he was arrested in May. He has since pleaded guilty to 16 counts of violating or attempting to violate the MBTA.

Special agent Ed Newcomer also sent me a photo of a dead Cooper’s Hawk recovered from Navarro’s property as well as an image of a severed talon. Defendant Rayvon Hall gave the talon to an undercover agent as a “souvenir” during the investigation. Another defendant, Darik McGhee, bragged that he once had a five-gallon bucket filled with severed talons. When asked why he didn't have it anymore, he responded: "You don't want to keep evidence at your house."

Here's a picture of a Swedish goshawk trap that isn't covered with blankets. The device may be used for legitimate research by scientists, but anyone who owns one must have a permit. (The defendants identified in the investigation did not.) If you know of or see a raptor trap like this one, please call your local FWS office.

I spoke with Bob Sallinger, conservation director of the Audubon Society of Portland, and Garry George, executive director of the Los Angeles Audubon Society. They praised the FWS special agents who busted the pigeon fanciers. But neither they nor the FWS agents I interviewed had a good estimate of how many people may have been trapping and killing hawks. And despite the local publicity and outrage, none of my sources felt confident that the atrocities have been stopped. Because many of the people arrested and charged were leaders of the NBRC or affiliated clubs, Sallinger said that the known cases are “the tip of the iceberg.”

David Patte, an FWS spokesman in Oregon, told me that an undercover agent in his office began his investigation by calling a local pigeon breeder. The agent, Patte said, gave the breeder a line about wanting to get into racing roller pigeons. The first statement the guy made in response, Patte said, was "You're going to have to learn how to kill hawks — and love it." — M.M.

Watch a video of roller pigeons in flight.

Read Congressman Peter DaFazio’s proposed legislation to make intentional violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act a felony. Plus, find links to more information about illegal killing of hawks.

Back-seat Uganda

Here’s a question for you: Is it correct to visit a country like Uganda and to write only about its birds? I don't think so. I photographed the children above in Kampala, the capital, on the last day of my trip. Like all the pictures that follow, it was taken from the back seat of our land cruiser.

What crazy-busy places Ugandan front yards are. I saw babies being bathed, animals being gutted, meals being prepared, chairs being re-caned, laundry being hung to dry, you name it -- all in the narrow strip of dirt fronting the road.

I took this picture of sidewalk shops in Kampala just a few hours after Hassan and I saw Scaly-breasted Illadopsis (and chimpanzees) in green Kibale National Park. The contrast between the two scenes couldn't be greater, and yet when I think of Uganda, both images -- one densely urban, the other dense forest -- come to mind.

As does this one, which shows bright yellow and green jerry cans for sale at a village store. I saw Ugandans carrying them everywhere outside of Kampala and other cities -- boys, girls, men, women, on foot, on bicycles. They used them to transport water.

Kampala's hilly streets were choked with taxis, trucks, motorbikes, and other vehicles -- and full of pedestrians -- when we made our way to the airport. We made only halting progress, and more than once I looked out the side window of our vehicle into a ocean of idling, tense traffic and was surprised to see a man and a young woman cradling a baby on a motorbike only inches away. --C.H.

See pictures of animals I saw in Uganda.

See pictures of the mountain gorillas I saw in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.

Read about my close encounter with a warthog at the Mweya Safari Lodge.

Read my story in Birder's World about my trip.

December in San Antonio

I admit a bias in all matters relating to Birder's World, including one for Hotspots Near You, written by locals with first-hand knowledge of the best birding places in North America. So during a mid-December trip to San Antonio, Texas, I stopped by the Mitchell Lake Audubon Center, number 25 on our list and a good place to see a Ladder-backed Woodpecker, pictured above.

I was not disappointed. Eagle-eyed local birder Andy Garcia, a docent for the center, led me on a grand tour of the vast network of dikes and ponds, guiding me to views of dozens of species, including such regional specialties as Least Grebes, Neotropical Cormorants, a Crested Caracara, and a Loggerhead Shrike. He needed only a glance to pick Bufflehead, Gadwall, Green-winged Teal, Hooded Merganser, Lesser Scaup, Northern Pintail, Northern Shoveler and Ruddy Duck out of a cluster of waterfowl hundreds of yards away.

As we bounced over the rutted dirt tracks, I saw hundreds of American White Pelicans and egrets, both Great and Snowy. A few Great Blue Herons flapped lazily overhead, sharing the skies with Osprey, cormorants, and an American Kestrel. Kinglets, Eastern Phoebes, Yellow-rumped Warblers, and Northern Cardinals flitted in and out of the bushes alongside the car. Rafts of American Coots paddled on several ponds.

Near one pond, at least half a dozen Black-crowned Night-Herons, both adults and juveniles, roosted in branches. As we drove along, American Pipits pecked at the path in front of our car, so reluctant to get out of the way that at one point I had to leave the vehicle to shoo them off.

Because Mitchell Lake attracts so many birds, even the surrounding area is rich in birding opportunities. While waiting for the center to open, I parked near a roadside wetland and watched the rising sun cast its light on foraging Black-necked Stilts, egrets, Little Blue Herons, and dowitchers. And everywhere, Great-tailed Grackles could be seen and heard, whistling and clacking away.

I visited Mitchell Lake on two consecutive mornings. The weather was cool for that part of Texas in mid-December but sunny and comfortable, especially for this northerner. For a few days, I dodged the snowstorm that was burying Milwaukee (and closed our offices), but the fun wouldn't last. Returning to Milwaukee's airport (also named Mitchell), I found my car buried in snow. I definitely prefer the other Mitchell. -- E.M.

Uganda photo album

My guide Hassan Mutebi took this picture. I'm standing on the equator marker between Kampala and Masaka. We stopped here on our way from Mabamba Swamp to Lake Mburo National Park. I used a similar shot to illustrate my editorial in the February 2008 issue.

Photo Editor Ernie Mastroianni did a great job of finding photos to accompany my article. Gray Crowned Crane, Yellow-billed Oxpecker, Southern Red Bishop, Woodland Kingfisher, Papyrus Gonolek, Shoebill -- they're all in the magazine. What he didn't have room to include were the many hooved and furry critters I saw during my trip, like these zebras. I took this snapshot while standing with my head sticking out the top of a land cruiser at Lake Mburo National Park.

I write in my article that I awoke "comfortable in a luxury safari tent" at Lake Mburo. This is it. It's completely covered and raised off the ground, and it contains two single beds, a dressing area, toilet, and a pull-chain, straight-down shower. (An attendant brought the warm water.) Listening to Gray Crowned Cranes and other birds while lying in bed in the early morning was a high point of my trip.

Another high point was looking down into this valley, located between Mbarara and Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. We had been driving for a while and stopped to stretch our legs. I remember I was looking down at the tea covering both sides of the valley when a vivid green bird materialized before my eyes. It was a small parrot, a lovebird, with a cherry-red face. Because it had been raining, I left my camera in the car, so there's no photo of the bird (Red-headed Lovebird, Agapornis pullarius), just of the spot where I saw it.

See pictures of the mountain gorillas I saw in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.

On birding trips in southeastern Arizona and Texas, I've had to stop my car for herds of cattle. In Uganda, we had to stop for olive baboons. These lollygaggers made us wait in Queen Elizabeth National Park.

The many elephants we saw in the park preferred to keep their distance. Only one paid much attention to us. An elephant the size of a mountain, with long white tusks, he strode toward our vehicle, stopped, and flared his ears and exhaled loudly while looking us straight in the eye. There was no mistaking his message: Go away.

The elephant in front of the Mweya Safari Lodge is a statue. We understood it to mean, Come on in. Bold Slender-billed and Yellow-backed Weavers steal sugar out of the bowls on the tables in the outdoor dining area on the far side of the building.

Read about my close encounter with a warthog at the Mweya Safari Lodge.

Keeping company with the hippos in this photo, taken from a boat traversing the Kazinga Channel, are a Gray-headed Gull, one Black-winged Stilt, a whole lot of Egyptian Geese, and a buffalo. When we set out on our cruise, the surface of the water was alive with hundred and hundreds of Bank Swallows darting every which way.

The list of mammals and reptiles I saw in Uganda is long: banded mongoose, lion, African elephant, Burchell's zebra, hippo, warthog, buffalo, bushbuck, Uganda kob, topi, Nile crocodile, and impalas like these. I'm still in awe of the experience. Just as one of the elemental joys of birdwatching is finding alive and wild a bird that existed previously only as a picture in a field guide, one of the profound pleasures of going on safari is discovering that you can actually still stand in the midst of scenes like this.

The list of primates is fun to recall, too: black and white colubus monkey, olive baboon, vervet monkey, red-tailed monkey, L'Hoest's monkey, mountain gorilla, and chimpanzees. This thoughtful guy, photographed at Kibale National Park hours before we raced back to Kampala to catch my flight home, gazed down at me placidly while one of his colleagues, up just as high, loosed a rain of fruit pits and chimp piss. --C.H.

Read my story in Birder's World about my trip.

The gorillas of Bwindi

This photo preserves the first view I ever had of a wild mountain gorilla, an adult female nursing a one-month-old baby. I wrote about the moment in my article in the February 2008 issue, but only as a sidebar to the main text and without any of the snapshots I took.

This is how things looked that day, December 5, 2006, in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, in Uganda’s heavily forested, mountainous southwestern corner.

See snapshots of other mammals and places I visited in Uganda.

Like Queen Elizabeth National Park (where I came face to face with a warthog), Bwindi is an Important Bird Area, home to 347 species, including 24 Albertine Rift endemics. (My guides Hassan Mutebi and Johnnie Kamugisha and I found a handful: Red-throated Alethe, Mountain Masked Apalis, Red-faced Woodland Warbler, and Purple-breasted Sunbird.) The park is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site and, as I discovered, a hugely popular destination for wildlife tourists.

Lake Kitandara Camp, just outside the entrance to the park, was my temporary home away from home. My tent at the camp (above) was named Shoebill.

The snows of Uganda

My article our February 2008 issue doesn't have a single picture of a warthog in it.

It does have a new painting by David Allen Sibley to accompany his column "I.D. Toolkit," wonderful photos of breeding flamingos, and portraits of Black-backed Woodpeckers, Peregrine Falcons, Sandhill Cranes, and other great birds.

The issue is at the printer, I am at home, and it is snowing, snowing to beat the band. Work has been called off, schools closed. Plows have rolled up and down the street several times, and I am achy from shoveling.

The timing of the storm is ironic, or perfect, since it has come exactly one year after another big storm blanketed the Midwest. That storm, a carbon copy of this year's, dumped about a foot of snow, slowed traffic, closed offices and schools, and very nearly made me miss the trip of a lifetime: a birding trip to East Africa, a trip I describe in the February issue.

I flew from Chicago to Washington, DC, to Amsterdam to Uganda the day before. If the snow had fallen a day earlier, or if my departure date had been the next day, my life list today would be 307 birds shorter and I would have had shoveling to do.

As it turned out, I didn't even learn about the storm until days later, when my guides Hassan Mutebi and Johnnie Kamugisha and I reached Uganda's giant Queen Elizabeth National Park (one of Uganda's Important Bird Areas), and I got the chance to check e-mail at the magnificent Mweya Safari Lodge.

That's where I was when I made the acquaintance of the toothy fellow pictured above. I was in a deck chair on a porch overlooking Lake Edward and the Rwenzori Mountains, studying tinkerbirds in my field guide. He rumbled over the crest of the hillside in front of me, dropped to his knees a step or two away, and started shearing off great mouthfuls of grass. And grunting.

I nearly jumped out of my skin. Then I took his picture. And this one, of a Pied Wagtail:

I'll be publishing more of my snapshots from Uganda, and telling stories I didn't have room to include in my magazine story, in the days ahead. --C.H.

See pictures of animals I saw in Uganda.

See pictures of the mountain gorillas I saw in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.

See a complete list of the birds I saw in Uganda.

Read my story in Birder's World about my trip.

Updates: condors and grouse

Less than two months after California's legislature and movie-star governor banned lead bullets to protect condors, the state's Fish and Game Commission has expanded the ban. The new rule requires non-lead ammo in smaller guns — the kind used to hunt squirrels and rabbits. Lead bullets from small-game firearms has been implicated in condor poisonings in Pinnacles National Monument.

Return of the Condor author John Moir described why lead is the primary threat to condors in our December issue.

Meanwhile, the Greater Sage-Grouse has made headlines in the weeks since we reported that last summer's Murphy Complex fire destroyed 75 known leks in Idaho and Nevada.

Last week, a federal judge ordered the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to review its "tainted" 2004 decision not to list the sage-grouse as threatened or endangered. And the Interior Department has promised Senator Ron Wyden that it will review disputed endangered-species decisions on many more species, including Greater and Gunnison Sage-Grouse, Northern Spotted Owl, and Marbled Murrelet.

In addition, volunteers in Idaho are collecting sagebrush seeds to restore habitat lost in the Murphy Complex fire. The seeds will be planted this winter and spring. — M.M.

Audubon in Wisconsin

The Wisconsin museum famed for its annual Birds in Art exhibition has added two paintings from history's most famous bird artist to its permanent collection.

John James Audubon’s oil portrait Pacific Loons (above) is the highlight of the acquisition by the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau. Director Kathy Kelsey Foley called the 1834 work a “significant milestone” for the museum and a “curatorial dream come true.”

In addition, the museum acquired Audubon’s Black-Throated Diver, a hand-colored engraving of the same species that is one of the hundreds of images in Birds of America.

Pacific Loons is one of only a dozen or so known Audubon oil paintings of birds. The most famous, Foley said, is Osprey and Weakfish, which the National Gallery of Art owns. The artist whose name is synonymous with birds produced the majority of his bird portraits as watercolor engravings, including those published in Birds of America. Foley said Audubon painted oil portraits primarily to raise money to support Birds of America.

We have a 2001 edition in our library, so I looked up Black-Throated Diver. The scene is similar to Pacific Loons: Two adult loons turn their necks toward each other. But a loon in juvenal plumage swims between them, and the background is not the oil painting’s pleasant mix of grasses and puffy clouds but gray, somewhat choppy water, suggesting an oceanside scene.

The two paintings are on display now. To celebrate their arrival, the museum is hosting an exhibition, titled “Spirits of Wilderness,” that features eight other depictions of loons by 18th- and 19th-century artists. It includes works by Alexander Wilson and John and Elizabeth Gould.

"It's really interesting to see the variations and interpretations of loons by different artists," says Jane Weinke, the museum's curator of collections.

The exhibition continues through January 20. The star, of course, is Pacific Loons.

"It just has a presence," Weinke says. "For a museum whose major subject is bird art, this is our crown jewel. It's way too amazing to even think about." — M.M.

P.S.: It just so happens that we are working on a story for our April issue that describes a great place to see Pacific Loons. Stay tuned.

Read our review of John James Audubon: The Making of an American.