What is the commonest sandpiper in North America?

Not all scolopacids are called “sandpiper,” and some of them don’t pipe sand at all. The commonest sandpiper in North America, for example, spends most of its time lurking in dark forests, where it is rarely seen except when it emerges for a twilight twirl around its aerial dance floor.

According to the figures cited in The Shorebird Guide, American Woodcock has a North American (and thus a global) population of about 5,000,000 birds; Semipalmated and Western Sandpipers–had I not known the answer, I might have guessed one of those species myself–each tally about 4,000,000 individuals.

Right now is the time to get out and listen for the evening twitterings of woodcock throughout the species’ breeding range. Participants in Paul Lehman’s March tour of Nebraska will probably be the first WINGS group to witness the sky dance this year, but any trip to the eastern half of the US or southern Canada has a good chance of encountering this secretive and startlingly abundant sandpiper.

A factual question this time:

What is the most abundant sandpiper in North America?

Leave your answer as a comment below. The first correct answer will win a new WINGS cap.

As Michael Bowen was the first to point out, increasing size is the key to this riddle about hawk names. His suggestion–Crane–is a good one, giving us Sparrow (Hawk), Pigeon (Hawk), Duck (Hawk), Crane (Hawk).

Andy Jones kept it neatly within the family Falconidae with his proposal, Partridge (Hawk), an obsolete name for (among other species) Gyrfalcon.

Photo: James Lidster

Both answers count as correct, while Elwood Hain’s answer, Auk, wins the prize for the most compelling and most poignant series submitted: (Dusky Seaside) Sparrow, (Passenger) Pigeon, (Labrador) Duck, (Great) Auk.

My own answer? Goose. Falconers are said to have classed their birds by size, the smallest being the Sparrow Hawk, followed by Pigeon Hawk (Merlin) and Duck Hawk (Peregrine Falcon), all of them outweighed by the Goose Hawk–which we know as Goshawk.

Michael, Andy, and Elwood will all soon be sporting their stylish new WINGS caps.

More a riddle this time than a question:

What is the next bird name in the series “Sparrow, Pigeon, Duck…”? There may be more than one defensible answer to this one, so explain your solution.

The first correct answer, and the “best” incorrect answer, will be rewarded with a modest prize from WINGS. Leave your answer as a comment to this blog entry!

Wild Turkey, Nebraska. Photo: Rick Wright.

The first Wild Turkeys brought to Europe were sent back from Mexico by Cortés in 1519. According to the Handbook of the Birds of the World, domestic turkeys were “well established” in Spain and in England by 1541–so well established, in fact, that the Jamestown colonists actually brought turkeys along with them when they sailed for Virginia in 1607, making that the first North American bird to travel west across the Atlantic.

Happy Thanksgiving!

What was the first native North American bird species to be transported west across the Atlantic Ocean from Europe?

Submit your answer as a comment here at The Wingbeat. The first correct answer, and the wittiest, most cogent, or most startling incorrect answer, will win a dapper new WINGS cap. We’ll include our answer and the names of the winners in the December 2009 e-newsletter.

Which North American breeding bird has been called “the horseshoe blackbird”?

Eastern Meadowlark, Nebraska. Photo: Rick Wright.

The bird we now know as the Eastern Meadowlark was given the rather unimaginative name Alauda magna–”big lark”–by Linnaeus in 1758. The great Swedish taxonomist based his description on a painting by Mark Catesby, labeled “The Large Lark.”

Almost sixty years later, Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot moved the species to a new genus, Sturnella, thus creating the slightly nonsensical scientific name Sturnella magna, “big little starling.”

Vieillot’s description of the newly erected genus was also based on a painting, this time one in Buffon’s great Natural History. Buffon, abandoning the prosaic nomenclature of Linnaeus and Catesby, had called the bird “Merle à fer-à-cheval,” the horseshoe blackbird, a reference to the black necklace crossing the yellow breast.

What common US bird has a taste for monarch butterflies?

We all learned in school that birds would avoid the foul-tasting monarch.

But not all birds are put off by the butterflies’ toxins, which the caterpillars concentrate while growing fat on milkweed.

Black-billed Cuckoos, Scott’s Orioles, and Purple Martins have been seen to capture and eat adult monarchs; Loggerhead Shrikes are said to hang the butterflies in the sun to let the poison break down.

But the uncontested champions among monarch eaters are Mexico’s Black-backed Oriole–and the familiar Black-headed Grosbeak.   Birds of these two species consume several hundred thousand monarchs on the wintering grounds in central Mexico.

Looks innocent enough....

One important introduced species is also apparently immune to the monarchs’ poison: the domestic chicken.

What is the largest North American passerine thought to have hosted the egg of a brood parasite?

In North America north of Mexico, we immediately think of the cowbirds when we think of brood parasites–birds that lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, of the same or a different species. While the cowbirds are the only North American species that breed only by using this fascinating strategy, many others–”facultative” brood parasites–are known to have given it a whirl.

Both Black-billed and Yellow-billed Cuckoos, for example, occasionally deposit their eggs in alien nests, as do their relatives the roadrunners. The largest passerine to have hosted such an egg is the largest passerine in North America, a Common Raven whose nest held the egg of an ambitious Greater Roadrunner.

Logically enough, aerial display is most frequent in birds of open country, where elevated songposts are scarce or absent, and flight song is common across a vast range of species, from shorebirds to sparrows.

The larks are among the most famous of sky singers. And of the larks, none is better known than the Eurasian Skylark, a bird that calls up cultural memories even for those who haven’t yet seen this blithe spirit in life.

The typical song flight of a Skylark lasts for about three minutes, an astoundingly long time for a bird to be in the air and not going anywhere. But the record is held by a bird in Britain said to have sung for sixty-eight minutes before finally dropping to earth.

With the exception of Antarctica, every continent has its larks. The family attains its greatest diversity in Africa, where it is thought to have originated; Ethiopia and South Africa are especially lark-bountiful, with some 65 species between them, including many endemics.

Sprague’s Pipit is just as long-winded. Birds of North America Online cites one example of a bird whose “display bout” lasted for nearly three hours; it isn’t clear from that source whether that was a single display flight, but it must have been an impressive performance in any case.

Thanks to Ted Floyd and Ron Martin for the pointer to Sprague’s Pipit.