Birds According to Peterson

Joe Meche is president of the North Cascades Audubon Society and also serves the chapter as newsletter editor and birding programs coordinator. He has been watching birds for more than 50 years and photographing birds and landscapes for more than 30 years. He has written more than 100 articles for Whatcom Watch.

Roger Tory Peterson saw birds primarily as visual entities. You might hear a bird in the bush before you see it but in most cases, the chances are that you were first attracted by movement or a flash of color. In the early stages of basic field identification, experienced birders learned to be aware of visual clues to narrow the possibilities of what the bird might be. Some of the first clues are size and shape, followed closely by flight patterns, behavior, and habitat. Being aware of your surroundings is as much a part of learning the birds as anything else.

To aid the learning process, on the end papers of his more recent field guides for birds, Peterson provided silhouettes of birds in typical habitats. This is especially helpful in the field when you can usually eliminate certain birds as possibilities, simply because they wouldn’t fit into a particular habitat (although, birds surprise us every now and then). These silhouettes always reminded me of the training for the old Civil Air Patrol that helped observers to identify enemy aircraft by their shapes.

As the Peterson System of bird identification evolved, he further simplified the process by dividing them into eight categories that combined visual and behavioral characteristics, as well as habitat. These eight categories follow the taxonomic sequence of birds listed by the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU). As it turns out, one of the larger groups of birds listed in the AOU checklist, as well as in most field guides, has long been at the top of my own favorite birds list. These are the birds that Peterson referred to as the swimmers, or duck-like birds, commonly referred to as waterfowl.

Waterfowl on the Bayou

When I was growing up in southwest Louisiana, I was surrounded by birdlife in general, but the one group of birds that had the strongest influence on me was waterfowl. When your hometown is located in the middle of thousands of acres of rice fields, those fields become a large part of your existence. From the time rice was planted and the irrigation and growing process began, these fields provided safe havens for a large variety of birds. In the fall, the fields were drained and the rice was harvested. Through late fall and winter, the fields were left alone and that was the time of year when the immense flocks of northern waterfowl began to arrive and feed on the stubble in the fields.

Hundreds of thousands of visitors in your neighborhood don’t go unnoticed. Some of my earliest memories include the sound these visitors made during the night when they were first arriving and descending into the local fields. On foggy nights, the cacophony of communication within the flocks was music to my young ears. Throughout the winter, the frequent and massive movements of waterfowl were part of daily life, and often a severe distraction from schoolwork or assigned chores around the house. Part of the joy was learning what these birds were and where they came from. It’s not surprising that I’m still a big fan of waterfowl.

Waterfowl on the Bay

When fall turns into winter in the Pacific Northwest, we find ourselves in a little bit of waterfowl heaven. From freshwater to salt, the variety and numbers of waterfowl in the area can be quite impressive as well as enjoyable to the observer. From the large trumpeter swans to the diminutive buffleheads, birders enjoy a heyday throughout the colder months. We have swans and geese, sea ducks, bay ducks, and pond ducks around all winter. A further distinction applies when you begin to sort through the list of Peterson’s swimmers or duck-like birds and learn that some are divers, while others are dabblers.

Through adaptive evolution divers’ legs are set farther back on their bodies to enable them to propel themselves underwater in pursuit of food. Because of the location of their legs, divers are not very mobile when they’re on land. The legs of dabblers, on the other hand, are more centered on their bodies and while they aren’t capable of swimming underwater, they’re much more mobile on land, so it’s yet another example of tradeoffs in nature. Divers do exactly that when feeding while dabblers are the birds you see with their rear ends in the air as they reach as far as their bills can go to feed on the bottom of shallow ponds. They also feed on surface plants, especially thick patches of algae.

Divers v. Dabblers

The majority of the swimmers that you see on salt water are divers, while those that you see on fresh water in winter tend to be a mix of the two. Hooded mergansers, for instance, mix freely with wood ducks on fresh water through most of the year. Hoodies are divers and woodies are dabblers that eat a wide variety of seeds and berries as well as aquatic insects. At times, a female hoodie will lay an egg or two in the nest of a woodie and when the ducklings hatch, it’s interesting to watch the nestlings adjust to their separate ways of feeding. The video, Hoodies and Woodies shows this in rather humorous detail.

The dabblers are enjoyable to watch but when it comes to sheer entertainment for the observer, they cannot compare to the action-oriented divers, especially the ones that we find on saltwater throughout the winter. The saltwater extravaganza of swimmers includes larger-sized cormorants and loons, as well as the smaller horned and eared grebes, with several sea and bay ducks in between. A real treat for birdwatchers is an actively feeding mixed flock of all three scoter species, or a thousand or more loons feeding in the channel between the Semiahmoo Spit and White Rock, BC.

Notable among the active divers are the loons and in some parts of the world the common loon is actually known as the great northern diver — a most appropriate nickname. Loons have heavy, streamlined bodies that are truly adapted to their watery world. Loons stay underwater for extended periods of time and travel some distance in pursuit of food. For the photographer, it can be quite exasperating to guess where and when a loon might surface for the next photo.

One of the most sought after species in local saltwater habitats in winter is the long-tailed duck, formerly known as the oldsquaw. These sea ducks are quite beautiful and a joy to watch as they perform their inimitable dives. The long-tailed is known to be the deepest diving of all ducks, diving as far down as 200 feet and staying underwater for as long as a minute and a half. Like the loons, it’s always difficult to know where they will surface. Therein lies part of the beauty of the divers.

Okanogan Waterfowl

An interesting fact about our saltwater swimmers is that most of them fly inland to nest and raise their young on freshwater ponds and lakes. It’s difficult to imagine heavy-bodied loons flying over the Cascades to nest on lakes in the high country of the Okanogan. On lakes east of Oroville and Tonasket, we’ve found loons, grebes, Barrow’s and common goldeneyes raising their young, knowing they will follow the adults in late fall as they return to saltwater for the winter.

The swimmers make up an impressive group of birds, to say the least. They are all uniquely beautiful and well suited to their chosen habitats. Their feeding habits and overall behavior in the watery world makes them all enjoyable to watch as you learn about all the species that make up this group. Winter in the Northwest provides a showcase to observe these wonderful birds.

Next Month: The Aerialists