Young Snowy Egret, and the Curious Behavior of Crows toward a Turkey Vulture

Snowy Egrets commonly breed along the Atlantic coast from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico and Central America. Post breeding, young individuals often disperse further inland, and one such rare visitor turned up this morning feeding along an overgrown island in the West River.

 

Great Egrets are common migrants here and one happened to be in the vicinity. This photo shows the difference in size.

Yesterday morning, walking along the same trail with the river on one side and a harvested corn field on the other, I saw  a flock of crows, which was feeding on the corn field, rise into the air with a great deal of agitated cawing to follow a large bird flying overhead. Soon the majority settled into a tree by the river, but several birds continued the pursuit until they all disappeared from view. Typical mobbing behavior, I thought, as I was trying to fire off a series of shots to catch the action. Looking at the photos at home however I discovered that the large bird was in fact a Turkey Vulture.

Crows usually don't feel threatened by TVs and don't waste their time chasing them off. So what made them go after the TV here? Young crows perhaps playing a game of pursuit? I tried to find something on Google but nothing turned up. So if one of my readers has insight into the behavior I'd love to hear it.
 
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Plum Island continued: Eastern Towhees, Purple Martins and more

Continuing with my visit to Plum Island Part III:
---So I broke for lunch, settled myself on a bench on the Sandy Point boardwalk and unwrapped a sandwich I had brought from home. Soon however  I stopped eating, mesmerized by an Eastern Towhee singing in the tree just above my head.

Spectrogram and wave form show repeated complexes consisting of introductory note, a trill of 3 to 4 syllables and ending in a buzzy trill

I never managed to get a good look at the bird - it remained hidden the foliage, but driving back to the exit I saw an Eastern Towhee sitting on a small juniper tree by the side of the road.

Further along the road, a Great Egret was hunting, leaning forward, stretching its neck longer and longer until it suddenly pounced on a prey in the grass. By the time I was able to get a shot, whatever it had swallowed was already half way down its gullet.

An Osprey was flying over the salt marsh.

I stopped at Ocean #1 to check out the Purple Martins. 

Purple Martin House

Purple Martin Adults

Detail: Adult Purple Martin

A very curious chick

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Ancient looking Wood Storks, Boat-tailed Grackles and more at Clear Lakes Community Park

My next stop was the Eagle Lakes Community Park on the Tamiami Trail. According to BirdsEye I would find some interesting birds there and was not disappointed. The park was an ordinary looking suburban park with a large parking lot, ball courts and a children's play area, not very promising. At the parking lot I had run into a birder carrying a tripod and scope who told me  that there were three lakes. At the one that he had gone to he had only seen some Blue Jays that morning. So I was very surprised when walking past the ball court to the first lake I saw a very tame Wood Stork stand on the grass near the water.

The head appears to be all horned calluses and the neck thick knobbed leather, looking very ancient and out of place in our current Cenozoic (post dinosaur) era. There are no fossil records in N. America. The bill is used for probing for prey -mostly fish - in shallow waters, sometimes accompanied by foot stomping and wing flapping. I have no clue what's the advantage of the naked neck, perhaps as protection against sun, against insects? I could not find anything on it in my reading.

When you see the bird's somewhat lumbering flapping flight it is hard to imagine that it soars and rides the thermals at a height of  more than half a mile up to cover longer distances, which costs about one tenth the energy of flapping flight. 

Other birds at that site included a Great Egret

.... a Little Blue Heron

.
... a Glossy Ibis in non-breeding plumage

and an Anhinga in a fruit tree

On my way back to the parking lot I ran into a gaggle of Boat-tailed Grackles. These are sleek looking large birds that, when in  group, are almost constantly engaged in a loud chatter, an ever changing cacophony of screeches, jeebs, clucks, gurgles and rattles. With so many different sounds there must be a specific meaning to each.

Female Boat-tailed Grackle

Male Boat-tailed Grackle

An odd fact from  Cornell Lab's All About Birds: "The Boat-tailed Grackle has an odd mating system: harem defense polygyny. Females cluster their nests, and the males compete to defend the entire colony and mate there. The most dominant male gets most of the copulations in a system similar to that used by many deer. But all is not as simple as it seems. Although the dominant male may get up to 87% of the copulations at a colony, DNA fingerprinting shows that he actually sires only about 25% of the young in the colony. Most of the young are fathered by noncolony males away from the colonies."

To be continued....