Germination!

I checked my cottonwood seed pots on Sunday afternoon and spotted two tiny seedlings!


One seedling was growing in wildfire soil and the other was growing in unburned soil. The seeds that germinated were from a tree in an an unburned site, so while I now have evidence that seeds can germinate in wildfire soils, I do not yet know if seeds from a burned tree can germinate.

In other plant-growing news, Sarah, Andie, and I checked out our garden yesterday. Now that the sun has returned, things have really started growing.


Our kale is ready to harvest, it is time to thin the Walla Walla onions,


and the peas finally have flowers.


We planted a few tomato, tomatillo, and pepper starts at the far end of the garden. We now look forward to late summer salsas.

Cottonwoods and Fire

In addition to birds, I spend lot of time researching trees and shrubs. My favorite of these is the Rio Grande cottonwood in New Mexico. Specifically, I am interested in the population response of cottonwoods to wildfire.


Over the years I have learned that fire kills the above-ground portion of the trees. In some trees, however, the root crowns survive and produce reprouts that can grow to the height of the original tree. After six to ten years of growth, resprouts can produce seeds, but the long-term effects of wildfire on cottonwood populations remain unknown.

Last week in New Mexico, I came across two remarkable cottonwoods in a small wildfire site. Judging from the height of nearby saltcedar resprouts, I would guess that the area had burned in April or May.
One cottonwood was a male, judging from the pollen-producing catkins in its canopy.

He had been scorched at least three quarters of its height, yet he continues to support leaves and reproductive parts. Most cottonwoods burned that much do not produce leaves or soon drop them. A few meters away, a female cottonwood had also been scorched by the fire.


Unlike the male, she had no leaves and likely will never again unless she resprouts. Instead of leaves, her canopy was filled with seed-releasing inflorescences. If I am anthropomorphizing here, but it seems that, being burned and knowing she would not produce seeds for a long time, if ever again, she put all her energy into making one last seed crop, instead of leafing out to make sugar for growth and future reproduction. Unfortunately few if any seeds will go on to becomre trees to replace her. Cottonwoods are notoriously picky about their preffered germination sites, which is why there are no baby cottonwoods in the bosque.

To successfully germinate, a cottonwood seed needs an area cleared of competing vegetation, moist soil, water from below the surface of the soil that is drawn up to where baby roots can reach it, and a decline in the water depth that is not faster than the roots are capable of growing. These conditions usually exist at some point, but rarely at the same time, hence the old cottonwoods that are not being replaced.

A hypothesis I have been working on is that wildfire sites like this one could provide a means for cottonwoods to germinate. The fire has cleared the competing vegetation and high runnoff from the deep winter snowpack has resulted in moist soil in flooded areas.


The female's seeds had settled in the moist soil, so they many germinate!

If the flood waters recede at the right pace, the old cottonwood female may get to reproduce after all. One thing that I am not sure of is whether burned soils allow germination. Since I would be leaving New Mexico soon, I brought some of the study site home with me. Before leaving, I scooped up some soil and bagged a few seeds from the old cottonwood.
Yesterday I began a mini experiement to see if they germinate.


I separated seeds from their pods, then buried them in small planters filled with wildfire and unburned plot soils.


To replicate a flood, I set the planters in a large plot and filled it with water. I will gradually lower the water level to emulate a receding flood. To recreate New Mexico conditions, I used the covered bed of my truck, which I rarely drive, into a greenhouse. The black lining helped the greenhouse heat up to a New Mexico-like 90 degrees.

I will report results from my experiment as they develop.

Black-chins and White Nests

The greater roadrunner is the state bird of New Mexico and can be found just about anywhere around Albuquerque.


It is hard to imagine a more charismatic and appropriate bird for this honor. If there was to be a runner-up, however, I would nominate the black-chinned hummingbird.



During the spring and summer in central New Mexico, there is an unbelievable number of these little buzzers in this area. I doubt that an equal or greater number of individual hummingbirds can be found anywhere else in the country for such a long period of time. They buzz around towns, woodlands, and dry deserts and swarm around feeders. When you drive through farm country, you can spot them perched every wire and fence line. At the edge of the Rio Grande bosque, they dart out of the canopy to hover in search of flying insects. When the males are loaded with testosterone, they buzz up and down and side to side in spectacular territorial and aggressive displays.

Within the bosque, they are probably the most abundant nesting birds. Their nests are everywhere and nest survival rates are higher in this forest than in others studied in the region. The bosque is therefore a critical habitat for the southwestern population of this species. Forest Service crews find twice as many hummingbird nests as they do for the second most abundant nester, the mourning dove. During the last year I have been compiling results from eight years of study of over 700 nests. I will be presenting results from these analyses at the American Ornithologists Union meeting here in Portland later this summer. I needed some photos of nests and adults for my presentation, so one of my goals for the New Mexico trip was to view and photograph a few nests.

It did not take long.


When I arrived at my friends Geoff and Aaron's house, Aaron showed me a crazy nest built within the loop of a rope from which a plastic bottle was hung from the ceiling of a shed. This was the tallest nest I have ever seen of this species, it could have been a "double decker", a nest built on top of an old one. Like other nests of this bird, it was bright white because they are built with the cottony seeds of cottonwoods. Another example of the importance of these trees to life in the Rio Grande Valley.



The next day, while measuring vegetation at a wildfire site with the Forest Service crew, I heard a hummingbird buzz away from a very close distance, a sure sign of a nest.

After several minutes of searching we found the nest very low in a Russian olive shrub. The female was incubating two tiny eggs and was eager for us to move on to the next vegetation measurement point.

Results of my analyses suggest that Russian olive is their preferred nesting substrate when available and nests at low heights in shrubs are safer than those built high in trees such as cottonwoods.


I took a quick photo of the nest, but a pesky branch got in the way.

The day after we found the nest, I was checking out sites at Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge when, as luck would have it, some nice folks from Hummingbirds of New Mexico were capturing and banding Back-chins at the headquarters' feeders.


I was able to talk shop about hummingbird research and snap a few pictures that will look great in my presentation.

As you can see, the male sports a shiny purple throat below his namesake black chin. The female is less distinctive, but can be identified by her long and slightly curved bill and overall skinny body shape, relative to other western hummingbird species.

I found one more nest a few days later.


Unfortunately, the photo I took was out of focus, but it gives one an idea of how small and delicate the nests appear. Now that I have been re-immersed in their world, I can get back to work writing papers and presentations about one of my favorite New Mexico birds.

Back From the Land of Enchantment

If you have wondered why I have not posted for a while, it is because I spent the last six days in my beloved state of New Mexico.


Though Sarah and I plan on living indefinitely in Oregon, I consider New Mexico a sort of home, along with my native state of Montana. I am a desert junkie and I spent three summers in New Mexico conducting graduate research. When I finished my thesis, I continued to work with the forest service on projects in or near my study sites. All of these projects are conducted in a large cottonwood forest known locally as "the bosque."


It is a one-of-kind forest made up of huge Rio Grande Cottonwoods (Populus deltoides spp. wislizenii). This forest supports an amazing number of birds and other animals despite the fact that the ecosystem has been completely restructured by humans to maximize water delivery to farms in New Mexico and Texas.

Over the years, engineers have sandwiched the forest between the river and levees. Floods, which are required for cottonwood germination, rarely occur and exotic shrubs have instead moved in below the giant cottonwoods.

These changes have resulted in big problems for the forest.


Wildfire is one of the most urgent of these problems. The bosque runs right through the center of Albuquerque, bringing the threat of wildfire into the heart of an urban area. To lower wildfire risk, managers are removing exotic vegetation and woody debris to reduce fuel loads.


My research projects examine effects of both wildfire and fuel reduction on populations of birds, plants, and insects in the bosque. More details of this work can be found here.

It had been two years since I last visited New Mexico, so I could not wait to return and soak up the rich culture and ecology of the state.


I planned an ambitious schedule to collect as much data and observations at as many sites as possible. I think that I largely succeeded and I will detail my activities in future posts. Apart from my luggage and data returning home 12 hours later than me, my travels went along without a hitch.

I am now back in Oregon adjusting to the change from hot and dry to cool and damp weather. I brought a lot of green chile back with me to ease the transition. I have a lot of data to enter and things to unpack, so I'd better get to it....

Kountin Birds at Killin

Killin Wetlands is one of the premier birds spots in Washington County and for three days each summer, I have the place all to my self. The wetlands are owned and managed by Portland Metro, the tri-county regional government. Each summer, I conduct volunteer point counts to help their biologists monitor restoration effects on the bird community. Point counts are the currency of bird management and conducted by spending five minutes at a point and recording the number and species of every bird seen or heard. On Monday, I made my first visit of the year and counted plenty of birds.

The wetlands are divided into a northern and a southern unit.


Much of the north unit is flooded and contains tall willows.





This white pole marks my favorite point in the north section.


There is something fun about recording birds while standing in waist-deep water.

A few meters away from the point, I accidentally flushed a female cinnamon teal off of her nest in a tuft of grass.


I glanced in the tuft and spotted four small eggs just inches above the water. I waded away quickly, hoping that the female would soon return.

The southern unit is mostly a sea of canary grass growing up to seven feet tall in some areas.


At stations like these I can only see a few feet in each direction, so I need to rely on hearing alone to identify most birds.


I found a trampled path in the grass and found a pile of rodent-chewed willows. I had apparently discovered a beaver highway!



I rescued this cardinal meadowhawk from the road. It seemed to be too chilly for it to fly.

After a few hours wading through the water and swimming through the grass, I completed the survey and identified 38 species. As usual, the most common birds were red-winged blackbirds, song sparrows, marsh wrens, and common yellowthroats. The highlights for me were singing willow flycatchers, an osprey passing overhead, a few ravens, and the amazingly loud grunts of a Virginia rail. I will return in the next two weeks and seek more species.

Great Blue Heron Walk

After two years of watching herons nest near the Hillsboro Library, I decided to organize a Great Blue Heron Week event to show people these and other great birds. Great Blue Heron week is a metro area-wide celebration of urban and suburban wildlife.

I planned a walk around the rookery tree and through the very birdy Dawson Creek Corporate Park. As the event approached, the herons were not at their nests. I hoped that the participants would not be too disappointed if the nests had failed.

On Sunday morning, at least twenty people arrived for the walk. As I feared, we did not see any activity at the nests. Instead, I showed everyone the nests and discussed heron breeding biology.


We walked around the park and spotted a couple of flying herons, as well as Canada geese and mallards tending their fuzzy little young.



We found many more great birds such as American kestrels, black-headed grosbeaks, and cedar waxwings, and everyone was able to get a great view of them in the spotting scope. We stopped by the acorn woodpecker colony, which turned out to be a crowd-pleaser as usual.

We moved on to a nice willow grove, were we found singing Wilson’s warblers, calling willow flycatchers, a begging song sparrow fledgling, and an Anna’s hummingbird on her nest.

At the end of the walk I heard no complaints about lack of heron nesting activity and everyone appeared to have had a great time.

A few minutes later, Sarah, her sister Greta, and Andie the dog met me at the library. We repeated the walk so I could show them all of the cool things I found. We saw the same birds as before plus a blazing male Bullock’s oriole and a female kestrel that carried something to a perch. When we put the scope on it, we could see that she had caught a vole and was starting to eat it from the head down while the unfortunate rodent continued to kick at the air with its hind legs. This was too much for Sarah and Greta to watch, but, being non-eaters of red meat, I feel they are exempt from watching one animal dismantle another.

With one more commitment out of the way, I am now ready to move on to other projects. More on those to come...

Staycation!

Like many others, we elected to stay home this extended weekend. During the last two years, we spent Memorial day weekend in Camp Sherman, on the east slopes of the Cascades with Sarah's family. This year, Sarah's family did not go, so we made our own plans. I miss that ponderosa pine country, but I will soon get my dryland fix in New Mexico.


On Saturday, we went to the Beaverton Farmer's Market and defrosted a freezer at Sarah's parents house. We need the extra freezer space for all the produce we expect from our CSA.
Sarah and her friend shopped on Sunday and I caught up on some Forest Service work.

On Monday, we took a small tour of the Washington County wineries.


We live in the middle of a great and growing wine region that specializes in Pinot Noir, the varietal made famous by the movie Sideways.


We visited five wineries in five hours. We tried some wines, spotted some birds, and enjoyed the views.
The most interesting tasting room was at Shafer Vineyards west of Forest Grove.

This quirky operation sells wines, jellies, and Christmas decorations. The Christmas items were mostly nutcrackers and smokers. I had not seen smokers before and was intrigued. They are apparently traditional decorations in Germany and represent whimsical figures exhaling after taking a pull off of their pipes. An incense cone is placed inside and smoke emerges from the mouth.


My favorite was this German football fan, complete with the national team jersey.

Our favorite wine tasting occured at Apalloni Vineyards.


They gave us tastes straight from the barrels and we were so impressed we signed up for their wine club. We considered it similar to joining a CSA for wine drinkers. Four times a year, we can pick up a few bottles of special releases and enjoy VIP tours of the vineyard. I spent a few days working in their fields two years ago, so I look forward to returning to the grounds.

We finished the trip at Helvatia Vineyards north of Hillsboro. They had planned outdoor fiddle music, but the weather forced the players inside.

Sarah and I made a new friend and enjoyed tasting the wines.

Outside of the tasting rooms, we spotted California quail, western bluebirds, and chipping sparrows, birds we don't usually see in the Orenco Lowlands. We also spotted adorable alpacas,


both woolly


and recently shorn.

We returned to the apartment ready for a four day work week and plenty of other projects ahead.