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Cinnamon Teal – spice on the water

Seasonal colors, check! Pumpkin spices, check! Plentiful food and gathering with family? Check and check! Cinnamon teals are birds of the season! Turkeys notwithstanding.

Their color is brilliant autumn rust, a very red cinnamon.

The spice, of course, is in their name.

Feasting? That’s what the season is for: they dine and rest in preparation for raising young next spring.

And gathering with family? Cinnamon teals often feed together in tight groups, but they are not so numerous that they cover lakes the way some ducks and geese do. Fortunately, they seem to have an inclusive attitude, and readily paddle among other ducks on the ponds– adding spice to the mix, one might say.

Cinnamon Teal Drake

Cinnamon Teal Drake

Teals are small dabbling ducks. The dabblers are ducks who feed not by diving but by skimming aquatic plants and insects from the surface or tipping tail-up to stretch below water to gather snails from the bottom of their shallow ponds. Cinnamon teal, with relatively large bills perfect for filtering surface water, often skim the top of a pond near the cattails and tules that ring it.

Along those tules a male may establish a favored resting spot, perhaps in the morning sun. There his fiery eye and brilliant rust-colored head and lower body can shine. If he stretches a wing he shows a green patch at the hind end of his upper wing, the teal color that defines this group. Forward of that color patch, known as a speculum, he shows an even larger strip of powdery blue feathers. But he does not always shine so brightly.

Ducks are heavy birds, and their aerodynamics require them to fly fast or not at all. That requires all their feathers to be in good form. Most birds molt, or replace their feathers, piecemeal, but ducks doing so would be flight-compromised for a long time. Instead they lose all their large feathers at once, becoming completely flightless for a much shorter period. Male ducks typically enter this phase after their young have hatched. They lose their bright colors and their flight feathers. Brown camouflage feathers grow in, and they retire from public life for a couple months. By mid to late fall they will grow colorful new feathers, including flight feathers

Cinnamon Teal Female

The timing works well. The females have raised their ducklings, and the young have fledged and flown. She is ready to start looking for a mate for next year just as he is freshly dressed to impress. She will study the males as they preen and strut for her attention, and make her selection. The pair will bond over the winter.

The female runs nesting. She builds her nest in dead pond-side vegetation, often under overhanging reeds that require her to tunnel into the den. There she will incubate 4-16 eggs, sometimes including eggs donated by a female from another species. When the young hatch in about three weeks she will guide them for a couple months, until they take wing to spread their own spice.

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Return of the Salmon Festival at the Coleman National Fish Hatchery

 

Join us as we celebrate the 28th annual Return of the Salmon Festival. This family friendly event is free to the public and will have over 50 booths with information and activities. View salmon spawning operations, a salmon aquarium, natural resource information booths and much more. Wintu Audubon will sponsor a booth with activities for all.

Coleman Fish Hatchery is resuming its Return of the Salmon Festival and Wintu Audubon will once again offer a booth for the birds, not to mention the festival goers! At our booth we hand out information on birds and the chapter, and help lucky children make quail-calls! If you can spare a couple hours to help staff our booth, please contact Dan Greaney at greaneys@yahoo.com .  No expertise but friendliness required!

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Nur Pon Open Space

Join Wintu Audubon Society for a bird walk around Nur Pon on Thursday, October 20 at 9:00 am. Nur Pon, or “Salmon Run” in the Wintu language, was once known as Henderson Open Space before the City of Redding and numerous other agencies began a restoration project that established a side channel along the Sacramento River for salmon spawning. The parkland has been cleared of debris, much of the non-native vegetation has been removed, the area fenced and secured, and more restoration work is underway.

Wintu Audubon Education Chair Tricia Ford will lead the easy walk of approximately 1.5 miles, taking two to three hours to identify the birds of river and oak woodland. Binoculars will be available for loan. Hiking boots are recommended for the river cobble. Bring water and a snack. Nur Pon is off Hartnell Avenue at the intersection of Parkview Avenue and Henderson Road on the east side of the river. Park behind the Cobblestone Shopping Center (once the site of Raley’s Supermarket) inside the wrought iron fence.

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Return of the Salmon Festival at the Coleman National Fish Hatchery

 

Join us as we celebrate the 28th annual Return of the Salmon Festival. This family friendly event is free to the public and will have over 50 booths with information and activities. View salmon spawning operations, a salmon aquarium, natural resource information booths and much more. Wintu Audubon will sponsor a booth with activities for all.

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California Condor – Coming Soon to a Sky Near You

This condor soaring in Zion National Park shows its white wing wedges, its bald head that sheds bacteria, and the number tags that allow the condor recovery team to track their releases.

For some people, there is a hole in the sky, a blank spot. The condor is missing.

When humans first crossed the Bering Strait into North America condors soared widely across the continent. Their fossils have been found along all the coastal regions of the contiguous US. But the megafauna–mastodons, ground sloths, and other giants–began to die off, and the scavengers that likely ate their carcasses also declined. By the time Lewis and Clark sighted condors in the Columbia River gorge in 1805, it appears they lived only from British Columbia down to Baja California. It is likely that marine mammals as well as elk fed these birds. In any case, as pioneers and settlers moved into the area, they dwindled, their range further shrank, and they became known as “California” condors.

Condors are huge. Their wingspan is routinely over nine feet. Their flight habits resemble those of their little cousins, turkey vultures. On spread wings they ride warm columns of air to thousands of feet up. Then they can float for miles and miles, seeking the dead animals below that will make their meals, all without once flapping their airplane wings after the initial labor of getting airborne.

Condors have keen eyesight, but they lack the sense of smell that turkey vultures have. So sometimes the smaller vultures can find a dinner carcass first. But if the hide is too thick, they cannot cut through it, and must await the condor, whose size and power allows it to rip through the tougher hides. Once a carcass is opened, first golden eagles may dine, then condors, and then the other scavengers.

Over the last couple centuries shooting, poisoning, egg-collecting, and harassment brought the number of California condors down to twenty-seven. In a desperate attempt to save them, the US Fish & Wildlife Service captured the last wild condors in 1987 and launched a breeding program that sought to bring them back by protecting them, avoiding inbreeding, and promoting egg-laying.

Condors reproduce slowly. They lay just one egg in a nest, and after two months of incubation the hatchling depends on its parents for at least another six months. With this long fledging period, the parents usually nest only every other year. The captive breeding team successfully doubled population growth by removing the first egg quickly, to be raised by hand.  The mother bird then was likely to lay a second egg, which the condors themselves incubated and raised.
The captive breeding program has been successful, so that now three hundred twenty-four condors are flying free in Arizona and Southern California. And now comes the North State’s turn.

In 2008 the Yurok tribe, centered along the lower Klamath River, began the work of returning the condor, prey-go-neesh by its older name, to North State skies. They collaborated with many groups and agencies, including US Fish and Wildlife, National and State Parks, and the Oregon, Los Angeles, and San Diego Zoos. They evaluated essential elements of habitat. They found that marine and terrestrial wildlife carcasses will likely be available to North State condors. They found that DDT and its related chemicals, which are still produced in South America, are at non-catastrophic levels this far north. They found that lead from ingested bullets could be fatal, and were working with hunters to replace lead bullets when the state banned lead bullets in 2019.

The tribe has also worked to develop their own capacity to acclimate new releases, monitor the birds, and treat them for problems such as lead poisoning.
The birds to be released in the North State will be young, just two years old. They can begin to breed at age seven or eight. The condor lifespan can be upwards of sixty years.  The plan is to release six birds each year for twenty years.

If there is a hole in our sky, the condors will begin to fill it this spring. The first two birds are slated to be released this April or May. Look skyward for updates!

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