Outdoors: Having a grand time flushing out birds

I have been hunting pheasants with Tom Lounsbury for about a decade now and Lounsbury (who is a good man, and thorough) was more excited leading up to this season than I’d ever heard him before. His fields were certainly as a gorgeous as I’ve ever seen them – head-high big bluestem and Indian grass across the bulk of them – and Lounsbury, who is not prone to exaggeration, said he was hearing and seeing more roosters this year than he has in many.

But the first hour afoot with competent dogs through some of the prettiest grass this side of South Dakota yielded just two flushes: a lone hen and an unidentifiable single (perhaps a young rooster?) that flushed at about 100 yards.

We heard a single shot from a farther field – Lounsbury had divided us into two foursomes that went to separate fields to start – and then a couple more shotgun reports a short time later.

When we regrouped, there were no birds in the bag and a disagreement about how many had been flushed. Bob Walker, one of the usual suspects on these soirees, had shot a bird that he said folded up nicely, but no one could find it in the grass. Then a bird got up about 25 yards away – a rooster that had no tail feathers, according to Lounsbury – that a couple of other guys got a pop at but failed to bring down. Walker insisted that his bird had been hit hard enough that it wasn’t getting up again. The others, noting the lack of accessories on the rear end of the escapee, were not so sure.

So we got back together to sweep across the fields again, all of us in the same field. It was the way the oldsters in the crowd, which was practically all us, save Isaiah Battel and another fellow who is merely in his 50s, remember how it used to be when we were lads: lots of guys forming a line and marching across the fall fields.

This time, Brady, Bill Parker’s German shorthair, went on point relatively quickly and Russ Mason, chief of wildlife with the Department of Natural Resources, killed a cock. We were on the board.

We pivoted, started across again, and Rub, my setter, obviously had a snootful of scent – he was back-and-forthing at a frantic pace – but was unable to pinpoint it and Samson, Battel’s lumbering Lab, was acting awfully birdy, too. A runner. Sixty yards later, the bird got up, well off to my right and I heard a couple of shotgun reports, but saw the bird going away from right to left (my favorite shot) so I swung and slapped the trigger. It fell deader than disco.

Over the next half hour we put up four more roosters within shooting range, two of which wound up dead. Mason killed his limit bird and Parker brought one down, too. Rub pointed, a bird flushed in front of Battel, going away from us to Battel’s right, but the youngster of the group missed it – “I missed a lay-up,” he later allowed, rather sheepishly – and by the time I had a clean shot at the going-away bird, I missed it, too. The fourth drew dispatched lead but no impact. A final bird got up at marginal shooting range, I heard someone holler “hen,” and as I relaxed, I saw tail feathers. I might have been able to get him if I hadn’t hesitated. (And I won’t rat out the guy who misidentified it; he knows who he is.)

So depending on how you do the math, we were four of seven or eight. Not stellar, but not so bad.

We broke for lunch, then went back to the original field Lounsbury had hunted and a cock got up within shooting range of a couple of guys who failed to execute. We put up two more roosters from that field (one a reflush?) – both at rifle distance – tromped across the other field again, put up a couple of roosters at distances that failed to yield a shot, and that was it.

Eight hunters, most with about a half day of boots on the ground, with seven dogs (a setter, a shorthair, a Brittany, two Labs and a beagle) provided four birds for the pot. We should have killed at least a couple more and could have even managed one per man had everyone done what we’d come to do. (Did anyone ever miss back in the day? Never hear much about that, do you?)

We’d planned one more sweep, the last hour or so of the day, but most of the guys bailed out and it started to rain. Rub, who runs like a sprinter until he’s exhausted, was toast. Only Samson had any juice left. I didn’t like our odds, I called it.

Still, it was grand.

You hear a lot about how there aren’t any pheasants anymore -- and compared to the ‘60s, I guess there aren’t. But in truth, long-term data from the DNR indicates that even during the best of times, pheasant hunters in Michigan averaged half a bird per day. That’s exactly what happened for us.

So the old line that the DNR trots out annually – find the right habitat and you’ll find pheasants – is as true as it’s ever been. They’re out there. You’ve just got to find them.

How young female birds benefit from an older male partner

Paper draws on wealth of data about gray jays in Ontario's Algonquin Park

A May-December romance brings benefits for young female gray jays mated to older males, according to new Canadian research.

The paper, published this month in the journal Animal Behaviour, used almost four decades of data on a marked population of gray jays in Ontario's Algonquin Park to study how the birds adjust their reproductive habits in response to changes in temperature and other conditions.

Gray jays, also known as Canada jays or whisky jacks, don't migrate south in the winter, instead living year-round in boreal forests across Canada and the northern U.S.

They manage this feat of survival by caching food all over their large, permanent habitats, then retrieving it during the winter months. The small, fluffy birds take advantage of those winter supplies to nest much earlier than most other birds, laying eggs between late February and March.

Gray jays don't migrate during the winter, instead relying on hidden caches of food to feed themselves and their offspring. (Dan Strickland)

The researchers found that female gray jays that laid their eggs earlier in the season had the most reproductive success, with a higher survival rate for offspring.

"That's slightly counterintuitive when you're talking about a bird that nests in the winter, because earlier means colder," said Ryan Norris, an associate professor at the University of Guelph and co-author of the paper.

"But it presumably gives them more time for their young to develop over the breeding period."

By breeding early, said Norris, gray jay pairs give their young more time to learn the food caching and retrieval skills that will help them survive the winter.

The benefit of an older male mate

The choice to breed early comes with experience.

Older female gray jays tended to lay their eggs earlier than younger females, possibly because older birds are more effective at finding and caching food for winter.

However, young gray jay females were more likely to lay their eggs earlier — and achieve better reproductive outcomes — when partnered with an older male over a younger male, suggesting that "older male partners may buffer the effects of female inexperience."

Because they don't migrate south during the winter, gray jays can lay their eggs as early as late February. (Brett Forsyth)

The younger females mated with older males made those beneficial laying choices regardless of variations in temperature that might have influenced them to lay later if they had mated with a younger male. This suggests a surprising male influence in female reproductive timing, and shows that social environment can influence gray jays' reproductive choices.

"Nobody's reported this before in birds, this kind of effect that males can have on female laying decisions," said Norris.

Seeking insight into climate change

Although these findings about older males' influence on younger females' reproductive choices are interesting in and of themselves, the researchers set out to learn more about how gray jays reacted to climate change.

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"It contributes towards being able to predict the impact of climate change on populations," said Norris.

"Climate change is affecting wild populations everywhere around the world, and we have to be able to understand how, and we have to be able to predict what's going to happen in the future."

Researchers have marked and studied a group of gray jays in Ontario's Algonquin Park for decades, gathering a wealth of data about the birds. (Amy Newman)

Gray jays are especially good for studying the long-term effects of climate change on reproduction because they have a remarkably long lifespan for such small birds — some of the Algonquin Park gray jays have been known to live as long as 16 years.

Because Algonquin Park represents the southern edge of the gray jays' range, the birds there experience relatively warm conditions, said Norris.

Decades of studying gray jays

The research findings are "partly a lesson on the value of long-term studies," said Norris, who credits co-author Dan Strickland with managing decades of research on the Algonquin Park gray jays and helping to produce such a long-term body of data.

Strickland himself credits Russ Rutter, an Algonquin Park naturalist who started studying the park's gray jays in the 1960s. Strickland continued and expanded the work after Rutter's death in 1976 and continued studying the gray jays even after he retired as chief park naturalist in 2000.

"It's doubtful that there's a study of a marked population in Canada, and maybe even the world, that has been studied as long as this one has," said Strickland.

But Strickland said Algonquin Park's gray jay population is in decline, possibly because of climate change, as the gray jays rely on cold weather to refrigerate their winter caches and provide enough food to feed their young.

Gray jays are known for brashly approaching humans in search of food. (Ryan Norris)

Strickland speaks fondly of his years of interaction with the gray jays, which are known for boldly approaching humans in search of food.

"They're cute, and they're fluffy, and a lot of people mark their interest in nature going back to when they had a wild bird actually land on their hand and take food," said Strickland.

"It's a neat bridge between urban man and wild nature."

For 10 months out of the year, common swifts live in mid-air

Common swifts are known for their impressive aerial abilities, capturing food and nest material while in flight. Now, by attaching data loggers to the birds, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on October 27 have confirmed what some had suspected: common swifts can go for most of the year (10 months!) without ever coming down.

While there had been examples of birds remaining in flight for periods of months, including frigate birds and alpine swifts, the evidence on common swifts sets a new record, the researchers say.

"When the common swifts leave their breeding site in August for a migration to the Central African rainforests via West Africa, they never touch ground until they return for the next breeding season 10 months later," says Anders Hedenström of Lund University in Sweden. "Some individuals may roost for brief periods, or even entire nights in mid-winter, but others literally never landed during this period."

Hedenström says the birds likely save energy during the day by gliding in upward currents of warm air. But they also ascend to high altitudes each day at dawn and dusk.

Scientists had long ago proposed that swifts might spend most of their lives in flight. To find out, Hedenström and colleagues developed a new type of micro data logger. The data loggers record acceleration to monitor the birds' flight activity. Later, the researchers added light sensors for use in geolocation. The researchers attached the data loggers to 19 common swifts that were later recaptured.

The data showed that swifts spend more than 99 percent of their time during their 10-month non-breeding period in flight. While some individuals settled down at some point, others never did. The birds' flight activity often appeared lower during the day than at night, most likely because the birds spent their days soaring on warm air currents.

Hedenström says the researchers don't yet know whether or how the birds sleep. But, "the fact that some individuals never landed during 10 months suggests they sleep on the wing." Perhaps they find time to nap during slow descents at dawn and dusk, he suggests. That's one possibility he and his colleagues hope to explore in future research.

Despite the high energetic costs associated with all that flight, common swifts also manage to live surprisingly long lives, contrary to popular notions about living hard and dying young. There are documented cases of common swifts living to the age of 20.

In that time, "the accumulated flight distance equals seven round-trip journeys to the moon," Hedenström says. And that, he says, means there are many more intriguing questions to ask and answer about the birds' physiology.