Birds of a feather

MAT-SU — Birders in Alaska, Canada and some as far south as Central America will begin tracking the movements of wild birds in their neighborhoods Saturday so scientists can learn more about migration habits, bird distribution and their numbers.

Bob Winckler, who lives in the Settlers Bay area, is participating in Project FeederWatch and has several feeders outside a picture window. He will dedicate as much as 12 hours over two days to count the birds that frequent his yard.

He and the other participants in the program don’t count each bird, they count the highest number of birds they see of the same species during their time watching.

“We have seven to eight species that come here,” he said, rattling off some of them: two kinds of woodpeckers, chickadees, redpolls, nuthatches, jays, magpies and pine siskins. An occasional hawk or falcon will come by to try to get a lunch, but Winckler has most of his feeders near a stand of trees so the birds can escape into the woods where the hawks have trouble finding them.

“They all rely on each other’s warning calls,” Winckler said, to scatter for the trees when danger approaches.

He also has a squirrel that seems to think all the seeds belong to him, but Winckler has put up barriers under the feeders to keep the rodent out. He also has netting in front of his window so when the birds get spooked they don’t bang into the glass, but instead hit the net and bounce off unharmed.

Winckler said people who want to participate, some 40 Alaskans do each year, can watch for just an hour, but must log that time as well as the weather conditions and other elements scientists might find useful in determining where and how many birds are at a given time.

The program runs through April 3, 2009, and is run by site of the coordinating institution, Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Bird Studies Canada.

Winckler said when he was on Adak for the Navy he got his start birding from one of his superiors at the time who was one of the top birders in the nation. The officer would take him out to watch for birds, particularly at Clam Lagoon where birds frequent on the remote island.

He spent two hitches there that totaled more than 20 years, so he was able to hone his birding skills as well as raise a family on the treeless, wind-swept outpost.

A family of birders

Bird watching has become a family project for the Gaisers, who live in the Lazy Mountain area outside Palmer.

Jim and Stephanie Gaiser and their five home-schooled children are using a Cornell home-school FeederWatch guide that helps them not only keep track of birds but includes other disciplines such as math and science to incorporate in the birding exercises.

“They can calculate how many birds multiplied by a set amount of minutes to tell them what the bird load is at a feeder,” Jim Gaiser said.

The family also got to witness an avian air assault to defend a nest.

“A junco was trying to protect her nest against weasels,” Gaiser said. “The birds ganged together as a community and drove the weasel off. Woodpeckers, chickadees, juncos and ruby-crowned kinglets — different kinds of aircraft — attacking the weasel.”

He said the kinglet, despite its diminutive size — about 4 inches tall and a third of an ounce — was the most ferocious in defending the other species’ nest by dive-bombing the weasel.

A family of woodpeckers became so accustomed to the family of Gaisers that the children have the birds literally eating out of their hands.

In addition to the woodpeckers, and the above-mentioned birds, the Gaisers see pine grosbeaks, redpolls, shrikes, brown creepers, nuthatches, great horned owls, rough-legged and red-tailed hawks, Merlin falcons, northern hawk owls and, of course, magpies.

They’ve also watched eagles tear through huge cottonwoods on their property tearing limbs from the treetops for branches to build their nests.

“The great horned owls had three babies,” Gaiser said, “and one of the babies decided to stay in a tree near our house. In the summer, we like to leave some windows down. The screeching just about made us run him off. But that’s the way the mother finds them.”

Contact T.C. Mitchell at valleylife@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.