Waterfowl on a Rainy Day

Though soggy, windy, and rainy, it happened to be a delightfully mild day to search for migrating waterfowl in the Lower Susquehanna River Watershed.  Here’s a look at what we found temporarily grounded by the poor flight conditions…

Northern Pintails
It’s prime time for northbound Northern Pintails.
American Wigeons and Ring-necked Ducks
This raft of distant waterfowl appears to include mostly American Wigeons and Ring-necked Ducks.
Ring-necked Duck
A much more cooperative drake Ring-necked Duck.
American Black Ducks
A couple of American Black Ducks take a break during an afternoon shower.
Northern Shovelers
A pair of Northern Shovelers in the rain.
Common Mergansers
And a pair of blissful Common Mergansers.
Common Mergansers
Uh oh!…must be something he said.

The Fog of a January Thaw

As week-old snow and ice slowly disappears from the Lower Susquehanna River Watershed landscape, we ventured out to see what might be lurking in the dense clouds of fog that for more than two days now have accompanied a mid-winter warm spell.

York Haven Dam Powerhouse
After freezing to a slushy consistency earlier this week, the Susquehanna is already beginning to thaw.   Below the York Haven Dam at Conewago Falls, the water is open and ice-free.
Mallards and a pair of American Wigeon on a frozen lake.
On frozen man-made lakes and ponds, geese and ducks like these Mallards and American Wigeon are presently concentrated around small pockets of open water.
American Robin in a Callery pear
During the past ten days, American Robin numbers have exploded throughout the lower Susquehanna valley.  The majority of these birds may be a mix of both those coming south to escape the late onset of wintry conditions to our north and those inching north into our region as early spring migrants.
American Robin
The January thaw has melted the snow from lawns and fields to provide thousands of visiting robins with a chance to forage for earthworms.
Cooper's Hawk
A visit by this young Cooper’s Hawk to the susquehannnawildlife.net headquarters garden sent songbirds scrambling…
Eastern Gray Squirrel
…but did nothing to unnerve our resident Eastern Gray Squirrels,…
Eastern Gray Squirrel
…which promptly went into tail-waving mode to advertise their presence.
Red-tailed Hawk
But earlier in the week, when heavy snow cover in the rural areas surrounding our urbanized neighborhood made it difficult for rodent-eating raptors to find food, we received brief visits from both a Red-tailed Hawk…
Red-shouldered Hawk
…and this young Red-shouldered Hawk, an uncommon bird of prey most often found in wet woods and other lowlands.
Eastern Gray Squirrel
To escape notice during visits by these larger raptors, our squirrels remained motionless and commenced performance of their best bump-on-a-log impressions.
Red-shouldered Hawk in flight.
Unimpressed, each of our visiting buteos remained for just a few minutes before moving on in search of more favorable hunting grounds and prey.
Early Successional Growth
As snow melted and exposed bare ground in fields of early successional growth, we encountered…
White-crowned Sparrow
…a flock of White-crowned Sparrows, most in first-winter plumage…
American Tree Sparrow
…and at least a dozen American Tree Sparrows.  During the twentieth century, these handsome songbirds were regular winter visitors to the lower Susquehanna region.  During recent decades, they’ve become increasingly more difficult to find.  Currently, moderate numbers appear to be arriving to escape harsher weather to our north.
Adult Male Northern Harrier
What could be more appropriate on a foggy, gray evening than finding a “gray ghost” (adult male Northern Harrier) patrolling the fields in search of mice and voles.

If scenes of a January thaw begin to awaken your hopes and aspirations for all things spring, then you’ll appreciate this pair of closing photographs…

Pileated Woodpecker in Silver Maple
The maroon-red flower buds of Silver Maples are beginning to swell.  And woodpeckers including Pileated Woodpeckers are beginning to drum, a timber-pounding behavior they use to establish breeding territories in habitats with suitable sites for cavity nesting.
Skunk Cabbage
In wet soil surrounding spring seeps and streams, Skunk Cabbage is rising through the leaf litter to herald the coming of a new season.  Spring must surely be just around the corner.

Off To The Races

Trying to get a favorable place to nest before others arrive, the “early birds” are presently racing north through the lower Susquehanna valley.  Check out these sightings from earlier today…

Ring-necked Ducks
A pair of Ring-necked Ducks.
Hooded Mergansers
Hooded Mergansers, two males and a female.
American Wigeons
A pair of American Wigeons.
A male Canvasback.
A male Canvasback.
Eastern Phoebe
During these chilly days of late winter, this hardy Eastern Phoebe finds sustenance by seizing flying insects along the water’s edge.
An American Robin in classic worm-hunting posture.
Possibly our most familiar sign of spring, an American Robin in classic worm-hunting posture.
A Common Grackle in a maple tree that is starting to flower.
An iridescent Common Grackle in a maple tree that is beginning to flower.
A male Red-winged Blackbird singing near a small patch of cattails.
A male Red-winged Blackbird singing from a perch near a small patch of cattails.  During the spring migration, noisy flocks of males compete for a breeding territory at these sites.  Each of the victors defends his spot and awaits the arrival of a female mate while the losers move on to vie for their own breeding location farther north.

Time to get outside and have a look.  The spectacle of spring migration passes quickly.  You don’t want to miss it!

An Encore of the Susquehanna Seawatch

In late March and early April, a rainy night and fog at daybreak can lead to an ideal morning for spotting migratory waterfowl and seabirds during their layover on the lower Susquehanna.  Visibility was just good enough to spot these birds at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, most of them feeding at midriver.

Northern Shovelers are regular migrants, more often seen on ponds and in wetlands than on the river.
A pair of American Wigeons head upriver.
A Horned Grebe.
A small flock of northbound Buffleheads.
Ring-necked Ducks.
Lesser Scaup, eight of the more than 100 seen along Front Street in Harrisburg at the Pennsylvania Governor’s Residence.  Note how the white bar on the wing’s secondaries becomes diffused and dusky in the primaries.
Lesser Scaup spend the winter on bays and lakes to our south.
More Scaup, the lead bird with bright white extending through the secondaries into the primaries is possibly a Greater Scaup (Aythya marila).
Long-tailed Ducks, formerly known as Oldsquaw, are a diving duck that winters on the Great Lakes and on bays along the Atlantic Coast.  They nest on freshwater ponds and lakes in the tundra of Canada and Alaska.
A male Common Merganser.
This pair of Hooded Mergansers may be nesting in a tree cavity nearby.
The local Peregrine Falcon grabbed a passing Common Grackle…
…prompting the more than 100 Bonaparte’s Gulls in the vicinity to quickly depart and fly upstream.
Birds of Conewago Falls in the Lower Susquehanna River Watershed: Northern Flicker
It pays to keep an eye on the trees along the shoreline too.  Migrants like this Northern Flicker are beginning to come through in numbers.

Photo of the Day

Birds/Waterfowl of Conewago Falls in the Lower Susquehanna River Watershed: American Wigeons
American Wigeons, sometimes called Baldpates because of the white foreheads and caps on the drake birds, are migrating through the Lower Susquehanna River Watershed right now.  These dabbling ducks feed mostly upon vegetative matter in the shallow waters of wetlands and ponds.  They’ll cross the border into Canada to nest. 

A Tufted Duck at Middle Creek

With large crowds of observers stopping by at the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area to view the thousands of migrating Snow Geese and Tundra Swans there, you may not notice the smaller but just as enthusiastic crowd gathering at the refuge to see a single, rather inconspicuous waterfowl, a male Tufted Duck (Aythya fuligula).  This extraordinarily rare visitor has been on the refuge for at least two weeks now.  The Tufted Duck, a diving benthic feeder, is native to Europe and Asia, but this vagrant individual seems to be comfortable in the company of its North American counterparts, a flock of Ring-necked Ducks.  Birders known as “listers” relish the chance to see such an unusual find.  Many are traveling from bordering states for a chance to add it to their list of species observed during their lifetime—their “life list”.

Birds/Waterfowl of Conewago Falls in the Lower Susquehanna River Watershed: Tufted Duck
The male Tufted Duck (right) with a male Ring-necked Duck (left).
Birds/Waterfowl of Conewago Falls in the Lower Susquehanna River Watershed: Tufted Duck
This male Tufted Duck has been seen in the company of Ring-necked Ducks and other waterfowl on this pond located opposite the small white shed along Hopeland Road in the Lebanon County section of the Middle Creek W.M.A.  It has also been seen on other nearby ponds and, when the Hopeland Road pond is frozen, on the main lake near Willow Point.
Birds/Waterfowl of Conewago Falls in the Lower Susquehanna River Watershed: Tufted Duck
A Canada Goose, an American Wigeon, and the rare Tufted Duck.  If you want to see the Tufted Duck’s “tuft”, you’ll need to remember your binoculars or, better yet, a spotting scope.

Want to start a “life list” of bird sightings?  Just get out a piece of paper or start a document on your computer and jot down the name of the bird and the date and location where you saw it for the first time.  That’s all there is to it.  Beginning a “life list” can be the start of a lifelong passion.  And a Tufted Duck wouldn’t be too shabby as the first “lifer” on your list.

2020: A Good Year

You say you really don’t want to take a look back at 2020?  Okay, we understand.  But here’s something you may find interesting, and it has to do with the Susquehanna River in 2020.

As you may know, the National Weather Service has calculated the mean temperature for the year 2020 as monitored just upriver from Conewago Falls at Harrisburg International Airport.  The 56.7° Fahrenheit value was the highest in nearly 130 years of monitoring at the various stations used to register official climate statistics for the capital city.  The previous high, 56.6°, was set in 1998.

Though not a prerequisite for its occurrence, record-breaking heat was accompanied by a drought in 2020.  Most of the Susquehanna River drainage basin experienced drought conditions during the second half of the year, particularly areas of the watershed upstream of Conewago Falls.  A lack of significant rainfall resulted in low river flows throughout late summer and much of the autumn.  Lacking water from the northern reaches, we see mid-river rocks and experience minimal readings on flow gauges along the lower Susquehanna, even if our local precipitation happens to be about average.

Back in October, when the river was about as low as it was going to get, we took a walk across the Susquehanna at Columbia-Wrightsville atop the Route 462/Veteran’s Memorial Bridge to have a look at the benthos—the life on the river’s bottom.

As we begin our stroll across the river, we quickly notice Mallards and a Double-crested Cormorant (far left) feeding among aquatic plants.  You can see the leaves of the vegetation just breaking the water’s surface, particularly behind the feeding waterfowl.  Let’s have a closer look.
An underwater meadow of American Eelgrass (Vallisneria americana) as seen from atop the Veteran’s Memorial Bridge at Columbia-Wrightsville.  Also known as Freshwater Eelgrass, Tapegrass, and Wild Celery, it is without a doubt the Susquehanna’s most important submerged aquatic plant.  It grows in alluvial substrate (gravel, sand, mud, etc.) in river segments with moderate to slow current.  Water three to six feet deep in bright sunshine is ideal for its growth, so an absence of flooding and the sun-blocking turbidity of muddy silt-laden water is favorable.
Plants in the genus Vallisneria have ribbon-like leaves up to three feet in length that grow from nodes rooted along the creeping stems called runners.  A single plant can, over a period of years, spread by runners to create a sizable clump or intertwine with other individual plants to establish dense meadows and an essential wildlife habitat.
An uprooted segment of eelgrass floats over a thick bed of what may be parts of the same plant.  Eelgrass meadows on the lower Susquehanna River were decimated by several events: deposition of anthracite coal sediments (culm) in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, dredging of the same anthracite coal sediments during the mid-twentieth century, and the ongoing deposition of sediments from erosion occurring in farm fields, logged forests, abandoned mill ponds, and along denuded streambanks.  Not only has each of these events impacted the plants physically by either burying them or ripping them out by the roots, each has also contributed to the increase in water turbidity (cloudiness) that blocks sunlight and impairs their growth and recovery.
A submerged log surrounded by beds of eelgrass forms a haven for fishes in sections of the river lacking the structure found in rock-rich places like Conewago Falls.  A period absent of high water and sediment runoff extended through the growing season in 2020 to allow lush clumps of eelgrass like these to thrive and further improve water quality by taking up nutrients, particularly nitrogen and phosphorus.  Nutrients used by vascular plants including eelgrass become unavailable for feeding detrimental algal blooms in downstream waters including Chesapeake Bay.
Small fishes and invertebrates attract predatory fishes to eelgrass beds.  We watched this Smallmouth Bass leave an ambush site among eelgrass’s lush growth to shadow a Common Carp as it rummaged through the substrate for small bits of food.  The bass would snatch up crayfish that darted away from the cover of stones disturbed by the foraging carp.
Sunfishes are among the species taking advantage of eelgrass beds for spawning.  They’ll build a nest scrape in the margins between clumps of plants allowing their young quick access to dense cover upon hatching.  The abundance of invertebrate life among the leaves of eelgrass nourishes feeding fishes, and in turn provides food for predators including Bald Eagles, this one carrying a freshly-caught Bluegill.

These improvements in water quality and wildlife habitat can have a ripple effect.  In 2020, the reduction in nutrient loads entering Chesapeake Bay from the low-flowing Susquehanna may have combined with better-than-average flows from some of the bay’s lesser-polluted smaller tributaries to yield a reduction in the size of the bay’s oxygen-deprived “dead zones”.  These dead zones typically occur in late summer when water temperatures are at their warmest, dissolved oxygen levels are at their lowest, and nutrient-fed algal blooms have peaked and died.  Algal blooms can self-enhance their severity by clouding water, which blocks sunlight from reaching submerged aquatic plants and stunts their growth—making quantities of unconsumed nutrients available to make more algae.  When a huge biomass of algae dies in a susceptible part of the bay, its decay can consume enough of the remaining dissolved oxygen to kill aquatic organisms and create a “dead zone”.  The Chesapeake Bay Program reports that the average size of this year’s dead zone was 1.0 cubic miles, just below the 35-year average of 1.2 cubic miles.

Back on a stormy day in mid-November, 2020, we took a look at the tidal freshwater section of Chesapeake Bay, the area known as Susquehanna Flats, located just to the southwest of the river’s mouth at Havre de Grace, Maryland.  We wanted to see how the restored American Eelgrass beds there might have fared during a growing season with below average loads of nutrients and life-choking sediments spilling out of the nearby Susquehanna River.  Here’s what we saw.

We followed the signs from Havre de Grace to Swan Harbor Farm Park.
Harford County Parks and Recreation’s Swan Harbor Farm Park consists of a recently-acquired farming estate overlooking the tidal freshwater of Susquehanna Flats.
Along the bay shore, a gazebo and a fishing pier have been added.  Both provide excellent observation points.
The shoreline looked the way it should look on upper Chesapeake Bay, a vegetated buffer and piles of trees and other organic matter at the high-water line.  There was less man-made garbage than we might find following a summer that experienced an outflow from river flooding, but there was still more than we should be seeing.
Judging by the piles of fresh American Eelgrass on the beach, it looks like it’s been a good year.  Though considered a freshwater plant, eelgrass will tolerate some brackish water, which typically invades upper Chesapeake Bay each autumn due to a seasonal reduction in freshwater inflow from the Susquehanna and other tributaries.  Saltwater can creep still further north when the freshwater input falls below seasonal norms during years of severe drought.  The Susquehanna Flats portion of the upper bay very rarely experiences an invasion by brackish water; there was none in 2020.
As we scanned the area with binoculars and a spotting scope, a raft of over one thousand ducks and American Coots (foreground) could be seen bobbing among floating eelgrass leaves and clumps of the plants that had broken away from their mooring in the mud.  Waterfowl feed on eelgrass leaves and on the isopods and other invertebrates that make this plant community their home.
While coots and grebes seemed to favor the shallower water near shore, a wide variety of both diving and dabbling ducks were widespread in the eelgrass beds more distant.  Discernable were Ring-necked Ducks, scaup, scoters, Long-tailed Ducks, Redheads, American Wigeons, Gadwall, Ruddy Ducks, American Black Ducks, and Buffleheads.

We noticed a few Canvasbacks (Aythya valisineria) on the Susquehanna Flats during our visit.  Canvasbacks are renowned as benthic feeders, preferring the tubers and other parts of submerged aquatic plants (a.k.a. submersed aquatic vegetation or S.A.V.) including eelgrass, but also feeding on invertebrates including bivalves.  The association between Canvasbacks and eelgrass is reflected in the former’s scientific species name valisineria, a derivitive of the genus name of the latter, Vallisneria.

Canvasbacks on Chesapeake Bay.  (United States Fish and Wildlife Service image by Ryan Hagerty)

The plight of the Canvasback and of American Eelgrass on the Susquehanna River was described by Herbert H. Beck in his account of the birds found in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, published in 1924:

“Like all ducks, however, it stops to feed within the county less frequently than formerly, principally because the vast beds of wild celery which existed earlier on broads of the Susquehanna, as at Marietta and Washington Borough, have now been almost entirely wiped out by sedimentation of culm (anthracite coal waste).  Prior to 1875 the four or five square miles of quiet water off Marietta were often as abundantly spread with wild fowl as the Susquehanna Flats are now.”

Beck quotes old Marietta resident and gunner Henry Zink:

“Sometimes there were as many as 500,000 ducks of various kinds on the Marietta broad at one time.”

The abundance of Canvasbacks and other ducks on the Susquehanna Flats would eventually plummet too.  In the 1950s, there were an estimated 250, 000 Canvasbacks wintering on Chesapeake Bay, primarily in the area of the American Eelgrass, a.k.a. Wild Celery, beds on the Susquehanna Flats.  When those eelgrass beds started disappearing during the second half of the twentieth century, the numbers of Canvasbacks wintering on the bay took a nosedive.  As a population, the birds moved elsewhere to feed on different sources of food, often in saltier estuarine waters.

Canvasbacks were able to eat other foods and change their winter range to adapt to the loss of habitat on the Susquehanna River and Chesapeake Bay.  But not all species are the omnivores that Canvasbacks happen to be, so they can’t just change their diet and/or fly away to a better place.  And every time a habitat like the American Eelgrass plant community is eliminated from a region, it fragments the range for each species that relied upon it for all or part of its life cycle.  Wildlife species get compacted into smaller and smaller suitable spaces and eventually their abundance and diversity are impacted.  We sometimes marvel at large concentrations of birds and other wildlife without seeing the whole picture—that man has compressed them into ever-shrinking pieces of habitat that are but a fraction of the widespread environs they once utilized for survival.  Then we sometimes harass and persecute them on the little pieces of refuge that remain.  It’s not very nice, is it?

By the end of 2020, things on the Susquehanna were getting back to normal.  Near normal rainfall over much of the watershed during the final three months of the year was supplemented by a mid-December snowstorm, then heavy downpours on Christmas Eve melted it all away.  Several days later, the Susquehanna River was bank full and dishing out some minor flooding for the first time since early May.  Isn’t it great to get back to normal?

The rain-and-snow-melt-swollen Susquehanna from Chickies Rock looking upriver toward Marietta during the high-water crest on December 27th.
Cresting at Columbia as seen from the Route 462/Veteran’s Memorial Bridge.  A Great Black-backed Gull monitors the waters for edibles.
All back to normal on the Susquehanna to end 2020.
Yep, back to normal on the Susquehanna.  Maybe 2021 will turn out to be another good year, or maybe it’ll  just be a Michelin or Firestone.

SOURCES

Beck, Herbert H.  1924.  A Chapter on the Ornithology of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  The Lewis Historical Publishing Company.  New York, NY.

White, Christopher P.  1989.  Chesapeake Bay, Nature of the Estuary: A Field Guide.  Tidewater Publishers.  Centreville, MD.

City Life: Gulls, Dabbling Ducks, and More

So you aren’t particularly interested in a stroll through the Pennsylvania woods during the gasoline and gunpowder gang’s second-biggest holiday of the year—the annual sacrifice-of-the-White-tailed-Deity ritual.  I get it.  Two weeks and nothing to do.  Well, why not try a hike through the city instead?  I’m not kidding.  You might be surprised at what you see.  Here are some photographs taken today during several strolls in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

First stop was City Island in the Susquehanna River—accessible from downtown Harrisburg or the river’s west shore by way of the Market Street Bridge.

From the middle of the Susquehanna River, City Island offers a spectacular view of the downtown Harrisburg skyline.  In summer, it’s the capital city’s playground.  During the colder months, it’s a great place to take a quiet walk and find unusual birds.
This Bald Eagle was in mature trees along the river shoreline near the Harrisburg Senator’s baseball stadium.
Ring-billed Gulls gather on the “cement beach” at the north end of City Island.
One of a dozen or so Herring Gulls seen from the island’s north end. This particular bird is a juvenile.
A Ring-billed Gull and some petite Bonaparte’s Gulls.  Really good birders will tell you to always check through flocks of these smaller gulls carefully.  It turns out they’re onto something.  Look closely at the gull to the right.
A bright red bill and more of a crescent shape to the black spot behind the eye, that’s an adult Black-headed Gull (Chroicocephalus ridibundus) in winter plumage, a rare bird on the Susquehanna.  Black-headed Gulls have colonized North America from Europe, breeding in Iceland, southernmost Greenland, and rarely Newfoundland.

Okay, City Island was worth the effort.  Next stop is Wildwood Park, located along Industrial Road just north of the Pennsylvania Farm Show complex and the Harrisburg Area Community College (HACC) campus.  There are six miles of trails surrounding mile-long Wildwood Lake within this marvelous Dauphin County Parks Department property.

A flock of Killdeer at the south end of Wildwood Lake.  From November through February, a walk along the south and west sides of the impoundment can be a photographer’s dream. The light is suitable in the morning, then just keeps getting better as the day wears on.
Is this probable Carolina/Black-capped Chickadee hybrid a resident at Wildwood or just a visitor from a few miles to the north?  Currently, pure Black-capped Chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) nest in the mountains well to the north of Harrisburg, and pure Carolina Chickadees nest south of the city.  Harrisburg possibly remains within the intergrade/hybrid zone, an area where the ranges of the two species overlap, but probably not for long.  During recent decades, this zone has been creeping north, at times by as much as a half mile or more each year.  So if the capital city isn’t Carolina Chickadee territory yet, it soon will be.
Another chickadee likely to be a hybrid, this one with some white in the greater wing coverts like a Black-capped, but with a call even more rapid than that of the typical Carolina, the species known for uttering the faster “chick-a-dee-dee-dee”.  It sounded wired, like it had visited a Starbucks all morning.
In the lower Susquehanna valley, Carolina Chickadees have already replaced hybrids and pure Black-capped Chickadees as nesting birds in the Piedmont hills south of Harrisburg and the Great Valley.  This Carolina Chickadee was photographed recently in the Furnace Hills at Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area in northern Lancaster County.  The transition there was probably complete by the end of the twentieth century.  Note the characteristic overall grayish appearance of the wings and the neat lower border of the black bib on this bird, 
For comparison, a bird presumed to be a pure Black-capped Chickadee photographed earlier this month in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania.  This fall, “Black-caps”, like many other northern perching birds, are moving south to invade the lower elevations and milder climes of the Piedmont and Atlantic Coastal Plain Provinces.  Note the extensive areas of white in the wings, the long tail, the buffy flanks, and the jagged edge of the black bib.
Along Wildwood Lake’s west shore, an adult male Sharp-shinned Hawk was soon attracted to the commotion created by bantering chickadees and other songbirds.
Yellow during the first year, the eyes of the Sharp-shinned Hawk get redder as the bird ages.
Also along the west border of Wildwood Lake, temperatures were warm enough to inspire Painted Turtles (Chrysemys picta) to seek a sun bath atop logs in the flooded portions of the abandoned Pennsylvania Canal.

And now, without further ado, it’s time for the waterfowl of Wildwood Lake—in order of their occurrence.

A pair of Wood Ducks (hen left, drake right) with American Black Ducks and Canada Geese.
A pair of Northern Pintails.
A pair of American Wigeons (Mareca americana).
A hen (left) and drake (right) Gadwall.
Mallards.
A female Northern Shoveler.
An American Black Duck.
Canada Geese.
You just knew there had to be a booby prize, a “Blue Suede” (a.k.a. Blue Swede), a domestic variety of Mallard.
It’s a Green-winged Teal (Anas crecca) sampler.  Clockwise from left: a juvenile male, a female, and an adult male.
A drake and two hen Green-winged Teal.  Isn’t that great light by late afternoon?

See, you don’t have to cloak yourself in bright orange ceremonial garments just to go for a hike.  Go put on your walking shoes and a warm coat, grab your binoculars and/or camera, and have a look at wildlife in a city near you.  You never know what you might find.

SOURCES

Taylor, Scott A., Thomas A. White, Wesley M. Hochachka, Valentina Ferretti, Robert L. Curry, and Irby Lovette.  2014.  “Climate-Mediated Movement of an Avian Hybrid Zone”.  Current Biology.  24:6  pp.671-676.