Month: October 2020

This past weekend while walking my puppy to Freshfields along Seabrook Island Road, we were met with several groups of chatty dark gray birds!  What a pleasure to see the Gray Catbirds were so active, calling and chasing each other!  I also heard them while playing golf on the weekend and while driving the car around the island.  I’m not sure if there are groups passing through on their fall migration, or if these individuals have been here all summer and they are just becoming more active.  In any event, check out the article and video below to learn more about this beautiful chatty bird!

Original blog published on October 2, 2016 below:

Gray Catbird – Dumetella carolinensis 
Length:  8.5″; Wingspan: 11″; Weight: 1.3 oz.

If you struggle with learning bird songs and calls, try starting with the “catty mew” of the Gray Catbird.  Just the sound of it makes you think of a cat which will help you remember its name!

These birds are migratory, but you can hear and see them all year round on Seabrook Island.  They are a medium-sized, slender songbird with a long, rounded, black tail and a narrow, straight bill. Catbirds are fairly long legged and have broad, rounded wings.  They give the impression of being entirely slaty gray, however, look closely and you’ll see a small black cap, blackish tail and a rich rufous-brown patch under the tail.

The Gray Catbird diet consists mostly of insects and berries. Especially in early summer, it eats many beetles, ants, caterpillars, grasshoppers, crickets, true bugs, and other insects, as well as spiders and millipedes. Nestlings are fed almost entirely on insects. More than half the annual diet of adults may be vegetable matter, especially in fall and winter, when they eat many kinds of wild berries and some cultivated fruit.  To attract Gray Catbirds, plant shrubs in areas of your yard near young deciduous trees. Catbirds also love fruit, so you can entice them with plantings of native fruit-bearing trees and shrubs such as dogwood, winterberry, and serviceberry.

It belongs to the genus Dumetella, which means “small thicket.” And that’s exactly where you should go look for this little skulker.  Look for Gray Catbirds in dense tangles of shrubs, small trees, and vines, along forest edges, stream-side thickets, old fields, and fencerows.  On Seabrook, catbirds are regular in the myrtles leading to the beach and along estuaries and the edges of woods (the Nature Trail, etc.). If you listen for their cat-like meow you will be more likely to find them.

Like its larger cousin the Northern Mockingbird, not only does the Gray Catbird have a similar look, but they can have a large repertoire of melodies and sounds.  Watch this video to hear it imitate many other bird species and even a frog!

If you would like to learn more about this bird visit:

• The Cornell Lab of Ornithology – All About Birders: Gray Catbird

Gray Catbird – file photo from All About Birds

Gray Catbird – Ed Konrad

Gray Catbird Range Map – Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Article submitted by:  Nancy Brown
Photographs provided by:  Ed Konrad

Register Now

Saturday October 24, 2020 6:00 am– 4:00 pm (sunrise 7:30am)
Trip to Bear Island & Donnelly WMA
Location: Meet at SI Real Estate Office to Car Pool
Max: 10
Cost: free to members, $5 per guest

If you have never been to Bear Island Wildlife Management Area (WMA) or to Donnelly WMA, you won’t want to miss this opportunity – it’s well worth the 60-mile one-way trip! Part of the ACE Basin, this area is perfect habitat for birds with ponds, rivers, salt marsh, freshwater marsh, mudflats mixed pine-hardwood forest and farmland. Most of the birding is done by car with stops to get out and take short walks for viewing. Bear Island closes for hunting from November 1 – February 9 each year, so this is the last chance to visit before spring. We hope the winter waterfowl will have returned including the Tundra Swan. Our old friend, David Gardner plans to join us from his new home near Augusta. Each person should bring their own lunch, snacks and beverages, as there are no restaurants in the area. Also be sure to bring sun block, bug spray, a hat, binoculars, camera and a scope if you have one.

We will ask that people wear masks while riding together and to maintain social distance and wear masks while birding. Due to COVID concerns, shared use of scopes is discouraged.

If you are not yet a SIB member, you must first become a member by following the instructions on our website: https://seabrookislandbirders.org/contact/join-sib/.

Once you are a member, please register no later than Thursday October 22, 2020. All registrants will receive a confirmation letter the day prior the event.

During this unusual year, many of us have enjoyed taking pictures of birds while we remain socially distant. We’d like you to share your experiences with the rest of the group. Please forward your pictures to SeabrookIslandBirders@gmail.com. Include when and where the picture was taken, the photographer and if you know it, the species shown. By sending your great works to SIB, unless you indicate otherwise, you are authorizing SIB to publish them in any of the various communications SIB uses. Credit will be given to the appropriate photographer.

You can then look forward to our future posts (ie. Seabrooker, Tidelines, SIB Blog) to see other member’s birding experiences.

Bird Identification 
Top left: Prothonotary Warbler 
Top right: Rose-breasted Grosbeak 
Middle right: Anhinga female & male with Great Egrets
Bottom left: Scarlet Tanager 
Bottom middle: Hermit Thrush
Bottom right: Mississippi Kite

With so many birds on Seabrook Island you expect to find an occasional feather in your yard or on your walks. Identifying a single feather can be tricky. When we look at a bird we are looking at the sum of all its feather parts. Compare it to jigsaw puzzles. If several puzzles were tossed together it would be difficult to pick one puzzle piece and identify to which puzzle it belonged. 

There are several resources you might try if you are interested in identifying a feather. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service website (fws.org) has “The Feather Atlas.” This section includes a tool to identify feathers. Much like the Merlin app that is used to identify birds, this tool asks for you to supply certain criteria about the feather and it will list suggestions with photos of birds that meet that criteria. With their extensive database and your knowledge of local birds, your chance of successfully identifying the feather with the Feather Atlas is pretty good.

Your mobile phone’s camera can also help identify your feather. If you have the Google app downloaded on your phone, you have access to Google Lens. Check to the right of the search bar and you should see a small icon that looks slightly like a camera just next to the microphone. Click on that icon and the Google Lens camera will come up. If you take a picture of something using that camera Google will bring up similar images with descriptions from the Google database. On a personal note, I have had great success using Google Lens to identify flowers, plants, bugs, butterflies, and sometimes feathers. However, I have occasionally taken a photo of a feather and it has matched my feather photo to photos of animal print shoes or Etsy items decorated with feather images. This could, however, be the fault of the photographer. 

A free mobile phone app that is strictly used for identifying images in nature is iNaturalist. This app is structured like a social network where contributions from naturalists, scientists, and those who are merely curious have created a quality database of all things in nature. When you take a photo using this app it will, like Google Lens, provide you with similar images that have been identified. The first suggestion is generally the closest match to your image. If you are confident that you have correctly identified the subject of your photo, you can identify it, share it, and become a database contributor. 

When Diane and Andy Allen were left an interesting feather on their mailbox by a friend, they asked Nancy Brown if she might be able to identify the bird. By using the iNaturalist app and Google Lens, Nancy was confident that what they had was a Wild Turkey feather. It is always more satisfying when you can put a name to what you find in nature and using these recognition tools make it easier.

One important reminder – Feathers are protected.  If you find a feather, study it, photograph it, appreciate it, but leave it where you found it. Under federal law it is illegal to take them home.