 Oh, let's get going. All right, today I'm so excited to bring two of my good friends to the presentation. They are the co-founders of the Galbatross project. They're going to be talking today about female boreal bird identification. We have a senior editor of Popular Science, Perbeda Saha, hello, Perbeda, and senior network content editor at the National Audubon Society Martha Harbison. Hello, Martha. Hello. Welcome and take it away. Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us from across the country or across the continent or across the world, wherever. We're very lucky to be at this festival. I admit I have not been to Rangely, but just studying the birds that are in the locality and that breed up there, we were just talking before the presentation that we need to head up there that next summer and especially look for those big males or listen for them. So my name is Perbeda, and you all are the second audience to go through the female bird ID class with us. But tonight is going to be very special because we are focusing on boreal birds and the wealth of breeding species that Nick and David already mentioned in Rangely and the boreal forest. So very quickly, my name is Perbeda, and Martha and I and our colleague, Stephanie, we founded the Galvatross Project, which pretty much came out of our own birding curiosity and fascination and frustration that there is this underappreciation for female birds out there. You look at a field guide. I have the Sibley guide, which is beautiful. But there's very little identification information when it comes to the female type of a species. And the same goes for ornithological study, photography, lots of fields of birding and bird science. So we started to just focus on identifying and understanding female birds in our own practice. And just in the past year or two, have tried to make it more of a crowdsourcing and community science effort. And now we are able to talk to very enthusiastic birders and bird lovers like you across the country. So excited to be here. Sorry about that. I'm still learning how to advance my slides. So yeah, thank you. And thank you, Perbeda, for that introduction. I think the one thing that I'd like to, some of the basics that I'd like to set the tone for this particular presentation and when we talk about female birds, I would like to stress a couple of things. And some of the ways that we in the Galvatross project sort of approach the female bird identification is that, first up, it's not a competition. So much about birding can feel like it's like, well, have you seen that yet? Or why didn't you? Oh, you got that ID wrong. Doing female bird ID is actually quite difficult. And we're going to go through some of the ways in which it can be difficult in ways that you can navigate around that. But I think the first thing to understand is that it's harder. You need to learn a lot more about birds in order to do this well and be successful at it. And it's OK. Whenever I have to lead a bird event, I always tell people it's OK to suck at this. It's more important to have fun. And yeah, so one of the things that's really important is to sort of reevaluate the way that you go birding. A lot of us, especially when we're starting out and I see this when I'm leading neophyte birders, they try and memorize everything. And there is a lot of that. Like when you're trying to learn to identify species, you're like, I need this field mark, this field mark, and this field mark, and maybe this vocalization. And you do this like, it's basically a decision tree. When it comes to female bird ID, what we found, or what I found personally, I should say, is that I can identify the species quite well. But I'm looking at behaviors. And a lot of times, I'm not going to have that memorized. Or I didn't even think that that might be a sex-specific behavior. And so I will note it down either mentally or in my phone or whatever. And then I will go back and do research later. And so a lot of female bird ID is actually about being very present in the moment when you're birding and noticing a lot of sort of the holistic, the holistic bird, not just what it looks like, but what it's doing, what type of habitat is it exploiting? Is it doing, what's its behaviors? And then going back and looking to see what the literature says. Then you can take that back out into the field later. So I've personally found that it's much better to observe it first and then look it up, as opposed to try and memorize a bunch of stuff and then go out and find female birds. And it's like we've been talking about boreal species. And so one of the things that we did is we tried to go through a lot of the stuff that we do in this talk is looking at types or classes of things, the classes of things to notice. But we went through and we tried to find as many boreal examples as possible because the methodology that we use is applicable across the United States and across, I would say the ABA for sure. Things get a little more complicated once you actually get into the tropics. But like I said, since it's a boreal bird ID sort of discussion, we decided to focus more on what we can find in the boreal forest. Yeah, so I really wanted to quickly give a shout out to the spruce grass, which I've never seen one of these beautiful birds. Hopefully many of you have. But our classic view of the spruce grass is the bird on the left. This very bold red eyebrow or supercilliary, which the male carries around. And you know, that's fair, it's very striking, but check out the female on the right. Like she has this beautiful barring on her chest, all this brown variation, the orange coming in, her back and tail are very different. And sometimes they also, I believe, have a hint of red in the supercilliary. What's even cooler is that there are several types and subspecies of spruce grouse across the Northern US, across Canada and the Pacific Northwest. And a lot of them are differentiated because the females have so much variation in their feathers and their behavior. So I thought it was great to look at this remarkable species where the females, who we typically don't think of as remarkable, they're really kind of the epitome of that. But to be clear, like a lot of the examples we pull out today, they are birds that there are ways for us as humans to be able to differentiate them as male-female. But there are some birds out there that you just can't do it. I mean, you have to leave it up to the birds themselves. So it's not like every bird on this planet is going to be identifiable as male-female based on our perspectives. Yeah, and that's okay. That's the one of the things is like, you have to be really okay with the ambiguity and not even just the ambiguity. Sometimes you're like, yeah, we're just never gonna know. They're actually, I found earlier this year that sandhill cranes are one of them. Apparently you can't even like, so like even if you look at the cloaca, you can't tell. So it's like, okay, I guess we're just gonna let them have their secrets. Whoops, I jumped forward. All right, well, we're gonna hop into ways, I thought that there was a, there it is. I actually hopped over a slide, I apologize. So it's like, one of the questions is why do we look at female birds? It's not just because it's fun, although it's really fun. Like I said, you can really learn a ton and really take your birding to the next level when you start, when you commit to looking for female birds, like all of a sudden you gain a ton of different skill sets that maybe had been neglected before. So I highly recommend maybe at least giving it a try for the summertime or for the next migration, not fall migration, fall migration is a mess, but maybe next spring migration. But there are like actually very important scientific reasons why we need to care about female birds and conservation. And it turns out when you actually study female, if you study both male and female birds separately, people have found that among other things, the different sexes will use habitats differently. One of the classic studies is with the golden wing warblers. And as it turns out, like, yes, they, you know, there's like their very specific breeding habitat in the, you know, the American Northeast. But when they go to Central America for the winter, the males and the females actually use totally different habitats down there. They actually separate based on elevation in the mountains. And so if you care about full life cycle conservation and you're building, you know, habitat land management plans down in Central America, you can't just like track where the males go because you won't actually be conserving that species. You need to know where they both go and then protect both habitats. And there have been a number of studies that have come out in the last few years that have really looked at the male bias in a lot of the migration studies. And it turns out there's actually a huge knowledge gap in how female birds, how they migrate through space and where they go in the winter. So that's actually something that scientists are now trying to fill in. All right, so now we are gonna move on to the female ID. As you can see on the right, there are a lot of different options for this. And we're gonna go through and give you some examples for each. But it's not just about plumage. Like plumage is actually, like plumage is great. Feathers are awesome. But there's way more to female bird ID than just looking at, and even just sexual dimorphism than just the color of their feathers or the pattern. So we break it down into three different areas. There are the obvious ones. The wood duck would be one of those where it's like the males and the females are very different. Northern Cardinal would be another classic example of this. Then there we call patches of difference. This is where you need to sort of notice, you know, when a bird is slightly different, you're like, oh yeah, there's a female right there. And then there are the subtle ones. They actually have to pay really close attention because maybe it's only a very subtle difference between the males and females. I'm just gonna hop right in and just do, here's an obvious one that's a boreal, that's one of the boreal birds that I love when I go up to the Adirondacks. Although if we did have an eruption year, so we had them hanging out in Brooklyn this past winter, red crossbills. You can see very much the female, all of these slides, males are on the left, females are on the right. You can see that there's a very clear plumage difference between the two. Now we're gonna move into patches of difference. Perbedee, do you wanna take this or do you want me to take it? I think you could take this one. Okay. No, I think your slides jumped forward a little bit. Oh no, oh wow, yeah, sorry about that. So, sorry, first, patches of difference. Northern flicker. Obviously we're looking at the yellow shafted, so that's the Eastern subspecies, not even really subspecies, the Eastern type of flicker. And you can see that the males, they have the black malar stripe, mustaches I usually tell people that don't wanna hear terms like malar stripe. Female on the right does not have that. That's one way that it's like, and so there are different things you can look at, but that's like, okay, great, we have a malar stripe. The second one, which usually blows people's minds because everyone has in their head that kestrels are just, there is the classic kestrel look, but American kestrels are actually dimorphic or physically dimorphic. And the way that you can tell the difference between those is that the females have a bard back and they don't have any of that steel gray on their wings. So it's like, even from really far away, you can tell whether you're looking at a male or a female, like obviously we're talking about adults here, but just based on whether or not you can see that little patch of blue on the wing area. And the last one, this is another boreal specialist, the blackback woodpecker. Again, the male has the yellow little patch on the top of its head and female has a black patch. Now we're gonna get into the subtle ones. Yeah, so we're going from easiest to a little more challenging. So when it comes to warblers, I don't know about you all, but I am seeing yellow warblers up the wazoo, also hearing them, often you hear the males before you see them, but if you do catch that very bright flash of yellow and you get a good look at the chest, that is the most helpful feature for sexing these birds. So the males, the adult males should have like a pretty, sometimes in the field, it looks like a pretty bright red streaking down the chest. And as you can see the female on the right, she's really clean on the chest. In the fall, the females will be more dull and olive than yellow, but you do also in the fall have to worry about juvenile birds, but let's pretend that it's gonna be summer forever. Yeah, we should like stress that a lot of times when you're looking to sexual dimorphism, springtime is easier, although we'll get into some tricks on that, but that a lot of this, especially when it comes to birds where juvenile males have the same plumage as females, like none of these rules sort of really, a lot of these rules don't work in fall is what it comes down to, but you also have to be careful in spring. This is one of my favorites. Yeah, this is a good one. And again, I don't typically have access to bohemian wax wings down here in New Jersey, but I can practice this rule on cedar wax wings. It works for both of the species. And many of you might know that just to tell cedar wax wings from bohemian wax wings, you can see here the bohemians, they are super gray down the front and then they have that like reddish, rosy, like makeup look on their face, which is really pretty, but you can also really hone your focus and check out that the black on the chin in the male, which is on the left, the black will be a lot more extensive. I like to think of it as a neck beard. And in a female, it's going to be, it's still gonna be dark and right under the bill, but it won't spread out as much under her chin. So I think of it as more of like a sole patch. The other tip is on the secondaries, which are the wings that, the wing feathers that you usually see when a bird is perched. Those will, on the male, they will have like a lot more of that yellow waxy look as opposed to the female. So yeah, those are your two big sexing tips for this really beautiful bird. And again, you can try those with cedar wax wings as well. I actually have used that successfully in the field with cedar wax wings. This is actually one of those field marks that's hard to capture on camera because of shadowing and this, that, whatever. But if you actually sit with a flock of wax wings and you just start looking at their chins, you actually do start to notice that there is a difference between the two birds. You can actually separate them out into two different populations. See if this, nope. There we go. Okay. And then, so as Martha kind of teased before, sometimes you're going to have a really tough sexual ID challenge when you're looking at a younger bird versus a female, and especially young males because they'll be in that non-breeding plumage so they won't look like your typical male from a field guide again. So one of my favorites is the ruby-throated hummingbird, blessed to be the only hummingbird on the East Coast, although we are seeing more Western hummingbirds come over here now. So on the left, at quick glance, you might think that this is a female ruby-throated simply because it doesn't have that red ruby throat or the gorget, which are the shiny feathers under the chin. But this is actually a juvenile male and the way you can tell is it has those like cinnamon kind of brownish feathers on the flanks. That's kind of going to be, again, it helps if you have the right perspective, but that's going to be your best bet for telling a juvenile male from the female, which is on the right. The other good tip is if you get a view of the tail feathers like we do on the right, the tail feathers on the female are going to look super fresh because she is in that full plumage. So as you can see like they're sharp, they're perfectly rounded on the edge and there's like crisp white lines. On the male, on the young male, it's going to be like pretty raggedy because they're eventually going to swap those tail feathers out. So this is if you want to get like really nitty gritty and really have fun with sexing birds, but it's, you know, you should be seeing hummingbirds around right now, especially at feeders. So it's one to challenge yourself on. And one more very, very detailed one that I know Martha really likes this challenge. So American red starts. Again, the female is very different from the adult male. As you might know, the adult males are black and they have like these bright orange, like warning signs on their wings and their tails. The female is pretty clean looking, but she has yellow on the tail and yellow in her arm hits as does the young male or the juvenile male, which is on the left. So the tip we use here is really looking for random odd black feathers, whether it be on the sides of the bird or on the face. And if you do see that like tiny detail, that black feather, then that will, that should clue you in that it's a young male, not a female. Yeah, one thing that my colleague, one of my colleagues who's a bird bander actually pointed out to me in the photo on the left, which was just taken last month in Central Park, is that if you look at the primaries, that's like the edge of the wing. The end, basically the end of the wing that's sort of pointing out over the back there. You can see how rough it looks. It's because this bird's been wearing those feathers since last summer. So this young male is going and you can see on its face where it's starting to molt and show the adult male black feathers. Eventually this bird is gonna lose these really old, raggedy primaries and have nice clean feathers by the end of the next molt cycle, which is something that I hadn't noticed when I first saw this photo. I just saw the black dots. But then yeah, my colleague was like, oh yeah, look at the primaries, they look rough. And I was like, oh yeah, you're right. Judging birds all the time. All right, so we're moving on from feathers. We're gonna talk about size real quick, especially with one group of birds, which are the raptors. Often raptors don't show a lot of differentiation and plumage between female and male. So the trick there is size. And it's not true for every single raptor, but many of the common ones, the females are a lot bigger. And there are a couple of different theories behind why this might be. Most of them link to, you know, it helps her keep her offspring alive better. But yeah, what we know is that at least with red-tailed hawks, there's a pretty big differentiation. And this is a lucky photo because we get to see the female under the male. The females can be up to 20% bigger, which is handy for us. And then bald eagles, also similar. So in this photo, the female is on the right. And she can be up to 25% bigger. So again, this tip is really only helpful if you're looking at, you know, a pair or a mother with, you know, a male offspring. You really need that side-by-side comparison, almost kind of like, you know, trying to ID greater and lesser yellow legs. You need to see them next to each other to get that size sampling. So plumage and size are two of the things that a lot of birders are pretty familiar with, like, you know, using to differentiate males and females. But there are a lot of other ones that you're just like, wow, I didn't know that was actually a thing. First it was like, you know, wow, you can actually sex European starlings. Now this only works during the breeding season, but if you get really close to European starlings and you look at the base of the bill, females have a pink, you can see that pink wash. Sorry, the females actually on the left hand this time. But anyway, so you can see the pink wash that's right at the base of the bill of that bird. The males are sort of grayish-green. It can be hard to find, so you're gonna need to look at a group of them as they're usually strutting around on the ground. But, you know, whatever, I've got a zillion of those in New York City. So I've actually gotten very good at finding female starlings when I've been out at Prospect Park. But it's actually one that's quite satisfying. You're like, oh yeah, look at that, they weren't lying. So yeah, that's when I actually suggest that maybe you try and find this year if you happen to be around an area where there are starlings. Bill size is a second one. And actually a surprising number of birds have a bill-size dimorphism. Most of them, you'll find it in pile, which is sort of the Bible for bird banders. And you need calipers in order to actually find it because they'll be like a millimeter or less in size difference, but it is there and statistically significant. There are certain species where you can actually see them with the eye. And one of them, this is actually a tip I got from my friend, Alvaro, is that Marbled Godwits, the females, you can see in this photo, the females on the bottom. So she's a little bit chunkier, but she's got a much larger and heavier bill. And then the one up on the right from the female is a male. The one that's on the upper left, I think is a little too far away and angled wrong. So I would not feel comfortable being able to actually sex that bird, but the one on the bottom for sure. Other birds that actually show this that don't show up in the boreal are brown pelicans. And brown pelican bills are very obviously different. The males have a much, much longer bill than females. And this is one of my favorites because it surprised the hell out of me when I first learned it. And this is only applicable to oyster catchers in the Western hemisphere, at least as far as I know. But you know how you look at it, if you've seen an oyster catcher and you look at its eye and you're like, wow, that thing's got a weird goat eye or a cat eye because it's got this like, it's basically, its pupil looks really weird. Those are called eye flecks and they're basically excess pigment. So it's not that they have a normal pupil like everybody that's round, but these dark or black flecks on the iris will make it look like the pupils are misshapen. And genetic analysis has shown that this is a sex-linked trait and that you can basically tell more than 90, more than 93% confidence in both the black and American oyster catcher. Eye flecks mean female. And the larger the eye fleck or the more pronounced or the more of them that there are, the higher confidence that you have that it's a female. Nobody knows why this is, but scientists basically went out, looked at a bunch of oyster catchers and looked at their eyes and also took some blood from them and ran the analysis. And it's like, it's there, which is like kind of weird. Just wanna show you just so you can get a really good look at that eye fleck on the lower right of the eye. And this is something that Prebita and I have used in the field to find female oyster catchers. It's quite satisfying. So if you are in an area where oyster catchers hang out like, and especially if you got a spotting scope, take a look at those eyeballs. Now we're gonna get into the really cool stuff which is behavior. Yeah, this is really fun because it makes you slow down while you're birding and really takes stock of what a bird is doing, how it's interacting with other birds and interacting with its habitat. So going to start with migration timing which is a little less relevant right now but will definitely help you in early spring and also in fall. So as you'd expect most of, for many species that breed up here in the US, the males are going to start moving up first, the adult males, I should say, just so that they can scope out the territory, they can get the upper ground before the females, before the females arrive. Not so with Wilson's and red phallorobes and these two species, they flip a lot of sexual norms. The females actually mate with multiple males, the males do all of the nest and chick care, it's pretty wild and birders love talking about them and studying them. But when it comes to migration timing, it's similar, the female Wilson's phallorope, they breed out in western lakes and they'll get up here by, or they'll get up there by mid June and the males will arrive a full two weeks later. Same for the red phalloropes which breed up in the Arctic. Yeah, and once the females get up there, they do the bulk of the work, they defend the territory, they court the male, they lay the eggs but then as soon as all that's over, they're gone, they're gone by July and the males stick around and like I said, do all the upkeep with the family. But what's going to be more helpful for you is knowing which birds follow the typical trend which again is the males coming up first. So a lot of warblers follow that. I'm sure up in the boreal, the black pole warblers are very famous for their long journeys and again the males will arrive first but the one I wanted to focus on was the ruby crown kinglet which is a, which is dimorphic based on its feathers. The name of the species is kind of a hues to the male description because they have that ruby crown that they flare. The females do not have that but otherwise they're very identical to look at but the males migrate a lot earlier in spring and then in the fall it kind of flips. So the young birds that were born this summer, they will leave first, then the females will go and then finally the males. So if you're seeing ruby crown kinglets like I don't know, maybe in October or even later than that, then it's a pretty strong guess that they are males. Another thing you can look at is pair feeding both with the blue jays and the cedar wax wings. And this is really important because both those species will actually pass food back and forth to each other but the male is the one that initiates every time. So if you see an initiation and you see the first bird passed to the second the second bird is the female. This is one that I haven't done a whole lot of research on because I don't actually see this behavior a lot except in these two species but if you see it that might be something you wanna look up. Okay and then we're getting into this phase right now with a lot of birds nest building. In some species only the female builds the nest and we kind of learned this through our own anecdotal evidence and then found it in like the birds of the world encyclopedia online. But yeah, so the female Eastern Kingbirds if you see them gathering nest material that's a pretty good sign that it's a female. Otherwise again visually they're not distinguishable male, female and if you see one sitting on the nest then it's a female. Same for the boreal chickadee. The male does hang around and the pair will actually go house hunting together which is super cute. Like they nest in cavities so they're like poking their heads in and figuring out if the cavity is right for them. But once they find the one they want the female starts the initial renovations she'll start to excavate and then the male might help out a little bit but then she'll go out look for feathers and other like furnishings to make the inside of the nest comfortable for the eggs and for the hatchlings. So yeah, the female does the bulk of the work there. You might see the male hanging around just keeping a watch over things but she's the hub of the activity when it comes to nesting. Sorry, I'm waiting for the slide to actually advance so I don't end up wherever. Incubation, now this is a biggie. Obviously hard because a lot of birds it's very actually very hard to find their nests for really good reasons because they don't want predators to find it either. But there are a number of species where only the female incubates. This is actually one thing that Purbita and I and the rest of the Galbatross project have noticed is that people will really anthropomorphize birds and be like, if they see birds taking care of young or sitting on the nest, they must be female. And as it turns out, that's actually not, not is it only like not true, but it's actually not typical. There are a lot of species where both sexes will incubate, will build nests, will brood young. So it's actually can be not necessarily a challenge but it actually is notable when you find species where some of those, what in the humans would be considered more of a female gender segregated, gender segregated habits doesn't actually turn out with birds, but for the ones that do, it's actually pretty cool. So one of the ones like Canada goose, is like, if you find a Canada goose incubating eggs, it's a female. It does get a little bit challenging because you have to make sure those are eggs and not young because once they hatch, then both sexes will actually, keep the young protected and brood them until it's time to, until they leave the nest and start foraging on their own. But if it's during egg laying season and the bird is on the nest, it's definitely a female. Same with the boreal chickadee. In fact, all the chickadees that I've looked at so far and I think I've looked at all of them now, at least in the ABA area, in those birds, it's only the female that will incubate the egg. So if you have one in like a nest box and you can like poke your head in, like it's like, all right, I found a female chickadee. Same as with the gray crested flycatcher and all of the flycatchers in that genus, including the ash-throated, which I know is much more of a Western bird. Again, only the females incubate. Canada Jay, I actually found that out today. So if you find a thick Canada Jay that's incubating, it's definitely a female. It's actually one of the only ways that you can sex those two birds, at least without having it in hand. The one that I really love is that all of the impid and X-fly catchers in North America have this pattern of the female incubating eggs. So you may have no idea what species it is, but you can basically, it's like putting impid spa, female in e-bird is like the flex that I'm like really taking into 2021. And I'm definitely gonna be looking for that. Down here, it's really willow flycatcher, but up in the boreal, a lot of least flycatchers. One of the things that I learned first in the literature, but then when like just talking with a bunch of ecologists and ornithologists is that for cavity nesting birds later in summer, if you wanna find the females, look at their tail feathers, because what happens is that their tail feathers are mashed up against the wall of the cavity and they rub there. And so female chickadees, female flycatchers, their tail feathers or retracies are extremely worn. Sometimes they're bent, they look like hell. And that's the way that a lot of people, a lot of field ecologists will actually find females by looking at the worn retracies of the birds. That's cool. I don't know if you shared that tip with me, but now I know it. I think I learned it like a little bit later, but then I started talking to people, some of my colleagues are like, oh yeah, yeah, I've seen that, that's cool. That's too fun. Also fun, this photo, I had to share it with everyone. The photographer gave us permission. He's out in Bemidji, Minnesota, and the story made headlines a few years ago. This common Mergancer female, she ended up with 76 chicks in her brood somehow, just a conglomerate of adopted chicks, which is amazing. But the reason I bring her up is in a lot of waterfowl, you have the female doing most of the caring for the young once they hatch and they get into the water. And I say a lot of waterfowl, but not all waterfowls. So one famous example for Maine would be the common loon. Both the mother and father are very attentive to the chicks. So you might have seen a chick riding on the adult's back. That could be either sex of loon, and grebes do that as well. Both of them will share those duties. So yeah, unfortunately, we haven't really found a good way to distinguish female common loons. So that's something we hope that Maine birders will look out for and report back to us. I only thought about it because actually we found a bird, we found a wren that was doing some caring to fecal sac once, and we're like, huh, I wonder if that's a female. And it turns out no. So I did a bunch of research and actually dug into the primary literature and nest sanitation. So that can be like carrying fecal sacs, that can be like taking out eggshells, picking out parasites, all of those types of nest care, things, there's very few types of nest care. So that's one of the things that I think things, there's very little research on it. I have found a couple of species where it seems like the females will take most or all of those duties, including the tree swallow, the evening gross beak, and the Audubon's Oriole, but it is not foolproof at all. And you look at some of the papers and the numbers, the N is like two, or one of them was seven. I was like, wow, that's a rich data set. They just looked at seven nests. So this is something that is incomplete and interesting to me anyway, but this is something that not a lot of people have looked at. So I'd say if you see a bird with a fecal sac or carrying a shell or whatnot, you can look up and see if it's sex, if it might be some sex segregation, but this one's a really tough one, but I just wanted to tell you about it because it is there and it could lead to a revelation, but usually not. Cool. This is, so these are vocalizations. Prabita, I don't know if you want to tell us about them and I can play them for people. Sure. So one vocalizations is a huge chapter and a huge piece of birding and identification, but again, most of the songs that we're familiar with are recorded or studied from males. And there's been this huge perception that females don't sing because they don't need to, they don't need to compete like that. They don't need to attract mates by making themselves heard, but female vocalization is probably a lot more diverse than we know and that we have little clips of in our bird ID apps and libraries. So there are several experts around the world who are trying to look more into this, but you can do your own research. So one thing that we tried is the Macaulay Library, which has multimedia, free for use. You can go in and search for recordings and then filter them by female just to see what those differences are and how the female sound. So here's a pretty common yellow throat that's like a very common song that you can hear in this season, but here's a sample of what the female sounds like, which is actually pretty distinct. So the female was that kind of like quick chittering that we just ended on, which is really cool. So another gray background for... Oh no. This beautiful new kitchen tool makes it even... So Blue Jays, another visually, like visually you cannot tell them apart, the females are just as beautiful and blue as the males, but they exhibit this really interesting barking sound and this clip should show that off. They are normally made while the female making the call about something down. Rattle calls are used as alert calls when another J intrudes in a care space. The fifth group includes... Cool. Sorry, it was, I shouldn't have called it a bark. It's very clearly a rattle, but yeah, Blue Jays make a wide assortment of calls, but if you hear that one, that one specific to the female. So I wanted to pull in the superb lyre bird, which couldn't be further from Range Lee, Maine or from the boreal forest, but yeah, superb lyre birds, they're in Australia and many of you have probably seen the famous David Attenborough video where the male is mimicking chainsaws from the forest and wrapping them into his song, but the females can also mimic objects that they hear around them and they'll use them as territorial calls or they'll even hear hawks and then mimic those to keep other predators away from their nests. So there are ornithologists out in Australia who've been recording the female voices and trying to build this story around what kind of how they're using sound in their lives. Finally, this is a really fun one. So if you're lucky to have a mated pair of great horned owls around your property or at your local park, you might hear them doing this very classic hooting duet at dusk or at dawn. And you can tell who is who based on the pitch of the hoot. So the females hoot is going to be slightly higher pitched than the males. So I touched on this before, but they're kind of like the Galbatross project is trying to understand female bird ID from a lot of different facets. There are scientists at Cornell University and other institutions who are doing evolutionary studies and also fieldwork to understand how female bird historically, how it existed. It's thought that the ancestor of all birds like the females did sing maybe almost as profusely as males. So that's why there's this idea that it probably exists a lot more than we know. Like one of my favorite warblers oven birds, the female has six unique calls of her own. So yeah, it's worth it to listen for the females, listen to the females if you can identify them and see what new sounds you come up with from there. Awesome, I, let's see if I can actually get this to work. Okay, so last thing that we're gonna talk about is habitat usage. This is one that I think is actually really cool. There are, it can be really specific to the bird and to the time of year, but different sexes will exploit the same habitat differently. One of the ones I found not too long ago is the American three-toed woodpecker. As it turns out, the males and the females will forage in completely different areas. So not only will the males like target much larger chunks, like much larger branches on the tree, if there's a burned patch, only the males will go in there and then the females will actually stay on the margins or will be in the unburned areas. It also in Quebec is actually the American three-toed woodpecker has a pretty wide range and there are some geographic variations. There was one study of the woodpeckers in Quebec and it turns out the females always foraged higher on the tree than the males. So, which I think is really cool, but this is like a thing that happens. So that's something you can notice. Again, so these birds are dimorphic. So it doesn't mean this isn't the only way that you're gonna be able to identify a female, but it's something that is clearly happening within that species. That's something that you can look for and just appreciate. Downie woodpeckers shows similar like differentiated foraging patterns where if there are males and females in the same area, then the males always go to the smaller branches and the females preferentially forage on the tree trunks. If you take the males out, then the females move to the smaller branches because for that species, that's actually the preferred foraging area. So the males will out-compete the females when both sexes are around, but you take one away and the females will actually go and exploit the preferred habitat. The last one, which I think is cool, and this is actually, again, based on migration timing, American kestrels in the, this is really in the wintering grounds in the American Southwest. The females actually, they migrate first and they occupy the prime grassland hunting habitat. The males come later and they have, and they get pushed to the forest edges. So when you're out there, you can see that it's like, there's gonna be all females are gonna be like posted up on posts and stuff, being able to like survey the wide grasslands, the males are gonna be hanging out in your trees. And I think that's the end of the sort of main section of this, Praveeta, do you think we have time for the quiz? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, the whole idea here is that we gave you a lot of examples and we gave you a lot of ideas on how to start looking at and listening for female birds differently. So really it's up to you to go into the field or to look through photographs or even through books and put these to the test. And again, there's always the possibility of finding new differences and nuances, which is the best part. Yeah, so we have a little quiz, it's a big group and again, you all are muted. So it's going to be a self quiz. We'll put the photos up and we just want to know if it's a male or a female of the species. And yeah, in a few minutes, we'll share what the answers are. So you've got a red start here. We did talk about this species during the presentation. It was a bit of a tricky one. Yeah, Nick is right. You can put them in the chat. We can see what folks come up with. That would be fun. I apologize for having, this is not the ideal full screen here, but I'm terrified if I click on something, the whole thing's going to come crashing down. So you're stuck with my desktop. So yeah, so here's the first one. Here's number two. All right, so this is a ruby-throated hummingbird. Oh, I guess if people are putting in the chat, then I shouldn't give the species. So again, male or female? Yeah, male or female. Give you a couple more seconds to look at this one. It is not a boreal species, but we just love this, it's just a nifty little quiz photo. Yeah, so female or male? This was taken in Texas, right? In spring? Oh, good question. It was taken in spring, yes, that's important. I don't remember what state it was. Sorry, I should have noted that. Yeah, and the other two photos were both also from spring. And number four, all right. So we can go to the Q&A section or the questions. If anybody has questions for us, again, I apologize for the sort of weirdness at the very end here, but thank you to everybody that sat through this with us and hopefully had a good time learning about some female bird ID. Because again, it's like very much about spending more time with an individual bird and noticing how it behaves and how it moves much more than like ticking off species as you're like cruising through the forest, which is again, that's definitely how spring migration feels to me a lot. It's like, all right, it's like there's so many birds. But so sometimes it's just necessary to slow down. We do have some materials on our website, femalebirdday.wordpress.com. And we do talk about female birds on social media, mostly Instagram and Twitter with the hashtag female bird day. Female bird day itself happens on Memorial Day weekend every year, what's been for the past two years. And we're gonna keep on doing that going forward. So during that weekend, if you wanna go out and look for some female birds and then tell us about it on social media, that would be rad. So Martha, I know you're a writer and an editor and you wanna end on a cliffhanger, but we have to give the answers for the quiz. Oh yeah, no, no, no, I just figured we get through all of this. Oh, okay, got you. Project and then we can like give the answers to the quiz. That's it, sorry. Yeah, and I think people are being a little shy with their answers. Come on, throw some answers. Yeah, come on. It is for some people. Some people have noted that only, I believe the panelists here are able to see what folks type. But I'm only seeing one answer on here. So throw us some more, don't be afraid. Nobody can see you. Nobody can see who is typing. So even if you're wrong, it won't matter. And I can go back to the, yeah, and I can go back to the- Yeah, you wanna run through them again? Yeah, let me go back. So here's number one, taken in spring. Spring 2020, in fact. Courtesy of our friend Ryan Mendelbaum. Yes, courtesy of Ryan Mendelbaum. Here's number two. Here's number three. This is- That's a tough one. Yeah, this one stumped me actually. That's why I like it. Yeah. Here's number four. The crazy thing about this whip packer is that I found a blanket, too. I don't know what I mean, like. What an incredibly comfy bird. No, those are my gym shorts. It was a injured bird that I found. Gotcha. Hey, one woman's gym shorts is another bird's blanket. Waited blanket. So, yeah, here are the members of the Galvatross Project. Four of us, we all met at Audubon, and four of us still work at Audubon. Hey, that was incredibly interesting. Thank you so much. Oh, if you wanna go. So there's some resource here, too. You know, that was awesome. And I think you both hit it right on the head where it's easy to sort of focus on getting identification and then moving on. And after a while, you know, once you're a good birder, and I know a lot of folks at the Borel Burning Festival or the Rainsley Burning Festival are really good birders, you know, you sort of can lose some of the excitement, or you lose, you know, you think you know at all with all that stuff, but there's a whole other world out there of, you know, deeper interest and deeper knowledge and deeper understanding of how different species operate differently between the sexes and between the subspecies and between the ages. There's so much more to it, even if you are an expert birder. I didn't know any of those things, and I'm not an expert birder, but you know, most of those things I had never heard of before, and I will keep an eye out for. So thank you so much. That was really interesting. Let's try to cover the quiz answers we'll cook. And let me say, please, if you have questions for Martha or Previta, please put them in the Q&A box down below. Put them in there. We'll go through the answers from the quiz first, and then we will move on to questions. So maybe Martha, if you feel comfortable, you wanna throw that back up. Oh, yay, I can do that just a moment. Let's do it. And we did get a few more chats this time. So thank you to those of you who submitted your questions. And we got quite a few compliments for you too, also, which you should know. So here we go, number one. Martha, you can do this one, because I know you love it. I know I'm like such a fan of the American Red Star trick bird. So this in fact is a male. Again, this is a first year male, or an immature male. What happens with red starts on a lot of warblers is that they start, that you have the young males have plumage just like the females, all the way through until their first, basically not the summer they were born, but the first summer that they're back up in the Northern Hemisphere. If you look very closely, again, at the eye and in the Laurel area, so that's between the eye and the bill, there are some black feathers that are coming in here. And there's actually one tiny black feather you can see coming in that area as well. This is one that I didn't know. And then it was like, it was actually our colleague, Stephanie Bilkey, like looked at this like, no, that's actually a really young male that's just starting to molt. So I was like, that's when I like really like fell in love with young male American red starts and females, because then it became like this spring in particular, I was looking for, I would looked at every red start, every gray red start, I looked at very, very closely. And I found I was probably 50, it was probably 50-50 actually of immature male versus female. So that was, I learned something in it, like again, changed the way I birded the following spring. And that's a tough one for me sometimes, cause I think sometimes those black feathers in front of the eye can look like shadow. I think right here, it kind of, if you told me that was a shadow, I would also buy that. So let's keep in mind and look carefully. One of the things I've learned that it's like, when you talk with a lot of different birders and you start sharing photos, photo ID is not all that is cut out to be. It is very, very hard to look at subtleties with photos because you're really missing a lot of the contextual information. So I found that it's, that just photos by themselves can be very tricky. So here's number two. Yeah, I like this one. So similar to the red start, this ruby-throated hummingbird comes down to one feather. And it is that red feather in the gorget or the kind of neck-chin area. So that should be your indicator that it's a young male ruby-throated hummingbird. So, oh, go ahead. I would say you can see a little bit of the cinnamon color down here as well. Yeah, I love this. It's a great photo. Awesome. Ha-ha. This one. Ha-ha-ha. Yeah, so this one, first of all, I don't even know if I could ID this species in the field. It's a tough one, but it is a painted bunting. And the immature male and the female look so similar. It's very hard. And as you might know, like the adult male is just worlds different in terms of colors. So the key here was looking at what the bird is doing. And it's kind of, it's sitting at the top of a tree and it's just belting its heart out. So that was kind of the hint that this is probably a young male who was singing the typical painted bunting song. And trying to serenade a female. Yeah. Yeah, I got this one wrong. I thought for sure it was a female-painted bunting. And then- That was a tough one. Yeah, and it's like, oh yeah, it's singing. Wow. And if you've seen female buntings in the wild, they tend to hang out more in the understory. They don't sit at the top of bushes because they don't want to get picked off by a hawk. They like actually hang out in the middle of the canopy or under shrubs. And a lot of species do that. A lot of the grassland species, the males, the bobble lynx or the red-winged blackbirds, they hang out on the top of the grass. And then the females hang about a foot and a half, two feet down into the grass. So it's like you have to look at the basically where they are spatially in their space. And just to say that's another one where a photo ID can be tough because maybe that bird was yawning or burping or it was laughing at a joke at the bird earlier. Well, cool dad jokes, Nick. Gotta go, bye. Okay, and then the last one, like I said, this was a bird that I picked up on the side of the road because it needed rehab attention. It is a pilliated woodpecker. And first you can tell the age of the bird. Well, I mean, like not to the exact date, but you can tell it's a young bird because that red trademark pilliated woodpecker crest hasn't fully grown in. In terms of sex, I'm pretty sure it was a female because in adult males, they have the red mallard stripe or again, the mustache. And it does start to show up in the young males too. And in this bird, that stripe is purely black. There's a little bit of reddish like on its face, but that's like uniform I think across juveniles. So yeah, I'm pretty certain this is a young female. Right on, we did it. Thank you so much. That was great. If you have more questions, please put them in. We had some questions about what the answers were. Everyone is showering with thanks. I also want to thank you too so very much for joining us. This was outstanding for folks who are tuning in. And so it's, we're over time. So I think we should probably go enjoy our Saturday evenings. Next year, sign up for the Ranger Birding Festival. Come on up, it's beautiful. The weather is outstanding. There are birds, you have to, you have to swat them out of the way. You can't even like leave your house without seeing birds up there. So please sign up for the Ranger Birding Festival next year. Probably be the same weekend in 2022. I truly want to offer my thanks to Purbida and Martha for joining us tonight. This was outstanding. Thanks for taking your Saturday night with us. Thank you everyone watching and have a great weekend. Thank you. Bye. Bye.