When 14-year-old Owen Squires first looked through a pair of binoculars and told his mother the bird she\u2019d seen flitting around the Juneau Community Garden\u2019s weed pile was a hooded oriole, she didn\u2019t believe him. <\/p>\n
Now, birders have traveled to Juneau from as far away as Anchorage and Fairbanks for a chance to see the bird. It normally lives in Mexico, California, and more southerly regions; it\u2019s the first time it\u2019s been spotted in Alaska. <\/p>\n
On Sept. 19, the Squires family was out at the garden. Marsha Squires was throwing away weeds when she saw \u201ca flash of black and bright, bright yellow.\u201d<\/p>\n
She called her son Owen, age 14, over to see the bird. The two of them have been birding for years, she said, at least since Owen was four. <\/p>\n
\u201cHe knows when I yell \u2018Owen! Owen!\u2019 it\u2019s something exciting,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
At first, Marsha thought the bird might be a western tanager, a similarly colored bird with a reddish head. Her husband got the binoculars out of the car and gave them to Owen.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe (Owen) said \u2018Mom, that\u2019s an oriole,\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cI said \u2018No way, honey, there aren\u2019t orioles in Juneau.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n
Owen added that it was a hooded oriole.<\/p>\n
When Marsha looked through the binoculars herself, however, \u201cthere it was, plain as day for us,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve seen a couple orioles in Mexico, and so I kind of knew what most orioles looked like,\u201d Owen Squires said. \u201cBasically, it had a black throat, and I figured it out by the black throat.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI had to apologize to my kid,\u201d Marsha Squires said. \u201cMoms can be wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
Local birder Gus van Vliet said a new species being sighted in Juneau first is relatively rare.<\/p>\n
Tuesday, National Park Service employees saw and photographed a yellow-throated warbler in Bartlett Cove. That\u2019s also a first for Alaska.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis might be all tied into a different climate pattern, because we\u2019re right in the midst of the beginning of a pretty substantial El Ni\u00f1o event this upcoming fall and winter,\u201d van Vliet said. \u201cThis might be a harbinger of things to come.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are also a lot more birders in Alaska than there used to be, which may contribute to first-time sightings, said Bob Armstrong, naturalist and author of the book \u201cGuide to the Birds of Alaska.\u201d Armstrong posted a video of the oriole on his blog, www.naturebob.com. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe have more eyes out there,\u201d he said. \u201cIt definitely could be due to climate change, or habitat destruction down south. I don\u2019t really know, for that one.\u201d<\/p>\n
Armstrong and fellow birder Doug Jones used the unusual sighting to observe and video what, according to the literature, isn\u2019t normal behavior: the bird got nectar from flowers by approaching them from the bottom and sipping. <\/p>\n
\u201cAccording to the literature, they pierce the upper part of the flower and steal the nectar without benefiting the flower,\u201d Armstrong said. \u201cIt definitely is not piercing the flower. It\u2019s coming in from the bottom and getting the nectar.\u201d<\/p>\n
The arrival of the bird is \u201conce in a lifetime, theoretically,\u201d van Vliet said. Hooded orioles typically like dry and hot or warm weather and can be found singing in palm trees. <\/p>\n
\u201cNo one knows (what will happen to the bird now,),\u201d van Vliet said. \u201cSometimes they do (fly south) and sometimes they don\u2019t, and sometimes we just don\u2019t know, and that\u2019s the lion\u2019s share of these kinds of instances.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was just really, really thrilling to see it,\u201d Marsha Squires said. \u201cIt\u2019s just such an interesting find\u2026. What a great opportunity for people in Juneau to see an incredible bird.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2022 Contact Juneau Empire outdoors writer Mary Catharine Martin at maryc.martin@juneauempire.com. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When 14-year-old Owen Squires first looked through a pair of binoculars and told his mother the bird she\u2019d seen flitting around the Juneau Community Garden\u2019s weed pile was a hooded oriole, she didn\u2019t believe him. Now, birders have traveled to Juneau from as far away as Anchorage and Fairbanks for a chance to see the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":22842,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":7,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[149],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-22841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","tag-outdoors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22841\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22841"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=22841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}