No worries, I’m not going to rehash the snark in that column. This column is about the falcon. There is a handful of North American raptors for which I have never captured the images I wanted, and foremost among them was Merlin. I occasionally see these pugnacious little raptors in Arizona in winter, but the last one I captured with the camera was literally “on film” back in pre-digital days thirty years ago. Until last month when a friend mentioned he had seen one along the Salt River.
Busy packing for our trip to Yellowstone, I didn’t give it a second thought, but when the same friend reported the Merlin in the same area three weeks later after we returned to the Valley, I happily set everything aside and went for it. With my previous lack of history and experience with this species, my enthusiasm was high but my expectations low, so you can imagine my shock when the bird showed up like clockwork, at sunrise, in the exact tree where it had been reported. For the next several days, then, it became an “appointment” bird, hunting from the same perch from sunup to mid-morning.
As you may recall, for several summers after I slid down the slippery slope into dragonflies, I did very little bird photography but became something of an odonate enthusiast. As it turns out, the Salt River Merlin apparently is too. It is suspected, by both ornithologists and entomologists that American Kestrels may time their fall migration to the so-called generational migration of Common Green Darners, but Merlins? Merlins’ main prey species are small birds, but it is well documented they do take dragonflies on the wing. I was delighted to be able to corroborate that.
On one of my Merlin mornings I actually kept score. Between 8am and 9am my Merlin was successful on nine of eighteen forays from his perch 25 feet high in a dead snag, swooping down to snatch dragonflies on the wing out over mats of Mosquito Fern on the river’s surface. Considering BotW (Birds of the World) says the species’ hunting success rates during migration and winter vary from 5% to 22%, my Merlin, which plumage and size indicate is a young female of the Taiga subspecies, will have no trouble surviving the winter as she ups her game from large bugs to small birds.
The most interesting thing to me, though, was her breakfast choice. Over four days I witnessed about forty captures. She was too fast and her snatches a little too far away for the camera to catch the actual captures, but twice I recorded her in flight back to her perch with dragonflies in her talons, and I photographed at least a dozen meals well enough to identify her prey to species. Every one was a Blue-eyed Darner, mostly males, but a few females as well! Why was that the only odonate on the menu?
As the heat dome lingered over the Valley through early October, there was no dearth of dragonflies about, even at sunrise, and as the mornings warmed up I counted at least half a dozen species of large dragonflies. Especially common were Common Green Darners (CGDs) and Widow Skimmers, the former in great numbers because of their fall migration in progress. CGDs are marginally larger than Blue-eyeds and are a favorite of American Kestrels. What did my Merlin know that I didn’t know?
My best solution for this mystery is that Blue-eyeds fly a little slower and less erratically than CGDs and hover in place more, and the Merlin, ever the opportunist like all birds, instinctively knew it took less energy to grab Blue-eyeds than CGDs even though the latter were more numerous. I also noted Blue-eyeds in tandem over the mats of vegetation on the water, the females undoubtedly looking for suitable ovipositing spots, and most of the Merlin’s forays were downward and out over the mats.
Merlin was not the first avian species I have been able to document on the camera with dragonfly prey (American Kestrel, Greater Roadrunner, and Pied-billed Grebe), but it is always fun to capture a “twofer.” It’s not often the life cycles of the two animal groups with which I am most familiar intersect right in the camera’s field of view. That’s a good day at the office, and seeing the real Merlin in action sure beats walking around with a cell phone using an app that wrong more than it’s right.