Mayday on May Day!

Spring 2013 isn’t halfway over, and already it’s one for the record books. We Northlanders will never forget the many snowfall records shattered already this month. I’m down in Oklahoma, and while snow was falling up north, the wind down here was as fierce and relentless as I’ve ever experienced. When I tried to get out of my car in the Wichita Mountains, I could not open the door against the powerful wind until I moved it to face the opposite direction. It was hard for me to walk, and during a 2-hour search of the refuge, I saw only a single bird in flight—one Red-winged Blackbird flew across the road against the wind. I felt locked in a surreal movie, the poor bird moving in literal slow motion. I stared in such amazement that I didn’t think to time it, but I bet it took at least 30 seconds to cross a two-lane road. Even the huge, hulking bison huddled on the ground on the lee side of rocky mounds or stands of trees. I naturally worried about all the other birds, especially the Scissor-tailed Flycatchers, who weigh less than 1 ½ ounces but have so much surface area due to those long tails.

Team Sapsucker

On Wednesday, April 24, a team of 6 birders representing the Cornell Lab of Ornithology did a “Big Day” in Texas. The most birds ever seen in a single day on one of these Big Days was 264, seen by this very team in both 2011 and 2012. This year, perfect migration conditions from the Yucatan Peninsula sent literally millions of birds north, right as a cold front over Texas stopped them cold as they reached the shore. Photos of masses of birds went zooming through the Internet. So many birds were concentrated at High Island that the team demolished their own record by 30, tallying an amazing 294 species. This was cause for celebration of course—not only was it thrilling for the team to see so many birds in such a short period, but they were doing it to raise money for bird conservation projects at the Lab.

But for me the celebration was bittersweet—so many birds arriving to cold temperatures when they were exhausted and hungry meant many ended up dying. And many of the survivors made it up to Wisconsin and Minnesota just before our record snowstorms—again, weather will take a toll.

Weather of course has always taken a toll on birds and other wildlife. On March 13, 1904, over 750,000 dead Lapland Longspurs were tallied on two small lakes in Worthington, MN, following a heavy, wet snowfall during heavy migration, and it was estimated that millions died that night in southeastern MN and northeastern Iowa. Many birds wash ashore on the Great Lakes and ocean shorelines following extended foggy periods during migration, and that doesn’t count the drowned birds that are eaten by fish or gulls.

There isn’t anything we can do about the weather or its effects on wildlife other than long-term stuff that Al Gore has been begging us to do for lo these many years, and even without the climate change induced by our own shortsighted squandering of energy, there have always been bad weather events. But we can help those individual birds who gravitate to our own backyards. Setting out birdseed in reasonably sheltered areas of our yard is important. Black sunflower is the most nutritious for most birds. White millet scattered on the ground under some sheltering trees is valuable for the many Fox Sparrows, juncos, and other migrant sparrows passing through right now. Some early warblers have taken to visiting suet feeders right now. Setting out dishes of live mealworms will be appreciated by any insectivores who figure out such a novel source of food. And the first orioles and hummingbirds are starting to arrive not far south of us, so it’s not too early to set out grape jelly and sugar water. During cold weather, it’s okay to make the sugar water more concentrated—about 1/3 cup of sugar per cup of water. It may be a week or more before any hummers arrive, but just in case, I wouldn’t want the first ones passing through my yard to leave hungry.

Chestnut-sided Warbler desperate for food in Spring 2004.

Conservation Big Year

Can you see the TWO White-tailed Ptarmigans?

I'm up to 336 species on my Conservation Big Year, and I've been posting photos and content on that blog. So if you want to keep up with current information, check out my Conservation Big Year blog.

Snow Goose "Overpopulation"

White and blue forms of the Snow Goose

During my second spring of birdwatching, in 1976, I searched wetlands all around East Lansing, Michigan, trying to see as many kinds of waterfowl as possible. I was thrilled to add Snow Geese and Blue Geese to my lifelist. Then in 1983, the American Ornithologists’ Union snatched one of those species right off my list, deciding that the white and blue forms of these birds were subspecies of a single species. Because the white form was named first, they kept that name for the whole species, even though some Snow Geese were blue.

Geese are clannish birds, and young usually choose their mates within the large circle of distant relatives and acquaintances that their family hangs out with during fall and winter. This leads to limited breeding isolation, causing the many subspecies found in some goose species. But because different circles of geese do descend on the same wetlands in fall and winter, some young geese do choose their mates from other groups and breed successfully, so the groups aren’t genetically isolated enough to be considered separate species.

 For being so abundant, Snow Geese keep a lot of secrets from ornithologists. The blue-type birds have a much more restricted breeding range than the white-type, and nesting colonies of the blue-morphs were not discovered until less than 90 years ago, in 1929, after a direct and intentional search that lasted 6 years and covered over 30,000 miles.

Right now, numbers of Snow Geese are surging, and a lot of wildlife managers are in panic mode, crying “overpopulation,” and that they’re destroying the tundra. I’ve read a lot about this, and keep hearing that these high numbers are “unprecedented,” but there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. One of my friends on the national Bird Chat listserv, Barry Kent MacKay, this year’s featured artist for the Smithsonian’s International Migratory Bird Day and the Canadian representative of Born Free USA, a wildlife organization, notes that there were records of huge numbers of Snow Geese in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Obviously, this was before aerial surveys, so all the accounts by researchers earlier than the past few decades are dismissed as anecdotal, but that discounts a lot of professional eyewitness data to the contrary, and also discounts the huge toll on game birds made by unregulated hunting, for market and for sport, in the 19th and early 20th century. Birds of many species were barely recovering from that when I started birding, and no wildlife managers living today have any memory of how many birds there were before the slaughter.

 Wildlife managers are right that tundra habitat is in jeopardy, right when goose numbers are peaking, but that hardly implies a cause-and-effect relationship. Barry Kent MacKay notes that the critical problems facing the tundra stem from global climate change leading to the loss of permafrost, and from the oil and mining industries, and points out that the human, not goose, population explosion is the root of the real problems facing the tundra. 

Canada Goose numbers have increased due to adaptations individuals have made to urban and suburban habitats, opening up a whole new set of habitats that they can exploit successfully. There is no evidence that Snow Geese are exploiting new habitats, and frankly, very little evidence that their high numbers right now are greater than their numbers before they were overhunted. I’m thrilled that they’re rebounding, and hope that in a world where so many birds are declining, Snow Geese can stay abundant.

Snow Geese during migration at Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge

  Here is Barry Kent MacKay's post on BirdChat (reprinted with his permission.)

Here in southern Ontario birders tend to report their Ross's Goose sightings. But if the federal government has its way, that will stop. Canada wants to kill off as many as 9 out of every 10 Ross's Geese. At best I hold wildlife managers in low esteem but this is a new level of absurdity even for them. In 1999 the federal governments of both the U.S.and Canada amended regulations to let them kill huge numbers of migratory waterfowl species deemed "overabundant" as defined by the North American Waterfowl Management Plan (NAWMP). The U.S. was able to include the Ross's Goose, but we successfully challenged Canada, and here the courts ruled that "overabundance", as defined under NAWMP, had not been demonstrated by the Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS) for Ross's Goose. 

It still hasn't, but no matter; the idea is now to PREVENT those pesky Ross's Geese from becoming overabundant. And while we don't know how many there are (they have an annoying habit of looking like Snow Geese when being counted from the air) the estimate is up to a million, and growing. The objective is to reduce the number to 100,000. That's up to a 90 percent reduction in a native bird species, in the name of, get this, "conservation". NAWMP's goal is "Abundant and resilient waterfowl populations to support hunting and other uses without imperiling habitat." The kicker is in those last three words, although I think the first part fuels motive. Waterfowl hunting is in decline, and therefore so is licensing revenue that pays wildlife managers salaries and keeps them employed. But the "imperiling" comes, as it does from Snow Geese, from the fact that these birds "grub", meaning they dig with blunt beaks for the roots and rhizomes of arctic plants, creating mudflats. They've been doing this since the glaciers freed the land, and long ere that in other regions - tens of thousands of years - but now it's wrong. 

I confess that when NAWMP first set population goals I assumed that they were for minimum populations, not that they didn't want populations to increase beyond the goals they set; that there had to be the number they decided on, not less, but not more, either. Their argument is the increase is of concern by "imperiling habitat". And so they decided how many of each population of Snow Goose there should be, and "managed" to achieve that goal. For example, for the "greater" Snow Goose, which nests in the eastern arctic and winters along the Atlantic coast, the goal was 500,000 birds. Oops. Didn't work. They figure there are about 923,800. For the mid-continent population of "lesser" Snows the goal was 1,500.000. Oops.the real number is estimated to be 2,628,400. For the western central flyaway the goal was 110,000, but the estimate is for 170,300. For the Wrangle Island Snows they are only about 20,000 birds over their objective, but for the Snows nesting in the western Arctic the goal was 200,00, instead of the current 608,000. In business that would all be considered a spectacular failure and abandoned, but for government the plan is to take something that doesn't work and apply it to the Ross's Goose. Kill nine for every ten. 

The concern might well be valid if three conditions existed: 

One: wildlife populations are static 

Two: current and projected numbers are unprecedented 

Three: the arctic is unchanging. 

None is true, a fact that is, well, ignored. Of particular value to the pro-cull argument is the idea that these birds are out of control. This is easily proved by ignoring all evidence to the contrary. When I pointed this out regarding Snow Geese years ago I was told that yeah, okay, there were records of huge numbers of Snow Geese in the late nineteenth and even early twentieth century, but they were anecdotal, thus don't count. Of course they were anecdotal; the means to make more objective counts using aircraft flying in grids and analyzing photographs didn't exist. That should not negate them, but in the small minds of wildlife managers, it doesn't count. 

I believe their panic derives from remembering arctic habitat as they first saw it as students, when the "white geese" were at their lowest numbers. 

The fact is the arctic was largely unknown up to and even after 1938, when the nest of the Ross's Goose was finally discovered (it's amazing to realize that I shook the hand of the man who discovered the nest of the subarctic-breeding Harris's Sparrow, in Churchill!). About all that Arthur Cleveland Bent could say about the population of Ross's Goose in his "Life Histories of North American Wild Fowl", published 1923, was that it was "quite common". He added, "many are shot for market". 

Exactly. 

The enormity of the killing of birds in the 19th and early 20th century has largely been forgotten, as has the paucity of ornithological documentation of much of the continent, especially the far north. Bent also points out that Ross's were a lot "tamer" and less cautious than Snows, so would have been preferentially selected by market gunners. 

Ethical hunters really don't want to kill the numbers of Snows expected of them, since they can't eat that many birds and many have told me they won't kill what they don't need to eat. Our governments have done all they can to demonize these birds in the interest of "conservation" while, ironically, global climate change and loss of permafrost; the subsequent opening of the Northwest Passage and shipping of oil; the discovery of gold and diamonds and subsequent mining and the human population growth are real problems of our creation. 

Canada's response? According to The Toronto Star, January 2, 2013, one bill, C-38, "included more than $160 M in cuts to environmental spending, significantly impairing our ability to measure or mitigate our impact on Canada's wilderness and wildlife." We are the first country to withdraw from the Kyoto Accord and our greenhouse gas emissions are increasing. So what do we propose doing? Let's blame the Ross's Goose for "imperiling" the arctic, and kill 9 out of every ten.

Bridget Stutchbury's book, "The Private Lives of Birds"

I’ve been reading a fascinating book by Bridget Stutchbury, The Private Lives of Birds: A Scientist Reveals the Intricacies of Avian Social Life. The book came out in 2010, but I didn’t read it until recently. Bridget Stutchbury is a well-known researcher at York University in Toronto. She specializes in the behavioral ecology of migratory songbirds, and achieved international fame when she placed geolocators—tiny tracking devices—on Purple Martins and Wood Thrushes during one breeding season and retrapped the birds the following spring.

Geolocators are very tiny—one device and the harness used to hold it just above a bird’s rump weigh less than one gram. All a geolocator does is to record light levels and the time of day, and scientists must retrap a bird and remove the geolocator to retrieve any data, so the technology is useful only for species with high site fidelity, likely to be caught again the following year. Day-length varies with latitude and the time of solar noon varies with longitude. Data from a geolocator can reveal a bird’s entire migratory path and where it spent the winter accurately to about 125 miles for latitude. They provide much better resolution for longitude. Satellite tracking devices, used on loons, osprey, and other large birds, are significantly more precise but much too heavy for songbirds. Scientists don’t put any device weighing more than 4 percent of a bird’s body weight on it. Geolocators are tiny enough to weigh more like 2 percent of the weight of medium-sized songbirds such as thrushes and martins, and for now provide the best information we have for working out migration and wintering locations for Neotropical songbirds.

  This information is extremely useful not just for learning cool stuff about various birds, but also because in many species, local breeding populations may winter in different locations from other breeding populations of the same species. Some birds of conservation importance have robust populations in one state but may be declining dangerously in another. The problems causing a decline may be due to factors on the breeding grounds, but may also arise along the migration route or on the wintering grounds. Without knowing the migration pathways and wintering areas for different populations, we have no way of figuring out what is going wrong in one case but not the other, and have no chance to try to correct it.

 Bridget Stutchbury’s seminal research led to her 2007 book, The Silence of the Songbirds, subtitled "How we are losing the world’s songbirds and what we can do to save them," a wonderful book I devoured as soon as it came out. She also is co-author of a fantastic textbook, Behavioral Ecology of Tropical Birds, published in 2001. So her Private Lives of Birds is based on a vast body of research put together by her and her students through her career, using state-of-the-art technology and good old fashioned field work.

It’s a fun read, because she elegantly explains how she and other researchers figure out each piece of information even as she’s keeping her focus on exactly what the title says, the private lives of birds. For example, scientists banding nesting birds have long known that most songbirds are monogamous. So they were mystified when DNA analysis in more and more species established that a single brood of nestlings raised by supposedly monogamous birds all were likely to have the same mother but one or more of the chicks may have been fathered by one or more males other than the one raising them. Stutchbury explains the advantages to birds of this “extra-pair paternity,” and explains what male birds do to try to keep their own mates faithful even as they try to mate with other females.

Her writing is fun and accessible as well as authoritative. Here and there she or her editors made minor errors: one does not see large numbers of crocodiles on a Texas island. And sometimes I squirmed thinking about the individual birds that were experimented upon for her to make many of her discoveries. It sounds like she didn't "sacrifice" any birds, but trapping one of a mated pair and keeping it off territory for hours or days to see whether it could get the territory back was probably pretty unpleasant for both that bird and the one trying to take over the territory. Fortunately, she has a track record of using the valuable information from these experiments to promote bird conservation that ultimately can benefit those individual birds as well as larger populations.

The book is chock full of valuable facts and insights, and is well worth reading for anyone who wants to understand more about the private lives of birds.

Mark Dayton, Then and Now

Loon and human adults and babies require clean water and air. 

In the fall of 1982, during Minnesota’s Congress and Senate races, I wrote to each candidate asking what his stand was on several issues that would affect my new baby’s future. The one of highest importance to me then and now was the environment. All but one of the politicians responded with a form letter. The exception was Mark Dayton, who sent me not just one but two letters.

My scanner isn't working, so these are photographs of Dayton's letters.

Both letters addressed each of my concerns, and Dayton’s positions were stated forthrightly.

 He wrote, “Like you, I am very concerned about the quality of our country’s natural environment. Clean air and water are the foundation for the Minnesota way of life. We must make sure to protect it.” In one letter, he expressed concern about “cuts in the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget,” noting “We need senators and congressmen representing this state who will commit themselves to strong enforcement efforts by the EPA."

In the other letter, he wrote, “I support immediate reauthorization of the clean air and water acts. The Environmental Protection Agency’s budget must be increased.”

How things have changed! Two weeks ago, when speaking to the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce regarding PolyMet Mining Corporation’s proposed copper-nickel mining project in northeastern Minnesota, Mark Dayton said he wished he could abolish the EPA. And when speaking at a town hall meeting in Duluth on March 20, he affirmed his statement, griping that the permit process was too slow.

Dayton now wants to streamline the process so permits can be issued within 150 days of a proposal. This would be fine for simple projects not likely to have serious environmental impacts, but the permitting process is designed so objective reviewers can evaluate complex projects and deny permits or require modifications when a proposed project’s potential dangers are greater than its potential advantages.

Heavy metal mining is fraught with environmental dangers—some projects have devastated major waterways and groundwater supplies, leading to major bird die-offs and soil and water too toxic for human use. The permitting process isn’t supposed to be like getting a new drivers license or passport—the EPA isn’t supposed to rubber stamp each and every proposal on a simple timeline. PolyMet’s original environmental impact statement was rejected because it contained insufficient data to establish that impacts from the proposed mine would be less harmful than impacts from similar mines have been. Should this project be approved before PolyMet submits an acceptable environmental impact statement and the EPA has time to review it?

PolyMet, with corporate headquarters in Canada and wealthy shareholders around the world, plans to extract Minnesota’s valuable minerals for profit, without paying the state or its people any royalties. That is an exceptional privilege, which should come with reasonable responsibilities to ensure that we the people of Minnesota are not losing more than just our state’s geologic treasure.

Our people up here certainly need jobs, and any of us who use electricity depend on copper mining. But those of us who live right here have a right to ensure that any mining is done in an environmentally responsible way.

Dayton said it was wrong to “expect some group of people who work down in Chicago to have any real motivation to make the changes necessary to allow us to move forward and create jobs here in Minnesota.” But the scientists and regulators working at the EPA offices in Chicago are far more likely to be both knowledgeable and objective about potential environmental hazards of a mining project than politicians and state agencies that are being strong-armed by multi-national corporations with an agenda. The EPA process is only supposed to approve any project after being given all the information they need to be sure it will not irreparably harm our air and water.

Right now we’re watching the climate change before our very eyes. Monarch butterfly numbers are in a tailspin because of lax enforcement of pesticide laws here and habitat destruction in Mexico. Do we need to kill our rivers and lakes before people will once again understand that the EPA exists to protect us, the people and wildlife of America, not to rubberstamp every project that comes down the pike?

Book Review: The Unfeathered Bird by Katrina van Grouw

The saying, “There’s nothing new under the sun” is as applicable in the world of bird books as anywhere else. Innovations are always been preceded by something that inspired them. The Golden field guide, published in 1966, was the first to include sonagrams—spectrographs of bird songs. Yet in 1904, F. Schuyler Mathews’s Fieldbook of Wild Birds and Their Music included musical notations that were an early attempt to show pretty much the same thing—sound frequencies vs. time. 

Roger Tory Peterson has always been credited for what is called the “Peterson system” of using patternistic drawings with little lines or arrows pointing to important field marks, which Peterson first used in his 1934 field guide. 

But Ernest Thompson Seton’s book, Two Little Savages, published in 1917, included drawings almost identical to some of Peterson’s, and Seton used letters the way Peterson used arrows to point out important features. 

Peterson did credit Seton’s inspiration in his foreword, but readers virtually always give credit not to the person who first came up with an innovation but with the first person to make it famous. As with everything, the best bird books are built on the firm foundation of earlier works. Isaac Newton famously said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” but even this wasn’t a new thought. A good 500 years earlier, in 1159, John of Salisbury wrote of an even earlier person, “Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.” There is nothing new under the sun.

When my kids were little, Russ and I got a series of wonderful magazine-style publications called Zoo Books. My favorite feature of the bird Zoo Books was a brightly colored, accurate drawing showing what that species looked like under its feathers, under its skin, and under its muscles. I have always been fascinated by the “inside story” of how bird bodies work. The Zoo Books drawings were based on specimens and scientific drawings, bringing what could have read in prose as dry anatomy to vivid life.

So I was delighted when Princeton University Press sent me a copy of Katrina van Grouw’s new book, The Unfeathered Bird. As I said, the concept of depicting birds beneath their feathers is hardly new, but van Grouw’s execution is not just fresh—it’s hauntingly, astonishingly beautiful as well as an incalculably valuable contribution to science, education, and art. 

Far more comprehensively, in breadth and in depth, than Zoo Books, she has produced 585 drawings of 200 bird species. Van Grouw may be uniquely qualified to produce such a work. She’s former curator of the ornithological collections at London’s Natural History Museum and a taxidermist, giving her a first hand knowledge of the insides of bird bodies. As a bird bander, she has held in her hands living, breathing birds as well, watching and even feeling their bodies unfold into flight as she released them from her own hands. And she’s trained as a fine artist as well. 

Her illustrations of musculature and details of eyes, orbits, bills, ears, feet, skulls, wings, tongues, and bones are exquisitely rendered, but hardly dry anatomical renderings. In her hands, these specimens come to life, sometimes depicted with wickedly lovely humor. Her Red-and-green Macaw stares straight at the reader, stripped of its feathers and skin to show its musculature as it bites a pencil held to its beak with a beautifully detailed foot. Her Budgie is a skeleton perched on a birdcage dowel, its empty eye sockets staring into a mirror.

She poses most of her birds in vivid action—her depiction of a Northern Gannet is an articulated skeleton in arrow-like diving posture. Her European Nightjar holds its capacious mouth wide open. When I was rehabbing, I specialized on a close relative, the Common Nighthawk, and for a time worked on a Ph.D. research project on nighthawk bodies. I was going to be Gary Duke’s first avian physiology Ph.D. candidate to complete my research without sacrificing a single bird, but I did dissect already-dead nighthawks, and even prepared a few articulated skeletons. The first time I did this, I was astonished at how scrawny a nighthawk’s body was beneath the feathers. Most of us readers will be astonished by a great many of the avian features revealed in this wonderful book. And the elegant prose puts each body in full evolutionary context. She writes, “The bugling call of a flock of cranes is among the most evocative sounds in all nature and is audible at a great distance. The comparison with the stirring fanfare of a bugle is no accident. The far-reaching cries of cranes are produced with a wind instrument of their own—an elongated windpipe or trachea—which coils in the same way as man-made musical instruments.” Her lovingly rendered Whooping Crane drawing shows the trachea coiled within the breastbone like a beautiful brass instrument.

It’s only March, but I’ll be shocked as well as delighted if another book comes out that competes with The Unfeathered Bird as the top bird book of 2013. Interestingly, Katrina van Grauw also illustrated my favorite bird of 2012—the extraordinary Bird Sense: What It’s Like to Be a Bird, by Tim Birkhead. Bestselling bird books tend to be field guides to identification, but I am far more enamored with books that give real insights to how birds live and perceive their worlds. The Unfeathered Bird perfectly fits the bill.

Here's an interesting interview with Katrina van Grouw for the Smithsonian.

Setting Free the Evening Grosbeak

Adult male Evening Grosbeak (photo from August 2011)

On January 14, someone brought an adult male Evening Grosbeak to the Wildwoods Rehabilitation Center in Duluth. His beak was injured, soft tissue in his right wing was damaged, and his crop was torn so that when he ate, the seeds came out through the hole. Apparently the poor bird had tangled with an attacker, though probably not a cat. Evening Grosbeaks are one of the most vulnerable species to window strikes, and it’s possible this one hit a window and while it was dazed, a squirrel, jay, or other opportunistic animal got it, or it’s possible that it escaped after a hawk or shrike attack.

The people at Wildwoods cleaned out the grosbeak’s wounds, gave him antibiotics and subcutaneous fluids, immobilized his injured wing, and found him a ride down to the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center of Minnesota, in Roseville. There he underwent surgery to fix his crop. He wasn’t easy to deal with. Evening Grosbeaks have powerful beaks and are quick to use them in self-defense. Whenever he needed to be handled to treat any of his injuries or rewrap bandages, he’d bite, which would reinjure his beak again.

He was healed and ready to go by last weekend, so they sent him back north for release. By then, the person who brought him in was no longer getting grosbeaks at her feeder. Evening Grosbeaks are extremely sociable birds, seldom seen as individuals, so Wildwoods knew it would be better for the bird if they released it where other grosbeaks were rather than back where he came from. They put out the call on Facebook looking for anyone who had a feeder where grosbeaks were visiting. Unfortunately, even in the few places they were appearing through the winter, they’ve pretty much disappeared. Fortunately, there were still a handful hanging out at a popular feeding station in the Sax-Zim Bog, so on Wednesday, I drove out there with the bird to release him.

Grosbeaks aren’t reliable even in the bog anymore. I waited for almost an hour without hearing a single one. I wanted to release the bird early enough in the day that he’d have plenty of time to adjust to freedom again, especially because Evening Grosbeaks tend to start roosting in mid- or even early afternoon, so finally I played some Evening Grosbeak calls on my iPhone. The bird in the box in my car responded before those in the wild did, but finally I called in two or three and opened the box. The grosbeak instantly flew off into the trees toward them. I wanted to take some happy photos, but he was hardly going to sit out where I could see him—I’m sure the poor guy had had enough of people to last a lifetime. Fortunately, even if he didn’t realize it, his lifetime was going to last a lot longer thanks to a few good people.

Evening Grosbeaks were once abundant up here, seen in Duluth backyards year-round, and even more abundant in wilder parts of the North Woods. But they’ve declined dramatically. I had a small flock in my own yard in August and September 2011, but none since, and I’d gone several years without them before that, too. As Minnesota and Wisconsin reconsider the species designated endangered or threatened, I wish they’d add Evening Grosbeaks, because the decline is troubling, the reasons behind it elusive, and research is needed to reverse the trend. 

Saving one bird at a time isn’t an effective way to restore populations, but each Evening Grosbeak is a valuable individual in its own right as well as an increasingly significant fraction of the total population. The joy I felt sending this one off was intensified by his focus on getting away. Wildwoods Rehabilitation Center restored him to health, and he’ll live out his days in the wild woods where he belongs.

Boreal Owl Update

Boreal Owl

During the three decades I’ve lived in Duluth, several winters have been marked by irruptions of northern owls. When I first moved here, seeing these extraordinary birds filled me with wonder and delight. I vividly remember going up Lester River Road with my husband and first baby to see my lifer Great Gray Owl perched on a low fence. When its eyes met mine, I felt an electrical surge of joy. That’s also how I felt when I saw my first Boreal Owl along a wooded country driveway in Saginaw.

When I became a wildlife rehabber in 1987, people started bringing me emaciated and dead owls. Northern owls leave their normal breeding range when driven off by competitors or when food supplies dwindle dangerously—a regular occurrence because they rely on prey species with population cycles that fluctuate wildly between high and low numbers. Their primary food resources are cyclical, so populations of these northern owls are cyclical, too, irruptions occurring when peak populations are about to drop precipitously. It’s not that the owls moving south are necessarily doomed. David Evans keeps track of Snowy Owls in the Duluth-Superior area. Some of his banded birds have returned several years running. But birds wandering beyond their familiar environment are subject to higher levels of mortality than those remaining on their home turf. Boreal Owls new to an area may not be able to find an unoccupied cavity to hide out in during daytime, exposing them to harsh weather and attacks by aggressive jays, crows, and hawks. They may not know the habits of unfamiliar prey species nor recognize the best hunting areas on unfamiliar turf. Tragically, lack of success in one area—the trigger sending them wandering in the first place—makes them hungrier and weaker by the time they reach new areas. By March in irruption years I’m often inundated with phone calls from people distraught after finding a dead or dying owl in their yard.

People who haven’t spent decades watching the dark side of these irruptions can’t help but feel the same joy when they see their first Boreal or Great Gray Owl that I felt when I saw mine, and I can’t help but share their joy at these thrilling encounters.

This year I’ve received calls and emails from hundreds of people enjoying thrilling sights of Boreal Owls between Duluth and Two Harbors. Social media have made it all surreal. Sometimes 20 or more people have crowded along the side of Highway 61 or the Scenic  Highway, binoculars, spotting scopes, and cameras all directed at a tiny camouflaged mite in a tree. Boreal Owls usually hunt at night. When one is desperately hungry enough to be hunting by day, a pack of acquisitive birders can be distracting, may scare prey away, or may attract the attention of potential enemies. But birders witness the little owls successfully capturing rodents and shrews, too, and these birders’ unadulterated joy is contagious.

This owl held its left foot up part of the time, making me suspect a foot injury.

Except for my trip to Two Harbors on the day I call Superb Owl Sunday, I didn’t have the stomach to look for owls this year. As thrilling as our experience was, the Boreal Owl Russ and I saw seemed to have an injured foot, which made me worry about its long-term prospects. The next day some people retrieved one on the highway just south of Two Harbors, which I suspect was mine. It is recovering nicely at the Raptor Center—what I thought was a foot injury turned out to be a broken toe. That bird, mine or not, will be released soon. But the same day I found out about that, I looked out the window to find a dead Boreal Owl in my own backyard. The DNR is collecting carcasses to send down to the Field Museum in Chicago, so the tiny body is bagged with the necessary information in my freezer, and my own feelings about this year’s owl irruption have chilled considerably. 

The intensity of these events—both the joyful excitement and the heartfelt sorrow—is more than I can bear. By next month the surviving owls will wend their way back to their normal range. They’ll once again be out of sight, but not out of my mind. I’ll breathe easier thinking of them leading their lives in secluded privacy, where the woods are lovely, dark, and deep, far from the madding crowd.

 

Chickadee Day!

Black-capped Chickadee

Every year since 1975, I’ve celebrated March 2 as “Chickadee Day,” marking the anniversary of my seeing the first bird on my life list. My backyard chickadees always help me celebrate, and the celebration is even sweeter in years when I’m well supplied with mealworms, because one by one, my chickadees alight on my hand for them, and I get to appreciate all over again just how genuinely unique each individual chickadee is.

Chickadees appeal to me on many, many levels. I love them as I love all wild birds, as members of a unique species with wonderful physical and behavioral adaptations, and as individuals to be reckoned with. But I also love chickadees as role models of how humans, as individuals and as societies, could be. Chickadees are the epitome of self-reliance. Each chickadee finds a good unoccupied roost cavity or excavates one entirely on its own, using that tiny but sturdy chickadee beak.

Chickadee in its own excavated cavity

Even when temperatures plummet well below zero, each chickadee sleeps alone, except during the few weeks each year when adult females brood their young. Chickadees associate in flocks, each working hard to stock up on food resources. But no matter how hard chickadees work to build up their individual food stores, each allows other chickadees to raid its pantry when they need. Chickadees understand that individual initiative and hard work are essential, but also that luck plays a role for everyone. One extremely hard worker may fill every crevice of a birch tree with food that serves it and its flock for many seasons or years, and then out of the blue an ice storm takes down the tree. Chickadees don’t play the blame game or dismiss those facing misfortunes—you can count on each chickadee to both work its hardest and share its bounty.

As with most human societies, chickadee flocks are hierarchical in structure. The top ranking males and females are more assertive than lower ranking birds, and apparently have physical characteristics that help them assert their dominance. One researcher recognizes higher-ranking birds under UV lights because their feathers reflect more UV light than lower ranking birds. This may be a signal of which birds are better at furnishing themselves with good roost holes, better protecting their feathers from weathering, or may indicate which birds are most effective at procuring healthy diets, or in some other way indicate fitness. In fall, young birds joining a chickadee flock often raise their body feathers and hold their wings open, as if trying to appear larger, while working out their rankings.

My chickadee peeking in to get my attention

  However chickadees establish their flock’s dominance hierarchy, seldom does an individual chickadee not respect it. One of my backyard chickadees alights on my window frame and peeks in, tapping on the window or hovering a few moments to catch my attention. That bird may be smarter or more resourceful than others, but when I open the window and hold out my hand, it waits while three or four higher-ranking birds get the first mealworms. Maybe in a year or two, that chickadee will rise to the top of the flock hierarchy, but it sees no reason to disturb the social order for a quicker meal even if its clever actions are what enable the entire flock to procure such nutritious fare. Every chickadee brings its own skills and gifts to the table, and all are valued. The dominance hierarchy assures a social order that benefits one and all equally. Which, really, should be the point behind human societies, too.

Chickadee being rehabbed at the Raptor Education Group, Inc.

This year my chickadee celebration was made even better by the fact that Marge Gibson’s wildlife rehabilitation center, The Raptor Education Group, Inc. of Antigo, Wisconsin, set free a rehabbed chickadee that day. Someone had found the tiny mite struggling in the snow and brought it to them with a broken wing. Under Marge’s expert care in this state-of-the-art facility, the chickadee was restored to its proper life in the wild. My Chickadee Day celebrations are, in the overall scheme of the universe, pretty meaningless. Giving a chickadee with a broken wing a chance at survival—now that is something truly worth celebrating.

Chickadee being released to the wild after being rehabbed at the Raptor Education Group, Inc.

Birding Alone vs. Birding in Groups and on Tours

This Black-capped Chickadee peeks into my window to see where I am.

I've always enjoyed traveling to new places, and that enjoyment increased manyfold when I became a birder. In my own backyard, I know what species I can expect from day to day and can keep tabs on special individual birds. After traveling a few days or weeks, it's lovely to crank open my window and instantly have my good old chickadees alighting on my hand again. Yet as much as I treasure my backyard birds, every now and then I am seized by a powerful wanderlust. This January I drove to Florida for a couple of weeks. I love exploring places on my own. This year at one spot, I came upon a mother raccoon with three half-grown youngsters, and further on found an otter basking in the sun. I'd seen the otter earlier, running in that wonderful wavy lope characteristic of otters, and now it was resting. If I'd been with a group, we'd have quickly moved on to the next thing, but being alone, I could park myself near these beautiful animals for as long as I wanted.

Mother raccoon and baby at Viera Wetlands

Otter basking at Viera Wetlands

Last week I had an entirely different kind of birding experience--I went on one of Kim Eckert's Minnesota Birding Week adventures. Kim's been leading these trips for over 30 years, and they're always wonderful. Kim is intimately familiar with all the Texas birding hotspots, keeps in touch with virtually all the serious birders of the area, and has matchless bird finding and identification skills, so if a bird is anywhere to be found, people on his trips have as good a chance or better of seeing them than anyone going it alone.

Between about noon on Saturday, February 16, and Sunday, February 24, our group saw a total of 201 species, of which I personally saw 199, so in one week I saw more species than I'd seen in the previous 6 weeks of 2013, adding almost 100 species to my year list. Texas bird numbers are way down this year, based on my own personal experience and on what all the local birders were saying. Extended extreme drought conditions have taken a toll, sending some species elsewhere and almost certainly causing high levels of mortality in others.

Despite bad conditions, we had wonderful looks at some exceptionally difficult species. We started at 7 each morning and birded until almost dark each day. Each day was intense, but to offset the occasional frustration in not being able to spend as much time watching something fun, it's nice to put all the trip planning and driving in someone else's hands. I'm always a bit exhausted at day's end, but it's the good kind of exhaustion wherein I fall asleep with visions of Green Jays, Altamira Orioles, Whooping Cranes, and other amazing birds.

Green Jay

I spend a lot of time studying birds on my own, and I’ve always observed that I learn the birds of an area by searching them out one by one on my own. People who do virtually all their birding on group trips are seldom as strong on identification skills as those who bird alone. But it’s much easier to maximize the variety of birds seen in a new area in the company of a truly professional guide like Kim Eckert and a group of good birders who help spot things. I think the ideal approach is a combination of the two. On my Texas trip we saw and I photographed a large variety of wonderful birds, including a Flammulated Owl (well, his tummy feathers),

Flammulated Owl's tummy feathers

 a small group of White-collared Seedeaters,

White-collared Seedeater

 and even a Crimson-collared Grosbeak.

Crimson-collared Grosbeak (immature)

  In coming weeks I'll be talking more about these and other exciting species, mostly at my Conservation Big Year website.